Oct 20, 2010 · 58m · mixergy
#400 Reddit Founder: “I Wish I Still Owned Reddit Now” – with Steve Huffman
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this Mixergy interview, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman discusses Reddit's early organic growth, product philosophy, and acquisition by Condé Nast, while sharing hard-won startup lessons and introducing his travel search company, Hipmunk.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Andrew holds 25.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Andrew as informed peer 3.7 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 1.4 Andrew pushing back 2.7
speaking balance: gold is Andrew, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 44:00 Steve rejects the idea that legacy travel search engines work well
Steve directly pushes back against Andrew's defense of Expedia, arguing that sorting by price still leaves users overwhelmed with fragmented data and immense cognitive fatigue.
Hardest push from Andrew ▶ 3:37 Andrew demands proof that Reddit is larger than DiggAndrew aggressively interrupts and challenges Steve's assertion that Reddit is crushing Digg, demanding specific metric definitions and attempting to cross-examine him with Compete data.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:30 Steve teaches Andrew the mathematics of web performance and trafficSteve educates Andrew on the direct empirical relationship between site latency and page views, revealing that optimizing speed by 10% consistently produced an exact 10% traffic gain.
Andrew holds their own ▶ 48:05 Andrew demonstrates deep practical transit expertise on Northeast travelAndrew asserts clear domain knowledge by breaking down why Chinatown buses and Amtrak beat flights between DC and New York, prompting Steve to enthusiastically confirm this was Hipmunk's core vision.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Andrew as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Andrew pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analyzing Reddit's Competition and Growth Against Digg | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Andrew challenges Steve on why Reddit did not crush Digg earlier and attempts to cite live traffic figures from Compete.com. Steve clarifies that third-party analytics like Compete are unreliable and explains that Reddit grew steadily while Digg alienated its core community. | |
| Reddit's Organic Community Expansion and Early Traffic Drivers | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Andrew notes Alexis Ohanian previously credited Paul Graham's mailing list for initial traction and asks for specific tactical drivers behind Reddit's organic growth. Steve explains that after the initial bump, growth was driven by word-of-mouth and seasonal student influxes rather than deliberate PR spikes. | |
| Site Performance, Headline Optimization, and Minimalist Design Philosophy | 3 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Andrew presses for concrete tactics on how to build and maintain user retention. Steve schools Andrew on product engineering fundamentals, explaining that increasing site performance by 10% directly yielded a 10% increase in page views. | |
| Community Moderation Philosophy and the Origin of Hacker News | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Andrew brings up Paul Graham's hands-on moderation of Hacker News and asks how Reddit scaled its community. Steve reveals the origin story of Hacker News, explaining that Graham asked Reddit to build a heavily moderated sub-platform, and built HN himself after Reddit refused. | |
| Delegating Spam Control and Appointing First External Moderators | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Andrew inquires about delegating moderation to community members. Steve describes appointing hyper-active users like QGYH2 out of pure operational necessity to combat spam filter false positives and bad actors. | |
| Co-Founder Dynamics Between Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Andrew brings up previous interviews and asks if Steve ever felt resentful that Alexis Ohanian received the public limelight while Steve handled heavy programming. Steve rejects the premise, explaining that Alexis carried all operational, legal, and community goodwill responsibilities during intense personal hardship. | |
| Sibling-Like Trust and Mutual Accountability Between Founders | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Andrew presses Steve on why he agreed to sell Reddit to Conde Nast if he did not share Alexis's personal family pressures. Steve explains the sibling-like trust between them and the economic reality that poor college founders should take a life-changing buyout before market conditions turn. | |
| Emotional Aftermath of the Acquisition and Life as a Millionaire | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Andrew asks how becoming an instant millionaire changed Steve's day-to-day life. Steve recounts that his lifestyle barely shifted aside from reduced daily stress, though he broke down in tears the day before the acquisition closed. | |
