The Underdog Story of Reddit

Episode 565: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) are dropping an emergency pod to break down Paul Graham’s essay about Reddit’s IPO yesterday. Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:59) If you want to learn, teach. (3:45) Show up – the ultimate high agency move (5:54) Trust your gut (7:47) How to get the best ideas (12:30) Don’t be precious about the name (13:33) How Reddit faked early traction (16:45) Talent filters (19:37) “The best products are you pushed out” (23:42) We read Chris Saccsa’s early emails (26:32) Reddit’s exits to Conde Nast, then buys it back (29:20) 19 years later and still not profitable — Links: • Y Combinator - https://www.ycombinator.com/ • Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/ • Paul Graham Essays - https://paulgraham.com/articles.html • Product Hunt - https://www.producthunt.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. This was not supposed to be a podcast. This was me calling Sam two minutes ago and being like, dude, did you hear the stuff about Reddit? And he's like, no, no, no. He put the finger up to my lips.

• 0:12Shaan Puri?

  Push record. And in fact, me and Sam, we should really never talk if we're not recording. I think that's the new, the new lesson.

• 0:18Sam Parr?

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

• 0:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so let me give you the background. Reddit goes public today. Interesting. Fine. I didn'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. And it's titled The Reddits. It's on the Y C blog. Paul Graham has known these guys for nearly 20 years now. And so he wrote this post today that had so many little breadcrumbs that I thought there were like, as I was reading this, every paragraph was firing off like a connection to a different lesson learned. Like my, my brain of frameworks was literally like lit up like a Christmas tree with some of the things he was saying. And I just wanted to like, say them out loud to you. I wanted to.

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  I'm imagining you, I'm imagining you eating cereal as you're reading this. And then you have like one bite in and like you, you just.

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  This is my bowl, my salad. 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. All right. So I'm reading this essay and I want to give you kind of like point by point of what I think is really interesting.

• 1:31Sam Parr?

  And by the way, Paul Graham is the, I guess we have to 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.

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  Reddit was the first company in the first batch. But actually, what's more interesting is in that post, Reddit is not only the first Y C company in the first batch ever. It's actually the reason that Y C exists. I don't know if you do this, but this is kind of cool. So Paul Graham in this essay, he says, Y C started because he went to the Harvard like Computer Club or something like that and gave a talk, which by the way, is how many interesting things have started. I also believe this is kind of how Apple started. Wasn't there like a, they gave a talk or a demo at the Homebrew Club. This is how Tim Ferriss started the four hour work week. He taught a class at Princeton. And there's this principle, which is if you ever want to learn something, try to teach it. And that, that has led to many people writing books. So Tim Ferriss

• 2:25Shaan Puri?

  did it. Then he wrote a book, Nir Eyal, same thing when he wrote his book Hooked, same thing. He's like, 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. And the same thing happened here. Paul Graham gave a talk at the school. It's called How to Start a Startup. He gives this talk, and then from the talk, he's like, dude, I should create like a vehicle to invest in like, these earlier, younger founders. He's like, at the time, founders were thought to be like either older or just super young prodigies. But he's like, I think this college student age, I think that's where you could start companies from. So that's why he creates Y C. So he gives the talk. He meets with Steve and Alexis afterwards, and he's impressed by another thing. So the second interesting

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  thing. He gave this talk at Harvard. They didn't go to Harvard. These guys go to school in Virginia. They took a train up from Virginia to hear this talk because they used to follow his blog. So Steve loved his blog. He convinces Alexis, hey, come with me to go see this guy talk. They go up there. It's not like a show. There's no tickets. It's like, you know, 30 person room. And he's there. And so Paul was so impressed that these guys came from Virginia. He's like, they wanted to meet for coffee. He's like, okay, no problem. You guys came from such a far away. I'll do it. There's a principle there in the like, 80% of success is just showing up. Or like, when in doubt, like, just go, just take the train, take the flight, just show up, put yourself in positions for good things to happen. And

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  that's what they did. And it's a high agency move. They could have easily, hey, not gone, you know, showed up and not told them. But they, they went there, they took the train, they told them. And this is the first of many high agency moves that they pull. He talks about later, how They actually ended up rejecting these guys from YC. So he gives the talk, decides to create YC, reaches out to the guys like, hey, guys, 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. DoorDash. But there was no smartphones. So there is no DoorDash. They basically had to go to cellphone carriers and fast food chains and like,

• 4:35Shaan Puri?

  do it all manually so that you could do it like over text message, SMS back then.

