Reddit

“Consider three hundred million people will visit Reddit this month. That's almost as big as the population in the United States.”

“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…”

“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.”

“PG is terrible at naming companies, but when he nailed it with that phrase, it was special.”

“If I went back 10 years ago and knew everything I knew now and had to start Reddit all over again, I don't know if we could succeed.”

“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 …”

“She had no idea what Reddit was.”

“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.”

“So I regret from a business standpoint, yes, we sold it early, but I have no regret whatsoever as a decision because I got to make that phone call.”

“Unfortunately, snoo.com cost 4000 dollars, which we didn't have. It was a third of our fund, so couldn't afford it.”

“That is accurate.”

“We actually only worked on it for about three weeks before we launched it.”

“And this was a chance to basically get 12,000 dollars from an investor we really trusted to just try something for three months.”

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

“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.”

“And we actually saw my therapist saw him together.”

“And from that post, we got, I think, a couple hundred signups. Maybe 50 people really started using it, and that was the day we say we launched, because, like, people we never knew were now coming and inviting their friends, and yeah.”

“Reddit videos, at least at the time, and still to this day can be a sort of frontline for what's going to go viral on the internet.”

“And the algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, when you suddenly and massively just get an influx of views from an outside source, it's going to prioritize you in the algorithm.”

“And I made the video specifically for Reddit, for the food subreddit, because I had been posting there.”