alright this was not supposed to be a podcast this was me calling sam two minutes ago and being like dude did you hear the stuff about reddit and he's like no no just he put the finger up to my lips push record and in fact me and sam we should really never talk her for not recording i think that's the new the new lesson by the way i still have no idea what you're gonna bring up i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on the road okay so let me give you the background when goes public today interesting fine i don't really care i didn't participate in the stock or anything i wasn't really looking at the chart but i did read paul graham essay about reddit and he it's titled the reddit it's on the yc blog paul graham has known these guys for nearly twenty years now and so he wrote this post today that had so many little bread crumbs that i thought there were like as i was reading this every paragraph was firing off like a connection to a different lesson learned like my my brain of frameworks was literally like lit up like a christmas tree with some of the things he was saying and i just wanted to like say them out loud to you i wanted to i'm i'm imagining you i'm imagining you eating cereal as you're reading this and then you have like one bite and like you you just this is much my salad look it's half eaten because i was like oh shit i gotta put this down i gotta record this and so we didn't play on this but let's do alright so i'm reading this essay and i wanna give you kind of like point by point of what i think is really interesting and by the way paul graham is the i guess we have to give context now because this is like a podcast paul graham is the founder of y comb and reddit was one of the first companies reddit was the first company in the first batch but actually what's more interesting is in that post reddit is not only the first yc company in the first batch ever it's actually the reason that yc exists i don't know if you do this but this is kinda cool so program in this essay he says yc started because he went to the harvard like computer club or something like that and gave a talk which by the way is how many interesting things have started i also believe this is kinda how apple started wasn't there like a he he they gave a talk or a demo at the homebrew brew club this is how tim ferris started the four a workweek week he taught a class at princeton and there's this principle which is if you ever wanna learn something try to teach it and that that has led to many people writing so tim ferris did it then he wrote a book n il same thing when he wrote his book hooked same thing he's like i first was just giving a talk somewhere to give the talk i had to sharpen up my thoughts by the end of that i was like shit there's something to this and the same thing happened here program graham gave a talk at the schools called how to start a startup up he's gives us talk and then from the talk he's like dude i should create like a a vehicle to invest in like these earlier younger founders he's i got the time founders were thought to be like either older or just super young prod but he's like i think this college student age think that's where you could start companies from so that's why he creates yc so he gives the talk he meets with steve and alexa afterwards and he's impressed by another thing so the second interesting thing he gave this talk at harvard dan didn't go to harvard these guys go to school in virginia they took a train up from virginia to hear this talk because they used to follow his blog so steve loved his blog he convince as alexa hey come with me to go see this guy talk they go up there it's not like a show there's no tickets it's like you know thirty person room and he's there and so paul was so impressed that these guys came from virginia he's like they wanted to meet for coffee he's like okay no problem you guys came from such a far away i'll i'll do it there's a principle there in the like eighty percent of success is just showing up or like went in doubt like just go just take the train and take the flight just show up put yourself in positions for good things to happen and that's what they did and it's a high agency move they could have easily a not gone you know showed up and not told him but they they went there they took the train they told him and this is the first of many high agency moves that they pull he talks about later how they actually ended up rejecting these guys from yc so he he gives the talk decides to create yc reaches out to the guys like hey guys i was inspired by meeting you guys i actually created something called yc for people just like you you should fill out the application they fill out the application but he hates the idea so he rejects them their idea was ordering fast food off your phone door dash yeah but there was no no smartphones so there is no door dash they that they may able to go to cell phone carriers and fast food chains and like do it all manually so that you could do it like over text message sms back then and you you have to set the context even here about them showing up which is paul graham a big deal now you know paul graham funded airbnb dropbox whatever all the he's a big deal back then he had just sold a company for i think thirty or forty million dollars which was a big deal back then and i guess he had some extra money and he was blogging but he wasn't like a big deal he it was like a it this was like a very like this is like the hackers for programmers who are entrepreneurial right which is almost like as ridiculous as when twitch was coming up you're like people watch video games online it's like this guy just blogging about this type of internet stuff that's not even that cool or interesting it's very small market by the way twitch also in