It was 1999, height of the first Dot Com Boom, a midsummer's evening in San Francisco. Craig Newmark and his business partner Phillip left long anxious messages on my office voice mail.

Yes, hat Craig Newmark.

The one whose famous list was read by at least five hundred people – the DJs and fire artists, digital consultants and visionary hipsters who were building this thing we called the Web.

The one who would show up to office parties in a blazer and a black beret, standing in a corner making pronouncements in a soft monotone, the meaning of which you could only unlock once you realized that almost everything he said was wickedly funny.

A founder quits

We had been negotiating a partner break-up for a few months. She wanted to go big, commercial. Investors, sponsorship, content deals, advertising, flashing spinning animations on the website. Craig wanted to keep things real. So I was called in to negotiate the separation.

Things got heated, things got strange… and personal. As these things do.

Then suddenly, Craigslist was hijacked! Somebody had called up NSI, the domain company, and talked them into pointing the Craigslist web addresses site to her company site, not his.

This means war… of words

This is known in the trade as a domain hijacking achieved by social engineering hack

Imagine if you went to craigslist.com and instead you got ApartmentFinder. Or this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000304032515/https://listfoundation.org/

I can't tell you how it all went down because lawyer-client confidentiality still applies, but let's just say that I went into put-out-the-fire mode. After some stern demands we got the site back. It's now worth a few billion dollars I hear, and used by more than five hundred people.