Chris Slowe was Reddit's first employee, joining Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in a cramped Somerville apartment in summer 2005. The team worked in scrappy conditions with live web development, then got acquired by Condé Nast in 2006 and kept building independently.
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And so like today, Reddit is essentially a household name, right? But like, it's not just a clear, perfect, beautiful path from let's co found Reddit to it being the behemoth it is today. Like, tell me a little bit about how your role evolved, like what you learned, I guess. Were you ever a team lead or anything like that prior to being the CTO of Reddit? Like, tell me about that.
Oh yeah, no, it's been a long, it's been a long journey. So the other, the rest of the story is my story. Reddit was, I was Reddit's first employee and so I got involved with. So you know, Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in summer of 05. And they, you know, they were also in the first Y Combinator batch, which is how I met them in the first place. And so another one of those kind of totally random events that changed my life was, yeah, at the end of the summer my startup failed and I had an apartment with two free bedrooms and I was friends with Steve and Alexis and so they moved in. And then two months later I was working on Reddit. And you know, at that point that was very much like, I mean it was the, in a, in a crappy Somerville apartment version of the bunch of nerds in a, in a, in a garage or in a basement just kind of working on something. Like we had a, we had this office that, where the, or our office, our office was our living room and we were in this like third story walk up in Somerville, Mass. And the floor in the office was nothing even close to level. Like if anything it was actually kind of V shaped. So if you let go, if you were sitting in a chair with wheels and you let go of one of the desks, you would just fall towards the middle of the room. It was really, really janky. And so it was really, I mean the startup was very scrappy. The whole experience was, you know, learning how to develop a functioning web app live while you're doing it. And so that was much of the experience for the first like, you know, five years was very, very small team. We got acquired Originally by Conde Nastin 06 and kind of got pulled in to that company and just kind of were mostly left to our own devices to kind of like, you know, continue to iterate the product. And it was really just like we were doing what we thought was best, not really knowing what was right or what was wrong or how to actually do it.
