The Underdog Story of Reddit
All right, this was not supposed to be a podcast. This was me calling Sam 2 minutes ago and being like, dude, did you hear the stuff about Reddit? And he's like, no, no, no. He put the finger up to my lips.
Shh.
Push record. And in fact, me and Sam, we should really never talk if we're not recording. I think that's the new lesson.
By the way, I still have no idea what you're going to bring up. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road.
Okay, so let me give you the background. Reddit goes public today. Ah, interesting. Fine. Uh, I don't really care. I didn't participate in the stock or anything. I wasn't really looking at the chart, but I did read Paul Graham's essay about Reddit and he, it's titled The Reddits. It's on the YC blog. Paul Graham, uh, has known these guys for nearly 20 years now. And so he wrote this post today that had so many little breadcrumbs that I thought there were like, as I was reading this, every paragraph was firing off like connection to a different lesson learned. Like, my brain of frameworks was literally like lit up like a Christmas tree with some of the things he was saying. And I just wanted to like say them out loud to you. I wanted to—
I'm imagining you eating cereal as you're reading this, and then you have like one bite in and like you just drop the spoon.
This is my bowl, my salad. I'm eating. Look, it's half eaten because I was like, oh shit, I gotta put this down. I gotta record this. And so, um, we didn't plan this, but let's do it. All right. So I'm reading this essay and I want to give you kind of like point by point of what I think is really interesting.
And by the way, Paul Graham is the— I guess we have to give context now because this is like a podcast. Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, and Reddit was one of the first companies.
Reddit was the first company in the first batch. But actually what's more interesting is in that post, Reddit is not only the first YC company in the first batch ever, it's actually the reason that YC exists. I don't know if you knew this, but, um, this is kind of cool. So Paul Graham, in this essay, he says, YC started because he went to the Harvard, like, computer club or something like that and gave a talk, which by the way is how many interesting things have started. I also believe this is kind of how Apple started. Wasn't there like a, uh, he, they gave a talk or a demo at the Homebrew Club. This is how Tim Ferriss started The 4-Hour Workweek. He taught a class at Princeton. And there's this principle, which is if you ever wanna learn something, try to teach it. And that, uh, that has led to many people writing books. So Tim Ferriss did it, then he wrote a book. Nir Eyal, Same thing when he wrote his book Hooked. Same thing. He's like, I first was just giving a talk somewhere. To give the talk, I had to sharpen up my thoughts. By the end of that, I was like, shit, there's something to this. And the same thing happened here. Paul Graham gave a talk at the school called How to Start a Startup. He gives this talk, and then from the talk, he's like, dude, I should create like a vehicle to invest in like these earlier, younger founders. He's like, at the time, founders were thought to be like either older or just super young prodigies. But he's like, I think this college student age, I think that's where you could start, um, companies from. So that's why he creates YC. So he gives the talk, he meets with Steve and Alexis afterwards, and he's impressed by another thing. So the second interesting thing, he gave this talk at Harvard. They didn't go to Harvard. These guys go to school in Virginia. They took a train up from Virginia to hear this talk because they used to follow his blog. So, uh, Steve loved his blog. He convinces Alexis, hey, come with me. To go see this guy talk. They go up there. It's not like a show. There's no tickets. It's like, you know, 30-person room and he's there. And so Paul was so impressed that these guys came from Virginia. He's like, they wanted to meet for coffee. He's like, okay, no problem. You guys came from such a far away. I'll do it. There's a principle there in the like 80% of success is just showing up or like when in doubt, like just go, just take the train, take the flight, just show up. Put yourself in positions for good things to happen. And that's what they did. And it's a high agency move. They could have easily, hey, not gone, you know, showed up and not told him. But they went there, they took the train, they told him. And this is the first of many high agency moves that they pull. He talks about later how they actually ended up rejecting these guys from YC. So he gives the talk, decides to create YC, reaches out to the guys like, hey guys, I was inspired by meeting you guys. I actually created something called YC. For people just like you, you should fill out the application. They fill out the application, but he hates the idea. So he rejects them. Their idea was ordering fast food off your phone. DoorDash. But there was no smartphones. So there is no DoorDash. They basically had to go to cell phone carriers and fast food chains and like do it all manually so that you could do it like over text message, SMS back then.
