Live Episode! Reddit: Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman

With $12,000 and a mascot named Snoo, two former college roommates designed a web site they hoped would become "the front page of the Internet." Today, despite growing pains, personal issues and persistent trolls, Reddit has over 300 million monthly users and is valued at 1.8 billion dollars. Recorded live in San Francisco. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Support for this podcast comes from American Express Open. If you listen to How I Built This, you're curious about ideas, and you probably have some ideas of your own. American Express Open can help you with money and know-how, so you can turn those ideas into action. Visit open.com to get business done.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Every single person I know texted me and said, "You gotta go back to Reddit." And it just felt like, at the time, I had no choice. And it wasn't even kind of a CEO mentality. It was more of just like an engineer who knew how Reddit works. And watching these trolls run rampant on Reddit, I remember just thinking, "I know how to fix this. I too know the mind of a troll. And if you just give me access to the code, I can fix this."

• 0:58Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:11Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's special live episode, how two college roommates built an internet community that's become a virtual nation with a population bigger than Brazil.

• 1:28Guy Raz?

  So if you're one of the 300 million active Reddit users, you probably think of it as this incredible place, a home where you can find your tribe, groups of people talking about the weird stuff you're into. But if you are not into Reddit, it can seem like this super-intimidating insiders' club that's kind of hard to penetrate. And if you land on the homepage and you're not familiar with it, you might think you've accidentally stumbled onto the internet circa 2005, because that is what Reddit looks like. It's a discussion site filled entirely with user-generated content, which means, depending on the time of day, anything from photos of cats wearing Renaissance-era costumes

• 2:12Guy Raz?

  to serious discussions about US foreign policy. And this simple little site is also worth a ton of money. Actually, its most recent valuation put it at $1.8 billion.

• 2:26Guy Raz?

  And all of this from an idea that Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian came up with on a road trip to Boston during their senior year of college in 2005. Now, since then, Reddit and the founders have been through a lot of ups and downs. Reddit's users nearly shut it down in 2015. At a certain point, parts of the site were hijacked by trolls who used it to spread hateful messages. And even Alexis and Steve went through a long period when they stopped speaking. But recently, Reddit started to hit its stride again. To be specific, a $200 million cash infusion from investors with plans to make the site into a more user-friendly place.

• 3:09Guy Raz?

  And a couple of weeks ago, in San Francisco, I sat down with Alexis and Steve in front of a live audience to hear about how they came to invent what's become known as the front page of the internet.

• 3:30Guy Raz?

  First of all, Steve, I just wanted to begin by asking you, I think, a really important question, which is, you are wearing a purple sweater with a dinosaur on which a robot is riding the dinosaur.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:42Guy Raz?

  Can you talk a little bit about your sweater?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  With pleasure. Thank you for asking.

• 3:47Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  So, the advice that you're often given is, dress like the person you want to be. And so, I went to Google and I typed in "awesome sweater", and clicked on images, and I just scrolled down till I found something that spoke to me. I'm not making this up. And then, I found this.

• 4:09Guy Raz?

  Cool. Great. Okay, now we can start the interview.

• 4:17Guy Raz?

  So, how did you guys meet? Steve, tell me the story that you remember.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Sure. As I recall, we met first, our first year of college, at University of Virginia on our first day.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Wahoo.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And so, I arrived before Alexis, and we were on the same hall, and our rooms were across from each other. And everybody's rooms had their names on the door. And so, mine said Steve and David, and across the hall were Alexis and Mike. And my first thought was, this is sweet. There are girls in our hall. And so needless to say, when I met Alexis, my first emotion was disappointment.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I was elated because Steve was playing Playstation 2. So I was happy to meet you. We got over the fact that I was not what he expected and became fast friends.

• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Fast friends and like, super close friends, right?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we talked about our gaming rigs, played a lot of video games together, and lived together for years.

• 5:22Guy Raz?

  Eight years, I think in total.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Shared many intimate experiences in college together that we will not go into detail about. And yeah, we're best of friends.

• 5:33Guy Raz?

  And what did you study?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  I was a history and business major.

• 5:37Guy Raz?

  So, nothing to do with...

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yes, humanities.

• 5:40Guy Raz?

  Nothing to do with technology at all?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I took programming classes in high school and I fancied myself a programmer until I met Steve and realized I was not going to be a programmer for a living.

• 5:50Guy Raz?

  You were a computer science major?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, and so I had always grown up wanting to be a business major until I met Alexis.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And I decided that engineering is the path for me.

• 6:05Guy Raz?

  So when you guys were at, you know, in college, were you, I mean, were you talking about business, starting a business, doing something together? Was that something you would talk about during your video game sessions?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Eventually.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, not at first.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  I would say the first three years were really just video games.

