How Reddit Went From $12M to $2.2B + Cracked Social Media Monetization

Steve Huffman, Co-Founder and CEO of Reddit, joins Sourcery at Reddit's San Francisco HQ for a deep dive into how Reddit became one of the strongest businesses in social media — and why it may be even more important in the AI era. On its 2-year anniversary as a public company (NYSE: $RDDT), we cover Reddit’s 2024 debut on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), including how the company brought its community along for the ride through one of the largest directed share programs in tech IPO history—allowing Reddit users to buy shares at the IPO price. From $12M in revenue in 2015 to $2.2B in 2025, Reddit has quietly built one of the most durable social platforms on the internet. A core idea from this conversation: Reddit is built on real humans — and as Steve puts it, there needs to be an “ass in seat.” As AI agents, bots, and synthetic content flood the internet, Reddit is doubling down on authenticity, human conversation, and community-driven moderation — while also becoming one of the most valuable data sources powering top AI models. We cover: Reddit’s NYSE IPO and why Steve recommends going public Why Reddit’s ad business is working while others struggle How Reddit became critical training data for companies like OpenAI and Google The “ass in seat” philosophy and why human presence matters How Reddit handles bots, agents, and AI-generated content Why Reddit may have cracked the social media business model Steve’s contrarian take on IPOs and building long-term companies Reddit by the numbers: 121M Daily Active Uniques 471M+ Weekly Active Uniques 100K+ Active Communities 24B+ Posts & Comments $2.2B Annual Revenue (2025) If you want to understand where the internet is heading — and why human communities may matter more than ever — subscribe to Sourcery. Steve Huffman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuffman56/ Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/iV-nhcDTvdw 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery •VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

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

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Last time I checked, you have 121 million daily active uniques, 471 million weekly active uniques, 100K active communities, 24 billion posts and comments. Last year reached to 2.2 billion in annual revenue, which was up 69%.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  In 2015, I did not think that was gonna happen because I didn't think more than maybe a week ahead.

• 0:23Molly O'Shea?

  You've been public nearly two years now. What's that been like?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Being public is great. It's like a side hobby of mine to catch other CEOs who are thinking about going public and tell them that they should. Being public's not so bad. Going public is tough.

• 0:38Molly O'Shea?

  What role did the Reddit communities play in this process?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  One of the reasons is I wanted our users, who have a deep sense of ownership over Reddit, that they've earned. Part of our IPO was doing one of the largest directed share programs ever to let users buy into the IPO at the IPO price. That's $34. It's a business model that scales with usage. It turns out it's a business model that's aligned with just what people talk about, which is what Reddit is. There's a natural fit.

• 1:13Molly O'Shea?

  Steve, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Hi, thank you. My pleasure.

• 1:17Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having us here at Reddit's HQ.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for being here.

• 1:21Molly O'Shea?

  I was saying this, but this is genuinely like a gorgeous office.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Thank you. I don't take it for granted. We've had, we've had some duds.

• 1:31Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Over the years. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  The worst is either the building we shared with Child Protective Services

• 1:40Speaker 01

  or the, the, the office we had at Midmarket, Market and 10th during COVID, which was like a no-go zone. We had a nice-ish office in the Tenderloin. It was a little high-low experience.

• 1:54Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  So this one's good. I love this one.

• 1:56Molly O'Shea?

  What were the decisions for those previous offices?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Probably financial, I think. I didn't choose the CPS building. Well, so we shared an office with Wired when we got acquired. That was a couple blocks from here on the other side of South Park. That was really fun. And then when I was gone, yeah, they moved out into the CPS building. I don't know why. This is like, bad vibes.

• 2:21Molly O'Shea?

  That's not a good vibe.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not great. Not great. But here is nice.

• 2:25Molly O'Shea?

  Here is nice. Here's great vibes.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  The present is nice. Yeah, we, now is great.

• 2:31Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I first want to shout out Michael Barnett Co2 for making the introduction. Really appreciate that. Thank you, Michael.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Thanks, Michael.

• 2:38Molly O'Shea?

  Last time I saw you was right before your earnings. You had a nice dinner with a handful of people. I met your CFO. I met your CMO. I sat next to Sierra. We had a great time. And the food was delicious. I don't know, you guys.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, now I'm blinking on the name of that restaurant. I would love to give them a shout out. It was great. It was great. If I recall, that restaurant during COVID was like making meals. Or the chef who started that restaurant was like making meals for people and helping other restaurants. They have like a really nice story as well.

• 3:10Molly O'Shea?

  You've been public nearly two years now. What's that been like? What's the status of the business today?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  So, being public is great. And, and I've, it's like a side hobby of mine to catch other CEOs who are thinking about going public and tell them that they should. I mean, there's, there's, there's one big if there, which is like if you're ready.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  But I feel like there was so much, it's easy to find feedback. It's easy to find a CEO who took their company public and then regrets it. And it doesn't, it doesn't make sense to me. You know, you, you get to do this really incredible thing. For many people, it's... It's a once in a life, for most people, it's a once in a lifetime thing that I think anybody in business would aspire to, or most people in business would aspire to. And then you spend the rest of your career bitching about it. It just, that doesn't, and it's like so great for the business, it's so great for employees, and you know, you do right by your investors, you know, in theory. And I think for us, all those things are true.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Very happy for our employees and for the people who supported Reddit along the way. And it's also made us a better business. Like the rigor, the routine, the pressure, I think all of that has really helped us. So there's no question, we would not be where we are today without going public. And then being public's not so bad. You kind of get in the routine of things, and it's nice. Going public is tough. Like that, we were in like a two-year purgatory. We thought we were going to go out in 2022. The markets were closed then, and we thought we'd be one of the first companies out. And it'd be a little chaotic, but Reddit's a little chaotic, so we're like, let's go for it, that fits.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And then things got really chaotic. So we waited. We were on file for two years, updating our S1 every quarter, before we finally went out in 24. But I'm still glad we did.