that first batch and emmett best friends with steve the you know the guy who created reddit alright so anyways more principles so the first one is if you wanna if you wanna actually learn try to teach giving a talk is actually a really good gateway into either books or companies or whatever if you can't articulate in a forty five minute talk a bunch of really insightful things that get other people excited it probably won't work as a as a as a book or company and in reverse even if you're not planning to do it's a great way to generate you know sharp ideas just to go try to teach a class second thing taking the train showing up alright great now here's the next one trusting your gut so like i said he he's inspired by these guys he creates yc because he meets these guys but their idea he hates he hates the order food off your phone he's like that's too hard and he says at the time i didn't realize that the game i'm supposed to be doing is sort of betting on people not ideas i thought at that time i'm supposed to be betting on ideas and i hated their idea said they rejected him and he's like you know jessica his wife who he he credits says having like the best kind of like people detector of anybody he knows she was like oh you rejected the muffins he's like muffins and she's like yeah what i called those guys you know steve and alexis they're like so enduring they're like a little poodle like you know they're like little puppy she called the muffins she's like oh that's sad i like the muffins he's like yeah i didn't like their idea she's like feel like we should have the muffins in why nyc like they're they're the reason you created this why why would you not accept them so he calls them back up they're on the train right home to virginia and he says guys i want you to be in nyc but like we got own i i'll fund you only if you're gonna change your idea and how much was funding was it fifteen thousand dollars yeah like nothing yeah so basically like a summer yeah exactly but it was it was the somebody believing you and you was the real currency there they're on the train right home from virginia they just get off at the next stop and then hop on the next train going back up north again and they like immediately sees the opportunity which is another kinda like again these were all like little bread crumbs of successful things successful like successful actions successful behaviors that it doesn't surprise me that a reddit comes out of something like this on his side it was trusting his gut ball paul side trusting his gut that he wanted these guys involved that he should bet on people not ideas early on and for them it was being willing to hop off the train and just take the next train up north again so he gets there now here's the next interesting idea the some of the best ideas are found not thought of discovered not thought of so program had been blogging and his blog was not too big of a deal back then it was is you know okay or not not what it is today but he noticed that a lot of his traffic to his blog was coming from a website called do you remember delicious yeah was it really a website or was it like a bookmark was it a bookmark bookmark tools is a way to save the stuff you liked like bookmark for later for yourself but they had one little side feature called delicious dot com slash popular and slash popular was basically on just an ag of all like what is what are the most popular bookmark things that day it was a side feature sort of a throw away idea for them but what program noticed was he's like damn i get actually a lot of traffic from the slash popular tab of delicious not the main product it's the side product and so he took that he's like guys you need a new idea here's an idea the delicious slash popular thing is cool what if there was just a page that was like the front page of the internet it's like what are all the most interesting links of the day that you should go check out just take the side thing and let's make it the main thing that's a pretty wild thing to think about because back then so they started in two thousand five which meant google was only eight years old and adwords was probably new i don't remember when facebook was started but right around then like like internet advertising i guess was still pretty new do they weren't even think about advertising they were just thinking what's a cool thing that should exist on the internet what's a cool useful product that same idea i heard again many years later when i met ryan hoover ryan hoover was the founder of product dump but but must well don't know is before that he was he was blogging and then i reached out to him and i was i really wanna hire you i tried to hire him he wanted to join my team was like he didn't pass the interview process for some whatever reason so they were like we don't think he's got enough experience or something and i really liked ryan i was like hey man so sorry like let's keep in touch i feel like our pads are gonna cross again three weeks later he emails me about an idea he's like hey maybe instead of a job i should start something and who he tells me he goes i got he goes like you i like to go to hacker news every morning back then that was my routine i we we both to go hacker news every morning still is but my favorite tab is not the main page of hacker news it's the side page the show section where you can go it's like a show and tell where you could show what you're building because if you go to hacker news you click show it's only like links to cool products that people are just like hey i wanna show you guys i made this hey i wanna show you guys i made this he's like what if there was something that was just the show tab let's make the side thing the main thing and so that's what product hunt became and product hunt then