Doing Well By Doing Good

The Chronicle has a nice in-depth interview with Craig Newmark, done prior to eBay investment. In it, he talks about doing well by doing good:

Q: Your site is one of the few that remains true to some of the earliest ideals of the Internet. It's fairly altruistic and basically non-commercial in nature. How have you been able to keep Craigslist a fairly organic community and why?

A: First, I don't feel like we are altruistic or anything like that. Basically, it's a matter of giving people a break. Just the same, we had to become a serious business. That became clear in early 1999. We were trying to do it with volunteers, and things were falling apart. Falling apart is bad. At that point, I started making a real company out of it, figuring that we would be charging for job postings and that would help us out.

That said, there is nothing pious or anti-commercial about us. The decision to make it a business was based on values I've been somewhat facetiously calling nerd values. The disease of my people -- the nerds -- is that we are very literal, which is a real pain in the butt, frankly. But again, nerd values are simple. It's good to make a good living. It's good to do well for your staff.

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort. We're still looking for new and other ways of doing that.

...Q: You provide jobs. You provide salaries. You provide a service. Do you think there's a way that Craigslist could be a model for others to run a successful business while providing a service to society?

A: Well, there's a basic cliche that I guess applies: "Doing well by doing good." We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing. We're seeing the beginnings of a kind of environment like we saw during the bubble.

We're just trying to do our best to maintain that moral compass.

It used to be that companies only addressed the social goods they create when social costs (negative externalities) forced them to. It was a function of risk management and crisis communications.

Doing well by doing good is an old practice that generates results. Post-bust it has seeped into corporate conciousness. Its even at the core of a new business lifestyle magazine. Its encouraging to have founders like Pierre, Larry, Sergey and Craig baking the production of social goods into their companies while generating performance -- while having employees and investors value the same. Its just good business.