• 5:18Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, you were one of the companies that tested the waters for most of the tech market. Now, I would say like, the public market's really tilted in your favor, the stock's been doing tremendously well, you've had great performance. And I think, I think people are trying to test the waters again right now, and are like looking for more stories to see what will happen, but the AI volatility is making it really hard for software companies. For you, what do you think led to the success of the IPO and the strength of the business through that?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I think there are two things. So one is the business itself, and then maybe the conditions. So the business itself was really starting to click. So we've had revenue growth over 60% for five quarters in a row. And we were able to get to GAAP profitability in our first year out, a little bit ahead of schedule. And so that that sort of momentum is very helpful, right? Just having the business work.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I think especially in our space where we've seen companies go public at our scale, but then not be profitable for a while, or have some other, you know, maybe business gotchas. But we learned from from that. And so getting to profitability was really important to us.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  The conditions are interesting. So, you know, when we went out, it was like $34 a share was the IPO price. So we went out in March 2024. Our last private round was in end of '21. Share price was $61. So we went out with a pretty big valuation haircut from from our previous peak.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Because the conditions were a little choppy. But the price can either go up or down. So if you go out at a at the low end, much higher likelihood of it going up. And, you know, when some companies go public, they really try to push the valuation.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And you save you save some on dilution. But if you go out at a lower price, and this is what the advice I generally give, is go out at a lower price. So you can have that momentum, carry your price up. Everybody's happy. Your new investors are happy, your employees will be happy.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  It costs you a little bit of dilution.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  But I think it's the best marketing dollars you may ever spend. You make a lot of friends that way. And so Reddit's price has been volatile, you know, over the last couple of years. But it's volatile between like, you know, 100 something and 200 something. Right, we IPO'd at $34. So we made a lot of friends, a lot of people did really well. And I'm very happy about that. And so we had to, you know, maybe swallow our ego a little bit and just take effectively a down round. And but then we grew out of it. So I feel really good about how that played out.

• 8:30Molly O'Shea?

  What role did the Reddit communities play in this process?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Well, so one of the reasons to go public.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Is I wanted our, our users who have a sense of ownership over Reddit, a deep sense of ownership that they've earned, right? Everything interesting about Reddit is created by our users. I wanted them to be able to actually be owners of Reddit. And so part of, part of our IPO was doing one of the largest directed share programs ever to let users buy into the IPO at the IPO price at thirty four dollars. In a normal IPO, what would happen is the retail investors, they invest at the first trade. So if there's a pop, it would be higher. So we popped to forty seven dollars. That would normally be their price.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  But we're like, we want the users to be able to buy in at the same price that the IPO investors get. And my only regret is not getting more users into that program. We actually had capacity to do a lot more. But what we were fighting, and I, I learned some lessons here. We had, within the last year of during our IPO, we've gotten a big fight with our user base over the API, API access. So a lot of the users were mad at us and then didn't invest in the IPO. And because of the quiet period, you can't really say anything.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  You can't sell the stock and there's good reasons for that, obviously. So there was a, a negative sentiment among our users. So we did get a lot in. Every user who came into our DSP, we fulfilled their full order. And I just wish we could have, um, I, I, I wish more users would have participated because they all did very well. But I'm still very proud that we, we went through that. And I think as a general,

• 10:38Speaker 01

  As a general thing, I think if you're taking your company public, finding ways to include your customers, or your users, or your biggest supporters in that ride is a special opportunity.

• 10:50Molly O'Shea?

  I've had some pretty awesome interviews with public company CEOs that have crazy cult audiences and cult communities around them. One being Alex Karp and Palantir. They've got an amazing cult community around them. I did Open Door recently. They have the Open Army. And I also did Archer, which went public via SPAC. And they attribute their success as a public company to their online communities on Reddit. Like, he said that that, Adam, the CEO, has said that their Reddit community played a central role in making that a viable stock and a viable IPO and kind of their process as a public company.

• 11:31Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the biggest misconceptions are for Reddit communities?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Any community, whether on Reddit, or online or offline,

• 11:45Speaker 01

  by definition, I think, has a few things. Like, what is a community? And so I think a community is not just a shared set of interests. That's one dimension. But there's also a shared set of values. There's usually an affection or care for one another, the members. Often like a kind of shared vernacular or vocabulary.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And so we see this on Reddit. So just putting aside the stock or company-based communities, almost every Reddit community has these qualities.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And I think if you don't spend a lot of time on Reddit, it's hard to appreciate this. Because elsewhere, what you see online are more interest groups. But you lack the community aspect that really kind of binds things together.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Now Reddit's interesting because there's, Reddit is communities, right? It's thousands and thousands of communities. One of the big evolutions that we've been through over the last, you know Reddit's 20 years old, maybe call it over the last 10 years or so, is I think the dilution of the Reddit community. Like when we started Reddit, there were no subreddits. It was really just one place, the Reddit community, which had a distinct tone.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Now there isn't just one place. And so we've seen that, that, that kind of Reddit community split into thousands of sub-communities.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  But each of the sub-communities does have an opinion about Reddit, the platform. And, and that's evolved, that's evolved a lot as well. Like, one of my favorite communities now is like the Reddit stock community, which are, are user shareholders. It's not, it's not, it's not as meme-y as some of the other ones, which is a common, actually, pattern on Reddit. Like Reddit creates virality, but itself is not viral. Reddit creates meme stocks, but itself isn't really that. You get, there's a little bit of that energy, but not like those other companies.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  But it's really special to see the Reddit stock users, you know, support each other. Like, they, they really seem to do care about how, not just how Reddit does, but how the, their fellow shareholders are doing.

