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Transcript of our conversation with Steve Huffman:
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and thinking about the next decade ahead, what do you think Reddit can be that it isn't today?
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And, you know, how do you get there? I'm curious.
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In one word, universal.
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We have 100 million people on the platform every day. It's great. It's a big number. It's like 3 billion internet users every day. Our 4 billion community is universal. Reddit is people talking about stuff. People talk about stuff online and offline. People want to talk to other people. They want to be with other people.
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They want to share a few laughs. They want to feel that sense of connection and belonging. That's what Reddit is. And so I just feel like we haven't even scratched the surface on Reddit. What Reddit can be. And then on top of that, there's Reddit. Now, as a information source, as a knowledge source about everything.
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to Founders in Arms podcast with me Immad Akhund co-founder and CEO of Mercury.
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And I'm Raj Suri Co-Founder of Lima and Tribe. Today we have with us Steve Huffman is founder and CEO of Reddit. Welcome, Steve.
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Thanks, guys. Glad to be here.
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Reddit. I mean, what a journey you've had with Reddit now. So Reddit today is around 20 billion valuation, 100 million daus All right.
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That's right.
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Yeah. And, so you started in to 2005 and it's been 20 years now. You celebrate a 20 year anniversary this year. Is there a big celebration?
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Yeah. I mean, I assume that will
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know, I
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seen these emails going
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by somebody doing something.
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Do you remember the exact date? Like when you launched
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it? When do you think of the
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inception date?
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We started working. June. I think we launched it June 22nd. And so I think. I think we celebrate. It's somewhere in June. We'll call that the 20 years. But the 22nd is a date that sticks out in my mind.
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One, thing I've always wanted to ask you about Reddit is like, how has the journey been? Everyone knows Reddit today as, you know, the, the primary, you know, source for kind of, peer to peer sharing, online and, you know, how is the journey?
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But yeah, obviously it has not been smooth and up, you know, up into the right. There have been some ups and downs throughout the journey, but how long did it take before you knew that this was going to be significant, or did you not know that until very recently? I mean, like, like, you know, when was that moment?
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Because, you know, there's there's a trope right now in Silicon Valley that in consumer, you either know immediately or, you know, you, you, you know, you basically it's not worth working on. Right? But for Reddit, like, when was there ever a moment where you're like, oh, now this is actually going to be one of the top consumer apps in the, you know, in the world.
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can answer that both ways. My. The feeling I have most often is we haven't made it yet.
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I there's, like. I still
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think we we have not built the version of the product that that we've been dreaming about. Like this. Like, whenever I use Reddit, I just feel like there's just so much work to do. And so in that that's been, I think, my mindset about Reddit for 20 years of just,
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oh, I want to do this all I want to do that.
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Oh,
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we haven't quite captured this idea or this or that. And so that's still the way I think about it.
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If I knew what I knew. Now, there are certainly signs very, very early on that Reddit was interesting like that, that Reddit was going to be big. You know, I don't know, but that Reddit is interesting. Like that was as soon as August 2005.
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I
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didn't I didn't realize this was special or hard to come by at the time, but we launched in June, and by August the platform was kind of almost self-sustaining. Right. It had we had a enough users that Reddit was full of new content every day. And, you know, I, you know, we'd probably call that product market fit.
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When when young entrepreneurs ask, like, what does product market fit? My answer now is, well, is your product growing? And you can't explain why? That's definitely product market fit.
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Are you
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working your ass off in. Your product is barely growing. That is not product market
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fit. And so
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Reddit was working in August of 2005.
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that
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I now know is really special.
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But I didn't realize that for a long time.
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Was it a year later that you saw the decline in us? Or like.
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that deal closed October 31st, 2006. But I think we decided to sell and maybe even agreed on the price by, like, March of 2006. So within a year, I think that deal was basically done.
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Is the acquisition price public?
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It's public enough at this point. I think, I think it's, I think it's reported as $10 million and that there was a split between kind of a front end and the back in the end of, of that deal. But that was the
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Yeah. So, I mean, even though you knew it was working. Yeah, obviously, 2006, 10 million was a lot of money for any web property. And, and
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we will. We will? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We were all
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kids back then. Yeah.
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Like, what was
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the point where you were like, okay, you know, that was maybe not a mistake, but like, yeah, the value was not captured.
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Like, most of the value was still to be captured. The must have been another point where you were like, hey, shit. Like, I sold this thing for 10 million, but it's actually like the most important, one of the most important
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things on the internet.
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Right. So we sold after a year and a half.
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was a nine year period. I didn't realize it was so long before you came back.
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Yeah. So we sold after a year and a half. I left, but I had a three year contract, with our acquirer. Kind of nice slash advance. I left at the end of that. And then I was gone for, about five years until I came
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back in 2015.
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And when I came back
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in 2015, that was, you know, my mentality then was, this thing is so special and can be so much bigger. And but not only I think is Reddit missing the opportunity? Reddit is is is at risk of of dying entirely.