| Why Early-Stage Startups Fail: Utility, Stamina, and Denial | 3 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Andrew asks what causes most Y Combinator startups to fail. Steve explains that failed founders rarely quit cleanly; instead, they build things that lack utility and drag out a zombie startup for months while making excuses about waiting on deals. | |
| Y Combinator Case Studies: Airbnb's Transformation vs Brain Guppy | 3 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Steve illustrates startup trajectory differences by contrasting Airbnb's aggressive turnaround inside YC against early batch company Brain Guppy, whose founders chose returning to school over iterating. Steve notes this led YC to ban active students. | |
| Paul Graham's Product Mentorship and Brutal Feedback Style | 5 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Andrew questions the mystique around Paul Graham's product genius and pushes Steve to explain the exact mechanics of Graham's feedback. Steve breaks down Graham's unfiltered bluntness and cites specific UI advice Graham gave regarding upper-left visual density. | |
| Personal Motivations, Family Influences, and Drive to Persist | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Andrew inquires about Steve's personal drive and family background. Steve explains his motivation was avoiding working for others and proving to his parents that running an internet company was a real job. | |
| Childhood Passion for Programming and Early Building Experiments | 4 | 6 | 3 | 4 | When Steve introduces Hipmunk, Andrew plays devil's advocate, arguing Expedia already lets users sort by price and stops. Steve firmly pushes back, schooling Andrew on cognitive overload and explaining that traditional sites cause decision fatigue by dumping hundreds of disorganized flight options. | |
| Expanding Multimodal Travel: Integrating Amtrak Trains and Chinatown Buses | 6 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Andrew demonstrates his own deep travel expertise along the Northeast corridor, validating Hipmunk's Amtrak integration and proposing the inclusion of regional Chinatown bus lines. Steve enthusiastically agrees that multimodal transportation was the core founding vision. | |
| Founding Hipmunk, Investor Accountability, and Preventing Burnout | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Andrew questions why an already wealthy founder took institutional funding rather than bootstrapping like 37signals. Steve explains that outside capital creates essential psychological accountability that prevents a comfortable founder from walking away when things get tough. | |
| Managing Burnout, Personal Hobbies, and Hipmunk's New Challenges | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Andrew asks how to game Reddit headlines and probes into political and religious subreddits. Steve explains Reddit's delicate balance of user moderation, detailing past incidents where the community engaged in vigilante behavior before establishing internal social boundaries. |
Statements from this episode (29)
Huffman: Digg failed by neglecting its community and chasing Twitter
“I think Digg, Digg seems to be catering to the wrong crowd. Either they're, ah, acquiescing to investor pressure or, you know, just trying to change their product too much. Maybe they're trying to compete with Twitter too hard. But what they're not focusing on…”
Huffman: Reddit is crushing Digg and is nearly twice its size
“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…”
Huffman: Reddit reached nine million unique visitors last month
“I can only speak for Reddit's numbers, and that, they got nine million uniques last month.”
Huffman: Paul Graham delivered Reddit's first ~1,000 unique visitors
“So Paul brought us the first maybe thousand or so uniques.”
Huffman: College returns drove Reddit's traffic spikes every August and September
“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.”
Huffman: A 10% speed increase boosted Reddit page views by 10%
“If we made the site go faster by 10%, page use would go up by 10%.”
Huffman: Site speed was Reddit's only reliable traffic driver
“The only consistent thing we could do to drive traffic was make Reddit faster. Because sometimes we'd add a lot of features and traffic would go down. Sometimes we'd stagnate for a month or two and traffic would go up. And we're always just like, who knows, le…”
Huffman: Long headlines and minimal censorship drove community bonding
“Allowing users to have really long headlines, for example, was one thing that we did that, that other sites didn't, or, you know, not censoring swear words, or, you know, not censoring anything to the extent that we could get away with it, allows the community…”
Huffman: Reddit avoided centralized moderation because it does not scale
“And one of the decisions that we made on Reddit is that we don't want to be moderators. It's, it doesn't scale very well.”