• 14:08Molly O'Shea?

  I was thinking about that on the way over and preparing this, because I've gone through and I've seen how well you've been able to grow the ad side of the business, whereas some other social platforms still are struggling. Why do you think advertising has become so attractive on Reddit?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So, there's another paradox here in our history, which is when we started Reddit, I hated ads. And if you go on Reddit, there's like this, almost like anti-commercial vibe, still on Reddit. And that's because Reddit is, is authentic. And so it's easy to go from authentic to anti ads. But that's not actually what's happening.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It turns out, much to our surprise and good fortune, What people talk about is what should I buy next? Like forty percent of the conversations on Reddit are commercial. The anti, the anti-commercial space is just, that's what people talk about. But they don't usually say, what should I buy? They say, what should I watch? What should I wear? Where should I go? What game should I play? What should I listen to? What, you know? And so they're asking their friends, their online friends, or, you know, community members, advice. It just happens to be that advice is often answering a question of, what should I buy?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  And so what that means is Reddit has become an essential part of people's purchasing decisions, which makes it a really natural fit for advertisers. One of our old creative strategists, this guy, Will Katie, he was here for a long time. He had this saying that I love, which is, users hate ads, but they love brands. And just one of the brands' only way to communicate with their customers is through ads. But on Reddit, there's, uh, the brands are increasingly figuring out how to use the ads to communicate in a uniquely Reddit way.

• 16:06Molly O'Shea?

  Hmm.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  But we have a lot of subreddits, you know, take all the advertising away. We have a lot of subreddits dedicated to brands and their products. You know, our biggest category for a long time was gaming. Like every, every gaming subreddit is really a product about, or is a community about a product. And so there's just such a natural overlap. And then at the same time, our ads work, right? We've just invested a lot in our own ad tech so that the, the targeting and the measurement and all these things that, that advertisers need actually get a return on. And Reddit works as a brand platform and as a performance platform. So we've had to kind of grow our way into this and build our way into this.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  But it only works because the foundation kind of lined up with what the customer, you know, the user, the users were the customers of our customers. You know, everything lines up nicely.

• 17:05Molly O'Shea?

  Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the US. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Brex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same-day and even same-hour liquidity,

• 17:49Molly O'Shea?

  access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Hims, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid, trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real-world judgment. That's why companies like Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence.

• 18:31Molly O'Shea?

  Visit turing.com/sorcery. Is this how you transitioned so seamlessly with a huge splash into training data? So I think, last time I checked, Reddit has done over 24 billion posts and comments. And so these platforms like OpenAI are using the training data in their algorithms for their LLMs, that kind of thing. How did that come to be?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Well, that's been an interesting third chapter for us. Right? If the first chapter of Reddit is...

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Reddit's not traditional media. That was our thinking 20 years ago. It's just we need another source of information. And then the second chapter was Reddit's not social media. You know, Reddit's different than social media. It's organized around communities, not the, what I call the Fs, friends, family, famous people, followers. Now we're in this third chapter, which is Reddit's not AI. But in an interesting paradox, Reddit is the fuel for AI. So if you have a question on the internet, pre-AI and post-AI, where is the answer going to come from? Ultimately, the answer is going to come from other people, which are on Reddit.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  This is one, Reddit is one of the best supplies of human intelligence. And so, yeah, Reddit's data has been used to train every large language model you've heard of, some with and others without our permission, which has, you know, been a situation to navigate. But with our biggest partners, Google and OpenAI, you know, we do it on purpose. And I think it's worked well. I think those, you know, big search products help people discover Reddit, help people learn that Reddit has communities relevant to them, which is one of our biggest challenges. At this point, everybody's heard about Reddit, but not everybody realizes that Reddit actually is relevant to them.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  And so our presence in search and elsewhere on the internet actually helps just close that perception gap. And then in turn, you know, we get users that create more content, which becomes more, you know, more information, you know, for these AI products.

• 20:45Molly O'Shea?

  I've had a couple of conversations and they've revolved around bots and it can expand anything from your software is going to be taken over by bots, your blah blah blah is going to be blah blah blah. And then on these platforms, it's, okay, it's going to be full of bots. You have a really interesting take on bots. You have bots all over Reddit and they're in plain sight. So how did you position bots on Reddit? And how do you see that evolving with the likes of like OpenClaw and autonomous agents taking over?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So there's a lot here. So, yeah, Reddit's had bots.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  You know, pre-AI, but labeled bots.