became this sensation in silicon valley ends up selling the for twenty million dollars and you know it was this this success for ryan and so this is like reddit kinda had that same idea that same thing where it took the side page of delicious and so there's something to this which is one great place to discover ideas is look at your invoices or look at your p and l look at the cost section i think that's one great place to find investments or ideas another one is look at your traffic referrals and if you ever noticed referrals coming from some place that's interesting another one is what's a side feature your favorite side feature of a different app that actually could be a standalone app in itself and so there's something to that philosophy one bit one quick story scott be i talked to scott be scott be is a famous entrepreneur an investor he told me that when he was in his early twenties he had a website and he noticed that he was getting a lot of traffic from this brand new website called pinterest and so he reached out to the founder of pinterest and was like hey what what's this thing tell me all about it and he wasn't getting a lot of traffic like a hundred people a day or something like pretty small and the guy was like yeah it's just this thing i'm working on i'm gonna raise a little bit of money on a three million dollar evaluation do you wanna invest scott goes like well i only have like fifty grand in my name but guess i'll give you fifteen thousand dollars and he did that went on to make probably a hundred million dollars that same week he started getting traffic from a website called stumble upon and he and he goes it does the same things so he talks to the guy stumble pawn but they're not raising but he becomes friends with garrett camp who goes on a couple years later to found uber and he invest in uber as well fifteen thousand dollars also made something like a hundred million dollars because both times he was getting traffic from these brand new websites that he felt were interesting exactly that's i'm saying these are bread breadcrumbs that it's not specific to the reddit story this is everywhere and those are perfect perfect examples of of the same the same principle it's kinda like the art of noticing like if you could notice you know where you're getting traffic or notice that this keeps growing every month you might find something earlier than everybody else so that's another one alright here's another principle that i found interesting the name reddit was not meant to be the name of the site they wanted to call it new dot com s n o o and today the the reddit mascot name is sn and reddit was kinda like their placeholder name for it it was it was the working title and it was like we're gonna change when we actually launched this thing we're gonna change it but like for now it's this new dot com was too expensive so they couldn't afford it and this is so common like we're so often wrong about names some people get really precious about names early on but paul graham advise these guys to just like just pick a name that kind of like feels right works right for you right now you can change it later if you need but also he urged them to ship it fast he's like i think we could build a fast version of this and reddit actually launched in three weeks after they went through the after they got it admitted yc which is incredibly fast and then from there they just started iterating that's awesome that's that's amazing next thing do you know how they got their early traction have you heard the story it's it's a good one yeah basically steve hoffman and alexis i believe what they did is they just created a bunch of fake usernames and they just would submit constantly like different links to look like many people were participating because the way that a site like reddit or any community works is you typically have like ninety nine percent of people going to view stuff and only one percent of people actually submitting stuff so they had to submit content in order to create supply exactly exactly nobody wants to be nobody wants to come into a dead room and start dancing right if you go to a night nightclub there's nobody on the answer you're not gonna go either so they had to fake it till they make it right i think that's kind of the principal here was fake it till you make it gone right and this was they were the they were the users i think they talked about like they created i think thirty different accounts just and they would just not only submit the links for reddit but he would then comment yeah and they would comment as different personalities and i think steve talked to once like he's like the first day i logged on and the comments under a link were not for me was like this hallelujah moment it's like holy shit we did it we got enough of that critical mass that chicken and egg problem we solved it we got the the all rolling and importantly they had also set the culture you did this i thought really really well when you launched trends i got to see you launch trends from a idea to a three four five million a year rep recurring revenue product and all it was was a facebook group and in that facebook group that there was a research reporting too but the the facebook group i think it was actually the main product it was and you were so damn active and i was like oh this is how you build a community every day you would go in there and you'd be like hey what's up guys i was just thinking about this interesting thing i'm like no you're the fuck you weren't you were like you were like i have to stoke this fire otherwise this fire is gonna go out right now and i used to write posts on other people's behalf i don't know if you've ever if you did this at at the time me were like hey can you post this in the group i'm like i