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So somewhere between
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when I left at the end of 2009 and when I came back in 2015, I was like, oh, I think what happened was I was working on Hitmonchan all
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right.
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Where playing tickets.
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And that was a brutal business. We we it's funny. We had a nice product. We never had product market fit. We never really got the business going. And so that, I think, really put Reddit in the context of how this thing just kind of grows on its own. It's how special that is.
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You said that like, that was like an existential risk to it when you came back in 2015, like. Well, I guess you could see the bones were good, but there was like some serious problems. Like, what was the biggest issue?
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So, I mean, the bones were great. You know, Reddit, I think, had all of this really amazing content. And this was also during the kind of rise of social media.
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And so I
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think this is where Reddit really started, kind of to develop this position. Maybe, what developed this position of Reddit is not social media,
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right?
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Social media
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is friends, like we call it, people, you know, and people you know of. It's very performative and shallow. I think in an authentic. And so that kind of made Reddit. I think more and more make sense of like, this is the not social media place to be with people on the internet.
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And so those are the bones.
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I think it was really, really special. People were, creating these bonds and having these conversations that were just totally unique. I think, like, but then we also had these communities behaving very badly, and taking advantage of Reddit and getting on the front page. And so that was what was in the press. It was demoralizing to employees.
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And so it was it was causing Reddit to develop our reputation. That was both bad. And I think, you know, out of alignment with what the other 99% of Reddit was.
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And so
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that it was scaring people away and it was making people not want to work at. Right. It was making users not want to be on Reddit.
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And so when I came back to write, it was like, okay, we got to fix this problem because Reddit is so special, it would be a shame if it was lost because, you know, we can't get a hold of these kind of content and behavior issues on the platform.
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that was a series of kind of content moderation decisions you made. I think some of them were pretty unpopular, if I remember. So I guess, what did you do? And, like, what were your big lessons from the.
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So Reddit in 2015 had no content policy. Had no safety team. Had, I think, to my recollection, never banned a subreddit.
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Need perhaps 1 or 2, in kind of extreme circumstances. So we were really just starting from scratch, and these things were, I think, really hard ideas for the platform and for the company.
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I mean, I'm sure when you started the company, you were you had a libertarian kind of mindset that, like, you know,
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you don't want to censor things
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oh, I still do like that. That's still there. When we started the company, the one of the kind of founding principles of Reddit is we are not the gatekeepers. Right. We didn't. We felt like traditional media was controlled and is controlled by a handful of people.
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know, various editors and powers that be. And so and as a result, they're deciding what people
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get to think about.
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And and so we wanted Reddit to be a place that was powered by its users, powered by its community specifically, not us. All right. Our belief was we don't get to be the gatekeepers. You know, we facilitate the conversation, but we don't control the conversation. That's still how we think about.
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But we also learned that if you let a group of people torment everybody else on the platform and behave badly, then you don't have a platform,
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a community platform or running a business. It has to be a place people want to be. And so there's, I think, a sense of decorum, that's really important. Otherwise people just won't be there and our advertisers won't want to be there.
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And then there's no there's no users and there's no business. And so it's, when we make, decisions regarding kind of content and behavior on Reddit, it's not about controlling what people can talk about and therefore think about. It's about creating a space that, is a place that people want to join and be a part of and contribute to.
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And so, yes, there are there are limits. And you can see it in our content policy. Every word and our content policy is a lesson that we learned the hard way. But we've we've tried to come at it from the point of view of how to recreate, create a, a healthy, fair, but still as open as possible space.
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It feels like very similar to, like, the journey the probably Elon has been, you know, running Twitter. It probably killed all the safety teams, but then realized that he lost a bunch of revenue and users because of that. You know, it seems like they're still learning that journey. I don't even know if they've. But they probably come back a little bit towards more safety as well.
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You know, you just feel like you just need to establish good guardrails for something to exist on the internet, where people are freely sharing things like that. That's the right thing for all of these apps as well.
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I can't talk about other platforms, decisions or motivations,
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but I know for us, it's really that simple. We want to
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have a place
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where everybody wants to be and feels like they can be.
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It makes a lot of
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sense. And, so, you know, you were mentioning, you know, you could answer this both ways and, you know, you mentioned that, you know, looking back at it, you got to product market fit very early. Well, you saw people were using it, you know, consistently. Do you think there's this one idea of, like, if you have a brand on the internet, and the internet itself has grown a lot since two, 2005, that just riding that wave over the course of 20 years and being like a having a creating a, as you said, like a, controlled space, to some degree or like semi controlled or pseudo controlled,
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like, you know, that has been kind of been the story of is like, is this is going to grow because people are going to use the internet more over, you know, over the course of 20 years. And if you long as you create the right space for it and create a trusted brand like has that been the formula for success or are there other aspects as well?
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Now I think. I think for any company to survive 20 years, you're not riding a single wave. You know you're riding multiple waves. And I think every day is a fight, you know, to. You don't just get to exist for 20 years. I don't think any company or anything gets to last that long. Any institution. Or relationship for that matter.