• 21:23Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  You know, bots that'll correct your spelling, bots that answer questions, you know, little utility things. So funny things, utility things. Our moderators create all sorts of, you know, programs, bots, to help moderate their communities. And so that's just a part of the Reddit ecosystem. When people say bots today, they're referring to, you know, AI masquerading as humans. That's not allowed on Reddit.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  What we see, but we've invested so much over a long time on preventing people from manipulating Reddit. Now, it's an arms race. So, you know, the front in that battle is always moving and the state of the art is always evolving. And AI is another chapter in it, but it's not a news story for us. What we see a lot of now is the in-between. And this is where I think it's a little bit more of a gray area, which is a human user. They registered as a human, they're using Reddit, but they used an LLM to write their post. But what's interesting, then that's, it's a minority of posts on Reddit, but you will see it.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  But when you see those posts on Reddit, the comments will basically say, you know, go away, bot. Or, you know, thanks for the post, OpenAI, or whatever.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And so we're going to write now this, I think, development of, like, the immune system. Like, before, we have a policy that says you can't use prompts, which I don't think we're gonna have that policy. Because that's just how people are gonna write, you know, in a couple of years. Everybody's gonna learn how to, for better or for worse, have learned how to write with AI.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  The communities themselves reject that sort of content. That's basically low effort. And they downvote it, you know, they'll flame it in the comments. And you don't see that on other platforms. I see Slop and now AI Slop just going unchecked.

• 23:27Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  And it's just, it's just. It's, I don't know, it's, it's makes these platforms very unpleasant to use. Agents are a whole nother can of worms, which is, if you've got an agent using Reddit.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  But I think, I mean, this is going to be a very popular way of using the internet. So we can't just say, no agents. The way, the way we're thinking about it today is we want to make sure there's an ass in seat. Like, are you physically watching this thing?

• 23:54Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And we'll have to see where that goes. I still think if you write, if you use a bot AI to write content on Reddit today, it's going to get flamed because the AIs actually aren't very good writers. But that's a societal thing we're all learning, which is like when these things came out, we were so amazed. It's like, wow, look how much content they can produce.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  But then after a year or two of this, you're like, oh, it's kind of, it's all the same tone. It's, it's, it's kind of, it used to be flat. Now it's like this weird bombastic style of writing that's like really stands out. I presume it'll get better.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  But our point is, at the minimum, we want a human behind it, right? The idea has to come from a human. And if it's not, we'll probably reject it and our community will definitely reject it.

• 24:41Molly O'Shea?

  With your highly advanced ass in seat protocol credential system, how do you now look at other platforms? And what kind of mistakes do you think they're making?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I don't want to judge other platforms.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I think one, one thing that's always been important to Reddit is the authenticity. And

• 25:06Speaker 01

  I've said for a long time, Reddit is the world's greatest bullshit detector. Right? Reddit is very sensitive to inauthenticity. So whether it's written by AI or it's some self-serving piece of content, or just, you know, low effort or crap. The community has a, they don't want that. That is one of the things that Reddit broadly craves is authenticity. And so our users fight for it, our mods fight for it, we fight for it. Reddit's never been the engagement platform, right? Find the most engaging or enraging posts to drive time on site or to drive traffic. That's just not how we run the business.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  That's not what our community wants. When we were watching social media explode, right? We predate almost every social media platform. We're like a year younger than Facebook.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  YouTube was maybe six months old when we launched. But then, you know, Instagram and TikTok and Snap and Twitter, all these companies came later and grew past us.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  We saw what they were doing. And we just said, that's not, that wouldn't work on Reddit. It would kill Reddit. We could do that. And at the time, we were making almost a business decision. Well, a values decision and a business decision, which to me felt like, okay, we're going to be smaller.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Because we're not going to do those things. But if we did those things, we'd, we'd, we'd kill the soul of Reddit. I'm very pleased that, I think because we were stubborn, we get to exist today. What I was wrong about is that Reddit would always be small. Turns out, people actually really appreciate what we're doing. It's just been a slower burn, it's taken us longer to get here. But I think in a world where social media is huge, it actually creates a context for Reddit. Or creates a context for people to appreciate why Reddit is the way it is. And now even more so with AI, where the whole internet becomes sanitized and summarized by AI. Which actually has a lot of value. But it causes people to appreciate the humanness of Reddit.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And so now we've seen this pattern enough times that we just stick to the things that we love about Reddit. The principles and values that got us here. We can continue to grow this thing that we love in a in a unique way.

• 27:27Molly O'Shea?

  I think a lot of people should try to post a self promoting post on Reddit and just see what happens. A couple of years ago, when I was helping out some of the portfolio companies with their go to market strategies, we tried to promote the companies on Reddit and it was a complete flame out. It did not work out and we're like, all right, we're gonna need like a real expert who understands this platform and the communities and the language and what works in order to like actually integrate it. But that's an entirely like, it's a separate job.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  It's tricky to do well, or you could just buy ads.

• 28:03Molly O'Shea?

  You could just buy ads. It's that simple. No organic for you. Mm hmm.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Well, it is. It is hard. It's doable. But you have to actually tell this to customers. Like before you advertise on Reddit, you should use Reddit. Like you have to have some native understanding of the culture here and how it's different. And then you can, you'll be more successful both paid and organic. One of the first early rules of Reddit was no self promotion. That kind of emerged from the community. It's the one thing, I'm so torn on this. I'd love to have that one back. Because Reddit loves original content.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  But Reddit hates self promotion. But I'm like, where do you think original content comes from? And so there's a line in there, you know, between a, you know, a writer, an artist, like some creator who's actually creating great stuff. And maybe a company who's just trying to use Reddit to promote their stuff. And so we're trying to find, how do we navigate that? Because we want the artists, the creators, the writers, the people who have interesting things to say and share.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  We want the brands too, but the brands need to show up as brands. Like it's okay for them to say, we're here to sell you stuff. In fact, they do a lot better, paid and organic, if they just tell the truth. I'm here to sell you something. Like tried and true organic strategy on Reddit for a brand is to do an AMA. Like I'm, you know, famous director. I'm here to answer your questions. I'm also here to promote my movie. People get that. Or I'm here to answer questions. I'm also here to promote my book. I think the difference is, I think when you're transparent, it's still authentic. You can sell stuff authentically. But if you say you're there for one reason, but you're really there for another, they will sniff that out. And then you will get flamed.

