Reddit IPO: 8 Startup Lessons For Any Entrepreneur Starting Out

Shaan Puri

Alright, this was not supposed to be a podcast. This was me calling Sam 2 minutes ago and being like, "Dude, did you hear the stuff about Reddit?" And he's like, "No, no, no," just... he put the finger up to my lips [and said] "Push record." In fact, me and Sam... we should really never talk if we're not recording. I think that's the new lesson.

Sam Parr

By the way, I still have no idea what you're going to bring up.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so let me give you the background. Reddit goes public today. Interesting, fine. I don't really care; I didn't participate in the stock or anything. I wasn't really looking at the chart, but I did read Paul Graham's essay about Reddit. It's titled "The Reddit's" and it's on the Y Combinator blog. Paul Graham has known these guys for nearly 20 years now, and he wrote this post today that had so many little breadcrumbs. As I was reading this, every paragraph was firing off like a connection to a different lesson learned. My brain of frameworks was literally lit up like a Christmas tree with some of the things he was saying. I just wanted to say them out loud to you. I wanted to...

Sam Parr

I'm imagining you eating cereal as you're reading this. Then you have like one bite in and... like you'll just...

Shaan Puri

[Sounds of dropping food] My salad... I'm eating. Look, it's half-eaten because I was like, "Oh shit, I gotta put this down. I gotta record this." And so we didn't plan this, but let's do it. Alright, so I'm reading this essay and I want to give you kind of like... a **by**... of what I think is really interesting.

Sam Parr

And by the way, Paul Graham is the... I guess we should give context now because this is like a podcast. Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, and Reddit was one of the first companies [in Y Combinator].

Shaan Puri

Reddit was the first company in the first batch of Y Combinator (YC). But actually, what's more interesting is that in that post, Reddit is not only the first YC company in the first batch ever, it's actually the reason that YC exists. I don't know if you know this, but this is kind of cool. Paul Graham, in this essay, says YC started because he went to the Harvard Computer Club or something like that and gave a talk. By the way, this is how many interesting things have started. I also believe this is kind of how Apple started. Wasn't there a talk or a demo at the Homebrew Club? This is how Tim Ferriss started "The 4-Hour Workweek." He taught a class at Princeton. There's this principle: if you ever want to learn something, try to teach it. That has led to many people writing books. So, Tim Ferriss did it, then he wrote a book. Nir Eyal had the same experience when he wrote his book "Hooked." He said, "I first was just giving a talk somewhere. To give the talk, I had to sharpen up my thoughts. By the end of that, I was like, 'Shit, there's something to this.'" The same thing happened here. Paul Graham gave a talk at the school called "How to Start a Startup." After giving this talk, he thought, "Dude, I should create a vehicle to invest in these earlier, younger founders." At the time, founders were thought to be either older or just super young prodigies. But he thought, "I think this college student age is where you could start companies from." That's why he created YC. So, he gives the talk and meets with Steve and Alexis afterward. He was impressed by another thing: he gave this talk at Harvard, but these guys didn't go to Harvard. They went to school in Virginia. They took a train up from Virginia to hear this talk because they used to follow his blog. Steve loved his blog and convinced Alexis, "Hey, come with me to go see this guy talk." They went up there; it wasn't like a show. There were no tickets, just a 30-person room, and he was there. Paul was so impressed that these guys came from Virginia that he said, "They wanted to meet for coffee." He thought, "Okay, no problem. You guys came from so far away; I'll do it." There's a principle here: 80% of success is just showing up. When in doubt, just go. Take the train, take the flight, just show up. Put yourself in positions for good things to happen, and that's what they did. It was a high-agency move. They could have easily not gone, but they took the train, they told him, and this was the first of many high-agency moves they pulled. He talks about how they actually ended up rejecting these guys from YC. He gives the talk, decides to create YC, and reaches out to the guys, saying, "Hey, I was inspired by meeting you guys. I actually created something called YC for people just like you. You should fill out the application." They fill out the application, but he hates the idea, so he rejects them. Their idea was ordering fast food off your phone—right, DoorDash.

Sam Parr

Yeah, but...

Shaan Puri

But there were no smartphones, so there was no DoorDash. They basically had to go to cell phone carriers and fast food chains and do it all manually so that you could do it over text message (SMS) back then.