And you have to set the context even here about them showing up, which is Paul Graham's a big deal now. You know, Paul Graham funded Airbnb, Dropbox, whatever. He's a big deal back then. He had just sold a company for, I think, $30 or $40 million, which was a big deal back then. And I guess he had some extra money and he was blogging, but he wasn't like a big deal. It was like a, it was, this was like a very like, this is like the—
for hackers, for programmers who are entrepreneurial, right?
Which is almost like, uh, as ridiculous as when Twitch was coming up. You're like, people watch video games online? It's like, this guy's just blogging about this type of internet stuff. That's not even that cool or interesting. It was a very small market.
By the way, Twitch also in that first batch. And Emmett, best friends with Steve, the, you know, the guy who created Reddit. All right, so anyways, uh, more principles. So the first one is, if you want to— if you want to actually learn, try to teach. Giving a talk is actually a really good gateway into either books or companies or whatever. If you can't articulate in a 45-minute talk a bunch of really insightful things that get other people excited, it probably won't work as a, as a, as a book or company. And, and reverse, even if you're not planning to do it, it's a great way to generate, you know, sharp ideas is to go try to teach a class. Second thing, taking the train, showing up. All right, great. Now here's the next one. Trusting your gut. So like I said, he, he's inspired by these guys. He creates YC because he meets these guys, but their idea he hates. He hates the order food off your phone. He's like, that's too hard. And he says, at the time, I didn't realize that The game I'm supposed to be doing is sort of betting on people, not ideas. I thought at that time I'm supposed to be betting on ideas, and I hated their idea. So they rejected him. And he's like, you know, Jessica, his wife, who he credits as having like the best kind of like people detector of anybody he knows, she was like, oh, you rejected the muffins? And he's like, muffins? And she's like, yeah, that's what I call those guys, you know, Steve and Alexis. They're like so endearing. They're like a little poodle, like, you know, they're like a little puppy. She called them muffins. She's like, oh, that's sad. I like the muffins. And he's like, yeah, but I didn't like their idea. She's like, I feel like we should have the Muffins in YC. Like, they're, they're the reason you created this. Why, why would you not accept them? So he calls them back up. They're on the train ride home to Virginia, and he says, uh, guys, I want you to be in YC, but like, we gotta— I'll fund you only if you're gonna change your idea.
And how much was funding? Was it $15,000?
Yeah, like nothing. Yeah.
So basically like, uh, a summer.
Yeah, exactly. But it was, it was the— somebody believing you and you was the real currency there. They're on the train ride home from Virginia. They just get off at the next stop and then hop on the next train going back up north again. And they like immediately seize the opportunity, which is another kind of like, again, these were all like little breadcrumbs of successful things, successful, like successful actions, successful behaviors that it doesn't surprise me that a Reddit comes out of something like this. On his side, it was trusting his gut, Paul's side, trusting his gut that he wanted these guys involved. He should bet on people, not ideas early on.. And for them it was being willing to hop off the train and just take the next train up north again. So he gets there. Now here's the next interesting idea. The, some of the best ideas are found, not thought of, discovered, not thought of. So Paul Graham had been blogging and his blog was not too big of a deal back then. It was, it was, you know, okay. Not, not what it is today. But he noticed that a lot of his traffic to his blog was coming from a website called Delicious. Do you remember Delicious?
Yeah, was it really a website or was it like a bookmark?
Was it like a bookmark? It was a bookmarking tool. It was a way to save the stuff you liked, like bookmark for later for yourself. But they had one little side feature called delicious.com/popular. And /popular was basically just an aggregator of all, like, what is this? What are the most popular bookmarked things that day? It was a side feature, sort of a throwaway idea for them. But what Paul Graham noticed was he's like, damn, I get actually a lot of traffic from the /popular tab. Of Delicious. It's not the main product, it's the side product. And so he took that, he's like, guys, you need a new idea. Here's an idea. Um, the Delicious slash Popular thing is cool. What if there was just a page that was like the front page of the internet? It's like, what are all the most interesting links of the day that you should go check out? Just take the side thing and let's make it the main thing.