that and did you pasted this huge thing and i was like okay i guess that's it's well written so like sure so you got us you were basically our fake accounts yeah and i got i i i couldn't remember if this was pre m days so if this was pre sean being famous and i would like get other popular people and write on their behalf of like hey just post this and yeah they were really won't be like hey can you go comment like your message forty of us he'd like please go comment on this thing this baller just joined and i want this to feel really active for him like i want him to i want him to feel overwhelmed and i'm like okay what do you want me to you're like say this and i went and i would go comment that and then that guy would be like wow what a community this is fantastic and like that first impression was so good because of that that's what the reddit guys did and i found by the way you have to do that i have i've had to do that in that case to about two thousand people with hampton i only had to do it to about three hundred people and so the numbers that you actually have to do that for like the new members or whatever the community is a website visitors it's actually not that high do those numbers sound so high you did it for two thousand members that's crazy i don't remember exactly but that doesn't seem but now trends i think had twenty thousand members the like i remember it was sort of like the first hundred fifty days yeah we're you were tending to that fire you would not let it just go out yeah so it's was only about six months that i had to do that what's the other point alright next one okay talent filters so one thing program says he goes that the reason steve showed up at that talk was because he followed my blog which was about lisp lisp is this like obscure programming language that i think program created if not created popular by i think he created it and he's like the thing about lisp is he goes it's one of those languages that few people will learn except out of your own intellectual curiosity meaning it's like it's not you don't learn it to get rich or to get famous or any of those things if you go through the right of passage of learning this thing and be interested in it you are just wired a certain way and you are somebody who pursues your intellectual like your intellectual interest in pursuits it's like i guess pretty elegant if you do code and lisp it's like really elegant in certain ways but again it's like cursive or calligraphy it's like you don't need to learn calligraphy but if you do you probably have like eye for design right the steve job thing sure so same sort of thing so he so that could be kinda interested that there are probably like a dozen things that i can think of that are like this amazing talent filters we talked last week about that startup up cognition that came out and raised a bunch of money and they have this like ai software programmer that's like you know better than chat at writing code and that guy was like in the math olympia ad right he was like his sport when we were playing you know basketball and soccer and stuff like that he was like you know sitting there at a on a stage buzzing in and answering like really hard math questions or the spelling bee it's like things that you do if you can become obsessed and degenerate generally obsessed about certain things you're wired a certain way and you are almost like predisposed to success then we it's like all i gotta is introduce you to the idea of the stock market trust me all you're like fucking world of warcraft grinding is gonna apply really really well over here you just have to get exposed at the right time here's a list poker yeah yeah board games yes is sports specifically individual sports so if you're world class like an in like a swimming track field cycling wrestling those types of things alright the video games one is obvious let me give you a wildcard card magic i'm not talking about like cards but like tada like that time bad every twelve year old boy i don't know any twelve year old boys who did not think magic was the shit and bought a magic set for sure if you could trick me on levi or make a coin come out of my ear like that took a lot of hard to work i'm into it ebay flipping was another one back in the day like you know sneaker flipping and ebay flipping was definitely another one being a mormon and going on a mission another one alright being from the country's the ukraine like war torn country that you have escaped from great filter yeah right there's like there's a there's a bunch of these alright next one one of the one of the the best principles my my my trainer and coach taught me was that the best products are simply you pushed out that's how i feel about this podcast this podcast is just me pushed out to the world and for whoever likes me they're gonna like this podcast and it's gonna feel very second nature to me to create this podcast because it's just me and so paul graham says almost the same principle without he doesn't have that catch phrase but he hasn't it said the same thing about about reddit he goes reddit is reddit was successful because steve has two things number one he likes ideas for the sake of ideas like he likes ideas just for the sake of interesting ness which is really what reddit is like you go to reddit it not because it's the top news story but because it's like mildly interesting or it's fascinating in some obscure way and that's what makes reddit it really really special and that's the type of stuff that steve really really likes and so naturally it went in that direction which is like not obvious actually like i think the obvious if you were like writing a business plan you would have made reddit a lot more like i don't know the home homepage of cnn today right the important stories