• 6:24Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  And I, it was our last year, sometime around that. I don't remember, I remember the first conversation, we were in, we went to that hockey game in DC, but I don't remember when that was, was that our last year?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  It was junior year, because I, as a history major, I thought the only way I was going to have a career was to go to law school. And I obsessed, I spent all my time in the library obsessing over my grades, studying for the LSAT, and then on a Saturday morning, walked out of an LSAT to go eat waffles. And I went to a Waffle House. It's a great place for epiphanies and waffles. And I had both there that morning and realized if I wanted these waffles more than the LSAT, I probably shouldn't be a lawyer. And then needed something to do with my life, and so naturally I went to my smartest friend and said, "Hey Steve, you always have these great ideas for technologies, like, let's try to make a business out of it."

• 7:17Guy Raz?

  And did you have an idea?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  I did have an idea. Another business unique to the mid-Atlantic is Sheetz Gas Station. And Sheetz had, at the time, you could get subs, sub sandwiches.

• 7:31Guy Raz?

  Because why, where else would you want to get a sub sandwich rather than the gas?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  You know.

• 7:35Guy Raz?

  You'd want to get a gas station sub sandwich.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Have you had one, guy?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Look, they're good, they're good subs.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And Sheetz had an electric POS terminal. So you could go in there and order from a touchscreen, which at the time was actually pretty cool. And so I'd sit there pumping my gas, thinking, there's an electronic ordering system inside. If I could just convey my order to that machine, the fella inside could be making my sandwich. And then I wouldn't have to wait. And so that was the idea for My Mobile Menu.

• 8:09Guy Raz?

  This would have been like a pre-app, because this is pre iPhones. It would have been like on a BlackBerry or a cellphone or something, or?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is what we learned later, that the idea was actually ahead of its time.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  The cellphones, iPhone didn't exist. The cellphones didn't have apps.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  We had a great name, though.

• 8:33Guy Raz?

  What was the name?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  My Mobile Menu.

• 8:34Guy Raz?

  Oh, perfect.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Or Mmm.

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  Great.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I spent days working on that guy. Days. Even made the little logo for that, too.

• 8:42Guy Raz?

  Did you really?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  It was just three Ms.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  So, so did you guys, how did you decide to pitch this idea?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Not very effectively. We, we had this fantasy of, I would work for my job. I, I worked for a startup all through college. But in Virginia, during that time, we didn't call them startups. We called them small businesses. And so I worked for the small business all through school. And I had a job offer to continue on after I graduated. The plan was, I would work there during the day. And then Alexis and I would work on My Mobile Menu in the evening. And we had considered, like, asking my parents for funding. But we actually didn't even know how to do that. So, we didn't.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  But then we had a life-changing spring break.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so this is spring break of senior year. So what was life-changing? What happened?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  We went to Cancun. Now, we were the only kids in Virginia who didn't because Katie saw that Paul Graham was giving a talk.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  So my girlfriend at the time knew that I was a Paul Graham fan.

• 9:58Guy Raz?

  Paul Graham?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Paul Graham is, well, was the founder and the lead of Y Combinator and wrote essays evangelizing startups and kind of nerd culture and engineering and how basically you can build yourself a new life on the internet, starting companies. And so I was a fan of his. And we learned that he was giving a talk at Harvard over our spring break called "How to Start a Startup." So Alexis and I decided to go.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  So Paul gave his lecture, which at the time is really, he just stands there and stares into his paper and reads an essay.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Nevertheless, at the end of the talk, Alexis basically dragged me up to the front of the room to meet Paul. And Alexis, as he does, introduced himself to Paul.

• 10:52Guy Raz?

  You said?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Hello, Dr. Graham. Could you please sign my friend's book?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  And I had my dog-eared copy of his Lisp programming book.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  And it would totally be worth the cost of buying you a drink to get you to come out with us. We came all the way from Virginia and we have a startup. We want to pitch you.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  And he agreed because you boys came all the way from Virginia.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  I think he was shocked we had trains.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And agreed to meet us later that evening.

• 11:19Guy Raz?

  So you take him out for, so he agrees to go for a drink with you?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  And we sat down at Cafe Algiers. I hope it's still there in Harvard Square.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  It is. I walked by it not too long ago.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  And we pitched him. We had a whole plan.

• 11:30Guy Raz?

  You pitched him my mobile menu?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:33Guy Raz?

  And what?

• 11:36Guy Raz?

  And what was his response?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  He said, "This will be the end of lines."

• 11:45Speaker 01

  And I was like, "No, Paul, actually, I don't think you understand. What I want to do is get my sub when I'm pumping gas."

• 11:54Speaker 02

  And he went off. He was so hyped. And we left there feeling amazing. Because this was like one of your idols who said that we actually had a really good idea.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  So we got back to Virginia. And a couple of days later Alexis said to me, "Hey Steve, you should send Paul an email thanking him for meeting us." And so I did. And he responded back. He's like, "Oh, are you those two guys from Virginia? I just announced this new program called Y Combinator to invest in people like you. You should apply." So we did.

• 12:28Guy Raz?

  And you're thinking, "We've got a sure bet because he already told us it's going to revolutionize lines."

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And we gave the interview of our lives when they invited us back up there.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, although there was a moment where I was explaining to Robert Morris, one of the probably best engineers, programmers on earth, what a web server is. Now, he already knew.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  But I took it upon myself to really tie it up.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  We nailed it.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  We nailed it. And then they said they were going to call us later that night.