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It's always work. So, when I think about Reddit's history, I think I think there's it's kind of come in multiple eras. The first era was kind of call it Reddit as a, as a, as a link aggregator, and a community,
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that was kind of built around conversation about other content on the internet, right?
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In 2005. If you wanted to find something interesting to to read or enjoy on the internet, you kind of had to, you know, you'd go to a couple of blogs, our websites you liked, RSS, I think only recently came into existence in that era. And so just finding stuff was hard. And so that was the other kind of idea behind Reddit, was that let's let people, bring interesting things they found and then vote on them and rank them.
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And then everybody can just, you know, control to this place and find interesting things.
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So that's kind of the first that's the first era of Reddit called the first 5 to 7 years. And then there was the era of Reddit isn't social media. And so social media came into existence after Reddit. I reddit's basically as old as Facebook and YouTube, and this is pre newsfeed Facebook, and pre homepage YouTube.
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And so then
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social media, you know Facebook with the newsfeed Twitter Instagram snap, you know, later TikTok they'd all kind of explode into existence and actually all grow to be bigger than Reddit.
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And
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there's a lot of conscious decisions we made, intentional decisions we made to not be social media. Some of it I made feeling somewhat insecure of like, oh, are we always going to be smaller because we don't build this like friends and follow our model, for example?
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But I think social
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media and hindsight has helped Reddit make more sense.
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But if you use social media for a
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while and then you use Reddit, you kind of start to get, oh, this is why Reddit does things the way it does, because it's
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we don't have
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influencers and we don't want influencers.
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We don't want you to feel
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like you have to show off to your friends.
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At what point in the journey did you have subreddits and subreddits became like a big thing.
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We had subreddits almost immediately,
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but I was the only one who
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could create them.
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So. So we had we had like three
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subreddits in 2005.
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Users could create subreddits in 2008. And so that was a big moment for Reddit.
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that seems like a compounding exponential, right? Because it's not just that Reddit's growing. Each subreddit is growing and by itself. And that every now and then you have some breakout, like WallStreetBets or something.
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That's right. And and so that's, that's one of kind of the other I think ideas of Reddit is right. Let a Thousand flowers bloom. And so, let users create these spaces. Human beings self-organize into communities, which is something humans do not just like online, not just on Reddit, but in general.
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And
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so we try to, we try to build things that will allow people to do people things and kind of follow their energy.
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And
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so that's like
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self-organization around kind of common values. That's conversations, that's, you know, give and receive support, sharing a laugh. And so these are things that people naturally do. And Reddit facilitates them.
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So you were saying there was a there was the next phase of the not social media phase. Is there a third phase or or based on the.
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there's a third phase that I think we're entering now, which is the Reddit is not AI phase.
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Whom.
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a lot of the rest of the internet is being powered, if not outright created by AI. And so you've got the the way the search ecosystem is evolving. You've got, you know, just being friends with AI, right?
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Having these like long conversations about stuff with AI or
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using AI for,
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getting information for the.
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feel like there's a there's almost a meta idea. At least I've noticed that the last two years, the internet's kind of become corrupt. Right? Like Google is just completely dominated by, by SEO and, like, fake stuff. And then social media is completely dominated by misinformation. And I feel like now, more and more, I put Reddit at the end of my search results because I'm like, I just want like the real authentic thing, not the
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the fake thing,
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which is almost like a meta level, which I makes way worse because now the fake thing is
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that's so it that's exactly the way we've been thinking about it is like social media makes. Right? It makes sense. And now I mix. Right. It makes sense.
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It's like the value of Reddit is
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that it's humans.
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But how do you ensure it's
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humans. Right. Like how do you. Is there something in place I mean I guess right now I still sounds different enough that you can tell, but like maybe in a year or two I, it's going to sound just like a human right.
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It's that's a P0 issue for us is the,
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human verification and making sure that Reddit remains a place where you can reliably talk to other humans, because that's,
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eyeballs.
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Strategic.
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You can fake eyeballs. I thought they
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look, you can fake faces, too. But right now, Reddit requires, a username and password.
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We strongly
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suggest you add an email.
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I think we're going to have to be more intentional about how people get on the Reddit, because it's the number one thing I see users worried about
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is
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not just on Reddit, but anywhere. Like believing that that what you're seeing is real. And it's certainly an issue on Reddit. So I think very important for us to know the humanity of our user base and ensure it.
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I notice a lot more apps are asking for video selfies including Mercury and Mercury. Asked me for a video selfie recently.
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I mean, video selfies will hold for a bit. Like, basically like the current game is make it so it's sufficiently hard for AI, that people won't do it. But like, all those things will become easy. I think the only actual like, long term solution is like KYC boots, right? You have to like every, every metro area has like a booth and you walk in there and you like, verify yourself.
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you just made fun of the orb, and then you just described
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Yeah. Basically this though. Yeah.