• 30:06Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, totally flamed. Beauty of it. And there is definitely a lesson there, and maybe just tell the truth.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Easier said than done, but yes.

• 30:18Molly O'Shea?

  Sometimes, I guess, when scrolling through different feeds, people just make shit up. And you did say that you're a bullshit detector. But like, you're scrolling through these things, and you're like, did that really happen?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  There is a lot of creative writing on Reddit.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  I was at a business dinner. There was like a tech guy, and his wife was there. And the tech guy was working on some AI thing. And his wife was like, I use Reddit. I love Reddit. I was like, oh, what do you do on Reddit? She's like, oh, I love to go to relationship advice and make up awful stories about my husband.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  She's like, I've been doing this for 10 years.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  And, oh, okay, my favorite, my favorite, favorite version of this story? I got an email, this was years ago. And the email said,

• 31:13Speaker 01

  "You may have seen this post." And I had seen the post. The post was this guy posting legal advice, asking for advice. And I can't remember the original post. The original post is small, but then in the comments, as people started asking questions, it came out that he was trying to hide a gun.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  And then people were like, what? Like, we're not going to be an accessory to whatever you did. And so the whole post had this, like, itself was a story as it evolved. And it kind of blew up elsewhere on Reddit. So the author of that original post emailed me and said, "If you hear from the police about this, I want you to know this is all fake. I made it up. It was just a troll."

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And, and he's like, if you don't believe me, you can check. I'm also the author of these other posts, which happened to be one of my favorite stories on Reddit from way back when about Grandpa Wiggly. There was a series of posts, these AMAs, like 15, 16, 17 years ago, where the guy's like, "My grandpa doesn't always use computers, but he makes mayonnaise. Grandpa Wiggly's mayonnaise. And so if you want to ask me questions, I'll ask my grandpa and respond with whatever he says." He came back three times, people interviewing this old guy, Grandpa Wiggly. He's like, "I made all that up too."

• 32:27Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And we checked, and it's just this guy. He's just a funny guy who just writes these elaborate, like, stories. But I think that, like, I don't get upset about those things because the point of Reddit is often not the post. The point is the conversation. Right? You, you read these relationship advice, or am I the asshole, or whatever. Like, the experience is the conversation. The conversation is real. The post is just a prompt for a conversation. So sometimes it's a real request for advice. Sometimes it might be a troll, but the advice is real. And the experience is real. The community is real. But sometimes people are just goofing off.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  And I think that's one of the fun things about Reddit.

• 33:17Molly O'Shea?

  That's amazing. I love that story. Yeah, I, uh, do you remember, there was like, this is kind of dark, but that Netflix movie or something, where like, people on the internet, like, fought to find, like, the killer of this, like, cat? And it was like, this whole thing, and it's like, you just can't, you can't beat the internet.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Um, you can't beat the internet in a lot of ways, you know, for better or for worse. You just think about how much attention is concentrated in some of those moments. Um, it is bewildering. We, we've seen this in the, the usage numbers. We, we had this one account, used to be the highest account, uh, the highest karma account on Reddit. QGYH2 was the username.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And we were just like, is this a real person? Or is this a bot? This like 15 years ago or more. Bots, bots like that weren't really a thing yet. That sort of automation. And everything we could find suggested this was a real person. In fact, somebody in our team eventually met this person. But they were spending like 18 hours a day on Reddit. We're just like, when does this person sleep? Like, this is insane.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  But some people just have that sort of attention and stamina and, you know, whatever it is that, that you, you take a, you take, you add, you add that up thousands of times. And yeah, some crazy things can emerge.

• 34:42Molly O'Shea?

  V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View the portfolio at get V C X dot com. That's get V C X dot com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor, Public, just launched something called Generated Assets. And it brings A I into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like A I powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow, or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Public's A I then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single U S stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis.

• 35:25Molly O'Shea?

  What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S and P 500. So you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond Generated Assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders ship faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, and get visas handled fast so you stay focused on scaling. Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits,

• 36:10Molly O'Shea?

  and compliance so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 37,000 fast-growing companies trust Deal to move fast. Visit D E E L dot com slash sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. To the point of human verification and just understanding if people are human or not on these platforms, I recently interviewed Alex Blanya of Tools for Humanity. And so, one of the interesting points that he had is he said, "In two months, maybe max two years, these platforms will not be usable unless they have technological shifts, if they make technological changes." What do you think other platforms'

• 36:54Molly O'Shea?

