Craigslist's Craig: 'Sunday School Roots' at Heart of Site

Craig Newmark is a nice, unassuming guy who just so happened to start a website that gets 20 billion pageviews a month and is frequently accused of killing the newspaper industry. Despite the wild success of his site—started as a simple group email in 1995—the Craigslist founder still believes in his company’s “just-enough profit” mantra. “It’s good to have enough to provide for the future of family, friends, self, maybe the occasional luxury,” he tells Business Insider. “After that, more satisfying to make a difference.”

Newmark seems to see himself as doing God’s work, in a way: Citing Leonard Cohen as a mentor, he says he’s “returned to my Sunday School roots without thinking much about it,” and adds that his site can help people “work together to make things better for everyone, deriving from basic shared values, essentially Sunday School fundamentals: Treat people like you want to be treated; and now and then, give the other person a break, like being your brother’s or sister’s keeper. If you’re busy, the Internet makes it fairly easy to help others while you’re multitasking with other stuff.”