Sam Parr

And you have to set the context even here about them showing up, which is Paul Graham. He's a big deal now, you know. Paul Graham funded Airbnb, Dropbox, and all the other big names. Back then, he had just sold a company for, I think, $30 or $40 million, which was a big deal at that time. I guess he had some extra money and he was blogging, but he wasn't like a big deal. It was like a very... this was like a very significant moment.

Shaan Puri

The hacker is for programmers who are entrepreneurial, right?

Sam Parr

Which is almost as ridiculous as when Twitch was coming up. You're like, "People watch video games online?" It's like this guy's just blogging about this type of internet stuff that's not even that cool or interesting. It was a very small market.

Shaan Puri

By the way, Twitch was also in that first batch, and Emmett is best friends with Steve, the guy who created Reddit. Alright, so anyway, more principles. The first one is: if you want to actually learn, try to teach. Giving a talk is actually a really good gateway into either books, companies, or whatever. If you can't articulate a bunch of really insightful things that get other people excited in a 45-minute talk, it probably won't work as a book or company. In reverse, even if you're not planning to do it, it's a great way to generate sharp ideas—go try to teach a class. The second thing is taking the train and showing up. Alright, great. Now here's the next one: trusting your gut. Like I said, he's inspired by these guys, and he creates Y Combinator (YC) because he meets them. But their idea? He hates it. He hates the idea of ordering food off your phone. He says, "At the time, I didn't realize that the game I'm supposed to be doing is sort of betting on people, not ideas." He thought he was supposed to be betting on ideas, and since he hated their idea, he rejected them. Then he talks about Jessica, his wife, who he credits as having the best kind of people detector of anybody he knows. She was like, "Oh, you rejected the muffins." He's like, "Muffins?" And she's like, "Yeah, that's what I called those guys—Steve and Alexis. They're like so endearing; they're like a little poodle, you know? They're like a little puppy. I called them muffins." She said, "Oh, that's sad. I like the muffins." He replied, "Yeah, but I didn't like their idea." She said, "I feel like we should have the muffins in YC. They're the reason you created this. Why would you not accept them?" So he calls them back up while they're on the train ride home to Virginia and says, "Guys, I want you to be in YC, but I'll fund you only if you're going to change your idea."

Sam Parr

And how much was the funding? Was it **$15,000**?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like nothing.

Sam Parr

15,000 like a summer.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. But it was the belief in you that was the real currency there. They're on the train ride home from Virginia. They just get off at the next stop and then hop on the next train going back up north again. They immediately seize the opportunity, which is another kind of... again, these were all like little breadcrumbs of successful actions and behaviors. It doesn't surprise me that a Reddit comes out of something like this. On his side, it was trusting his gut. Paul’s side was trusting his gut that he wanted these guys involved. He should bet on people, not ideas, early on. For them, it was being willing to hop off the train and just take the next train up north again. So he gets there. Now, here's the next interesting idea: some of the best ideas are found, not thought of; discovered, not thought of. Paul Graham had been blogging, and his blog was not too big of a deal back then. It was okay, or not what it is today. But he noticed that a lot of his traffic to his blog was coming from a website called Delicious. Do you remember Delicious?

Sam Parr

Was it really a website, or was it like a bookmark? Was it like a bookmark tool?

Shaan Puri

A way to save the stuff you liked, like a bookmark for later for yourself, but they had one little side feature called **delicious.com/popular**. **/popular** was basically just an aggregator of all the most popular bookmarked things that day. It was a side feature, sort of a throwaway idea for them. But what Paul Graham noticed was, "Damn, I get actually a lot of traffic from the **/popular** tab of Delicious." It's not the main product; it's the side product. So he took that and said, "Guys, you need a new idea. Here's an idea: the Delicious **/popular** thing is cool. What if there was just a page that was like the front page of the internet? It's like, what are all the most interesting links of the day that you should go check out? Just take the side thing and let's make it the main thing."

Sam Parr

That's a pretty wild thing to think about because back then, they started in 2005, which meant Google was only 8 years old. AdWords was probably new. I don't remember when Facebook started, but right around then, internet advertising was still pretty new.

Shaan Puri

Dude, they weren't even thinking about advertising. They were just thinking, "What's a cool thing that should exist on the internet? What's a cool, useful product?"