  best practices would be to change and have humans verified?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Again, with other platforms, I think they have a different model. And so, I think they may have different approaches or like levels of care. For us, our product is people. Like, our product is people and conversation and authenticity and community. And community doesn't happen without people. So for us, it really is an existential issue. The assumption is, when you're on Reddit, you should be interacting with other people.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  I know Alex, Tools for Humanity is a cool company. They do World ID.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I think that we're going down this route of human verification, and we need to do so in a way that also preserves our users' privacy. So, I think World is interesting. I think services like that are interesting because it's a third-party service to verify, like, are you a human? Or maybe, you know, maybe you're where you are, what country you're in, or your age. Those are kind of the three things that are really important to us from kind of a safety point of view. Well, we don't want to know your name. We don't want to know your address. Because on Reddit, anonymity is safety. It's a big misconception. People think anonymity equals lack of safety.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  As just real-world platforms with bad behavior don't exist. There's plenty of platforms with real-world identities and lots of bad behavior. What incentivizes good or bad behavior is, I think, the context. So the Reddit communities create this context for overall good behavior.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  But I think, you know, if we had gone to our users three years ago, pre-AI, and so we're going down this human verification route, they'd be really upset. Because it feels so, you know, it's such a potential risk to privacy. Now it's something they actually want. They want to know that Reddit is doing everything it can to preserve Reddit, the humanness of Reddit. And so I think third-party systems for verifying, you know, humanness in different ways are really important. So Tools for Humanity slash World is one.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  That one's nice because it's third-party, unique, unique identity per person, but we get no piece of information about the person. There's others we use that actually check your ID. I don't love those, but we're compelled or coerced to use them by various governments. And then there's Face ID and Touch ID, just like built into the phone. What I didn't appreciate about Face ID and Touch ID, or like, you know, other 2FA, like UBTE, things like that, is it actually require a physical presence to use them? So there has to be a human holding it to use it. So that's, for many of our use cases, that's human enough.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  But our design of these things is that you, it's not, Reddit doesn't do the verifying. And in fact, the way we want to implement these things is you actually kind of leave the app and then come back. So it's very clear you're in a different, you're in a different app, you're on a different website. And then all Reddit gets back is like a token that says they passed. So then we never know who you are, just that you passed this test. I think that, that's a model that will work very well for us. You're a human, but we don't know anything else about you. Then we can preserve the humanness, but also the privacy and the safety.

• 40:34Molly O'Shea?

  Through the different generations of social media and media in general, we've gone through things like forums, we've gone through different social feeds, mobile. Now we're having different algorithms and AI. What have your biggest learnings through those different waves been? And how has Reddit endured?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  So the things that are important to Reddit, we've talked about. It's communities, it's authenticity.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  It's, you know, alongside those things, maybe being stubborn, not making changes too quickly.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  But the UI, the pixels, the formats, the platforms, that's all for grabs. Those things evolve. So I think what we've been able to do is evolve on the things that matter, like the platforms. You know, move to mobile, the style has changed, support more content. Like Reddit used to be only links. Right now it's links and text and images and video. And, you know, we don't have audio yet, I'd love to have audio.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  But the communities, the authenticity, the voting, the human poweredness. Even where Reddit has algorithms, at the end of the day, nothing can become popular on Reddit without a community of people within the context of their values, voting on it and making it popular. Those are the qualities of Reddit we protect. But then we have to just continue to evolve. And we will, you know, we have and will continue to do so. So I think it's, yeah, being stubborn about the right things, but otherwise evolving on almost everything else.

• 42:15Molly O'Shea?

  What have you learned about human behavior?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  What's interesting about Reddit is you don't get famous in the real world for being good at Reddit.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  You might become infamous once in a while. You don't become rich by being good at Reddit. So, which is not true on social media. You can become rich and famous by being good at social media. And so I think the incentives of social media often cause people to behave in a way that is not true to themselves. You're incentivized, for example, to say extreme things. Something also funny. Social media is very funny, but then it also can be very extreme. And people say things that they may not believe, just to get credit for saying it. Reddit doesn't do that. And so I think that those sorts of incentives are what's really important. And keep Reddit, Reddit.

• 43:09Molly O'Shea?

  Speaking on the business side, how do you track metrics for Reddit? Like, what are the success metrics? Like, how do you keep on seeing the puck move forward?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  So I think with metrics, there's always the number and the story. And now, when I ask teams, when they set goals, actually, I want both. The number and the story. So what are the numbers we care about? We care about DAU, right? Daily active users. How many people are actually using the platform? We care about revenue. But, right, there's a healthy way to use the platform. There's a healthy way, a sustainable way to grow. And there's unsustainable ways. Same with dollars. There's easy dollars and there's, you know, maybe harder, but more resilient dollars. And so, yeah, we have goals for growing users, for growing revenue. But we also have our mission, which is to empower communities and make their knowledge accessible.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  We also have, you know, sub-goals around, you know, Reddit's the de facto place for communities online. Reddit's safe and fun. And so we both try to hit the numbers, but also within the guidelines of the story and try to do things the right way. And I think that can be harder. If you're only focused on numbers, I think you risk losing what's important. And then now you're kind of a slave to the numbers. But you can't ignore the numbers either. But then you're not going to make any progress. And so I think both are really important, the number and the story.

• 44:47Molly O'Shea?

  I think you're being a little humble, but you have some really big numbers.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Well, it helps that the ads work.

• 44:53Molly O'Shea?

  So, last time I checked, you have 121 million daily active uniques, 471 million weekly active uniques, about 100K active communities, 24 billion posts and comments, and last year reached up to 2.2 billion in annual revenue, which was up 69%.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Is that good?

• 45:15Molly O'Shea?

  That's pretty good.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 45:17Molly O'Shea?

