Jim Buckmaster is the CEO of Craigslist, an internet company which employs 25 people to run 450 websites for 50 countries. A Spanish version has recently launched and French, German, Italian and Portugese versions are in the pipeline. This productive little company is run by a CEO who dislikes meetings, e-mail, MBAs, studying the bottom line and pulling rank.

Read our Q&A with Jim Buckmaster below and to find out more about what it's like to work at Craigslist and Buckmaster's business philosophy download our podcast.

Can you tell us how Craigslist began?

"It was started as a hobby by a guy [Craig Newmark] in his spare time as an e-mail of San Francisco event listings and it grew from there because people receiving the list started e-mailing in their own listings ... until it reached a point where there were hundreds of people receiving the list and contributing listings. That was in 1995. In 1996 a web interface was added but it was still basically an e-mail list."

When did you join the company?

"I put my resume on the list in late 1999, looking for work as a web programmer, and Craig happened to see it and asked me in for an interview. I ended up taking a job as a lead programmer at the very start of 2000 and spent the year doing tech projects. Towards the end of the year I was picking up more and more management duties. There wasn’t a lot of management really happening at the company. But by the end of the year I was probably doing as much management as tech projects, and I took on the CEO title."

What is the office atmosphere like?

"We don’t really have the arcade games, fussball, ping pong tables or that sort of thing but I guess it’s a cosy kind of non-corporate atmosphere, it just feels like you're sitting in a house, which you are, and we don’t have the acoustic tiled ceilings or the cubicles, you know, and there’s no dress code. I spent a lot of years working in organisations that were regimented and we were told what to do in many different ways and I developed a very anti-authoritarian mindset by the time I was put in a position of authority. The last thing I wanted to do was reproduce all of those things that I had disliked so much. Such that our employees aren’t really told what to do, or when to do it, or when to come into work, or what they can wear, and we don’t set deadlines at all - unless they are set for us by some external force like a regulatory agency. I don’t think that artificial deadlines are a good idea. They just create stress where it is not needed."

So there is no management?

"We do have a hierarchy, we do have managerial positions, but I personally don’t like trying to impose my will on someone else or trying to hold it out that I’m in a position of authority. I hold that in reserve as an absolute last resort and certainly years go by when I don’t have to exert that kind of authority."

How do you motivate people?

"One of the wonderful things about working at Craigslist is that the company philosophy and approach is such that people generally feel very good about working there. In a sense we operate as a public service and basically do nothing but try to mould the site according to what users want. Because we have a non-traditional philosophy - it is very public-good centric – people feel good about coming to work. And in the Bay area where we’re located, where we’ve been for 13 years now, we’ve developed a very positive reputation...We are also very careful in hiring people who are a. talented and b. self motivated, people who seem to get what Craigslist is about, and aren’t just looking for another job. Then once we have people who fit that description, I’ve always found that it is just a matter of letting them do their work."

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