Sam Parr

Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's easy because I'm going to show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say "I," I mean not my team; I mean I'm the one who actually made it. I've got this company called Hampton. You can check it out at **joinhampton.com**. It's a community for founders, and one of the ways that we've grown is by creating these surveys. We ask our members certain questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask. So, things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, and all these interesting questions. Then, we'll put it in a survey. I went and made a landing page, so you can check it out at **joinhampton.com/wealth**. You can actually see the landing page that I made. The hard part with Hampton is that we are appealing to a sort of higher-end customer, similar to brands like Louis Vuitton or Ferrari. So, I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates; that's what we use. We just changed the colors a little bit to match our brand. It's very easy. They have this drag-and-drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. Once it's made, I then shared it on social media. We had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information. I can then see over the next handful of weeks how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. I can track where the revenue came from—Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. I can actually go and look at it and say, "Oh, well that worked, that didn't work. Do more of that, do less of that." If you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it! You can check it out; go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. Alright, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri

That same idea I heard again many years later when I met Ryan Hoover. Ryan Hoover was the founder of Product Hunt. What most people don't know is that before that, he was blogging. I reached out to him and I was like, "Hey, I really want to hire you." I tried to hire him, but he wanted to join my team. However, he didn't pass the interview process for some reason. They said, "We don't think he has enough experience" or something like that. I really liked Ryan, so I said, "Hey man, I'm so sorry. Let's keep in touch. I feel like our paths are going to cross again." Three weeks later, he emailed me about an idea. He said, "Hey, maybe instead of a job, I should start something." He told me, "I like to go to Hacker News every morning." Back then, that was my routine too. We both used to go to Hacker News every morning.

Sam Parr

Still is.

Shaan Puri

But my favorite tab is not the main page of Hacker News; it's the side page, the "Show" section. Here, you can go to a sort of show and tell where you can showcase what you're building. If you go to Hacker News and click "Show," it's only links to cool products that people are saying, "Hey, I want to show you guys I made this." So, I thought, what if there was something that was just the "Show" tab? Let's make the side thing the main thing. That's what Product Hunt became. Product Hunt then became this sensation in Silicon Valley and ended up selling the company for $20 million. It was just a success for Ryan. This is similar to how Reddit had that same idea, taking the side page of Delicious. There’s something to this. One great place to discover ideas is to look at your invoices or your P&L (Profit and Loss) statements, specifically the cost section. I think that's one great place to find investments or ideas. Another one is to look at your traffic referrals. If you ever notice referrals coming from some interesting place, that could be a clue. Lastly, consider what's a side feature of your favorite app that could actually stand alone as its own app. There’s something to that philosophy.

Sam Parr

One quick story: I talked to Scott Belsky. Scott Belsky is a famous entrepreneur and investor. He told me that when he was in his early twenties, he had a website and noticed that he was getting a lot of traffic from this brand new website called Pinterest. So, he reached out to the founder of Pinterest and asked, "Hey, what's this thing? Tell me all about it." At that time, he wasn't getting a lot of traffic—like 100 people a day or something pretty small. The founder replied, "Yeah, it's just this thing I'm working on. I'm going to raise a little bit of money at a $3,000,000 valuation. Do you want to invest?" Scott said, "Well, I only have like $50 to my name, but I guess I'll give you $15,000." He did that and went on to make probably $100,000,000. That same week, he started getting traffic from a website called StumbleUpon. He reached out to the guy at StumbleUpon. They weren't raising money, but he became friends with Garrett Camp, who went on a couple of years later to found Uber. He invested in Uber as well, also for $15,000, and made something like $100,000,000. Both times, he was getting traffic from these brand new websites that he thought were interesting.

Shaan Puri

Exactly! That's what I'm saying. These are breadcrumbs that are not specific to the Reddit story; this is everywhere. Those are perfect, perfect examples of the same principle. It's kind of like the art of noticing. If you can notice where you're getting traffic or notice that something keeps growing every month, you might find something earlier than everybody else. So that's another one. Alright, here's another principle that I found interesting: the name Reddit was not meant to be the name of the site. They wanted to call it **snoo.com** (S-N-O-O). Today, the Reddit mascot's name is Snoo, and Reddit was kind of like their placeholder name for it. It was the working title, and they thought, "We're going to change it when we actually launch this thing." But for now, **snoo.com** was too expensive, so they couldn't afford it. This is so common; we're often wrong about names. Some people get really precious about names early on, but Paul Graham advised these guys to just pick a name that feels right and works for you right now. You can change it later if you need to. He also urged them to ship it fast. He said, "I think we could build a fast version of this." Reddit actually launched in three weeks after they got admitted to Y Combinator, which is incredibly fast. From there, they just started iterating.