That's a pretty, uh, wild thing to think about because back then, so they started in 2005, which meant Google was only 8 years old and AdWords was probably new. I don't remember when Facebook was started, but right around then, like, internet advertising I guess was still pretty new.
Dude, they weren't even thinking about advertising. They were just thinking, what's a cool thing that should exist on the internet? What's a cool, useful product? That same idea I heard again many years later when I met Ryan Hoover. Ryan Hoover was, uh, the founder of Product Hunt, but what most people don't know is before that he was He was blogging. And then I reached out to him and I was like, hey, I really wanna hire you. I tried to hire him. He wanted to join my team, was like, he didn't pass the interview process for some whatever reason. So they were like, ah, we don't think he's got enough experience or something. And I really liked Ryan. I was like, hey man, so sorry. Like, let's keep in touch. I feel like our paths are gonna cross again. 3 weeks later, he emails me about an idea. He's like, hey, maybe instead of a job, I should start something. And what he tells me, he goes, like you, I like to go to Hacker News every morning. Back then, that was my routine. We both used to go to Hacker News every morning.
Still is.
But my favorite tab is not the main page of Hacker News. It's the side page, the show section where you can go. It's like a show and tell where you could show what you're building. Because if you go to Hacker News, you click show, it's only like links to cool products that people are just like, hey, I want to show you guys I made this. Hey, I want to show you guys I made this. He's like, what if there was something that was just the show tab? Let's make the side thing the main thing. And so that's what Product Hunt became. And Product Hunt then became this sensation in Silicon Valley, ends up selling the company for $20 million.. And you know, it was this, this success for Ryan. And so this was like Reddit kind of had that same idea, that same thing where it took the side page of Delicious. And so there's something to this, which is one great place to discover ideas is look at your invoices or look at your P&L, look at the cost section. I think that's one great place to find investments or ideas. Another one is look at your traffic referrals. And if you ever notice referrals coming from someplace, that's interesting. Another one is what's a side feature Your favorite side feature of a different app that actually could be a standalone app in itself. And so there's something to that philosophy.
One bit, one quick story. Scott Belsky. I talked to Scott Belsky. Scott Belsky, um, is a famous, uh, entrepreneur and investor. He told me that when he was in his early 20s, he had a website and he noticed that he was getting a lot of traffic from this brand new website called Pinterest. And so he reached out to the founder of Pinterest and was like, Hey, what's this thing? Tell me all about it. And he wasn't getting a lot of traffic, like 100 people a day or something like pretty small. And the guy was like, yeah, it's just this thing I'm working on. I'm going to raise a little bit of money at a $3 million valuation. Do you want to invest? Scott goes like, well, I only have like $50 grand in my name, but I guess I'll give you $15,000. And he did. That went on to make probably $100 million. That same week, he started getting traffic from a website called StumbleUpon. And he, and he goes and does the same thing. He saw, he talks to the guy, StumbleUpon, that they're not raising, but he becomes friends with Garrett Camp, who goes on a couple years later to found Uber, and he invests in Uber as well, $15,000, also made something like $100 million, because both times he was getting traffic from these brand new websites that he thought were interesting.
Exactly. That's what I'm saying. These are breadcrumbs that it's not specific to the Reddit story. This is everywhere. And those are perfect, perfect examples of, uh, of the same, The same principle. It's kind of like the art of noticing. Like if you can notice where you're getting traffic or notice that, hmm, this keeps growing every month, you might find something earlier than everybody else. So that's another one. All right, here's another principle that I found interesting. The name Reddit was not meant to be the name of the site. They wanted to call it snoo.com, S-N-O-O. And today the Reddit mascot's name is Snoo. And Reddit was kind of like their placeholder name for it. It was the working title and it was like, we're gonna change, when we actually launch this thing, we're gonna change it. But like for now it's this, snu.com was too expensive so they couldn't afford it. And this is so common, like we are so often wrong about names. Some people get really precious about names early on, but Paul Graham advised these guys to just like, just pick a name that kind of like feels right, works right for you right now. You can change it later if you need, but also he urged them to ship it fast. He's like, I think we could build a fast version of this. And Reddit actually launched in 3 weeks after they went through the, after they got it admitted to YC, which is incredibly fast. And then from there they just started iterating.