• 13:06Guy Raz?

  So you guys are high-fiving each other and you're ready for the call?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  And we got the call. And I picked up. Hello?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  And he said, "I'm sorry, we're rejecting you." And that really sucked. That really sucked. We were going to prove him wrong, though. We went out drinking and we were going to prove them wrong.

• 13:27Guy Raz?

  So you went out drinking and you were like, "Down with those guys. We're not going to make this thing anyway."

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And then the next morning, on the way back, he called.

• 13:36Guy Raz?

  Paul Graham called.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's like, "Hello? We got to play cool. Hello?" And it's Paul and he's like, "We still don't like your idea."

• 13:47Speaker 02

  It's like, "Why would you call to say that?"

• 13:52Speaker 02

  We like you two. And if you change your idea, we'll invest.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  I gotta get, I gotta play it cool. All right, we'll think about it. We'll get back to you.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  And I think at that point, we were already convinced we needed to get off this train and accept that offer.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  That, in that moment, my mobile menu died.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  So quickly. And we got, uh...

• 14:16Speaker 01

  We showed him.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Train right back.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. We literally jumped over the tracks and caught the next train going north.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Went right back, sat down with Paul.

• 14:26Guy Raz?

  So, so you go and you meet Paul and what? What do you start doing? You start like brainstorming with him?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Basically, yes. And so we were talking about like things we could build. And there was a couple of websites that we both liked at the time. One of which was Delicious. And so Delicious, uh, it was a social bookmarking website. And there was a, a page on Delicious called Popular. And on Delicious slash Popular, you could see things that were being bookmarked that day that were popular. And things that were being bookmarked more often would hang around a little longer. The, the thing is, when you bookmark something, it's because you can't finish it in one sitting. So it's reference material. It's, it's things you can't get through, things you want to come back to later. So Delicious Popular was basically this really cool index of the most boring content on the internet

• 15:20Speaker 01

  on any given day. And so, uh, and then we also left Slashdot. Slashdot, news for nerds, stuff that matters. It's still online. And Slashdot had this incredible community. You know, you go there for news every day, but really the magic of Slashdot lived in the comment section. And so the idea was, can we take the mechanics of Delicious, user submitted and, and kind of this top billboard top 40 effect, and combine it with good content and a good community? And that was the genesis of Reddit.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  And this was a, a chance to basically get $12,000 from an investor we really trusted to just try something for three months. And at worst case, you know, at the end of the summer, maybe we just would have, I don't know, gone back to Virginia.

• 16:04Guy Raz?

  Well, I mean, did you come up with a fully formed idea by talking with Paul? Because, I mean, going from my mobile menu to what became Reddit is a radical change. I mean, did you come up with that concept? Just go, you went back up to Boston, started brainstorming and that came out of it?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I have that notebook. It's in my desk at work, the notes I took during that first meeting. And I had actually written down in that notebook, the front page of the internet. That's what we were going to build.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  PG is terrible at naming companies, but when he nailed it with that phrase, it was special.

• 16:39Guy Raz?

  He said to you, you want to make, you should make the front page.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Make the front page of the internet. Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  And we said, okay, and so we did.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was easy as that. We thought we were, we thought we had gotten away with something, right? Like, here was this vague concept that we had sort of agreed to work on over the span of an hour, and here was 12 grand to just spend three months working on it.

• 17:01Guy Raz?

  Just to be clear, you meet Paul in spring break of 2005, so roughly March, maybe early April of 2005.

• 17:11Guy Raz?

  From what I understand, you launched Reddit in June of 2005, like two and a half months later.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  We actually only worked on it for about three weeks before we launched it.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I didn't write the first line of code until June. And I had never built a website before. And we were kind of Paul's special projects a little bit, you know, because of how we got into YC. And so he would email us daily with just ideas and, you know, things like, I think his two best pieces of advice were, "Your name is awful and you need to get rid of that little bug."

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, still have that email. That went in the book. I really, thanks, Paul.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  He actually had a lot of really good ideas during that time.

• 17:49Guy Raz?

  You wanted to name it Reddit?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yes. Alexis wanted to name it Reddit.

• 17:53Guy Raz?

  Had you, I mean, it's a great name.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Well, thank you.

• 17:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  You like it more than "mm"?

• 17:57Guy Raz?

  Yes, a little bit better than "mm."

• 17:59Speaker 02

  We couldn't afford "Snue," which was the name we wanted, which was actually Paul's idea. The idea was, people would ask, "Oh, what's new?" And we'd say, "Exactly, it's what's new online."

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And so instead Alexis was like, "They'll say, what's Reddit?"

• 18:16Speaker 02

  I hoped, I hoped people would say "I Reddit" on Reddit. Unfortunately, snue.com cost $4,000, which we didn't have, it was a third of our funding, so couldn't afford it. Named the mascot "Snue" instead, and then Reddit was available, totally, it was free, so, R-E-D-D-I-T. That and the mascot were my, my key contributions.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Top my LinkedIn profile.

• 18:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so, so in, in that, in that sort of, those beginning, the beginning period of time, Steve, you were coding, you were doing that, that sort of tech side.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  The real work.