Sam Parr

That's awesome! That's amazing.

Shaan Puri

Next thing, do you know how they got their early traction? Have you heard this story? It's a good one.

Sam Parr

Yeah, basically Steve Huffman and Alexis [Ohanian], I believe, created a bunch of fake usernames. They would constantly submit different links to make it look like many people were participating. The way that a site like Reddit or any community works is you typically have about 99% of people going to view stuff and only 1% of people actually submitting stuff. So they had to submit content in order to create supply.

Shaan Puri

Exactly, exactly! Nobody wants to come into a dead room and just start dancing, right? If you go to a nightclub and there's nobody on the dance floor, you're not going to go either. So they had to "fake it till they make it," right? I think that's kind of the principle here. They were the users. I think they talked about how they created 30 different accounts. They would not only submit the links for Reddit, but they would also comment as different personalities. I think Steve talked about this once. He said, "The first day I logged on and the comments under a link were not from me, it was like this hallelujah moment. It's like, holy shit, we did it! We got enough of that critical mass. That chicken and egg problem? We solved it! We got the ball rolling." Importantly, they had also set the culture. You did this really, really well when you launched Trends. I got to see you launch Trends from an idea to a $3, 4, 5 million a year recurring revenue product. And all it was, was a Facebook group. In that Facebook group, there was a research reporting tool, but the Facebook group, I think, was actually the main product.

Sam Parr

It was.

Shaan Puri

And you were so damn active, and I was like, "Oh, this is how you build a community." Every day you would go in there and you'd be like, "Hey, what's up guys? I was just thinking about this interesting thing." I'm like, no, the fuck you weren't. You were like... I have to stoke this fire, otherwise this fire is gonna go out right now.

Sam Parr

And I used to write posts on other people's behalf. I don't know if you've ever done this at the time.

Shaan Puri

Think me? You're like, "Hey, can you post this in the group?" I'm like, "I did."

Sam Parr

I ask you that.

Shaan Puri

And then you copy-pasted this huge thing, and I was like, "Okay, I guess it's well written, so sure." You were basically our fake account.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and I couldn't remember if this was pre-MFM days, so if this was pre-Sean being famous. I would get other popular people and write on their behalf, saying, "Hey, just post this." And yeah, it worked out really well.

Shaan Puri

He'd be like, "Hey, can you go..." You'd message 40 of us. He'd say, "Please go comment on this thing. This baller just joined, and I want this to feel really active for him. I want him to feel overwhelmed." And I'm like, "Okay, what do you want me to say?" You're like, "Say this," and I would go comment that. Then that guy would be like, "Wow, what a community! This is fantastic!" And that first impression was so good because of that. That's what the Reddit guys did.

Sam Parr

And I found, by the way, you have to do that. I've had to do that in that case to about 2,000 people. With Hampton, I only had to do it to about 300 people. So the numbers that you actually have to do that for, like the new members or whatever the community is of website visitors, it's actually not that high.

Shaan Puri

Dude, those numbers sound so high! You did it for 2,000 members? That's crazy!

Sam Parr

I don't remember exactly, but that doesn't seem right. Now, Trends had 20,000 members.

Shaan Puri

The way I remember it was sort of like the first 150 days.

Sam Parr

Yeah, you.

Shaan Puri

Were you tending to that fire? You would not let it just go out.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so it was only about 6 months that I had to do that. What's the other?

Shaan Puri

Alright, next one. Okay, talent filters. One thing Paul Graham says is that the reason Steve showed up at that talk was because he followed my blog, which was about Lisp. Lisp is this obscure programming language that I think Paul Graham created, or at least popularized. He says, "The thing about Lisp is it's one of those languages that few people will learn except out of their own intellectual curiosity." This means you don't learn it to get rich or to get famous or for any of those reasons. If you go through the rite of passage of learning this language and being interested in it, you are just wired a certain way. You are someone who pursues your intellectual interests and pursuits. It's pretty elegant if you code in Lisp; it's really elegant in certain ways. But again, it's like cursive or calligraphy. You don't need to learn calligraphy, but if you do, you probably have an eye for design. Right? The Steve Jobs thing.

Sam Parr

Sure.