• 4:39Sam Parr?

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

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  It was a blog for hackers, for programmers who were entrepreneurial.

• 5:02Sam Parr?

  Which is almost like 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.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  By the way, Twitch, also in that first batch, and Emmett, best friends with Steve, the guy who created Reddit. All right. So anyways, more principles. So the first one is if you want to, if you want to actually learn, try to teach. Giving a talk is actually a really good gateway into either books or companies or whatever. If you can't articulate in a 45 minute talk, a bunch of really insightful things that get other people excited, it probably won't work as a book or company. And in reverse, even if you're not planning to do it, it's a great way to generate, you know, sharp ideas is to go try to teach a class. Second thing, taking the train, showing up. All right, great. Now here's the next one, trusting your gut. So like I said, he's inspired by these guys. He creates YC because he meets these guys, but their idea, he hates.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  He hates the order food off your phone. He's like, that's too hard. And 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. I thought at that time, I'm supposed to be betting on ideas and I hated their idea. So they rejected him. And he's like, you know, Jessica, his wife, who he credits as having like the best kind of like people detector of anybody he knows. She was like, oh, you rejected the muffins? And he's like, muffins? And she's like, yeah, that's what I call those guys, Steve and Alexis. They're like so endearing. They're like a little poodle, like, you know, they're like a little puppy. She called the muffins. She's like, oh, that's sad. I like the muffins. And he's like, yeah, but I didn't like their idea. She's like, I feel like we should have the muffins in Y C. Like they're, they're the reason you created this. Why, why would you not accept them?

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  So he calls them back up. They're on the train ride home to Virginia and he says, uh, guys, I want you to be in Y C, but like, we gotta, I'll fund you only if you're gonna change your idea.

• 6:54Sam Parr?

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

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like nothing. Yeah.

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  So basically like a summer.

• 7:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. But it was, it was the, somebody believing you and you 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. And they like immediately seize the opportunity, which is another kind of like, again, these were all like little breadcrumbs of successful things, successful like, successful actions, successful behaviors that 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, trusting his gut that he wanted these guys involved. He should bet on people, not ideas early on. And 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

• 7:41Shaan Puri?

  idea. The, some of the best ideas are found, not thought of, discovered, not thought of. So Paul Graham had been blogging and his blog was not too big of a deal back then. It was, you know, okay, not, 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?

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Was it really a website or was it like a bookmark? Was like a bookmark?

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  Bookmarking tool is a way to save the stuff you liked, like bookmark for later, for yourself. But they had one little side feature called delicious.com/popular. And slash popular was basically just an aggregator of all, like, what is this? What are 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 he's like, damn, I get actually a lot of traffic from the slash popular tab of Delicious. Not the main product, it's the side product. And so he took that, he's like, guys, you need a new idea. Here's an idea.

• 8:38Shaan Puri?

  The delicious slash 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.

• 8:50Sam Parr?

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

• 9:06Shaan 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? That same idea I heard again many years later when I met Ryan Hoover. Ryan Hoover was the founder of Product Hunt. But what most people don't know is before that, he was, he was blogging. And then I reached out to him and I was like, hey, I really want to hire you. I tried to hire him. He wanted to join my team was like, he didn't pass the interview process for some whatever reason. So they were like, ah, we don't think he's got enough experience or something. And I really liked Ryan and I was like, hey, man, so sorry. Like, let's keep in touch. I feel like our paths are going to cross again. Three weeks later, he emails me about an idea. He's like, hey, maybe instead of a job, I should start something. And what he tells me, he goes, I go, he goes, like you, I like to go to Hacker News every morning.

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  Back then, that was my routine. I, we, we both used to go to Hacker News every morning.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  Still is.

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  But my favorite tab is not the main page of Hacker News. It's the side page, the show section where you can go, it's like a show and tell where you could show what you're building. Cause if you go to Hacker News, you click show, it's only like links to cool products that people are just like, hey, I want to show you guys, I made this. Hey, I want to show you guys, I made this. He's like, what if there was something that was just the show tab? Let's make the side thing, the main thing. And so that's what Product Hunt became and Product Hunt then became this sensation in Silicon Valley. Ends up selling the company for $20 million. And you know, it was this, this success for Ryan. And so this was like Reddit kind of had that same idea, that same thing where it took the side page of Delicious. And so there's something to this, which is. One great place to discover ideas is look at your invoices or look at your P and L.