• 18:52Guy Raz?

  And what were you doing? Were you handling this design?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  This was the running joke at Y Combinator because I was the only non-technical founder. And it was a very curious thing for all involved. Aside from naming the company and drawing the mascot, I had the important responsibility of everything else that wasn't technical, from ordering the pizza to... No, I'm serious. To keeping the spreadsheet with all the receipts, to haggling cellphone bills down. And it has to be an egoless job as a founder because you just have to get this done. Because anytime, Steve, anytime an engineer would spend doing something that's not technical is a waste of time. And I like to think, over the years, proved my worth.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  But back then, that was a very common question. A very common question at YC.

• 19:43Guy Raz?

  And how did you get people to post stuff at the beginning?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Funny you ask that.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  We cheated.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So we had a special version of the submit page. So for most users, of which there were none, they would see title and URL. And so that's how they would submit. And to be fair, the submit page has actually changed very little since then. And for Alexis and I, it was title, URL, and username. So you would put in the link you wanted to submit, and you'd make up a username and hit submit, and it would register that username if it didn't exist, or submit as that username if it did. And that's why the first hundred or so Reddit users were either characters from World of Warcraft or pieces of furniture in our living room.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Not very creative. Both at level 60 that summer, though.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  It's the level cap in Warcraft back then.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  So how did you get the word out? I mean, how did you actually get real users? Well, so Paul did that for us. He was like, "Hey, you guys need to launch, you need to launch, you need to launch." And I was like, "Okay, we're almost ready to launch." And then he wrote an essay where he linked to Reddit without telling us. I had my computer, and then I had a little screen next to it where I could see the error log of things going by. And all of a sudden, one day, it just starts scrolling really fast. And I was just like, "What is going on?" And what happened is Paul just launched us. And so that's basically how it happened. So our first real users were actually Paul Graham fans, people who are reading his essays.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And that kind of set the tone for the early days of Reddit.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'd have to be scrappy, because right in 05, there was no social networks to speak of. Facebook existed, but it wasn't beyond your college network. And we emailed every one of our friends, and I remember two of them, Morgan and Connor, thank you, actually signed up and started using it, but most people just didn't care. And you would just beg, try to beg bloggers to write about you. And I'll never forget, though, "A Changing Way" was the name of some random person's blog, and it was the first random person who ever took the time to write about Reddit. And I found this post years later. I mean, it took a little work with the Wayback Machine. And if you look, it was some random TypePad blog, right? The first two comments are from you and me, I don't know if you remember this. But we actually left him a comment that was just like, "Oh, thank you so much.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  This is so great. If you need anything, let us know. We're the co-founders." And it's in, especially in 05, it was a really isolating experience to put something out in the world and feel like no one cared. And so the first time someone cared felt amazing. That's how I found this guy's website a decade later, was because there was enough of it still seared in my brain, because someone cared, and we reached out and thanked them for it. And this was old school, just giving a damn to try to get anyone to write about us or talk about us at all.

• 22:54Guy Raz?

  Did you have a, like, a business model in your mind? I mean, you had $12,000, so, like, did you think, "Well, we'll eventually get advertising"? Because there was, I mean, web advertising wasn't what it is today.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  It existed. It was not a priority for us. We did have ads.

• 23:15Guy Raz?

  We had some better ads. But did you have a sense of how you were gonna make it sustainable?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Not really. We weren't really thinking in those terms, to be honest. Because of the way we got into YC, we barely, I mean, we didn't even really think of ourselves as a business. This was more of an adventure we were on. We didn't have a target destination, a North Star mission we were building towards. It was, "How do we, you know, get by every day without looking stupid in front of Paul Graham?" And then, once we, in August, a few months in, once we had real users, it became, "Well, let's just not let the users down." And that was our mentality for actually quite a while.

• 23:53Guy Raz?

  After Paul Graham wrote that essay and linked to Reddit, was that, is it the moment where it took off?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  No, no. That was the moment when we started getting real traffic. It was in August is when we started getting real users. I remember that day. We used to, Alexis and I were submitting all the content, and we had a rule back then that all of the content on the front page had to be less than 24 hours old. And the front page was 25 links long. So if there were fewer than 25 links submitted that day, there'd be fewer than 25 links on the front page, independent of quality. And, and so sometimes we'd go to the site and there'd be like seven links there, and it would just be white space. And so I had taken a day off for whatever reason. In the late afternoon, I remember thinking, "Shoot, I haven't thought about Reddit all day."

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I bet the front page is completely dried up. It's completely blank. And when I, when I checked, it was full of content from usernames that I'd never seen before. And so that was the day when we realized that this is a thing. These are real users. We're not just propping it up with our fake accounts anymore. And, and that, that was a really special day. I, I still get really kind of excited when I think about it, because that's when our motivation changed, and, and that's when Reddit was really born, I think.

• 25:19Guy Raz?