Shaan Puri

So, same sort of thing. That guy is kind of interesting. There are probably like a dozen things that I can think of that are like this amazing talent filter. We talked last week about that startup, Cognition, that came out and raised a bunch of money. They have this AI software programmer that's better than ChatGPT at writing code. That guy was in the Math Olympiad, right? While we were playing basketball and soccer and stuff like that, he was sitting there on a stage buzzing in and answering really hard math questions, or participating in the spelling bee. It's like, if you can become obsessed and degenerately obsessed about certain things, you're wired a certain way. You are almost predisposed to success. Then, you know, it's like all I gotta do is introduce you to the idea of the stock market. Trust me, all your grinding in World of Warcraft is going to apply really, really well over here. You just have to get exposed at the right time.

Sam Parr

Here's a list: - Poker - Board games

Shaan Puri

Yes.

Sam Parr

Sports, specifically individual sports. So if you're world-class, like in swimming, track and field, cycling, wrestling—those types of things. Alright, the video games one is obvious. Let me give you a wild card: magic. I'm not talking about cards, but like "ta-da," that type of magic.

Shaan Puri

That every 12-year-old boy... I don't know any 12-year-old boys who did not think magic was the shit and bought a magic set for sure.

Sam Parr

If you could trick me into levitating or make a coin come out of my ear, like that took a lot of hard work. I'm going to do it.

Shaan Puri

eBay flipping was another one. Back in the day, you know, sneaker flipping and eBay flipping were definitely popular. Being a Mormon and going on a mission is another example. Also, being from countries like Ukraine or any war-torn country that you have escaped from is a great filter, right? There are a bunch of these. Alright, next one. One of the best principles my trainer and coach taught me was that the best products are simply you pushed out. That's how I feel about this podcast. This podcast is just me pushed out to the world. For whoever likes me, they're going to like this podcast. It's going to feel very second nature to me to create this podcast because it's just me. Paul Graham says almost the same principle, although he doesn't have that catchphrase. He says the same thing about Reddit. He goes, "Reddit was successful because Steve has two things. Number one, he likes ideas for the sake of ideas. He likes ideas just for the sake of interestingness," which is really what Reddit is about. You go to Reddit not because it's the top news story, but because it's mildly interesting or fascinating in some obscure way. That's what makes Reddit really, really special, and that's the type of stuff that Steve really, really likes. Naturally, it went in that direction, which is not obvious, actually. I think the obvious approach, if you were writing a business plan, would have made Reddit a lot more like, I don't know, the homepage of CNN today—focusing on the important stories rather than the quirky, interesting stories that only scratch your intellectual itch and nothing really else.

Sam Parr

Dude, that's kind of a weird way to say the product is just pushed out of you, like...

Shaan Puri

Just ejaculated straight out.

Sam Parr

You just gotta squeeze really hard, grunt a little bit, and pop. It's just gonna be pushed right out of you.

Shaan Puri

Make your innie an outie. Alright, that's all you're really doing when it...

Sam Parr

Comes to entrepreneurship, alright Mark, I like you.

Shaan Puri

The next thing that he says is, "There he goes." The other thing about Steve is that he has a very anti-authority streak. He liked the idea of creating a website that didn't have editors. At the time on the internet, all websites that were like editorial news link submissions had this small class of gatekeepers who decided what was in and what was out. Reddit does not work that way. Over time, they have a self-moderating, democratic system, but there is no person at the company who decides what gets posted, what gets featured, or what gets shown. He's like, "Those two factors are just inherent in Steve himself." So, of course, the product is an extension of the founder.

Sam Parr

That's pretty amazing. I think Jason Fried has had a big part in that with his podcast where he talks about being crazier early on. His idea is that if you start a little bit crazy, a little wacky, a little weird, later on things inevitably become more tight-wound and conservative. So it's best to establish that unconventional approach early on. I've always felt that way, but I wasn't articulate enough to phrase it in such a wonderful way. That actually is a beautiful way of thinking about it.