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  Look at the cost section. I think that's one great place to find investments or ideas. Another one is look at your traffic referrals. And if you ever noticed referrals coming from someplace, that's interesting. Another one is what's a side feature? Your favorite side feature of a different app? That actually could be a standalone app in itself. And so there's something to that philosophy.

• 10:58Sam Parr?

  One bit, one quick story. Scott Belsky, 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 he noticed that he was getting a lot of traffic from this brand new website called Pinterest. And so he reached out to the founder of Pinterest and was like, hey, what's this thing? Tell me all about it. And he wasn't getting a lot of traffic, like a hundred people a day or something like pretty small. And the guy was like, yeah, it's just this thing I'm working on. I'm gonna raise a little bit of money at a $3 million valuation. Do you want to invest? Scott goes like, well, I only have like 50 grand in my name, but I guess I'll give you $15,000. And he did. That went on to make probably a hundred million dollars. That same week, he started getting traffic from a website called StumbleUpon.

• 11:43Sam Parr?

  And he goes and does the same thing. He talks to the guy, StumbleUpon, they're not raising, but he becomes friends with Garrett Camp, who goes on a couple of years later to found Uber. And he invests in Uber as well, $15,000. Also made something like a hundred million dollars because both times he was getting traffic from these brand new websites that he thought were interesting.

• 12:00Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. That's what I'm saying. These are breadcrumbs that it's not specific to the Reddit story. This is everywhere and those are perfect, perfect examples of, of the same, the same principle. It's kind of like the art of noticing. Like if you can notice, you know, where you're getting traffic or notice that, hmm, this keeps growing every month, you might find something earlier than everybody else. So that's another one. All right. 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. And 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 it was like, we're going to change. When we actually launched this thing, we're going to change it. But like, for now, it's this.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  Snoo.com was too expensive, so they couldn't afford it. And this is so common, like, we're so often wrong about names. Some people get really precious about names early on. But Paul Graham advised these guys to just like, just pick a name that kind of like feels right, works right for you right now. You can change it later if you need. But also, he urged them to ship it fast. He's like, I think we could build a fast version of this. And Reddit actually launched in three weeks after they went through the, after they got it admitted to Y C, which is incredibly fast. And then from there, they just started iterating.

• 13:15Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. That's amazing.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

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

• 13:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, basically, Steve Huffman and Alexis, I believe what they did is they just created a bunch of fake usernames and they just would submit constantly, like, different links to look like many people were participating. Because the way that a site like Reddit or any community works is you typically have like 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.

• 13:48Shaan Puri?

  Exactly, exactly. Nobody wants to be, nobody wants to come into a dead room and just start dancing, right? Like, if you go to a nightclub, 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 was fake it till you make it, gone, right? And this was, they were the, they were the users. I think they talked about like, they created, I think, 30 different accounts. And they would just not only submit the links for Reddit, but they would then comment. And they would comment as different personalities. And I think Steve talked once, like, he's like, the first day I logged on and the comments under a link were not from me, 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. And importantly, they had also set the culture.

• 14:31Shaan Puri?

  You did this, I thought, really, really well when you launched Trends. I got to see you launch. Trends from a idea to a three, four, five million a year recurring revenue product. And all it was, was a Facebook group. And in that Facebook group, there was a research reporting too. But the, the Facebook group, I think was actually the main product.

• 14:49Sam Parr?

  It was.

• 14:50Shaan 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, you were like, I have to stoke this fire. Otherwise this fire is going to go out right now.

• 15:08Sam Parr?

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

• 15:14Shaan Puri?

  You asked me, you were like, hey, can you post this in the group? I'm like.

• 15:16Sam Parr?

  Did I ask you that?

• 15:17Shaan Puri?

  And then you copy pasted this huge thing. And I was like, okay, I guess it's well written. So like, sure. So you got us, you were basically our fake accounts.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I got, I, I couldn't remember if this was pre MFM days. So if this was pre Sean being famous, uh, and I would like get other popular people and write on their behalf and be like, hey, just post this. And, uh, yeah, it worked out really well.

• 15:37Shaan Puri?

