Lots of press recently about CraigsList given Y Combinator’s call to entrepreneurs last year to find a way to create a more for-profit version. The call was repeated again this year. Lots of analysis followed with plenty of opinions about what’s good and bad about CraigsList. Bottom line is that the site works and it works well despite all its warts. The business should be an inspiration to entrepreneurs everywhere about how to do more with less and how to win through simplicity. Fred Wilson has a good summary post of that.
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Hi Sim, long time.
I think what the Y-C guys are missing is that CL is more competitive than a purely for-profit version could be. CL can’t be beat by a single entity, though a thousand open-source/open-data cuts may do it in at some point.
Unadulterated capitalism is the most evolved a competitive animal as many sectors can achieve right now; that doesn’t mean capitalism is the end point of evolution.