Shaan Puri

And read it exactly that way. The mascot is this like goofy alien creature, right? First of all, you don't have to have a mascot; you can have a logo without a mascot. But he has like this alien mascot, and it's like the weird shit got baked in early. Once this thing got big, the idea of like, "Hey, we're gonna introduce this new alien mascot" ... it'd be like, "Well, I don't know. Do the numbers support that? Do the focus groups support that? Is this gonna risk the traffic?" Blah, blah, blah. **It's important that the weirdness gets baked in early.**

Sam Parr

I shared an office at 3rd and Bryant in downtown San Francisco with Reddit when they were just 13 employees. We shared an office building; they were on the 3rd floor, and I was on the 4th. I used to get into the elevator, and I was such a fan of Reddit. I thought, "If I meet someone from Reddit in this elevator, I'm going to ask for a picture with them. This is a big deal!" You would see these guys wearing their Reddit backpacks and sweatshirts, and I was just thinking, "These are my heroes." Then, one day, it was just this nerdy Asian guy with a crappy mustache, who was about 5'3", getting into the elevator. His backpack was weighing him back, and it looked like he was going to fall over. I thought, "Sir, it is an honor!" I just remember thinking, "I love your work." So, I asked, "Can you sign here?" and I lifted up my shirt, asking if he could sign on my chest. I felt like the tide had turned. I'm not exactly a jock or an alpha-looking guy, but compared to this guy, I was. I was begging him, "Please, have mercy!"

Shaan Puri

Well, here’s another good one. Alexis Ohanian tweeted this out today. It was a screenshot of an email he got from Christopher Sacca. You know this is early on because his name is Christopher Sacca, not Chris. He was still Christopher back then, and his email was like, he’s still at Google. He was working at Google, so he emails them out of the blue. Alexis tweeted out, "Shout out to Sacca for being the first person, before my mom, before our investors, before anybody else, who saw how big and successful Reddit could become." Here’s what the email says: it just starts off, there’s no "hi," no "hello." It just goes, "Someday folks will be pleading with their hosting companies because they’re being reddited or something like that. You guys are driving a surprising amount of traffic to my site."

Sam Parr

I wonder what site it was.

Shaan Puri

He's working at Google at the time. I think he literally was just calling Google "his site," which is legendary. I don't know if there's another way of phrasing that.

Sam Parr

And the whole email so far is in lowercase. There's that one.

Shaan Puri

Lowercase "i" is how you start paragraph 3, by the way. Anyways, he goes: > "Anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you guys. Not only were you both impressive technologists, you both seem like well-rounded guys with senses of humor." And I love this, he goes, "Humor should never be underestimated."

Sam Parr

Alright, there's...

Shaan Puri

Some wisdom in that, bro. There's some wisdom in that.

Sam Parr

For a...

Shaan Puri

Long time.

Sam Parr

That's awesome! How old is Chris in this email, you think? I mean, he's not like a... he's not a bigwig yet.

Shaan Puri

25 is my guess. So, he's 48 now, and this is 24 years ago, which means he was 24 years old at that time.

Sam Parr

What Chris Sacca was 24 when he wrote this email.

Shaan Puri

Alright, oh no, no, sorry. Twenty years ago, so maybe he's 28. Sorry, 28.

Sam Parr

That's still like... this is a pretty baller email at a young age. Alright, go ahead.

Shaan Puri

So, he's 28 years old, and he says, "I would be thrilled to have you come visit us at the Google."

Sam Parr

Oof, alright, you lost me there.

Shaan Puri

That wouldn't stick. Yeah, luckily you've racked up a bunch of...

Sam Parr

Cool points in our boat. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri

Definitely just took a hit and then he's like, "You know, come, come." Then he goes, "This is the best part, dude. I didn't even see this the first time. Here's how the email ends: 'We can grab lunch sometime and I'll intro you to some Googlers. Cool?'" The next line: "Cool." Dude, god, I hope my emails never leak because I do shit like this all the time. That is so bad and so great at the same time.

Sam Parr

That's alright. Again, he's got so many cool points that he could be deducted a few douche points, and he's still way up on top.

Shaan Puri

Like this is better than just being like, "You're welcome in advance."

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah. Chris Sacca is the type of guy to introduce himself and say, "Pleased to meet me. This is awesome. This is cool." And then, one more thing you have on here: Sam Altman owns 8%, which is like $1,000,000,000 today. Before we even get to that, Reddit sold the company. Reddit has had a ton of drama. I forget the guy's name; his name was Aaron something. So basically, yeah, Aaron Schwartz. If I remember correctly, during Y Combinator (YC), that three-month program, there was another guy named Aaron who was pretty brilliant. He got in trouble, or rather, before that, his company wasn't working, so they merged with Reddit. He kind of became a co-founder of Reddit. A few years into the business, I think he got in trouble for doing something that a lot of people protested against. Basically, he stole information from MIT, I think it was, and they were going to lock him up for like 20 years.