  That summer that you guys launched in 2005, Alexis, your life kind of went off the rails, right? I mean, it's a pretty difficult summer for you. What was going on?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Well, two months after we launched, my girlfriend had a pretty serious accident falling out of a five-story window in Germany.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  I immediately flew out. She spent about four or five months in a coma. And finally, thankfully, actually came out of it, came back to the States by December that year and actually has made a near-full recovery, which was remarkable.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  But it was a hard, that was hard, to say the least. And a month later, my mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. And so, you know, you go from feeling invulnerable at 21 or 22 and start like just months into starting a business and, you know, feeling like you were gonna take over the world and then being really hit in the stomach and realizing, no, no, no, it's real life. And I knew at some point, I'd had an amazing life up until that point, very, very lucky. And I knew at some point the comeuppance was gonna come. I just didn't think it was gonna happen all at once. And I'll never forget the first meeting I had back with my mom. The first words out of her mouth were, "I'm sorry."

• 26:42Speaker 02

  She felt so bad because, you know, because she got cancer. That is the kind of woman she was, that she was always thinking of me, of other people ahead of herself. And that, in a lot of ways, came to define my entire experience at Reddit. Still, this day is imbued in what Reddit means to me because it is the best of her. I know that because of everything she gave me in confidence and motivation and support and unflinching love, that I could never fail, that Reddit could never really fail because she released me of any of that concern. And so, you know, starting a startup sucks. It really sucks.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  But it ain't that bad. Compared to what you do if you're going through chemotherapy, or you're like my father, supporting someone who is. And it was, you know, a gift that I'm still grateful for because it keeps perspective on every trauma, everything that I face. Because nothing's really actually that bad.

• 27:50Guy Raz?

  When we come back, why Alexis and Steve decided to sell Reddit, and how it took a toll on their friendship. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Live, recorded in San Francisco.

• 28:25Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to this live edition of How I Built This, recorded in San Francisco. So it's 2005, and Reddit has just launched, and the site is growing really fast. And so around this time, one of the founding partners of Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston, suggested that Alexis go to New York to help spread the word about Reddit. And one of the meetings on that visit would be life-changing.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  She said, "Just go down there, tell a couple people that you're in town on a press tour and see if they'll meet you for coffee." And so I crashed on a friend's sofa and had meetings. And one of the meetings was with a freelance reporter. And I thought I was pitching her for a story, but we actually kind of hit it off. And she ultimately was like, "You know what? I don't feel like we should, I don't want to write a story because like, I think we're friends. Like, let's not make this a business thing. Like, let's just stay in touch and be friends." And I was like, "Okay, cool, whatever. Like, I'm just here on a press tour." And, you know, I got a lot of stuff going on, so I gotta go. And... I don't know, a few weeks later, I get an email from this guy named Karosh Karamkani,

• 29:35Speaker 02

  who is the head of BD at Conde Nast, the digital arm of Conde Nast. And he explained to me that his wife, who was an editor at Wired, had heard from one of her writers, Rachel, the one I met, about this company called Reddit, and he wanted to have a quick phone call. And during that call, he basically pitched this idea of making a white label Reddit, called Lipstick, as like a test sort of project. And then, you know, five months later, we're talking about acquisition.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I think you glossed over the five months where I was the head moderator of Lipstick.com.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  You were an expert. Expert at celebrity gossip.

• 30:15Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, it's, it's pretty amazing. I mean, it's like, a year and a half after you start Reddit, you sell it to Conde Nast for somewhere between 10 and 20 million dollars. So presumably-

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Technically.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  That is accurate.

• 30:34Guy Raz?

  That is right, okay. So, was that the reason where you guys, like, you were 22, 23, and you were thinking, "Cool, we can like walk away with a couple million bucks"?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Basically.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, guy, this was, this was 16 months of work that was gonna mean more money for me than my entire family had made, my mother and father had made their entire lives. Like, are you kidding me? I'm at a GED, like, like, this was not, uh, this seemed like a joke. The best phone call of my life was calling her up, saying, "Hey, Mom, it was worth it." Like, all of that support, all of that everything, like, we did it. And, and that, I would never, ever trade that phone call. That will be the greatest phone call for the rest of my life. So I, I regret from a business standpoint, yes, we sold it early, but I have no regret whatsoever as a decision, because I got to make that phone call.

• 31:29Guy Raz?

  And she li- she lived to-

• 31:31Speaker 02

  To see it.

• 31:39Guy Raz?

  So, once that happened, you guys become employees of Conde Nast, I guess, right?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not in 4 Times Square, though. They didn't put us in the fancy cafeteria.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  So, we... yeah, but that's where we worked, right there on the corner in that organic building, for three years.

• 31:58Guy Raz?

  That was your commitment. You had to stay there for three years and then you could do whatever it was you wanted to do.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  That's right. And we both loved Reddit. But when our contracts ended, I can't speak for Alexis, but, you know, I left because I wanted to start another company that was involved in the exchange of money, so that I wouldn't have to contrive a business model. Because on Reddit, we were still, we hadn't quite figured out ads, right? It was just, it felt like we were swimming upstream. And I didn't realize how cool Reddit was. I thought, well, if you just build something, it'll just grow. That's how things go on the internet. And I didn't realize that Reddit was so special, that despite the fact that we didn't know what we were doing, and despite the fact that, like, at times we were very unproductive, it just grew.