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That's it. I mean, it's it's exactly what it is.
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I guess for people that don't know world. Well, coin has like an orb that they do a retina scan, but that only works if I. Yeah, I guess it's basically the orb.
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Where you need to then keep the private key safe and stuff like that. It is complicated, but yeah.
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But, I mean, I think this is the journey we're on,
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right? Is is
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is is, Certainly me. Sounds like maybe you. A lot of our user base, even a couple of years ago, maybe even a year ago, were had a set of concerns about face scanning human verification IDs and this and that. And then now we're entering this era where, look, we're going to have to make, decisions and trade off and hopefully build products that are, can can do two things at once, verify your, your humanness, but also preserve your identity or protect
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your identity.
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That
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is a very, very important, problem to solve for Reddit, but also for everywhere. I think that probably the leading edge of platforms like Reddit, video game services, dating sites, but everywhere, like, we enter the world, right? You can now deepfake anybody doing anything basically for free. That's the world we live in today. So I think we'll end up seeing a menu of options.
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Certainly. You'll see it on Reddit. A menu of options for doing different types of, verification. Our priority is to be able to do that, without ever knowing your name. Right. Because we still want people to feel safe being themselves on Reddit.
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I see which is why you think the world, the world
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coin solution is, is
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useful. Yeah. You want some sort of like place that is trusted, that knows, verifies identity and then it's like private
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Yeah. Third party is really important quality of
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this.
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You know, because then then we can preserve having some amount of distance between us in the actual identity of the person using Reddit.
00:23:18:17 - 00:23:25:17
I mean it probably won't happen in the US, but India has a biometric ID system, like you have
00:23:25:17 - 00:23:30:05
will definitely happen in the US. It's happening. It's
00:23:30:05 - 00:23:31:05
it's happening.
00:23:31:05 - 00:23:32:05
you think the driver's
00:23:32:05 - 00:23:33:17
license will do it,
00:23:33:17 - 00:23:35:17
it's called TSA pre
00:23:35:17 - 00:23:36:17
like it's
00:23:36:17 - 00:23:38:05
happening.
00:23:38:05 - 00:23:39:17
You're going to blink
00:23:39:17 - 00:23:45:05
in a year and like your face gets scanned all the time. Now.
00:23:45:10 - 00:23:46:05
Sure. I
00:23:46:05 - 00:23:47:17
meant, like, a governmental level thing
00:23:47:17 - 00:23:49:05
that, like, 100% of people have.
00:23:49:05 - 00:23:50:05
called TSA
00:23:50:05 - 00:23:54:19
pre or whatever the frickin they call it Global Entry or the the new one, the touchless ID thing.
00:23:54:19 - 00:23:58:08
It's it's coming real ID like it's happening.
00:23:58:08 - 00:23:59:10
Global entry has face scanning.
00:23:59:10 - 00:24:00:10
Now when you line to the
00:24:00:10 - 00:24:00:21
airport.
00:24:01:07 - 00:24:02:09
Okay, maybe, like, maybe
00:24:02:09 - 00:24:04:21
we just use all of that then.
00:24:04:21 - 00:24:07:09
That's what real lighting is. You live in California. You already.
00:24:07:09 - 00:24:09:09
Yeah, I did,
00:24:09:09 - 00:24:15:21
but, like, I can't use my real ID easily to, like, verify myself on Reddit yet, like, there's not good enough kind of
00:24:15:21 - 00:24:22:09
Give it like. Yeah. I mean, we're going to be compelled to do it through the age verification stuff.
00:24:22:09 - 00:24:23:21
You know, check your I.D. through this or
00:24:23:21 - 00:24:49:14
that service like that. That law has been written, in the UK and in other countries, and we'll have some equivalent of it in the US, I'm sure. And then I think what's really important and this is where we spent a lot of time with, with lawmakers, is kind of explaining that, the trade offs, but whether it's third party or government or or both.
00:24:49:16 - 00:24:58:09
It is it is coming. And I don't necessarily a bad thing. We just need to do it in a way that's, I think, safe, safe for people.
00:24:58:09 - 00:25:22:06
Talking about the other angle for I, you know, I think initially alarms were trained on Reddit, and, you know, they kind of scraped Reddit and the rest of the internet pretty freely. You know, when was the point where where you realized, like, hey, we need to make this into a commercial opportunity and rather than, yeah, this is like free data for the world.
00:25:22:14 - 00:25:26:14
I don't know if that was quite the way we thought about it.
00:25:26:14 - 00:25:28:14
00:25:28:14 - 00:25:50:02
So Reddit has historically been, and frankly, still are fairly permissive about access to Reddit, right? Reddit's openness is something that's important to us, and we love about Reddit. We're the last platform that you can broadly access almost all of its content without being logged in.
