The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Firing Underperformers Guarantees Company Improvement, While Hiring Only Offers a Chance
“When we hire somebody, there's a chance that your company gets better if it's a great hire. When you let somebody go, it is guaranteed your company will get better because at the minimum, you're not stressing about that person anymore.”
Digg failed because its community became toxic while Reddit successfully evolved
“That was part of his success, but I think that that group of individuals actually became pretty trollish, quite honestly, by the end of it, and navigating how to succeed through that was very hard for Digg and for Kevin, and you watched someone like a Reddit c…”
Ohanian: Resigned from Reddit board in 2020 requesting Black successor
“You know, after the murder of George Floyd and really thinking about sort of the role that I want to play in the world, I realized I needed to step down from the board of Reddit. I did that in June and you know, was very relieved to see that they honored my re…”
Hydrazine Capital missed $2B by distributing Reddit stock post-lockup
“It was about nine billion when the lockup ended. That was tough. I think the market cap's about thirty-nine billion now. I think it's pretty public. The fund owned just about seven percent. You can do the math. That's about maybe two billion of gains that coul…”
Dash: Reddit community consensus is more trustworthy than friends' opinions
“People actually weigh in, and it's become so trusted, because the aggregation of the community and the community actually giving it weight on what is valuable and not, is more trustworthy than necessarily what your friends think about something.”
Sahgal: Reddit required a minimum 10% CTR for push notifications
“One of the rules actually, before I talk about diversification, that we did the push notifications, which is a massive lever for Reddit, is we said you're only allowed to send push notifications if it hits a minimum CTR. And if it doesn't hit that CTR, it's sp…”
Sahgal: Reddit's biggest existential risk is imitating other social networks
“I think how we fuck up is by not, instead of doubling down where we are strong, we try to cover our weaknesses, or we look at what's happening with other social networks, and we try to follow.”
Sahgal: A new growth hire taking no action in month one is a red flag
“In the first month, the red flags have got to be people who are doing a lot of talking and a lot of listening and not a lot of action. The right candidate just wants to get going. And I mean, get going as in they want to launch something their second week ther…”
Steve Huffman Aims to Scale Reddit to Billions of Users by 2024
“And so what I'm truly excited to do, and hopeful that we can succeed at, is over the next five years, providing that not just for the millions of who use Reddit every day, but for, in the future, billions of people, if not everybody.”
Steve Huffman Recognizes His Top One Percent Hires Within Twenty Minutes
“The best hires I've made, like the top one percent, My very favorite people I knew in about the first 20 minutes of our conversation.”
Job Candidates Who Are Hard to Hire Will Be Hard to Manage
“There's a phrase that people in my orbit when they're hiring, which is hard to hire, hard to manage. If somebody is a pain in the ass in the interview process, they're not on time, or it's difficult to schedule, or all of your conversations are about title and…”
Consensus-Based Decision-Making Is Just a Way to Avoid Making Decisions
“I don't believe in decision through consensus at all. I think that's a great way to actually not make decisions.”
Altman: Hydrazine Capital backed Rippling at a $25 million valuation
“It was give money to the best people. You know, we did Reddit at a higher valuation. We did rippling at 25.”
Altman: Saga sold Rippling shares early to return capital to LPs
“Rippling and Reddit. We sold a little bit of rippling on the way up, just because, like, our LPs wanted money and, you know.”
Slonimski: Organic Growth Opportunities Lie in Discord, Reddit, and YouTube
“With the rest, I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. Building those communities where the users are. Discord, Reddit, YouTube following.”
Gupta: Crypto growth relies on Discord and Reddit over Meta and Search
“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”
Seibert: Tech companies are locking down data, reversing 20 years of open APIs
“You're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years, when everything was being pushed more and more ope…”
Dash: Video feeds inherently constrain ad inventory compared to text feeds
“Yeah, look, I think Adam is right in that that dynamic generally exists with feed oriented products.”
Sahgal: Daily active unique users is Reddit's North Star metric
“For Reddit, for example we, our North Star metric is DAUQ, DAU Uniques. Probably the most important metric for the company. Leading indicator of revenue, all of that.”
