Reddit

“The moment I lose the desire to go on Hacker News or go on Reddit or go on X and just figure out what's going on in the world and what people I don't know that I should get to know, that's the moment that I should probably hang up my cleats and move on because…”

“I think it's ballpark, fifty million dollars. For Google, so Google pays Reddit, fifty million dollars a year to kind of, ah, have trained in the past on it, but B, have updated data, and, ah, ChatGPT does the same thing.”

“In the AI era, there's really only one place where actual human-generated content exists, and the value of that content is super valuable, like, really valuable, because it helps train the models.”

“What's interesting about Reddit is you don't get famous in the real world for being good at Reddit. You might become infamous once in a while. You don't become rich by being good at Reddit. So, which is not true on social media. You can become rich and famous …”

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

“We want the brands too, but the brands need to show up as brands. Like it's okay for them to say, we're here to sell you stuff. In fact, they do a lot better paid and organic. If they just tell the truth, I'm here to sell you something.”

“Reddit's never been the engagement platform. Right? Find the most engaging or enraging posts to drive time on site or to drive traffic. That's just not how we run the business. That's not what our community wants.”

“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.”

“And we are way more productive now than we were before COVID. So you can't convince me that being in the office is the key to productivity. Maybe it is, but I think it's like lever number 10 behind like having a consistent strategy and having good leaders.”

“Tried and true organic strategy on Reddit for a brand is to do an AMA. Like, I'm, you know, famous director. I'm here to answer questions. I'm also here to promote my movie. People get that. Or I'm here to answer questions. I'm also here to promote my book. I …”

“When we were preparing to go public, a person I called a number of times was Rich Barton. He was the founder CEO of Expedia, then Zillow, then Glassdoor. And he had a lot of really good advice for me on Whether to go public? His answer was yes. He's like, do y…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Reddit creates virality, but itself is not viral. Reddit creates meme stocks, but itself Isn't really that. You get just a little bit of that energy, but not like those other companies.”

“And now even more so with AI, where the whole internet becomes sanitized and summarized by AI, which actually has a lot of value But it causes people to appreciate the humanness of Reddit.”

“The point of Reddit is often not the post. The point is the conversation, right? You read these relationship advice, or am I the asshole, or whatever. Like, the experience is the conversation. The conversation is real. The post is just the prompt for a convers…”

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

“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…”

“Reddit's different than social media. It's organized around communities, not the, what I call the F's. Friends, family, famous people, followers.”

“Our design of these things is that you, it's not, Reddit doesn't do the verifying. And in fact, the way we want to implement these things is you actually kind of leave the app and then come back. So it's very clear you're in a different app, you're on a differ…”

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

“No way. No way. No way. We are a building company. And so in order for engineering headcount to go down, we'd have to know everything we wanted to build. So let's say AI makes our engineers 50, a hundred percent, or even 10 X more productive. We'll just build …”

“When people say bots today, they're referring to, you know, AI masquerading as humans. That's not allowed on Reddit.”

“It's a big misconception. People think anonymity equals lack of safety. As if real world platforms with bad behavior don't exist. There's plenty of platforms with real world identities and lots of bad behavior. What incentivizes good or bad behavior is, I thin…”

“There's others we use that actually check your ID. I don't love those, but we're compelled or coerced to use them by various governments.”

“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.”

“The way we're thinking about it today is we want to make sure there's an ass in seat. Like, are you physically watching this thing?”

“One of the biggest decisions we made around then was we were going to invest in our own ad tech. So our own ad server, our own tracking, our own measurement, all of this. We were small to do that. And we moved off of programmatic. So most websites or platforms…”