rather than the quirky interesting stories that are only just they scratch your intellectual itch and nothing really else dude that's kind of a weird way it the product is just pushed out of you like there's like jack straight yeah yeah yeah you just gotta squeeze really hard grunt a little bit and pop it's just gonna be pushed right out of if you're any and audi alright that's all that's all you're really doing when it comes to entrepreneurship alright marty i like you alright the neck the next one that he says there he goes the other thing about steve he has that but then the second thing is he has a very anti authority streak so he likes the idea of creating a website that didn't have editors because at the time in the internet all edit all websites that were like editorial news link submissions they had this like small class of like the gatekeepers who decided what's in and what's out and reddit does not work that way they you know over time they have like a self like a democratic mod thing but there there is no person at the company who decides what gets posted to what gets featured what gets shown and he's like those two factors are just like inherent in steve himself and so it of course the product is an extension of of the founder that i mean yeah that that's pretty amazing i think what's his name jason freed had a big part of that in his podcast where he talks about being crazier early on because if you start a little bit crazy a little wacky a little weird later on things inevitably become more tight wound more conservative and so it's best to do it early on to establish that and i thought that i've always felt that but i didn't i wasn't articulate enough to phrase it in such a wonderful way and that actually is a beautiful way of thinking and read his act that way the the mascot is this like goofy alien creature right and it's like first of all you don't have to have a a mascot if you can have a logo without a mascot but he does like a this alien mascot but it's like the the weird shit got baked in early once this thing got big the idea of like hey we're gonna introduce this new alien mascot it'd be like well i don't know that to do the number support that to the focus group support that is is this gonna risk the traffic blah blah blah it's important that the weirdness gets baked in early i shared an office at third in bryant in downtown san francisco with reddit when they were thirteen employees like shared an office building they were on floor three i was on floor four and i used to get into the elevator and if i would like i was such a fan of reddit i was like if i meet someone from reddit in this elevator i'm gonna ask for like a picture with them this is a big deal and you would see these guys wearing their reddit backpacks and sweatshirt and i'm just thinking like these are my heroes and that it's just like this nerdy asia guy with like a crappy mustache who's like five three getting at the elevator the book bag was like weighing him back and like is it a fall over and i have like sir it is an honor like like i just remembered thinking like love your work yeah well like can you sign here just lifting up my shirt it asked something if to get like side on my chest like i was like the the tide has turned i'm not exactly like a like a jo alpha looking guy but compared to this guy i was yeah i'm like begging him like please have mercy well here here's another good one alexis han tweeted this out today it was a screenshot of an email he got from chris saga and you know this is early on because his name is christopher sa not chris he he was still christopher back then and it his his email was like he's still at google he was working at google so he emails them out of the blue and alexis tweeted out he goes shout out to sa for being the first person before my mom before our investors before anybody else who saw how big and successful reddit it could become and here's what the email says it just starts off there's no high no hello it just goes someday folks will be pleading with their hosting companies because they're being edited or something like that you guys are driving a surprising amount of traffic to my site i wonder what site it was he's working at google at the time i think he literally was just calling google his site which is legendary i don't know if another way from facebook and the whole email so far is lower caps there's not one lowercase high is how you starts paragraph three by the way anyways he goes anyways it was pleasure meeting a guy not only were you both impressive technologist technologists you both seem like well rounded guys with senses of humor and i love this he goes humor should never be underestimated alright there's no wisdom in that bro there's some for a long time that's awesome how how old does chris in this email you think i mean he's not like a he's not a big week yet twenty five is my guess so he's forty eight now and this is twenty four years ago so he's twenty four years old what chris sac was twenty four what when he wrote this email alright no no sorry twenty years ago so maybe he's twenty eight sorry twenty eight that's still like the the this is like a pretty baller email at a young age alright go ahead so he's twenty eight years what and he says i would be thrilled to have you come visit us at the goo oof alright he lost me there are well that stick yeah luckily you've you've racked up a bunch of wants in our yeah yeah yeah jeff just took a hit and then he's like you know come come then he goes this is the best part dude i didn't even see this the first time here's how the email ends he goes we can grab lunch sometime and intro you to some google cool question mark the next line cool period god i hope my emails never leaked because i do shit like this all the time that is so