00:25:51:23 - 00:26:27:02
And we've never, though, allowed the intention was never to allow Reddit's content to be taken for commercial use. So our terms have always basically said something to the effect of, like, you can access Reddit, you're just not allowed useful for commercial things. And yes, every limb has use Reddit content, either directly or indirectly, because it's like the largest deposit of accessible human, you know, conversation and interaction and behaviors and all of this information on the internet.
00:26:28:08 - 00:26:28:14
And
00:26:28:14 - 00:26:37:14
so our reasoning was, well, like, it's the cat's already out of the bag or the horses out of the barn or whatever. Metaphor works here.
00:26:39:02 - 00:26:51:22
Can we clean this up? Can we do this on terms that are, fair to run at the business and can we put constraints on it that are respectful of our users?
00:26:52:00 - 00:27:13:14
And so this is where we created our public content policy, which is kind of our framework in these relationships. So you know, this includes things like not reverse engineering the identity of our users, not using Reddit's information to target ads. Allowing content to be deleted, things like that. So it wasn't.
00:27:13:14 - 00:27:19:23
You know, the kind of it's played out the way it has.
00:27:20:01 - 00:27:37:02
I think if I knew what I knew now, back then, yes, we would have done, I think a few things differently. But I think the general idea of that Reddit is broadly open. I don't we would not have changed that. We still do, noncommercial free agreements to researchers, you know,
00:27:37:02 - 00:27:38:14
big and small.
00:27:38:14 - 00:27:43:05
Right? Because we've we've always believed that the information on Reddit is a valuable beyond Reddit.
00:27:43:10 - 00:27:44:02
Right. It's good for
00:27:44:02 - 00:27:45:14
research.
00:27:45:14 - 00:27:55:14
I think we would have been, much more, I think, vigilant about scraping.
00:27:57:02 - 00:28:05:02
I think, you know, institutions like Common Crawl sound noble, but they're basically data launderers.
00:28:06:02 - 00:28:07:14
And so, you know, they they
00:28:07:14 - 00:28:24:00
crawl Reddit and then they rehost and resell the data and not just read at the whole internet. And so that means our data is out there being distributed without our permission, without our users permission, with no terms on it whatsoever.
00:28:24:02 - 00:28:39:09
And and they're not the only one. There's a number of groups like that. But I think we would have been much less naive about, other people. I think taking advantage of Reddit, taking advantage of our users.
00:28:39:09 - 00:29:01:10
It. Really interesting question, Steve, about the future of the business model of the internet. Right. Like, how does this data get monetized? Do you think it's basically these AI companies monetizing their users and then paying, like, data providers such as yourself, or other websites, like some sort of license fee? Is that the way, you know, do you think the future evolves?
00:29:01:10 - 00:29:10:02
Obviously the search indexes, you know, are going to be very different going forward. Even Google now is trying to prioritize AI mode. They just sit outside of their
00:29:11:02 - 00:29:12:14
conference.
00:29:12:14 - 00:29:16:02
to be seen. I think
00:29:16:02 - 00:29:29:02
I can answer from Reddit's point of view, which is we'll always have. Right. It's a platform for humans. And so ads will work, right? Because that's how the business model for humans. I think a lot of the rest of the internet will change.
00:29:29:02 - 00:29:33:18
It's just putting aside other content platforms for a second.
00:29:35:02 - 00:29:39:14
Think about like. Okay, so the other company I did was travel search.
00:29:39:14 - 00:29:41:02
No human wants to do
00:29:41:02 - 00:29:42:14
travel search,
00:29:42:14 - 00:29:44:02
right? I,
00:29:44:02 - 00:29:50:02
I was in the relatively near future. They will be the main user of, you know, Expedia and Priceline.
00:29:50:10 - 00:29:52:02
Right. Agent.
00:29:52:02 - 00:29:59:02
And, and so I think the internet will need to evolve to be AI agent aware.
00:29:59:02 - 00:30:00:14
Search is a
00:30:00:14 - 00:30:02:16
really, really interesting one.
00:30:02:18 - 00:30:06:14
You know, there's lots of conversation about, oh, maybe the blue links are dead.
00:30:06:16 - 00:30:07:14
Who?
00:30:07:14 - 00:30:08:05
I mean, maybe
00:30:08:05 - 00:30:18:17
for humans. We'll see how that plays out. But the eyes are definitely clicking on a lot of blue links, right? Just watch the LMS work. They run a search
00:30:18:17 - 00:30:20:05
and they read all the links and
00:30:20:05 - 00:30:22:17
then they summarize it for you.
00:30:23:07 - 00:30:24:05
It is for now
00:30:24:05 - 00:30:35:05
the AI doesn't look at ads. And so I think, you know, where the AI is, the consumer of the web. Then the business models will need to evolve.
00:30:35:05 - 00:30:37:05
It's
00:30:41:19 - 00:31:01:23
One thing that's interesting, and I'm sure, Steve, you see this in your data as well. At Mercury we get more and more referrals from alums. So, it's not it's not quite close to, Google level, but it's like growing super fast. I think it's like 70% of our kind of customers come from other than referrals.