  Be like, hey, can you go comment? Like you'd message 40 of us. He'd be like, please go comment on this thing. This baller just joined and I want this to feel really active for him. Like I want 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 went and I would go comment that. And then that guy would be like, wow, what a community. This is fantastic. And like that first impression was so good because of that. That's what the Reddit guys did.

• 16:00Sam Parr?

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

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

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

• 16:21Sam Parr?

  I don't remember exactly, but that doesn't seem, but now trends, I think had 20,000 members.

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

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

• 16:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Shaan Puri?

  You were, you were tending to that fire. You would not let it just go out.

• 16:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So it was only about six months that I had to do that. Um, what's the other point?

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  All right. Next one. Um, okay.

• 16:41Shaan Puri?

  Talent filters. So one thing Paul Graham says, he goes that the reason Steve showed up at that talk was because he followed my blog, which was about Lisp. Lisp is this like obscure programming language that I think Paul Graham created, if not created popularized, but I think he created it. And he's like, the thing about Lisp is, um, he goes, it's one of those languages that few people will learn, except out of your own intellectual curiosity. Meaning it's like, it's not, you don't learn it to get rich or to get famous or any of those things. If you go through the rite of passage of learning this thing and being interested in it, you are just wired a certain way and you are somebody who pursues your intellectual, like your intellectual interests and pursuits. It's like, I guess, pretty elegant. If you do code in Lisp, it's

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  like really elegant in certain ways. But again, it's like cursive or calligraphy. It's like, you don't need to learn calligraphy, but if you do, you probably have an eye for design, right? The Steve Jobs thing. So same sort of thing. So he, so that got me kind of interested that there are probably like a dozen things that I can think of that are like this. Amazing talent filters. We talked last week about that startup cognition that came out and raised a bunch of money and they have this like AI software programmer that's like, you know, better than chat GPT that writing code. And that guy was like in the math Olympiad, right? He was like, his sport, when we were playing, you know, basketball and soccer and stuff like that, he was like, you know, sitting there at a, on a stage buzzing in and answering like

• 18:08Shaan Puri?

  really hard math questions or the spelling bee. It's like, things that you do, if you can become obsessed and degenerate, degenerately obsessed about certain things, you're wired a certain way and you are almost like predisposed to success, then well, it's like, all I got to do is introduce you to the idea of the stock market. Trust me, all your like fucking World of Warcraft grinding is going to apply really, really well over here. You just have to get exposed at the right time.

• 18:32Sam Parr?

  Here's a list. Poker.

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Sam Parr?

  Board games?

• 18:37Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 18:38Sam Parr?

  Uh, it's sports, specifically individual sports. So if you're world class, like an, like a swimming, track of field, cycling, wrestling, those types of things. All right. The video games one is obvious. Let me give you a wild card. Magic. I'm not talking about like cards, but like ta-da, like that type of magic.

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 19:00Sam Parr?

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

• 19:06Shaan Puri?

  eBay flipping was another one back in the day, like, you know, sneaker flipping and eBay flipping was definitely another one. Being a Mormon and going on a mission, another one, right? Being from the countries, the Ukraine, like any war torn country that you have escaped from, great filter, right? There's like, there's a, there's a bunch of these. Um, all right. Next one. One of, one of the, the best principles my, uh, my, 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. And for whoever likes me, they're going to like this podcast and it's going to feel very second nature to me to create this podcast because it's just me. And so, uh, Paul Graham says almost the same principle without, he doesn't have that catch

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  phrase, but he has to say the same thing about, about Reddit. He goes, Reddit is, Reddit was successful because Steve has two things. Number one, he likes ideas for the sake of ideas. Like he likes ideas just for the sake of interestingness, which is really what Reddit is. Like you go to Reddit, not because it's the top news story, but because it's like mildly interesting or it's fascinating in some obscure way. And that's what makes Reddit really, really special. And that's the type of stuff that Steve really, really likes. And so naturally it went in that direction, which is like, not obvious, actually. Like, I think the obvious, if you were like writing a business plan, you would have made Reddit a lot more like, I don't know, the homepage of CNN today, right? The important stories rather than the quirky, interesting stories that are only just, they

• 20:33Shaan Puri?

  scratch your intellectual itch and nothing really else.

• 20:36Sam Parr?

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

• 20:40Shaan Puri?

  Like ejaculated straight out.