That's awesome. That's amazing.
Um, next thing, do you know how they got their early traction? Have you heard this story? It's, it's a good one.
Yeah, basically Steve Huffman and Alexis, I believe what they did is they just created a bunch of fake usernames and they just would submit constantly like different links to look like many people were participating because the way that a site like Reddit or any community works is you typically have like 99% of people going to view stuff and only 1% of people actually submitting stuff. So they had to submit content in order to create, uh, supply.
Exactly, exactly. Nobody wants to be, nobody wants to come into a dead room and just start dancing, right? Like if you go to a nightclub, there's nobody on the dance floor, you're not gonna go either. So they had to fake it till they make it, right? I think that's kind of the principle here was fake it till you make it gone right. And this was, they were the users. I think they talked about like they created, I think 30 different accounts and they would just not only submit the links for Reddit, but they would then comment. And they would comment as different personalities. And I think Steve talked once, like, he's like, the first day I logged on and the comments under a link were not from me was like this hallelujah moment. It's like, holy shit, we did it. We got enough of that critical mass, that chicken and egg problem. We solved it, we got them the ball rolling. And importantly, they had also set the culture. You did this, I thought, really, really well when you launched Trends. I got to see you launch Trends from an idea to a 3, 4, 5 million a year recurring revenue product. And all it was was a Facebook group. And in that Facebook group, there was a research reporting too, but the Facebook group I think was actually the main product.
It was.
And you were so damn active.. And I was like, oh, this is how you build a community. Every day you would go in there and you'd be like, hey, what's up guys? I was just thinking about this interesting thing. I'm like, no, the fuck you weren't. You were like, you were like, I have to stoke this fire, otherwise this fire's gonna go out right now.
And I used to write posts on other people's behalf. I don't know if you've ever, if you did this at the time.
Yeah, you asked me, you were like, hey, can you post this in the group? I'm like, post it. Did I ask you that? And then you copy pasted this huge thing and I was like, Okay, I guess it's well written. So like, sure. So you got us to, you were basically our fake accounts.
Yeah. And I got, I, I couldn't remember if this was pre-MFM days. So if this was pre-Shawn being famous, uh, and I would like get other popular people and write on their behalf and be like, hey, just post this. And, uh, yeah, it worked out really well.
He would be like, hey, can you go comment? Like you'd message 40 of us. He'd be like, please go comment on this thing. This baller just joined and I want this to feel really active for him. Like, I want him to, I want him to feel overwhelmed. And I'm like, okay, what do you want me to say? You're like, say this. And I went and I would go comment that. And then that guy would be like, wow, what a community. This is fantastic. And like that first impression was so good because of that. That's what the Reddit guys did.
And I found, by the way, you have to do that. I have, I've had to do that, uh, in that case to about 2,000 people with Hampton. I only had to do it to about 300 people. And so the numbers that you actually have to do that for, like the new members or whatever the community is, the website visitors. It's actually not that high.
Dude, those numbers sound so high. You did it for 2,000 members? That's crazy.
Uh, the way I remember it was sort of like the first 150 days.
Yeah.
You were, you were tending to that fire. You would not let it just go out.
Uh, yeah. So it was only about 6 months that I had to do that. Um, what's the other point?
All right. Next one. Um, okay. Talent filters. So one thing Paul Graham says, he goes that the reason Steve showed up at that talk was because he followed my blog, which was about Lisp. Lisp is this obscure programming language that I think Paul Graham created, if not created, popularized, but I think he created it. And he's like, the thing about Lisp is, he goes, it's one of those languages that few people will learn except out of your own intellectual curiosity. Meaning it's like, It's not, you don't learn it to get rich or to get famous or any of those things. If you go through the rite of passage of learning this thing and being interested in it, you are just wired a certain way and you are somebody who pursues your intellectual interests and pursuits. It's like, I guess, pretty elegant if you do code in Lisp. It's like really elegant in certain ways. But again, it's like cursive or calligraphy. It's like you don't need to learn calligraphy, but if you do, you probably have an eye for design, right? The Steve Jobs thing. Right, sure. So same sort of thing. So he, so that got me kind of interested that there are probably like a dozen things that I can think of that are like this amazing talent filters. We talked last week about that startup Cognition that came out and raised a bunch of money and they have this like AI software programmer that's like, you know, better than ChatGPT at writing code. And that guy was like in the math Olympiad, right? He was like his sport when we were playing, you know, basketball and soccer and stuff like that. He was like, you know, sitting there at a, on a stage buzzing in and answering like really hard math questions or the spelling bee. It's like things that you do, if you can become obsessed and degenerate, degenerately obsessed about certain things, you're wired a certain way and you are almost like predisposed to success. Then, you know, it's like all I gotta do is introduce you to the idea of the stock market. Trust me, all your like fucking World of Warcraft grinding is gonna apply really, really well over here. You just have to get exposed at the right time.