just so bad and so great at the same time that's alright again he's got so many cool points that he could be deducted a few douche points and he's still way up on top this is better than just being like you're welcome in advance yeah yeah chris sake the type of guy to like introduce himself and say please to meet me this is awesome this is cool and then one more thing you have on here sam alt owns eight percent which is like a billion dollars today before we even get to that reddit sold the company so reddit has had a ton of drama i forget the guy's name his name was aaron something so basically yeah aaron schwartz so basically if i remember correctly during yc that three month period there was another guy named aaron who was pretty brilliant and he got in trouble or rather before that his company wasn't working so they merged with reddit so he kinda became a cofounder of reddit a few years into the business i think he got in trouble for doing something that is like a lot of people protest against but basically he stole information from mit i think it was and they were gonna lock him up for like twenty years we i think he basically gave access to i think scientific journals and jay store i think it was jay store i mean yes he's yeah stealing not the right word according to the government it was stealing according to him and i'm on his side it was like this information deserves to be free whatever and he was gonna get locked up for like years and he ended up killing himself and this along with a a bunch of other drama they had a bunch of like drama early on and in fact they sold the company to kanye nas i forget for how much but i i think here's the threat so like tweeted this out the other the day which was which was cool because or not the of the day four years ago time flies he talked about selling it in two thousand six so they started to i basically sold it in in in two thousand six so here's what he says so he goes halloween is a rural holiday because on halloween we sold reddit to con nest which was like not a tech company i'm actually it's a big magazine publisher he goes basically it was sixteen months of work i would be getting more money than my parents had made their entire working lives and there were lots of things about management team building or whatever that i just didn't know what i would need to know he said his mom was ill and he's like basically it was a ten million dollar exit and he goes i didn't know there were other like raising money or doing other things so we just kind of sold i think he said previously they they each walked steve and alexa walked away with two million dollars and then they they ended buying it back giving economist to spin it out and then ended buying it back essentially yes and when they did that they eventually raised money of which sam alt is credited with now owning eight percent of the company and sam alt so reddit has gone through all types of drama where like a ceo was fired and then a week later another ceo was fired sam alt was intermittent ceo for one day and you're interesting yeah i'm sure of ceo but yeah he was the fastest ceo sorry interim and he was the ceo because he was in one of their investors and his fund owns eight percent i don't think sam alt owns eight percent i think he owns a percentage of the eight percent which now today is worth something like a billion plus right right that's right as if that guy you know i'm glad alt has finally gotten a win under his belt you know like he's been added of that poor kid god bless them yeah exactly other remarkable things said not only do they sell too early but they're got they got they got a second ride back on the train this is also nineteen years in the making like it took a long time and by the way the company still not profitable like there's so many just crazy kind of mind bending things that if you're not from the silicon valley world like none of this compute i like reddit is the whatever like the fourth biggest you know social network in in the world or something like well i think it's a like the tenth most visited visited website in the in the country which is funny because if you go to like quote a normal person and be like hey do you use reddit and they're like either what's reddit or no i don't know how you know they use reddit use all of reddit use a lot of reddit there's a lot of reddit going on for people who are users reddit my life it's basically hacker news and reddit is how in twitter those three things are just how i get information they i think they have like seventy five million da or something like that anyways they it's crazy that after nineteen years is still not profitable but everybody who built it made a lot of money have you advertised reddit dude there's like no button i remember trying to advertise five years ago i remember being like we should run reddit it ads as this is a great market and i went through like a three hour process and i was like oh i guess it's impossible to advertise on reddit and was like i have to like send a a telegram to somebody if i wanna advertise on here now it's much better but i've advertise a little bit on reddit and this was like five years ago and the it's like so that that feeling that steve has a fuck authority the users have that which doesn't exactly make it the most advertising friendly audience and i've advertised on their chiefs very clicks were very cheap results very bad they did not buy whatever i was selling that's the slogan clicks cheap results terrible yeah joints you do the math alright well that's sick this was a good phone call is are you ready to hang up on me now yeah alright i'm gonna go now by alright that's the call i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from my all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back