Newmark: At the end of '97, we were getting about one million page views a month. At that point, Microsoft Sidewalk—or their PR people—approached me about running banner ads. I had decided to not do them, because they'd slow the site down and they were kind of dumb. Banner ads are, more often than not, kind of dumb. More importantly, I thought about my own values and I was thinking, "Hey, how much money do I need?" I was already doing well as a contractor. So I figured I would just not do that.

At that point, I got the first inkling of what I now call my "moral compass." I better understood it later—particularly since the presidential elections, because then I realized that people were claiming a moral high ground who actually didn't practice what they preached, and it's about time for people of goodwill to reassert their idea of what's right and what's wrong.