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Jim Buckmaster has a cheerful disregard for the conventional yardsticks of business success.
"I don't have a yacht or a Gulfstream," the chief executive of online classified advertising company Craigslist says. "I rent a house. I don't own a car; I have a bike."
That self-consciously anti-establishment stance has become a hallmark of Craigslist, much as it once fed the counterculture brand of Ben & Jerry's.
But while the ice cream maker eventually sold out to Unilever (UL, news, msgs), Craigslist seems bent on a bloody fight for its independence.
The battle surfaced in recent weeks with a lawsuit from eBay (EBAY, news, msgs), the e-commerce giant which bought a 28% stake in Craigslist in 2004. EBay accuses Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, who control the company, of trying to dilute its stake to reduce its potential influence over the company's board.
The Craigslist duo never seemed enthusiastic about having eBay as a shareholder (eBay acquired the stake from a former employee), but distrust has turned to outright hostility since last summer, when eBay launched a rival classified advertising site in the United States.
Among the suggestions that eBay has made to Craigslist's controlling shareholders, according to court papers released this month, was to buy the company outright.
- Update: Craigslist files countersuit
"If someone wanted to come up with a dump truck and give us a lot of cash we wouldn't say no," Buckmaster says. But he adds that he and Newmark have no interest in being answerable to an outside shareholder who would interfere with their unconventional principles.
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Craigslist's anti-big-business style has turned it into the largest classified site on the Internet, with 30 million classified listings a month. It is an institution in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where its success has been blamed (or credited, depending on where your sympathies lie) with devastating the local newspaper industry.
Buckmaster claims that, measured by per capita listings, Craigslist is now deeply rooted in Austin and Portland, Ore., as well as large areas of New York City. With Web sites covering nearly 50 cities, more than half of them now outside the United States, the company's traffic is growing at roughly 100% a year, he says.
Craigslist consciously trades off its anti-establishment image (most listings posted on its sites are free, and it makes money from charging professional recruiters for jobs advertisements in 10 cities, along with brokers handling apartment rentals in New York City).
Buckmaster's official profile blithely boasts that he has been called "a communist and a socialist anarchist." What he exhibits, however, is more a pragmatic brand of low-key capitalism. The Craigslist chief executive confesses to living a comfortable life on his earnings and does not rule out a sale of the company in the long term.
"We're trying to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible," he says, when asked about its mission. "Our strength is basic human needs -- housing, jobs, buying and selling stuff, romance."
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Craigslist: An economic indicator?Jim Buckmaster, chief executive at Craigslist, discussed a slowdown in job listings and other online-advertising trends in a February interview with CNBC's Bill Griffeth.
The fees that Craigslist does charge are designed to make it self-sustaining. "We only want to be profitable so that we don't have to raise cash or do a stock offering," Buckmaster says.
The company recently doubled its network facility, something that has added to its expenses.
Being able to provide most services free of charge, making enough money to live comfortably, keeping control of their own destiny; those, rather than the chance of a big payday, are things that really matter, says Buckmaster.
"I suspect a lot of people would make our choice if they were in our position," he says.
This article was reported and written by Richard Waters for the Financial Times.
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