  And what was it? It was, when you joined in 2015, you were at 12 million in revenue. So you went from 12 million in revenue in 2015, rejoined, to 2025 of 2.2 billion. Did you think that was gonna happen?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  In 2015, I didn't, I did not think that was gonna happen because I didn't think more than maybe a week ahead. We were so in the present then, so in the present, just trying to save the company, turn the company around. So, no, I did not think that was gonna happen.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, we found our, it took a while to find our voice on the business side. Turns out, I mean, turns out ads is great. Ads, as a business model, this is coming from the person. I told you, I didn't like ads.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Ads scales. So it's a business model that scales with usage. So it's very healthy there.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And turns out it's a business model that's aligned with just what people talk about, which is what Reddit is. And so, there's a natural fit. I think one of the most important things we did, so my partner in running Reddit is Jen Wong. She joined us, she's our COO. She joined us in 2018. And one of the biggest decisions we made around then was we were gonna invest in our own ad tech. So our own ad server, our own tracking, our own measurement, all of this. We were small to do that.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  And we moved off of programmatic. So most websites or platforms smaller than Reddit will use some ad network.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  So if somebody else sells your ads for you, you just basically, and you split it. So you give them the inventory, they sell it, you take a rev share. We said, as a matter of strategy, we wanna own the relationship with our customer, and we can't do that unless we have our own ad tech. So we made that investment. And in the process of selling and explaining Reddit,

• 47:22Speaker 01

  We learned that Reddit is actually driving a lot of purchasing decisions. And so it just happened that our product is a natural fit. I feel very fortunate for that because when we started Reddit, we weren't thinking about that.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Nor, I mean, maybe on Reddit, people weren't even talking about that. It just, it just turns out like there's such a question behind every hobby. Like, what's the funnest thing you do when you take up a new hobby? It's like buying all the new stuff, like getting all the new gear.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  And so there's just some natural alignment there. And we've been able to, I think, navigate that in a way that doesn't come at the expense of our communities. And sometimes it's even additive.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  And then also, I think, make smart strategic decisions like invest in our own tech and own the relationship and build a sales force. All of these things, you know, are, you know, smaller scale companies, many don't build their own sales force and they don't build their own tech. And it's worked out for us.

• 48:24Molly O'Shea?

  Another part of performance, besides metrics and tracking all the business stuff, that I lean into a lot is who you surround yourself with. One of our sponsors is Brex and they're all about performance. So for me, I believe performance is a metric of who you surround yourself with and who you're inspired by, who you keep around. Who is that for you? Do you have a mentor? Have you had someone that you've kind of like stuck as your north star?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I have lots of, I have lots of friends who meet that description. Who, but they're also really, really private, so I'm not going to name check them. But there's, yeah, I have a number of close friends, some of whom were investors in Reddit over the years, who I just think are very, very high integrity, very consistent, give good advice. Well, I mean, Jen, Jen, our COO, is one of those people.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Who, you know, funny thing about being a founder CEO is it's a job you inherit and you have to earn. And so then you end up hiring people, especially as you scale, who have Who are who are actually have have worked their way up to be execs at, you know, public companies. And so Jan, our COO, Drew, our CFO, both much more experienced than me. I've learned a lot from them. And then I learn a lot from people I don't know. You know, for example, I think Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, the founders of Berkshire

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Hathaway. Obviously, two of the most successful investors, business guys of all time. They're just so stubborn about their principles and both in investing and in life. And so, and I think that's a great example of you can be very, very successful without being an asshole. And so I think there's folks like that. When we were when we were preparing to go public, a person I called a number of times was Rich Barton. He was the founder, CEO of Expedia, then Zillow, then Glassdoor. And he had a lot of really good advice for me on whether to go public.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  His answer was yes. He's like, you want to ever play in the big leagues or do you want to stay in the minor leagues forever? And he also asked me some good question. He's like, I said, should we go public? He's like, well, what did you tell your investors you were gonna do? Well, I said, you know, we're gonna go public someday. He's like, well, then you should probably do that. And he also put that idea in my head that I we opened a conversation with. He's like, promise me one thing, Steve. You take your company public, don't be one of those CEOs who spends the rest of their career bitching about it. Just say thank you. That was great advice. And so that's how I try to think about it now.

• 51:21Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so we're strolling the halls of Reddit, San Francisco. How many employees are in this office?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Like, right now?

• 51:30Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Twenty-five.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  It's we. Okay, no, that's not true. On a normal day, at this hour, probably 25, because there's only on a normal day in San Francisco, we don't have a big office attendance. But I actually think there's an onsite going on right now. So there might be 50 or 100 here. But we don't have a return to office policy.

• 51:54Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  San Francisco is probably our quietest office, even though we have the most employees in the Bay Area. But my, I think, I have this theory. My theory is that the median age of Reddit has always been about my age. And during

• 52:10Molly O'Shea?

  You're 26?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, okay.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  I was born in 1983.

• 52:16Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  I think during COVID, everybody had kids. I had kids. And then everybody moved out SF into the burbs. And then the commuting here is so brutal, I just don't have the heart to make new parents commute two hours a day.

• 52:35Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  When they want to see their kids. And we are way more productive now than we were before COVID. So you can't convince me that being in the office is the key to productivity. Maybe it is, but I think it's like lever number 10 behind like having a consistent strategy and having good leaders. So it hasn't hurt us. Not forcing people to be here, but people do come in. And we ask, we ask teams to come together about once a quarter or so, like in person. Do your planning, do your dinners, do your happy hours, do all that. So like one of that, there's an onsite going on here probably every other week. But then the every other week is on the quiet side.

• 53:17Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, well, that's not bad. How much has AI played a role in productivity and product development for Reddit?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, it's, it's, it's really picking up. It's such a moving target, but the tools are changing so fast.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  I mean, my own experience, I'm a programmer. Like, that's my first love is programming. So I've done it almost every day since I was a little kid. I, something happened in December, not something happened, there was, the new models came out in December. And I haven't

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Read, let alone written, a line of code since December.