00:31:01:23 - 00:31:08:17
Now. But it's like it was like basically zero, six months ago. So in some ways, like
00:31:08:17 - 00:31:15:17
to someone asks the, the alarm, like what should I use for banking? And like, Mercury
00:31:15:17 - 00:31:16:17
comes up and like, like on the,
00:31:16:17 - 00:31:18:05
so,
00:31:18:05 - 00:31:22:05
here's a question. How did that information get into the lab?
00:31:24:02 - 00:31:26:05
Via Reddit, I guess, or
00:31:26:05 - 00:31:27:17
other other public sources.
00:31:27:17 - 00:31:39:17
Yeah. I think the value of, like, the human, curate, is super important. And like, presumably Reddit or other public human sources have to be the curator.
00:31:39:17 - 00:31:42:05
I don't know if any other public human sources, but yes, I agree.
00:31:43:17 - 00:31:53:17
Yeah. I don't know where else that would be. I guess, like, grok would use X or something. But yeah, there's not that many sources of public human information. Maybe New York Times or something,
00:31:53:17 - 00:31:55:05
but that's like. But in limited.
00:31:55:05 - 00:31:59:17
Yeah. Podcasts. Yeah. YouTube and podcasts I guess like scraping all
00:31:59:17 - 00:32:00:17
the transcribes
00:32:00:17 - 00:32:01:17
transcriptions.
00:32:01:17 - 00:32:02:08
Yeah.
00:32:02:08 - 00:32:12:01
Do you get a lot of referrals from that alums, or is that not like a major source?
00:32:13:20 - 00:32:45:00
a different dynamic. You know, I think the search ecosystem is just so wide open right now. And expanding. And so I think, I think one of the most interesting things is. Not, Necessarily like where people are running the queries, but what they're querying for.
00:32:45:02 - 00:32:57:08
All of a sudden, there's just this explosion of things. You can type in the search box and expect to get answers for. Right. We all kind of spent the last 20 years learning how to talk to Google.
00:32:58:08 - 00:32:59:20
And I don't think that skill
00:32:59:20 - 00:33:06:06
goes away. I you still need to talk to Google because Google's the best at indexing the entire web.
00:33:06:08 - 00:33:15:20
But now you can ask these like natural language questions, on Google and other platforms, including Reddit, right through Reddit Answers, which is our
00:33:15:20 - 00:33:17:08
version of the search
00:33:17:08 - 00:33:23:08
questions that you couldn't ask a traditional search engine before and now get an answer too.
00:33:23:08 - 00:33:24:20
And so I think
00:33:24:20 - 00:33:36:04
just the number of queries and the range of queries that people are running has probably grown, not probably, definitely grown massively over the last couple of years.
00:33:36:06 - 00:33:38:08
So I think that's really interesting.
00:33:38:16 - 00:33:45:20
Yeah. There's definitely this whole class of things that Google was pretty useless for, that in undergrad for,
00:33:45:20 - 00:33:56:20
Yeah. Like like so so so we've got this, LMS search on Reddit called Reddit Answers. You know, I was at a concert, I was at the Justice show in San Francisco the other week,
00:33:56:20 - 00:33:58:08
and I was able to ask it. I was
00:33:58:08 - 00:34:00:08
like, how long is this set?
00:34:00:08 - 00:34:01:20
And I got the answer. It's
00:34:01:20 - 00:34:03:08
90 minutes.
00:34:03:08 - 00:34:04:20
And so
00:34:04:20 - 00:34:10:01
that's sort of a question I would not have no way I could get an answer to before on the, a last version of the internet.
00:34:10:01 - 00:34:12:08
So I think that sort of thing is really, really powerful.
00:34:12:08 - 00:34:14:20
You're a CTO at, a hitman, right?
00:34:15:05 - 00:34:16:09
I was CTO
00:34:16:09 - 00:34:16:17
I think,
00:34:16:17 - 00:34:18:05
when you came back to
00:34:18:05 - 00:34:21:17
Reddit where you were the CEO the first time or the CEO
00:34:21:21 - 00:34:34:05
We didn't use that title the first time, but yes, for the first five years, I effectively ran Reddit. And then I was gone. And the the team, the team was down to one person at one point.
00:34:36:17 - 00:34:38:17
Just keeping the servers running.
00:34:40:17 - 00:34:46:17
basically. Yeah. And so they I came back 2015 as the, as CEO.
00:34:47:23 - 00:35:04:16
What? You know, I mean, I was find annoying when people say, what are the lessons learned? Because there's obviously too many, what are, like, contrarian ways you run the company, where you don't see other people do it? And you think that, like, obviously the right way to do it, at least for you.
00:35:07:00 - 00:35:09:16
I think, I mean,
00:35:11:04 - 00:35:31:16
lots I think there's so much, it advice out there that conflicting. Of course. But you can find somebody with with business or product or startup advice that takes the entire spectrum of the range of possibilities.
