The Ledger, every show

“Reddit's data has been used to train every large language model you've heard of, some with and others without our permission, which has, you know, been a situation to navigate but with our biggest partners, Google and OpenAI, you know, we do it on purpose, and…”

“So, you know, when we went out it was like, 34 dollars a share was the IPO price. So we went out March, twenty-twenty-four. Our last private round was in end of 21. Share price was 61 dollars. So we went out with a pretty big valuation haircut from our previou…”

“Like, 40% of the conversations on Reddit are commercial.”

“Our bottleneck at Reddit right now is actually code review. Because we can produce so much code, but we've got to review it and deploy it.”

“The other interesting dynamic with Reddit is of course our corpus has been used as a training set for all of the major LLMs.”

“If the human intelligence isn't compensated fairly, then the AI will eventually lose access to it. It'll dry up. There'll be no incentive to create new art, music, words, whatever it is.”

“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.”

“And I think by the time that these companies figure it out and make it safe and reliable and this and that, that there'll be other options that just work better. For example, electric bikes and scooters are really, really great. Public transit works really wel…”

“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.”

“And that's why the first hundred or so Reddit users were either characters from World of Warcraft or pieces of furniture in our living room.”

“Well, Reddit is crushing Dig now. I think they're almost twice as large as Dig... In traffic... And uniques per month and page views per month. Or is my understanding, you know, I haven't, I don't have direct access to Reddit numbers anymore, but from what the…”

“If we made the site go faster by 10%, page use would go up by 10%.”

“So we've had revenue growth over 60% for five quarters in a row.”

“And we were able to get to gap profitability in our first year out a little bit ahead of schedule.”

“Even where Reddit has algorithms at the end of the day, nothing can become popular on Reddit without a community of people within the context of their values voting on it and making it popular.”

“What I later learned when I came back is the strategy at Reddit was don't change anything.”

“We've been able to grow revenue and users basically without growing the team size which basically means costs have stayed level while we scale the rest of the company.”

“All the communities on Reddit, you know, the many thousands of them are created by users and run by users that we call moderators, and they were upset, you know, for some acute issues and also just, like, just general frustration, and so they took their commun…”

“Dig was five times bigger than us. They released a new version of their software that was so Disliked by users that the users came to Reddit.”

“Paul, Paul had approached us before building Hacker News and said, Hey, can you guys make me my own Reddit where people can only upvote and I can have like supreme control over the content? And then we were like, no, that's not, You know, that's not really on …”

“Whether or not you build a good product, you're going to get a ton of press just being a part of Y Combinator.”

“All the travel sites have access to the same data, effectively, including us.”

“Part of our IPO was doing one of the largest directed share programs ever to let users buy into the IPO at the IPO price at 34 dollars.”

“When I came back to the company employees, they wouldn't wear our swag in public”

“He said, this will be the end of lines.”

“I didn't write the first line of code until June, and I had never built a website before, and we were kind of Paul's special projects a little bit, you know, because of how we got into YC,”

“So our first real users were actually Paul Graham fans, people who were reading his essays, and that kind of set the tone for the for the early days of Reddit.”

“Alexis and I were submitting all the content, and we had a rule back then that all of the content on the front page had to be less than 24 hours old. And the front page was 25 links long. So if there were fewer than 25 links submitted that day, there would be …”

“I can only speak for Reddit's numbers, and that, they got nine million uniques last month.”

“So Paul brought us the first maybe thousand or so uniques.”

“I know one of the first outside moderators that sticks in my mind is QGYH too. He was this insane Reddit user. I shouldn't say he was insane. He spent insane amounts of time on the site and we always thought he was a bot for a long time because we would look a…”

“You know, we have the benefit of hindsight now, and we can see, you know, if we had known that Reddit was gonna grow 20 times since we got bought, you know, maybe we would've played our cards a little differently.”

“So one of the things he told us very early on, if I don't even think we had launched anything, maybe we had shown him some screenshots, was he insisted that we put as much content in the upper left of the page as possible.”

“Oh, our name, the logo, he hated the logo. He thought we should put the logo down in the lower right of the screen so people would, you know, it's, there was a lot of branding things that he cared about.”

“On Reddit, we basically, we had kind of two features and just iterated them over and over. You know, user submit stories, user submit content, or comments.”

“We were not accepted into Y Combinator. And the way Reddit came about was basically Paul told us, hey, we really like you guys. We just don't like that idea. So if you're willing to work on something else, you can be in YC.”

“There was a time when I was at Hitmonk where I knew zero percent of the people who worked at Reddit.”

“Kids going back to college in the fall is generally a big boost of users for us. There's not generally one event that's tied to it, but we found ourselves always chasing spikes that happened in August and September.”