• 32:48Guy Raz?

  So, once that time ended, you went and founded a new company, Hipmunk?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:54Guy Raz?

  And Alexis...

• 32:55Speaker 02

  I went to the motherland.

• 32:56Guy Raz?

  You went to Armenia, right?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  I went to Armenia.

• 32:58Guy Raz?

  Which is where your dad, your dad's side of the family was from for a couple of months. And were you just thinking, "I'm done with tech world, like, I've finished"?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Uh, ish, ish. I just wanted to unplug a bit, and I felt really guilty because I had never been. And so, I felt this tremendous guilt for not having this connection, and I had an amazing experience there, and could just kind of hit reset. And then came back, and I figured I was going to live in New York for the rest of my days. Helped draw a mascot for Hipmunk and Steve, but...

• 33:29Guy Raz?

  And you kind of got involved a little bit with Hipmunk at the...

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Briefly.

• 33:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I do recall, actually, at this point, Alexis and I, by 2009, had lived together for eight years, from 2001 to 2009. And when we, by the time we left Reddit, we were not on the best of terms.

• 33:47Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  We hadn't... So we had been through a lot together and we had never really discussed it. We had never discussed our roles at Reddit, um, kind of the boundaries, who was responsible for what. We, we didn't really have a, a way of resolving disputes and, and we didn't see a ton of each other. There, I was in, I, I moved to San Francisco right when we sold, but Alexa stayed on the east coast to be with his family for about a year and a half. And so when our contracts expired, we just kind of said, hey, you know, great, see you later and left it that way.

• 34:20Guy Raz?

  There was like unresolved tension.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  I mean, look, there was a lot that went on during that period for sure. But we never really exercised the muscles that founders have to exercise, that best friends don't. And there are lots of founder, like it's great to be able to start a company with one of your best friends. But, um, the conversations you have to have as co-founders are very different from the conversations you have to have as friends. And we didn't have enough of the hard ones often enough and it was just unresolved and festered. Like, I don't think it was, I didn't feel animosity.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  It was like neglect.

• 35:06Guy Raz?

  And you just kind of threw yourself into activism at that point, right?

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't want to see the internet get messed up. I like spending time on it. I have a career because of it. And I was in the right place at the right time for SOPA and PIPA. Yeah. And I didn't have a job, so it was really helpful.

• 35:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little about what that was about? I mean, you were super active in this SOPA campaign and net neutrality and what, what, what was it about at the time?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Well-intentioned people, I think most of whom are well-intentioned in DC. Writing bills for technology they don't really understand without people around them who are themselves technologists often lead to things like SOPA and PIPA. And those were two bills that were in, designed to stop copyright infringement. That would have in practice, basically broken the internet. One was a House bill, the other one was, the latter was the Senate bill and it was. Was it one of the best ways to ever get first exposed to DC? Because they told us all that it was gonna be inevitable when we got involved. And then maybe five or six months later, because of Americans picking up the phone and calling and the internet blacking out, they were unthinkable. Legislators were running from these bills.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  And it was a great demonstration of the power of people to actually affect change in DC, which I didn't think was a thing. I didn't like, that's what you sort of dream of, is how DC works. And I found a way to help.

• 36:27Guy Raz?

  And during that time, you were sort of full on at Hitmonk, trying to get that company...

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, starting any business, Hitmonk took all of my attention.

• 36:38Guy Raz?

  Hitmonk, I wish you'd clarify, was travel, it's a travel company.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, so Hitmonk, we were in the glamorous business of slinging plane tickets and hotel reservations. It's actually a lot of fun. We took a lot of pride in the work we were doing, and we built, I thought, a very nice product. And we always really enjoyed saving people time. But it was a brutal business. Travel is very cutthroat, and we didn't, we didn't realize that going in, how difficult that would be. So that took a lot of our attention and stress during those years.

• 37:06Guy Raz?

  And you guys were just done with Reddit? You were not involved at that point at all?

• 37:10Speaker 02

  I, I eventually, Reddit was still wholly owned by Condon Ast at this point, but I was involved as a board member, but not in the day-to-day at all.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And my day-to-day connection died when, when we left, there were six of us. Me, Alexis, Chris, David, Jeremy, and Mike. And Chris and David came with me to Hitmonk eventually, and that was my last connection to Reddit, really. And so there was a time when I was at Hitmonk where I knew 0% of the people who worked at Reddit. That was a little weird, to be honest. But I was also, my attention was so sucked into Hitmonk, I didn't feel painful, it just kind of was what it was.

• 37:51Guy Raz?

  In July of 2015, Reddit just goes nuts. It's just... Moderators start to shut down subreddits. What was going on? You were at Hitmonk, you're not at Reddit. Did you like check out Reddit and start to notice crazy stuff happening?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Well, so Reddit, a couple of things were happening over the course of 2015. Reddit had just raised $50 million and the CEO at that time, Yushan, basically had a midlife crisis and left abruptly. And so Ellen Pao took over and Reddit went through a series of crises that year, mostly content related on the site. The toxic users had kind of gotten out of control. And so it's just kind of one thing after another and Reddit's just getting killed in the press and everybody just feeling like, what is going on? And at the same time, Alexis and I were kind of repairing things. I don't remember exactly how it started. I know from my point of view, I just had this thought of like, hey, where's my best friend?

