Craigslist

In an industry obsessed with redesigns, growth hacking, and engagement metrics, Craigslist stands as a monument to radical simplicity. Craig Newmark built this thing in 1995 as an email list for San Francisco events, and nearly thirty years later it remains essentially unchanged: blue hyperlinks on a white background, organized by category, serving billions of page views with a team that could fit in a mid-sized conference room. The site loads in milliseconds because there's nothing to load. No JavaScript frameworks bloating the page, no tracking pixels following you around the internet, no dark patterns trying to extract your data. It's the anti-modern web, and it works perfectly.

The genius of Craigslist is what it refuses to do. While every other platform in tech desperately tries to become a "super app" or an "ecosystem," Craigslist just... lists things. Apartments. Jobs. Furniture. Missed connections. The site makes roughly $700 million annually with about 50 employees, which works out to $14 million in revenue per person. That's not a typo. Meanwhile, companies with thousands of engineers and billions in funding struggle to turn a profit. Craig understood something that Silicon Valley still hasn't learned: sometimes a simple tool that does one thing well is worth more than a sophisticated platform that does everything poorly.

From a technical perspective, Craigslist is almost embarrassingly primitive. View source and you'll find clean HTML that could have been written in 1999. The CSS is minimal. There's no React, no Next.js, no microservices architecture, no Kubernetes clusters. They use Perl, for god's sake. And yet the site handles more traffic than most "modern" web applications, stays up reliably, and costs virtually nothing to run. Every startup founder should be required to study Craigslist before they're allowed to raise a Series A. The technical choices are not accidental—they're philosophical: build only what you need, refuse complexity, serve users not investors.

The cultural impact of Craigslist cannot be overstated. Before Craigslist, classified ads were a profit center for newspapers—they used that revenue to fund journalism. Craigslist made those ads free and functionally killed that business model. You can argue about whether that was good or bad for society, but you can't argue with the efficiency: Craigslist replaced an industry with a single website. The missed connections section alone has inspired novels, documentaries, and countless human moments. People have found apartments, jobs, furniture, love, and meaning on these plain blue links. No algorithm curated it. No growth team optimized it. Craig just built a bulletin board and let humans be humans.

In 2026, when every website wants to be an app, when every app wants to harvest your data, when every tech company wants to be worth a trillion dollars, Craigslist remains stubbornly, beautifully itself. Craig Newmark gave away equity to employees, refused to maximize revenue, and now spends his billions on journalism and voting rights causes. The site is a living rebuke to the entire venture-backed startup model. It proves you can build something useful, keep it simple, make enough money, and stop there. Not everything needs to grow forever. Not everything needs to be disrupted. Sometimes a website can just be a website, and that's the most radical thing of all.