Jess vs. The World

About three years ago, I was approached by Romy Maxwell at Startup School in 2009. He asked my advice about the tool they were building to help people do radius searches for Craigslist apartments, remove duplicate listings, and let you know when pictures are duplicated to avoid scams. I urged him to contact Craig Newmark directly and share. I figured the reasonable response from Craig would have been to hire Romy and his partner or buy their technology. It’s literally what every reasonable company in the world does when innovative young people come along and make something your users want.

What happened next tells you all you need to know. Romy corresponded politely, explained how they were going about building their software, even decided to keep it non-revenue generating. They sent a link to Craig so he could check out their work and even while acting super friendly, he encouraged them, and then without communication or warning, blocked them.