• 38:56Guy Raz?

  Was it just around that time you thought?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I think this was probably like February.

• 39:00Guy Raz?

  Of 2015?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Of 2015. It was like, you know.

• 39:03Guy Raz?

  And what, you decided that you were just gonna reach out?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. I think we had dinner and, you know, we started this process of like, what happened? At that point, you know, we'd grown up. It was five years since we'd left Reddit. It's five years since 2009. And we just started kind of talking through things. We agreed, I remember that first dinner, that hey, we're gonna put some effort into this, just repairing our friendship. And we actually saw my therapist, saw him together.

• 39:33Guy Raz?

  The two of you went to therapy together?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  We did.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  When Steve pitched me on it, he was like, look, my therapist has a really good idea. Let's come together.

• 39:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  And I was like, sure, okay.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And so we were actively kind of working on things and so we were in more closer contact. And then things on Reddit are really starting to go haywire.

• 39:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And they reached a boiling point in July of 2015. The moderators who control their communities, all the communities on Reddit, you know, the many thousands of them are created by users and run by users that we call moderators. And they were upset, you know, for some acute issues and also just like, just general frustration. And so they took their communities down and has effectively turned Reddit off for a couple of days. Alexis and I were talking and I was just like Alexis, who was closer to Reddit at the time on the board. I was just like, look, you gotta get the site online. Like, just whatever you gotta do. Like, you've gotta, like, broker a peace to get this back online.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Because we were very fortunate that our largest competitor for years, Dig, made a blunder a few years prior and basically committed suicide. In front of the whole internet. Dig was five times bigger than us. They released a new version of their software that was so disliked by users that the users came to Reddit. And so that could happen was a very real fear of ours. And at the same time, every single person I know texted me and said, "You gotta go back to Reddit."

• 41:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  And that's kind of what got the ball rolling.

• 41:18Guy Raz?

  This all happened against a backdrop of Ellen Powell's resignation. She was very public about the abuse that was heaped on her. She wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, basically saying the trolls won. Around that time, the Southern Poverty Law Center releases this report that says some of the most virulent and violent propaganda. And then it would describe racists and misogynists and antisemites. And you go back to this.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I remember my friends, because I made the decision to go back at my buddy's 30th birthday.

• 41:53Guy Raz?

  And you also decided to go back.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, we both came back full-time then. But like, getting Steve installed as CEO was something that really only one person on the planet could do. And it was Steve.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  You know, I remember my friends were like, "Why are you running into that burning building?" And it just felt like, at the time, I had no choice. I really, really loved Reddit. And part of me, it wasn't even kind of a CEO mentality. It was more of just like an engineer who knew how Reddit works. And watching these trolls run rampant on Reddit, I remember just thinking, "I know how to fix this. I too know the mind of a troll. And if you just give me access to the code, I can fix this." And that was kind of my feeling, is I know we can do this. And I don't want to see Reddit, you know, taken over by these people.

• 42:49Guy Raz?

  I mean, is it, is it possible to fully get, you know, remove the racist misogynists, the, you know, horrible, horribly, you know, just cruel people? I mean, is, can you do that?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Um, well, look, anything is possible, but that's not the goal. What we want Reddit to be is, in many ways, a reflection of humanity. And humanity's not perfect, but what you get on Reddit is an authentic representation of what's going on in the world, and we believe that is very, very powerful. And the good news is, one of the things that Reddit has taught me is that people are fundamentally good, and that people in large numbers want to help each other. When you put people together in the right context, they will do really incredible things. And there's no reason why that needs to be undermined by a bunch of ass [BLEEP].

• 43:46Speaker 01

  But it doesn't mean ass [BLEEP] don't exist, but, but we can, we can make the conversation more balanced, and that's really been our focus.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  I mean, consider 300 million people will visit Reddit this month. That's almost as big as the population of the United States.

• 44:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  And the vast, vast, vast majority of those interactions and engagements are not, they're never reported by another user, and they're actually either benign or actually good. But if anything, it shows us how much more we have in common with each other than apart. Because when you're on r/skincareaddiction, you don't know anything else about the hundreds of thousands of other people talking about their acne scars, other than the fact that you have this shared issue. And, um, and whether it's about that, or putting arms on birds, r/sbirdswitharms, you find out that you're not the only one who weirdly wants to put The Rock's arms

• 44:45Speaker 02

  on a parakeet, and that's okay, because all people of all creeds should be able to come together and put Dwayne Johnson's arms on a parakeet.

• 44:54Guy Raz?

  Um...

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Do you not agree?

• 44:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  You look skeptical.

• 45:01Guy Raz?

  I, I, yeah, I think I agree, yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Okay. Would someone on r/sbirdswitharms put, uh, guys' arms on a bird?

• 45:09Guy Raz?