• 53:55Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  But I've produced so much more. But I don't even, like, you know, the model, right now, I still think it's like you have your editor, like cursor or whatever, you've got code and then AI on the side. I don't even have an editor anymore. It's just AI.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  So anyway, suffice to say, it's changing really rapidly. Our bottleneck at Reddit right now is actually code review. Because we can produce so much code, but we've got to review it and deploy it. So we're still, you know, working through that. The challenge, or the fun part, is like, I don't know what the tools are going to be in a month. Like, it's really evolving so fast. So I think you can't get married to any particular tool or way of working right now.

• 54:37Molly O'Shea?

  And how does that change headcount? Are you imagining that's going to decrease engineers?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  No way.

• 54:43Molly O'Shea?

  What is that going to?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  No way, no way. We are, we are a building company.

• 54:47Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  And so, in order for engineering headcount to go down, we'd have to know everything we wanted to build. So let's say AI makes our engineers 50, 100%, or even 10x more productive. We'll just build more stuff. Like, do more, do more with more. It's not do the same amount with less. We've, we just have a lot of work to do. And if we're not doing more with more, our competitors are. So I, I think there are maybe areas, like our GNA, so non-engineering, that's been flat the last couple of years. So we can scale those teams. But the building teams, we're builders. And if we can use AI to build more, we'll definitely use AI to build more. That's what we're doing.

• 55:31Molly O'Shea?

  How does this impact entry-level jobs? That's everyone's biggest concern.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Oh, so the kids coming out of college right now learned how to program with AI. They're really good at it. And so, I think we will go heavy on new grads, because there's so much more AI native. It's the old people like me. It's like, I didn't want to give it up. I finally did. Like, the models got good enough. But that's like my craft, it's my hobby, it's my first love. I don't want to, like, not write code anymore. Right? The younger people don't have that baggage. They just write with AI. And so, and I, I think there's so many reasons to hire new grads. Also, the best new grads.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Like, if you don't hire them as new grads, you will never see them. They will never be on the job market again. They're too valuable to ever let them be on the job market. So if you don't hire them when they're young, you will never see them. Or if you do, they're 100X more expensive. So you gotta, gotta, gotta get them right out of the gate.

• 56:34Molly O'Shea?

  My brother is a Reddit superfan. He-

• 56:38Speaker 01

  A lot of, we're good with brothers.

• 56:39Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, he, he is an active user. One of the, what is it, like 471 weekly active uniques? But, okay, so-

• 56:48Speaker 01

  There's probably five of them, but yeah.

• 56:50Molly O'Shea?

  Maybe. So Reddit's been around for 20 years. My brother Colin had a pressing question he really wanted to ask. What is the next 20 years gonna look like for Reddit?

• 56:59Speaker 01

  So, 20 years, everything's going to change. If we look back on the last 20 years, like the, the formats changes, the pixels change, how you discover Reddit, a lot of those mechanics have evolved. What's not gonna change is the core of Reddit, which is communities

• 57:19Speaker 01

  that hold conversations. Right? It's communities of people talking about things they care about. Voting, user submission, that users do everything interesting about Reddit. That is Reddit. But everything else has to evolve. You know, it always does. Like, 20 years is old. And it's really, it's not just old on internet times, it's just old. So, um, and I look back at all the change we've been through, and the next 20 years are probably gonna be even more accelerated.

• 57:48Molly O'Shea?

  What's the biggest lesson you've learned as a leader?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Like, the same way that Reddit's the world's greatest bullshit detector, it's like not, Reddit's not special in that regard.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  People can feel authenticity. And so I think as a leader, you have to be authentic. And so that means, say what you believe, be clear about what you care about.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  And that means sometimes you're saying things people don't wanna hear.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  That means sometimes maybe you're stubborn about a particular value or principle. But I think that sort of consistency and directness is really important, because that builds trust. And people won't do anything, certainly they won't, they won't follow you if they don't trust you. And so you have to be, you have to be consistent and authentic. And I think sometimes that's hard to do, because there's a natural- Tendency to tell people what they want to hear.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  But that's a short-term strategy that doesn't work.

• 58:50Molly O'Shea?

  What is behind your head?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  This is the ban hammer. This was made so the woodworking community, the woodworking subreddit, which I love, I'm not a woodworker, but it's one of my favorite things to do on Reddit is just spy on other people's hobbies. So for some reason, I get a lot of woodworking content, but this community made, they made like six ban hammers. And they gave us one. They also made one, I think one of the other owners of a ban hammer is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 59:19Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  One of the other ones. So yeah, this was made by the woodworking community and given to us.

• 59:22Molly O'Shea?

  You're gonna need a picture with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  I've been messaging him, he hasn't responded.

• 59:27Molly O'Shea?

  He hasn't responded?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Molly O'Shea?

  Alright, Arnold, we need a picture.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I think there is a picture of him with his ban hammer.

• 59:35Molly O'Shea?

  No, with you.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, not with me, okay, but you know, Arnold's ban hammer is pretty cool.

• 59:39Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, that's pretty cool. Lastly, is there anything in this office that we should see or know before we go?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Well, we got the ban hammer.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know.

• 59:50Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have a secret meditation corner? Like, what's the lore here?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  The lore?

• 59:54Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  It's an office in San Francisco. Okay, our old office had lore. Our old office was NBC's headquarters. So like famous bands used to play there and there's a secret tunnel to the hotel next door.

• 1:00:04Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  But this is just an office. It's a beautiful office.

• 1:00:08Molly O'Shea?

  It's a special office with great energy.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  The soul is what's inside. The soul is all of these people and empty desks.

• 1:00:16Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing, okay. Thank you.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:00:19Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.