00:35:33:00 - 00:35:34:12
think the most important
00:35:36:00 - 00:35:45:00
thing that we did, and the most important lesson that I've learned over the years, is just to use common sense,
00:35:46:00 - 00:35:46:21
right?
00:35:46:21 - 00:35:47:12
If
00:35:47:12 - 00:36:10:00
if what another company is doing or CEO is doing makes sense for you, then learn from it and try to emulate it if it doesn't make sense for you. Don't do it. There are many paths to success, right? The path to success for Facebook is very different than the path for Reddit,
00:36:11:12 - 00:36:15:22
right? We're not trying to build Facebook or TikTok or social media.
00:36:16:00 - 00:36:42:16
Those are very successful companies, but it's just not our platform. And it's not for us. And so I think a lot of the reasons we've done things over the years, but just like it felt right for us, it was an it was an alignment with our, at first intuition. And then later we had more explicit and documented values and a be in alignment with our values.
00:36:42:18 - 00:36:44:00
And
00:36:45:12 - 00:36:56:12
were times where I was insecure about that, right when social media was growing so much faster than Reddit. I was like, man, I guess we're just we're doing it wrong.
00:36:56:12 - 00:36:58:12
00:36:58:12 - 00:37:03:12
You know, and the the VC advice is, why can't you be more like Mark? Or why can't
00:37:03:12 - 00:37:06:00
you be more like Travis? I was like,
00:37:06:00 - 00:37:09:00
oh, I just just not, I don't know what to
00:37:09:00 - 00:37:09:06
tell you.
00:37:09:11 - 00:37:10:12
Yes, they're very successful, I
00:37:14:03 - 00:37:15:12
Do.
00:37:15:12 - 00:37:30:07
So I think one of the things that's happened over the last ten years is I think I and our team have become more confident in the way that we do things being right for Reddit. Because we can see it working.
00:37:30:09 - 00:37:34:00
But it's taken a while for it to, to, to play out.
00:37:35:15 - 00:37:43:12
Did the way you do things changed significantly when you became public? Or was it, like, relatively smooth?
00:37:43:16 - 00:37:51:00
I think the process of becoming public. Right. There's just there's this certain they're very specific requirements.
00:37:51:00 - 00:37:52:12
Right. You need to close the
00:37:52:12 - 00:38:06:03
books pretty fast. You can't have any mistakes. You need to to close certain things. You've got all these this requirements to live up to that require a certain amount of discipline and rigor to do and to do well.
00:38:06:05 - 00:38:31:12
So preparing to be a public company has made us so much more disciplined. And then you get, I think, along with it, a lot of pressure, which I think is a good thing. And so I think overwhelmingly preparing to be a public company and being a public company has just made us better and more disciplined.
00:38:31:12 - 00:38:40:12
guess one of the complaints that people make is the pressure is very short term. It's like, how are you going to make the next quarter and what are your metrics, etc.? Is that not something you felt?
00:38:40:12 - 00:38:44:12
Totally. Yeah. I'm going to have to talk about Google in every earnings call.
00:38:44:12 - 00:38:46:00
I don't like
00:38:46:00 - 00:38:52:12
doing that. So but the way to not do that is to
00:38:54:00 - 00:39:08:12
make Reddit, you know, have more diverse sources of traffic to make Reddit better, to grow, you know, logged in, high quality users, in a significant way.
00:39:08:12 - 00:39:10:00
So
00:39:10:00 - 00:39:13:17
I think, you know, sometimes.
00:39:13:17 - 00:39:24:12
Yeah. Investors, they I'll say they're long term. Actually, they don't all say that long term, but I'd say 90% of the ones I do say they're long term are also short term.
00:39:24:12 - 00:39:26:00
Okay.
00:39:26:00 - 00:39:29:00
That is that that's the game.
00:39:31:12 - 00:39:44:08
To grow over the long term, you also have to grow in the short term. So I think there's you know, you're always confronted with these decisions, not just as a public company.
00:39:44:10 - 00:39:55:00
Is this in the long term best interest of the company? Yes. Well then we should we should be doing it. No. Well, then we probably shouldn't be doing it. Okay, but can we do it faster?
00:39:57:16 - 00:40:03:12
That's always, I think, the way we want to be thinking about it. So,
00:40:03:12 - 00:40:05:00
Yeah.
00:40:05:00 - 00:40:10:12
And. There's always things to complain about
00:40:10:12 - 00:40:12:00
as a private company.
00:40:12:00 - 00:40:13:12
As a public company.
00:40:13:20 - 00:40:24:12
Is there things you've done, differently as a public company? I know you guys, pre-IPO, tried to sell some shares to kind of the Reddit community. Is there
00:40:24:12 - 00:40:26:00
other things you've done post
00:40:26:00 - 00:40:36:12
IPO that have, you know, tried to set up the governance of the company in a different way that, like, was more true to Reddit or any other kind of lessons you've heard to apply.