• 20:42Sam Parr?

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

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  Make your innie and outie. All right. That's all you're really doing when it comes to entrepreneurship.

• 20:54Sam Parr?

  All right, Steve, I like you.

• 20:57Shaan Puri?

  All right, the next, the next one that he says there, he goes, the other thing about Steve, he has that, but then the second thing is he has a very anti-authority streak. So he liked the idea of creating a website that didn't have editors because at the time in the internet, all edit, all websites that were like editorial news, link submissions, they had this like small class of like the gatekeepers who decided what's in and what's out. And Reddit does not work that way. They, you know, over time, they have like a self, like a democratic mod thing, but there, there is no person at the company who decides what gets posted, what gets featured, what gets shown. And he's like, those two factors are just like inherent in Steve himself. And so of course, the product is an extension of the, of the founder.

• 21:39Sam Parr?

  That, I mean, yeah, that's pretty amazing. I think, uh, what's his name? Jason Freed, uh, has had a big part of that in his podcast where he talks about being crazy early on, because if you start a little bit crazy, a little wacky, a little weird, later on, things inevitably become more tightwound, more conservative. And so it's best to do it early on to establish that. And I thought that, I've always felt that, but I didn't, I wasn't articulate enough to phrase it in such a wonderful way. And that actually is a beautiful way of thinking.

• 22:07Shaan Puri?

  And Reddit is exactly that way. The mascot is this like goofy alien creature, right? And it's like, first of all, you don't have to have a mascot. You could have a logo without a mascot, but he has like this alien mascot, but it's like, the, the weird shit got baked in early. Once this thing got big, the idea of like, hey, we're going to introduce this new alien mascot. It'd be like, well, I don't know, the, do the numbers support that? Do the focus groups support that? Is this going to risk the traffic? Blah, blah, blah. It's important that the weirdness gets baked in early.

• 22:37Sam Parr?

  I shared an office at Third and Bryant in downtown San Francisco with Reddit when they were 13 employees. Like shared an office building. They were on floor three. I was on floor four. And I used to get into the elevator and if I would like, I was such a fan of Reddit. I was like, if I meet someone from Reddit in this elevator, I'm going to ask for like a picture with them. This is a big deal. And you would see these guys wearing their Reddit backpacks and sweatshirts. And I'm just thinking like, these are my heroes. And then it's just like this nerdy Asian guy with like a crappy mustache. Who's like 5'3" getting in the elevator. The bookbag was like weighing him back and like, he's going to fall over. And I was like, sir, it is an honor.

• 23:16Sam Parr?

  Like, I just remember thinking like,

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  I love your work.

• 23:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Like, can you sign here? Just lifting up my shirt and ask if he could like sign on my chest like, I was like, the tide has turned. I'm not exactly like a, like a jock alpha looking guy, but compared to this guy I was. And yeah, I'm like begging him, like, please have mercy.

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  Well, here's another good one. Alexis O'Handon tweeted this out today. It was a screenshot of an email he got from Chris Saka. And you know, this is early on because his name is Christopher Saka. 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 and Alexis tweeted out, he goes, shout out to Saka for being the first person before my mom, before our investors, before anybody else, who saw how big and successful Reddit could become. And 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.

• 24:21Sam Parr?

  I wonder what site it was.

• 24:23Shaan Puri?

  He's working at Google at the time. I think he literally was just calling Google his site, which is.

• 24:30Shaan Puri?

  Legendary? I don't know if there's another way of facing that.

• 24:33Sam Parr?

  And the whole email so far is lowercase. There's not one.

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  Lowercase i is how you start. Paragraph three, by the way. Anyways, he goes, anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you, guy. 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.

• 24:48Sam Parr?

  All right.

• 24:49Shaan Puri?

  There's some wisdom in that, bro. We've been saying that for a long time.

• 24:53Sam Parr?

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

• 24:58Shaan Puri?

  25 is my guess. So he's 48 now. And this was 24 years ago. So he's 24 years old.

• 25:04Sam Parr?

  What? Chris Sacko was 24 when he wrote this email?

• 25:08Shaan Puri?

  All right. Oh, no, no, sorry. 20 years ago. So maybe he's 28. Sorry. 28.

• 25:11Sam Parr?

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

• 25:16Shaan Puri?

  So he's 28 years old and he says,

• 25:19Shaan Puri?