Sahgal: Social networks are shifting from friend graphs to interest-based communities
“What you're seeing now is the broad social networks are becoming all about communities and all about interests, and they just have different take on it. Like that's where tick tock is. That's what Instagram is becoming pretty quickly. That's what Reddit obviou…”
Sahgal: Startups shouldn't expect growth leaders to clean messy data infrastructure
“It would be very good to be disciplined around it because you, what you want is you don't want this person to be your head of data and to actually fix whatever's happening with your data. That is not their job. What you want is for them to be able to actually …”
Sahgal: Growth teams require full-time engineers rather than contractors
“As I mentioned in the beginning, you just need a few engineers who can collaborate, who can work with this person. Full-time, much better than contractors or part-time. Again, you want people who have skin in the game, who are in it. This is a high leverage ar…”
Ohanian: Reddit sale surpassed parents' lifetime earnings in 16 months
“We made more of that, that sale of Reddit than my folks had made their entire lives. And I got it for 16 months worth of work.”
Steve Huffman Believed Reddit Had Unmatched Potential Upon His 2015 Return
“Reddit has this, it's this incredible opportunity represents, has more potential than any company I can think of. And it feels like they're missing it. It feels like that opportunity is slipping through their fingers.”
Reddit Needed Alexis Ohanian's Charisma to Get Into Y Combinator
“You know, Alexis then and now has always been a very, like, high charisma person, an easy conversation, kind of a charming, funny person, and so in the early days of Reddit, even in that story I just told you, those skills were really important to us because I…”
Direct Truth-Telling Is the Most Compassionate Strategy During Employee Terminations
“The most compassionate thing that we can do for somebody is tell them the truth in a difficult situation.”
Robinhood's viral waitlist launched accidentally after a viral Reddit post
“Somebody found that way to Robinhood free stock trading. Posted it on Reddit, so it's like a Friday night, and then all of a sudden we're like, man, we're getting a lot of traffic, where is this coming from? So we actually hooked up Google Analytics, which tha…”
Tilt rejected a company mascot designed by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
“So the background there is the founder of Reddit, who has a very adorable mascot in Snoo on that you see next to every Reddit logo. He built, he designed us a mascot, and we ended up not using it.”
Discord gained its first 50 users from a Final Fantasy subreddit post
“We got 50 users that day from that post. And then that 50 turned into a hundred the next day and it sort of started to snowball.”
Press Report Prompted Reddit's Initial Outreach to Acquire Dubsmash
“So, interestingly enough a journalist was able to snuff out that two acquirers were actually coming in and thinking about acquiring the company. And, you know, I denied it. As much as I possibly could. And then really the next day I realized, I really don't ha…”
Dubsmash Endured Two to Three Failed M&A Processes Before Reddit Deal
“Openly we went through sort of almost two to three failed processes until we found a successful process with Reddit.”
Sahgal: Early growth leaders should spend 30-40% of time hiring
“Probably 30 to 40% of my time in those early years should have just been about hiring.”
Vaibhav Sahgal: Reddit runs monthly product reviews versus Zynga's weekly cadence
“So when I was at Zynga, we did them weekly because it was just a weekly product cadence. I mean, gaming is Gaming is brutal, right? It is a daily, weekly business. And you only have so much of a shelf life. So for gaming, that was the right cadence. For Reddit…”
Gabriel Weinberg was one of the first advertisers on Reddit
“I was one of the first, if not the first Reddit advertiser back in the day, like click-through rates can be through the roof.”
Steve Huffman Is Not a Social Person Despite Running Reddit
“I have lots of thoughts and a vision for Reddit, and I am not a social person.”
Reddit Was the Fifth Most Visited Website in the US in 2019
“Today, this company ranks as the number five most visited website in the US”
Stress Management Is the Art of Eliminating Cyclical, Repetitive Thoughts
“It's been removing these cyclical, useless thoughts from my head, and I think a lot of stress management is the tactics and the art of removing these thoughts from my head.”
Reddit created a 'Fix the Video Player' subreddit to collect bug reports
“We actually even created a subreddit called Fix the Video Player”
Linda Lian: AWS launched its developer community programs around 2017
“This was around 2017 when we really started building all of the developer community engagement programs that AWS still has today, including our developer Slack, our Reddit engagement, our Stack Overflow engagement, open sourcing product roadmaps on GitHub.”
Matt Mochary's coaching client list includes partners at Benchmark, Sequoia, and Kleiner
“On the VC side, Matt has worked with the likes of Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Several Sequoia partners, Hemond at GC, and Mamoon at Kleiner, to name a few. As for founders, Matt's worked with the founders of Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Reddit, Flexport, and many mor…”