  Um, please, no.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  You're welcome. You're welcome. Someone here is gonna do it.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley is a place where dreams come true, Guy.

• 45:26Guy Raz?

  I want to ask you about your personal lives. Because a lot of people want to know about yours, Steve.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:34Guy Raz?

  So, first of all.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Ask him anything.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna ask you anything.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Trade.

• 45:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, do you have a personal life? Have you been able to?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Because you work so damn hard.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  I don't think somebody walks around wearing a sweater with a robot riding a dinosaur without making a few friends.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got a personal life, thank you.

• 46:09Guy Raz?

  And, Lexus?

• 46:14Guy Raz?

  You are...

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Incidentally, mine is a lot more boring. I'm very much a homebody.

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  And you're...

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a fiance who's way, way more impressive.

• 46:24Guy Raz?

  Serena Williams, your partner. You are expecting a child, congratulations.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  I'm so excited, a little baby.

• 46:34Guy Raz?

  How did that happen?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Well, Guy, when a man and a woman love each other...

• 46:41Guy Raz?

  Yes?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  How did we meet?

• 46:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  A couple of years ago, I was hungover, overslept. I was actually at a conference that I really didn't want to be at, but it was a good thing I went because I overslept and I needed coffee. And they sent me outside to sit by the pool. And there was a table next to me where I sat, and there were four people there. And I had my headphones on and I was just working at my laptop. And then, one of them, this Australian guy, goes, "I'm mine, there's a rat by your table." I was like, "What?" I was like, "Oh dude, it's fine, I'm from Brooklyn and I see rats all the time. Thank you, but it's okay." And little did I know, he was trying to get me to leave because they wanted that table for the rest of the team.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  And then the woman who was next to him turned around and was like, "Oh, you're really not scared of rats?" And I was like, "No." And she's like, "Oh, what are you doing here?" And I was like, "Oh, I'm at this, you know, tech conference." And she's like, "Oh, you're here to speak?" And I was like, "I'm speaking." And, and, and then someone else at the table was like, "Oh, what are you talking about?" I was like, "I'm talking about Reddit." She had no idea what Reddit was.

• 47:55Guy Raz?

  Did you know who you were talking to? Because I'm assuming this is Serena.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  At this point, I was like 90, I was like 90% sure. But I'd never, I literally never watched tennis. I didn't care for the sport.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  I'm being honest, I really did not care for the sport.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  I wanna, I wanna jump in here with my favorite Serena story.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Okay. Not something we talked about ahead of time, but let's just do it live. This is trust.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  So this was, um...

• 48:20Speaker 02

  This is trust.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  It was, it was like one of my first days on the job with Alexis. We were there and it was a Saturday. It was during Wimbledon. And so Wimbledon was streaming on a, on a screen near us. So Alexis could watch, we could watch. And Alexis gets this text and it's just like wall-to-wall kissy emojis. And I was like, "Is that from Serena?" And just then, I look on the screen and Serena is coming out of the tunnel on her phone.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  We still will never know. We'll never know.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  And you know, it's delayed by a couple of seconds, right? And, and I was like, "Did I just watch Serena Williams send you a wall of..."

• 49:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Kissy emojis?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Didn't know he was gonna say that.

• 49:09Guy Raz?

  Wow. That's incredible.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  And he was like, "Yeah, bro."

• 49:22Guy Raz?

  So you guys are back at Reddit. You are running this thing. You just, just raised a bunch of money. I ask this question of everybody who comes on the show and I want to ask both of you to answer it. How much of what you think happened to you professionally is because of your skill and your talent? And how much of it is because of luck?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Somebody observed this that I thought was very smart. And he said, "Success is the product of intelligence, hard work, and luck." And you can't have a zero in any of those columns. You know, we started an internet company in 2005 when the kind of Web 2.0, this second wave of smarter funding and smarter people were coming into the ecosystem. You know, sometimes the wind blows your way. I'll tell you this, if I went back 10 years ago and knew everything I knew now and had to start Reddit all over again, I don't know if we could succeed. Right? It's just, it's a fickle thing, these social sites.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  And it's really all about the users and what are they into? And it's, it's hard to say if we could do it again all over, even with perfect knowledge.

• 50:36Guy Raz?

  Alexis.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  I'm personally heavy on the luck side. I don't want to totally remove agency because it's a ton of work. But I like that there, you can't have a zero in any of the columns. And it's so easy to look back on it and just think, all the dots connected. But there was, there are other forces at play that make it all work.

• 50:58Guy Raz?

  Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, founders of Reddit. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

• 51:13Guy Raz?

  And if you're wondering if someone actually put my arms on a bird, they did. You can type my name into Reddit to see it. Or you can go to our Twitter handle @HowIBuiltThis, where my team has kindly posted a photo of my arms attached to a parakeet's body.

• 51:36Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for listening to this special live episode of How I Built This. It was recorded in front of a live audience at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This episode was produced by Ramtin Arablouei, who also composed the music. Special thanks to Niva Grant, Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Claire Breen. Our intern is Lawrence Wu. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to a special live episode of How I Built This from NPR.