00:40:36:22 - 00:40:46:00
Letting the users be investors was a big reason we went public. Right. Our users have this deep sense of ownership over Reddit,
00:40:47:12 - 00:40:52:00
and I wanted them to have the opportunity to actually be owners of Reddit.
00:40:52:00 - 00:40:53:12
And so now many are,
00:40:53:12 - 00:41:01:12
And I'm very, very happy. Very happy with that. I think it's something that we're all very proud of.
00:41:02:01 - 00:41:03:00
I think just
00:41:03:00 - 00:41:14:12
being a public company. Right. What is a public company means? It means in many ways you're more transparent and the ownership and control is more distributed. Well, those are like, very Reddit ideas, right?
00:41:14:12 - 00:41:16:00
Transparency and decentralization,
00:41:16:00 - 00:41:25:22
like, those are kind of important concepts in the platform of Reddit. And so I think they map, pretty well to being a public company.
00:41:25:23 - 00:41:38:00
As opposed to a private company where your investors are just a handful of people. That's kind of more of like the gatekeeper institutional model. That was the reason we started Reddit was a reaction against that in media.
00:41:38:00 - 00:41:39:12
So,
00:41:39:12 - 00:41:49:06
I'm very happy we were able to do that. And the way we still try to do things as a public company is we take a couple of questions from our community on the earnings call.
00:41:49:08 - 00:42:00:00
We do a follow up, AMA response video, answering only questions that were posed to us on Reddit. And I'd love to find ways to do even more of that.
00:42:00:14 - 00:42:18:00
I was talking to Vlad, the Robinhood CEO. And obviously, for them, community ownership is also a big deal. He says every earnings call, they also produce content for the community. So they do like TikTok, like videos explaining the earnings call, that they released to the community. I thought that was kind of a cool idea.
00:42:18:06 - 00:42:38:00
Yeah, I think they did a really nice job at that. You know, they were. There were a few years, in front of us, and, they had a very big retail component in their IPO as well, which we tried to emulate. I had I was on a call with, with some of our moderators, a couple months ago and one of our long time odds.
00:42:38:02 - 00:42:43:12
He framed the question as basically as a shareholder,
00:42:43:12 - 00:42:45:00
why don't you
00:42:45:00 - 00:42:47:12
fix, you know, X, y, z? And I was just like, oh,
00:42:48:16 - 00:42:50:00
You know, like, adding.
00:42:50:00 - 00:43:03:00
so happy. I was like, because the idea, like, I what I want to do in line incentives. Right? We want this thing to grow. And so when I had a an OG mod preface prefaces question with as a shareholder so excited.
00:43:03:06 - 00:43:03:22
Yeah.
00:43:03:22 - 00:43:17:10
When we did our series B, we had about 3000 customers invest in a in a crowdfunding, the. You can do it as a private company as well, but there's lots of constraints and it's, you know, limited to a few thousand.
00:43:17:10 - 00:43:21:21
if you have a successful private company, I think you have a duty to go public,
00:43:23:09 - 00:43:38:09
your employees or the investors to whom you probably said you were given the opportunity, but to allow the public to invest in the growth of successful companies in America. I think that's a very powerful idea.
00:43:38:18 - 00:44:06:07
I do think the, the, the depth of the private market has reduced the incentive. So, yeah, we just did a round, and a significant part of the round is a secondary. And both existing employees, some former employees, you know, got the opportunity. So, and, like, these private markets are so deep that, you know, you can't I agree with you from, you know, customer ownership perspective.
00:44:06:09 - 00:44:12:21
It's not quite there, but a lot of the other incentives to going public have been removed, at least from my perspective,
00:44:12:21 - 00:44:13:21
it seems much simpler
00:44:13:21 - 00:44:16:06
and easier to just be a private company for longer.
00:44:16:06 - 00:44:34:09
That is for sure. True. Except you don't have a real valuation, and you are excluding people from being investors in your company. Yes, you can. You can do secondary, and you get to control your investors. All those things are are nice. But
00:44:34:09 - 00:44:50:03
true valuation. I mean, I think the second one is a is a true con. Like, I would love, customers to be owners, but a true valuation that also has a pro and con, right. Like either, you know, having a daily valuation is can, you know, there was a time where Reddit was down quite a bit, right?
00:44:50:03 - 00:44:50:09
Like,
00:44:50:09 - 00:44:51:09
it can be
00:44:51:09 - 00:44:52:21
demoralizing as all.
00:44:52:21 - 00:44:55:09
were down and up and down and up.
00:44:55:09 - 00:44:56:21
00:44:56:21 - 00:44:59:21
But I don't know, I love it. I love
00:45:00:05 - 00:45:00:21
You do.
00:45:02:09 - 00:45:04:21
I'm, I'm on almost,
00:45:04:21 - 00:45:07:21
What what is it you love about it? Like it seems like. Like
00:45:07:21 - 00:45:09:09
it seems like work. Yeah.
00:45:09:09 - 00:45:10:09
Okay.
00:45:10:09 - 00:45:11:21
Yeah. You just
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