Leave Craig Alone

No one knows what to make of Craig. The founder of one of the most ubiquitous web sites in the world; Craig does not want to sell to Google or eBay for billions of dollars; does not want to tweak his web site to make it pretty; does not want to maximize revenue; does not want to add myriad social networks; is not interested in driving web 2.0 or 3.0 (or wherever we are now) applications; does not want to tinker with different revenue models; and does to want to do much of anything but add cities and answer his email. He has 30 or so employees to eBay’s 16,000, and Amazon’s 20,000. Yet they drive 20 billion page views a month in what is largely a free site. Yet Craig’s revenue is guestimated at anywhere in the tens to hundreds of millions. Let’s see what is that on a revenue per employee basis. Whoa. We say leave Craig alone. We are so shocked by anyone who is not after every dollar he can squeeze out of a situation we don’t understand it. We have to question and criticize. We have no idea what motivates Craig, but we believe that Craig is, and should be, free to do whatever he wants with the business he started. Just as we are free to speculate about what he is doing, use his site, start a competitor or ignore him. One thing is for certain, Craig is unique and, as with any entrepreneur, everyone who enjoys using his site would be poorer but for what he has done. We say, “Go Craig...wherever you’re going.”
-- Paul Marotta