Here's a list. Poker. Yeah. Board games. Yes. Sports, specifically individual sports. So if you're world class, like an individual, like a swimming, track and field, cycling, wrestling, those types of things. All right. The video games one is obvious. Let me give you a wild card. Magic. I'm not talking about like cards, but like, ta-da, like that type of magic.
Every 12-year-old boy. I don't know any 12-year-old boys who did not think Magic was the shit and bought a Magic set for sure.
If you could trick me on levitating or make a coin come out of my ear, like that took a lot of hard work. I'm into it.
eBay flipping was another one back in the day. Like, you know, sneaker flipping and eBay flipping was definitely another one. Being a Mormon and going on a mission, another one, right? Being from the countries, the Ukraine, like any war-torn country that you have escaped from, great filter, right? There's like, there's a, there's a bunch of these. Um, all right, next one. One of the, one of the, the best principles my, uh, my, my trainer and coach taught me was that the best products are simply you pushed out. That's how I feel about this podcast. This podcast is just me pushed out to the world. And for whoever likes me, they're gonna like this podcast and it's gonna feel very second nature to me to create this podcast cuz it's just me. And so, uh, Paul Graham says almost the same principle without, he doesn't have that catchphrase, but he has, it says the same thing about, about Reddit. He goes, Reddit is— Reddit was successful because Steve has two things. Number one, he likes ideas for the sake of ideas. Like, he likes ideas just for the sake of interestingness, which is really what Reddit is. Like, you go to Reddit not because it's the top news story, but because it's like mildly interesting or it's fascinating in some obscure way. And that's what makes Reddit really, really special. And that's the type of stuff that Steve really, really likes. And so naturally it went in that direction, which is like, Not obvious, actually. Like, I think the obvious, if you were like writing a business plan, you would've made Reddit a lot more like, I don't know, the homepage of CNN today, right? The important stories rather than the quirky, interesting stories that are only just, they scratch your intellectual itch and nothing really else.
Dude, that's kind of a weird way to say it. The product is just pushed outta ya.
Like just ejaculated straight outta you.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
You just gotta squeeze really hard, grunt a little bit, and pop, it's just gonna be pushed right outta there.
You just gotta make your innie an outie. All right. That's, that's all you're really doing when it comes to entrepreneurship.
All right, Steve, I like you.
All right. The next, the next one that he says there, he goes, the other thing about Steve, he has that, but then the second thing is he has a very anti-authority streak. Um, so he liked the idea of creating a website that didn't have editors because at the time in the internet, all edit, all websites that were like editorial news link submissions, they had this like small class of like the gatekeepers who decided what's in and what's out. And Reddit does not work that way. They, you know, over time they have like a self, like a democratic mod thing, but there is no person at the company who decides what gets posted, what gets featured, what gets shown. And he's like, those two factors are just like inherent in Steve himself. And so it, of course, the product is an extension of the founder.
That, I mean, yeah, that, that's pretty amazing. I think, uh, what's his name? Jason Fried, uh, has had a big part of that in his podcast where he talks about being crazier early on because if you start a little bit crazy, a little wacky, a little weird, later on things inevitably become more tightwound, more conservative. And so it's best to do it early on to establish that. And I thought that I've always felt that, but I didn't, I wasn't articulate enough to phrase it in such a wonderful way. And that actually is a beautiful, uh, way of thinking.