Shaan Puri

We did something. I think he basically gave access to, I think, scientific journals and whatnot.

Sam Parr

I think it was JSTOR.

Shaan Puri

So, I mean, yes, he's...

Sam Parr

So, "stealing" is not the right word according to the government. It was stealing according to him, and I'm on his side. It was like, "This information deserves to be free," or whatever. He was going to get locked up for like years, and he ended up killing himself. This, along with a bunch of other drama, they had a lot of drama early on. In fact, they sold the company to Condé Nast. I forget for how much, but I think...

Shaan Puri

Here’s the thread. Alexis tweeted this out four years ago, which was cool because... or not the other day. Time flies! He talks about selling it in 2006. So, they basically sold it in 2006. Here’s what he says: "Halloween is a surreal holiday because on Halloween we sold Reddit to Condé Nast, which was not a tech company at the time. So, it's become a big..."

Sam Parr

Magazine publisher

Shaan Puri

He goes, "Basically, it was 16 months of work. I would be getting more money than my parents had made their entire working lives." There were lots of things about management, team building, or whatever that I just didn't know and I would need to know. He said his mom was ill and he's like, "Basically, it was a $10,000,000 exit." He goes, "I didn't know there were other options like raising money or doing other things, so we just kind of sold."

Sam Parr

I think he said previously they each walked away with $2,000,000.

Shaan Puri

And then they ended up buying it back or getting Condé Nast to spin it out, and then they ended up buying it back essentially.

Sam Parr

Yes, and when they did that, they eventually raised money, of which Sam Altman is credited with now owning 8% of the company. Reddit has gone through all types of drama, where a CEO was fired and then a week later, another CEO was fired. Sam Altman was the interim CEO for one day.

Shaan Puri

He was testing.

Sam Parr

Yeah, interim CEO. He was the **facet** CEO, sorry, interim. He was the CEO because he was one of their investors, and his fund owns 8%. I don't think Sam Altman owns 8%. I think he owns a percentage of the 8%, which now today is worth something like **$1,000,000,000+**.

Shaan Puri

Right, right, that's right.

Sam Parr

As if that guy... you know, I'm glad Altman has finally gotten a win under his belt. You know, like he's been at it. That poor kid, God bless him.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. Other remarkable things are that not only did they sell too early, but they got a second ride back on the train. This is also 19 years in the making; it took a long time. By the way, the company is still not profitable. There are so many just crazy, kind of mind-bending things that if you're not from the Silicon Valley world, none of this computes. It's like Reddit is the, whatever, the fourth biggest social network in the world or something like that.

Sam Parr

I think it's like the 10th most visited website in the country. Which is funny because if you go to a normal person and say, "Hey, do you use Reddit?" they're either going to respond with, "What's Reddit?" or "No, I don't." I don't know how you know.

Shaan Puri

People that use Reddit, use all of Reddit. They use a lot of Reddit. There's a lot of Reddit going on for people who are users.

Sam Parr

Reddit's my life. It's basically Hacker News, Reddit, and Twitter. Those three things are just how I get information.

Shaan Puri

They, I think, have like 75 million DAU (daily active users) or something like that. Anyway, it's crazy that after 19 years, it's still not profitable. But everybody who built it made a lot of money.

Sam Parr

Have you advertised on Reddit?

Shaan Puri

Dude, there's like no button. I remember trying to advertise 5 years ago. I remember thinking, "We should run Reddit ads; this is a great market." I went through like a 3-hour process and I was like, "Oh, I guess it's impossible to advertise on Reddit." It was like I had to send a telegram to somebody if I wanted to advertise on here. Now it's much better, but...

Sam Parr

I've advertised a little bit on Reddit, and this was like 5 years ago. It's like that feeling that Steve has of "fuck authority." The users have that, which doesn't exactly make it the most advertising-friendly audience. I've advertised on there; their clicks were very cheap, but the results were very bad. They did not buy whatever I was selling.

Shaan Puri

That's the slogan: "Clicks, cheap results, terrible." Yeah, join us.

Sam Parr

You do the math. Alright, well that's sick. This was a good phone call. Are you ready to hang up on me now?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, alright. I'm gonna go now. Bye!

Sam Parr

Alright, that's the call.