  I would be thrilled to have you come visit us at the Goog.

• 25:21Sam Parr?

  Oof. All right. You lost me there.

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  That one didn't stick.

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  Luckily you've racked up a bunch of cool points in our book.

• 25:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  Definitely took a hit.

• 25:32Shaan Puri?

  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. He goes, we can grab lunch sometime and intro you to some Googlers. Cool? Question mark? The next line. Cool. Period.

• 25:51Shaan Puri?

  God, I hope my emails never leak because I do shit like this all the time. That is so, just so bad and so great at the same time.

• 25:59Sam Parr?

  That's all right. 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.

• 26:05Shaan Puri?

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

• 26:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Chris Sacko, the type of guy to like introduce himself and say, please to meet me.

• 26:19Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. And then one more thing you have on here. Sam Altman owns 8%, which is like a billion dollars today. Before we even get to that, Reddit sold the company. So Reddit has had a ton of drama. I forget the guy's name. His name was Aaron something. So basically, yeah, Aaron Schwartz. So basically. If I remember correctly, during YC, that three month period, there was another guy named Aaron, who was pretty brilliant, and he got in trouble, or rather, before that, his company wasn't working, so they merged with Reddit. So 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 is like a, a lot of people protest against, but basically he stole information from MIT, I think it was, and they were gonna lock him up for like 20 years.

• 27:01Shaan Puri?

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

• 27:05Sam Parr?

  J. Store. I think it was J. Store.

• 27:08Shaan Puri?

  Yes, he's so...

• 27:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, stealing's 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, whatever. And he was gonna get locked up for like years. And he ended up killing himself. And this, along with a bunch of other drama, they had a bunch of like drama early on. And in fact, they sold the company to Conde Nast. I forget for how much, but I think...

• 27:32Shaan Puri?

  Here's the thread. So Alexis tweeted this out the other day, which was, which was cool because, or not the other day, four years ago, time flies.

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  He talks about selling it in 2006. So they started 2005, basically sold it in 2006. So here's what he says. So he goes, Halloween is a surreal holiday because on Halloween, we sold Reddit to Conde Nast, which was like, not a tech company at the time.

• 27:52Sam Parr?

  Magazine publisher.

• 27:54Shaan 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. And there were lots of things about management, team building, 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 million exit. And he goes, I didn't know there were other options, like raising money or doing other things, so we just kind of sold.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  I think he said previously, they, they each walked, Steve and Alexis walked away with $2 million.

• 28:20Shaan Puri?

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

• 28:26Sam Parr?

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

• 28:44Shaan Puri?

  He was fasting?

• 28:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he was the facet CEO, sorry, interim. And 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 a billion plus.

• 29:04Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. That's right.

• 29:06Sam 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.

• 29:14Shaan Puri?

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

• 29:42Sam Parr?

  Well, I think it's like the 10th most visited website in the, in the country, which is funny because if you go to like quote a normal person and be like, hey, do you use Reddit? And they're like, either what's Reddit? Or no, I don't know how, you know?

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

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

• 30:00Sam Parr?

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

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  They, I think they have like 75 million DAU or something like that. Anyways, they, it's crazy that after 19 years are still not profitable, but everybody who built it made a lot of money.

• 30:18Sam Parr?

  Have you advertised on Reddit?

• 30:20Shaan Puri?

  Dude, there's like no button. I remember trying to advertise five years ago. I remember being like, we should run Reddit. This is a great market. And I went through like a three hour process and I was like, oh, I guess it's impossible to advertise on Reddit. It was like, I have to like send a telegram to somebody if I want to advertise on here. Now it's much better, but.

• 30:36Sam Parr?

  I've advertised a little bit on Reddit and this was like five years ago and the it's like, so that that feeling that Steve has of fuck authority. The users have that, which doesn't exactly make it the most advertising friendly audience. And I've advertised on there. Cheaps very clicks were very cheap. Results very bad. They did not buy whatever I was selling.

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  That's the slogan. Clicks, cheap. Results, terrible.

• 31:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  Join us.

• 31:08Sam Parr?

  You do the math.

• 31:10Sam Parr?

  All right, well, that's sick. This was a good phone call. Are you ready to hang up on me now?

• 31:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, all right, I'm gonna go now, bye.

• 31:17Sam Parr?

  All right, that's the call.