And Reddit is exactly that way. The mascot is this goofy alien creature, right? And it's like, first of all, you don't have to have a mascot. You could have a logo without a mascot, but he has this alien mascot, but it's like the weird shit got baked in early. Once this thing got big, the idea of like, hey, we're going to introduce this new alien mascot. It'd be like, well, I don't know, do the numbers support that? Do the focus groups support that? Is this going to risk the traffic? Blah, blah, blah. It's important that the weirdness gets baked in early.
I shared an office at 3rd and Bryant in downtown San Francisco with Reddit when they were 13 employees, like shared an office building. They were on floor 3, I was on floor 4, and I used to get into the elevator and I would like— I was such a fan of Reddit. I was like, if I meet someone from Reddit in this elevator, I'm going to ask for like a picture with them. This is a big deal. And you would see these guys wearing their Reddit backpacks and sweatshirts. And I'm just thinking like, these are my heroes. And then it's just like, this nerdy Asian guy with like a crappy mustache who's like 5'3" getting in the elevator. The book bag was like weighing him back and like, is it a fall over? And I'm like, sir, it is an honor. Like, like, I just remember thinking like, I love your work. Yeah. Like, can you sign here? Just lifting up my shirt and asking if he could like sign on my chest. Like, I was like, the tide has turned. I'm not exactly like a, like a jock alpha looking guy, but compared to this guy, I was. And yeah, I'm like begging him like, please have mercy.
Well, here's another good one. Um, Alexis Ohanian tweeted this out today. It was a screenshot of an email he got from Chris Sacca. And you know, this is early on because his name is Christopher Sacca, not Chris. He was still Christopher back then. And his email was like, he's still at Google. He was working at Google. So he emails them out of the blue and Alexis tweeted out, he goes, Shout out to Saca for being the first person before my mom, before our investors, before anybody else who saw what, how big and successful Reddit could become. And here's what the email says. It just starts off. There's no hi, no hello. It just goes, someday folks will be pleading with their hosting companies because they're being reddited or something like that. You guys are driving a surprising amount of traffic to my site.
I wonder what site it was.
He's working at Google at the time. I think he literally was just calling Google his site, which is Legendary. I don't know if there's another way of phrasing that.
And the whole email so far is lower caps.
There's not one lowercase I is how you start paragraph 3, by the way. Um, anyways, he goes, anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you guys. Not only were you both impressive technologists, you both seem like well-rounded guys with senses of humor. And I love this. He goes, humor should never be underestimated.
All right.
There's some wisdom in that, bro. We've been saying that for a long time.
That's awesome. How, how old is Chris in this email, you think? I mean, he's not like a, he's not a bigwig yet.
25 is my guess. So he's 48 now and this was 24 years ago, so he's 24 years old.
What? Chris Sacca was 24 when he wrote this email?
All right. Oh no, no, sorry. 20 years ago. So maybe he's 28. Sorry. 28.
That's still like, this is like a pretty baller email at a young age. All right, go ahead.
So he's 28 years old and he says, um, I would be thrilled to have you come visit us at the Goog.
Oof. All right. You lost me there.
That one didn't stick.
Yeah.
Luckily you've racked up a bunch of cool points in our book. Yeah, definitely just took a hit. Um, and then he's like, you know, come, come. Then he goes, this is the best part, dude. I didn't even see this the first time. Here's how the email ends. He goes, we can grab lunch sometime and intro you to some Googlers. Cool? The next line, cool, period. Dude, God, I hope my emails never leak because I do shit like this all the time. That is so just so bad and so great at the same time.
That's all right. Again, he's got so many cool points that he could be deducted a few douche points and he's still way up on top.
Like, this is better than just being like, you're welcome in advance.
Yeah. Yeah. Chris Sacca, the type of guy to like introduce himself and say, please to meet me.
Yeah, exactly.
Um, this is awesome.
This is cool.