Huffman: Reddit allowed all non-spam content without tailoring the platform
“To a large extent, it's anything goes. As long as it's not spam, most content will survive. And so that was one of the big philosophical differences between Reddit and Hacker News is, is we didn't want to remove content or we didn't want to tailor the site to …”
Huffman: Paul Graham asked Reddit to build Hacker News first
“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 …”
Huffman: Reddit founders initially thought early moderator qgyh2 was a bot
“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…”
Huffman: Alexis Ohanian handled Reddit's marketing and goodwill better than Condé Nast
“And it turns out he just did that stuff better than what kind of NASA do for us. And so he continued, you know, I always describe his job as making us seem cool. And that's what he would do is, is he would basically maintain our goodwill, which was one of our …”
Huffman: Living together for eight years gave Reddit's founders sibling-level trust
“Alexis and I have been friends, like we lived together for eight years through Reddit. So we were, you know, pretty close to being brothers in the sense that, you know, I, we have the same relationship that I have with my sister, which is we can get mad at eac…”
Huffman: Reddit grew 20x following its 2006 sale to Condé Nast
“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.”
Huffman: Reddit might not have survived the 2008 recession independently
“Yeah, I, you know, I wish I still owned Reddit now, and had owned it for the last four or five years, but it would have, for everything to have gone right, for us to have the stomach to survive that economy, I mean, who knows, like, Kanye Nast's umbrella helpe…”
Huffman: He cried at his desk before finalizing the Reddit acquisition
“The day before was when all, all the lawyers had agreed, and we basically said, tomorrow we're gonna sign the papers. And I remember I got really emotional that day. I was sitting there at my desk in in Boston, and I just cried.”
Huffman: Startups get tons of press just for joining Y Combinator
“Whether or not you build a good product, you're going to get a ton of press just being a part of Y Combinator.”
Huffman: Founders trying to feign usefulness to avoid embarrassment often succeed
“Most people have a have a desire to not look like fools, and so that they work really hard to at least feign usefulness whether or not they actually have it, and most of them in the process of feigning usefulness build something useful.”
Huffman: Paul Graham is an exceptional product thinker lacking social filters
“Paul is, I think he's an exceptionally good product guy. He has a really good eye for what's useful and what isn't. And he's also completely stateless and has no social filter. So it helps that you can go to this guy who will just be like, this is stupid. And …”
Huffman: Paul Graham insisted early Reddit cram content into the upper-left
“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.”
Huffman: Paul Graham hated Reddit's alien logo and wanted it hidden
“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.”
Huffman: All travel search sites access the same flight data
“All the travel sites have access to the same data, effectively, including us.”
Huffman: Hipmunk differentiates by filtering out up to 90% of flight results
“One of the ways we can do that is we remove about 70% of listings right off the bat. If you tell us a little bit more about what you want to do, we can remove like 90% of listings.”
Huffman: Taking outside capital motivates founders by making it harder to quit
“Taking money from other people is, is a great motivator. Especially for me, it would have been tough, or I should say, it would have been easy for me to walk away from Hipmunk at any point. And I'd be like, Adam, you know, hey, this isn't working out. Let's ta…”
Huffman: He burned out repeatedly on early Reddit by lacking work-life balance
“One of the things I learned on Reddit was how to not burn out, or I should say, like, on Reddit, I burned out a couple times. I just wouldn't get any work done for a while, because I just didn't feel like working on the same thing. And, you know, one of the ex…”
Huffman: Early Reddit iterated on just two core features
“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.”
Huffman: He dislikes the lack of viewpoint diversity on parts of Reddit
“It's not the content that I don't like. I guess it's the amount, or it's the lack of different opinions on some parts of Reddit.”
Huffman: He personally moderated r/atheism to keep Reddit welcoming for new users
“While I agree wholeheartedly with their message, I felt like I was kind of the standard bearer for making Reddit seem welcoming for new users, and so people were like, oh, Spez, he's, I guess he's just some sort of devout Christian who just wants to squash our…”