And then one more thing you have on here, Sam Altman owns 8%, which is like $1 billion today. Before we even get to that, Reddit sold the company. So Reddit has had a ton of drama. I forget the guy's name. His name was Aaron something. So basically, yeah, Aaron Schwartz. So basically, if I remember correctly, during YC, that 3-month period, there was another guy named Aaron who was pretty brilliant and he got in trouble. Or rather, before that, his company wasn't working, so they merged with Reddit. So he kind of became a co-founder of Reddit. A few years into the business, I think he got in trouble for doing something that is like a, a lot of people protest against, but basically he stole information from MIT, I think it was, and they were going to lock him up for like 20 years.
I think he basically gave access to, I think, scientific journals and JSTOR.
I think it was JSTOR.
Uh, so yes, he's, yes, stealing is not the right word.
According to the government, it was stealing. According to him, and I'm on his side, it was like, this information deserves to be free, whatever. And he was going to get locked up for like years and he Ended up killing himself. And this, uh, along with a bunch of other drama, uh, they had a bunch of like drama early on. And in fact, they sold the company to Condé Nast. I forget for how much, but I think—
here's the thread. So Alexis tweeted this out the other day, which was, which was cool because— or not the other day, 4 years ago. Time flies. Um, he talks about selling it in 2006. So they started in 2005, basically sold it, um, in 2006. So here's what he says. So he goes, Halloween is a surreal holiday because on Halloween we sold Reddit to Condé Nast, which was like not a tech company at the time, it's like some big magazine publisher. He goes, basically it was 16 months of work. I would be getting more money than my parents had made their entire working lives. And there were lots of things about management, team building, whatever, that I just didn't know and I would need to know. Um, he said his mom was ill and he's like, basically it was a $10 million exit. And he goes, um, I didn't know there were other options like raising money or doing other things. So we just kind of Sold?
I think he said previously they, they each walked— Steve and Alexis walked away with $2 million.
And then they, they ended up buying it back or getting Condé Nast to spin it out and then ended up buying it back essentially.
Yes. And when they did that, they eventually raised money of which Sam Altman is credited with now owning 8% of the company. And Sam Altman— so Reddit has gone through all types of drama where like a CEO was fired and then a week later another CEO was fired. Sam Altman was intermittent CEO for one day. And he was fasting.
Yeah. Interim CEO.
Yeah. He was the fasted CEO.
Sorry.
Interim. Um, and he, uh, uh, was the CEO because he was one of their investors and his fund owns 8%. I don't think Sam Altman owns 8%. I think he owns a percentage of the 8%, which now today is worth something like a billion plus.
Right, right.
That's right. As if that guy, you know, I'm glad Altman has finally gotten a win under his belt. You know, like he's been at it, that poor kid. God bless him.
Yeah, exactly. Other remarkable things. So not only did they sell too early, but they're— they got, they got a second ride back on the train. Um, this is also 19 years in the making. Like it took a long time. And by the way, the company still not profitable. Like there's so many just crazy kind of mind-bending things that if you're not from the Silicon Valley world, like none of this computes. I was like, Reddit is the whatever, like the fourth biggest, uh, you know, social network in the world or something like that.
Well, I think it's, uh, like the 10th most visited website in the, uh, in the country, which is funny because if you go to like quote a normal person and be like, hey, do you use Reddit? And they're like either what's Reddit or no, I don't know how, you know, they use Reddit, use all of Reddit, use a lot of Reddit.
Reddit's my life. It's basically Hacker News and Reddit is how, and Twitter, those three things are just how I get information.
Dude, there's like no button. I remember trying to advertise 5 years ago. I remember being like, we should run Reddit ads. This is a great market. And I went through like a 3-hour process and I was like, oh, I guess it's impossible to advertise on Reddit. There's like, I have to like send a telegram to somebody if I want to advertise on here.
Now it's much better, but I've advertised a little bit on Reddit and this was like 5 years ago and it's like, so that, that feeling that Steve has of fuck authority, the users have that, which doesn't exactly make it the most, uh, advertising friendly audience. And, uh, I've advertised on there. Cheaps, very, uh, clicks were very cheap. Uh, results very bad. They did not buy whatever I was selling.
That's the slogan. Clicks cheap. Results?
Terrible. Yeah.
Join us.
You do the math. Um, all right, well, that's sick. This was a good phone call. Uh, is, are you ready to hang up on me now?
Yeah. All right. I'm going to go now. Bye.
All right. That's the call.
I feel like I could rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.