Co-founding Reddit with College Roommate | Steve Huffman

And I'm Joe Natoli. I'm one of the program coordinators here at Draper University. So welcome. We have Steve Huffman with us from Reddit.

Thank you all for having me.

So one of the ways that we welcome people here is with 1, 2, 3, you rock. So I'm gonna count to 3 and then everyone's gonna shout, you rock, and point at Steve. So 1, 2, 3. You rock!

Thank you.

Yeah, welcome.

It feels great.

So here at Draper University, we have about 70% of an international audience. So I wanted to start with kind of getting to know you as they might not be familiar with you. So I have some questions that are mostly fun. That's part of the motto here at Draper University, to keep it mostly fun. So the first question I have is, when does the narwhal bacon?

The narwhal beckons at midnight.

That it does. And would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

Okay, I've answered this a number of times. I'll give you—

I'm sure you have.

My standard answer, which is I'd rather fight 100 duck-sized horses because all you would have to do is walk up like one step Like, on the stage I would be safe because horses can't climb, and then from there you can just drown them.

Good answer. But what's a non-standard answer?

Well, not— I gave this answer at work the other day, and somebody pointed out that, like, you don't have to kill them, which hadn't occurred to me in years. So, you know, maybe we could just domesticate the horses and Live a happy life. Horses aren't really fighters anyway.

Lovers. And for people who don't know you, how would you describe yourself using— or describe yourself using your favorite subreddit or a combination of subreddits?

Probably Mildly Interesting.

Mildly— r/MildlyInteresting? What is on Mildly Interesting for those who don't know?

r/MildlyInteresting is a community of People who basically post mildly interesting things they see throughout the day. So, like, you know, the reflection on my car looks like a turtle, right? It's like mildly interesting.

And another popular subreddit is ELI5. So I figured since we have a number of international people here that might not be familiar with Reddit, if you could explain Reddit to them like they were 5. That would be awesome.

Okay. Well, just like ELI5, which is a community on Reddit for people to ask questions and get the answer explained to them as if they were a 5-year-old, the answerers never actually respond as if the questioner was a 5-year-old. They're always, like, very complex. And so that's what I will do to you now as well. Reddit is— it's a lot of things, but in short, it's a home to thousands of communities that represent pretty much every interest. And so we've got kind of news and politics and internet memes and culture and funny stuff. And we've also got a lot of conversational communities. AskReddit is actually our largest community where people just ask questions of the community and get answers. Relationship advice, sports, whatever you want. And so And each of the communities has kind of very, sometimes very different tones and cultures and use cases. And it's been kind of a fun ride, 'cause when we built Reddit, we didn't really have any of this in mind. So a lot of these communities are created, well, all of them are created by our users. And the cultural norms of each community are set by the users. And so it's really, one way I describe Reddit is we're fulfilling the promise of the internet. Which is to connect people around the world regardless of geographical or societal barriers.

The de facto homepage of the internet.

That is what we try. We used to say that tongue-in-cheek, but I think we're actually getting there.

I would definitely agree with that statement. Here at Draper University, it's all around entrepreneurship. At one point, Reddit had to start somewhere. You were a first-time entrepreneur and you teamed up with Alexis.

Yes.

Way back in—

2005.

2005. How did you two come together? And then you applied originally to Y Combinator with a food ordering app.

Yeah, so I mean, I can tell the whole story. I'll tell the quick version and we can go from there.

We'll start with the co-founding because a lot of them are going to—

So Alexis and I, I think one of the most important traits in a co-founder relationship is actually a lot like a marriage. Which is to say, you're gonna be spending a lot of time with this person. You need to trust this person. And it's not always easy. It does require a lot of work. And like many marriages, we met in college. Alexis and I, we lived across the hall from each other our first year at University of Virginia. And then we were basically housemates and roommates for the next, I think, 8 years. 4 years of college and then another basically 4 years of Reddit. And I think we moved every year. We lived in a lot of different places. And through college we were always buddies. We didn't work together. We didn't have any classes together. I was a computer science major and he was a history and business major. And so we actually had relatively little overlap at school, but we just were close friends. We bonded over video games and sports. sports and that sort of stuff. And then towards the end of college, we started talking about starting a company together. Basically, I would share him ideas for companies I wanted to start. And kind of finally towards the end, he encouraged me and I guess himself to a degree to do one of these things together.

When did that discussion turn into the application for Y Combinator?

OK. As I recall, it was basically our 4th year at school. We were gonna start this company called MyBubbleMenu, which would help you order food. It would allow you to order food from your cell phone, basically. Now, this is in 2005, so this is before iPhones and apps of any significance, and a lot of restaurants weren't connected to the internet.

Right.

Maybe didn't even know what the internet was in some cases.

In hindsight, do you think that was still a good idea?

Well, the company— not at the time. It was definitely ahead of its time. The company exists now as Order Ahead or Eat24, or there's 100 companies just like that. So I think it's a good idea. I don't know if anybody's quite nailed it. Order Ahead is probably the closest to what we envisioned. I don't know how they're doing. But that was really the closest to what we had envisioned. So we were planning on just working on this in Virginia. I had a job all through college as a programmer for a startup. But in Virginia we don't call them startups, we call them small businesses. And so I had this job at a small business in Virginia as a programmer all through college. And I planned on graduating, working for them full-time, and then at night we'd work on our company. So we incorporated it in Charlottesville. We didn't plan on raising money. We didn't really know how to raise money. And what happened was during spring break, so March-ish of our last year of college. Spring break, right, I don't know how international the idea is, but right, it's just like a week at the beginning of spring when college kids go usually south to Mexico and just party. drink and party. And we took our— during our spring break, Paul Graham, who was an idol of mine, he hadn't started Y Combinator yet, but he had made a bunch of money in the first bubble, sold his company to Yahoo, and he wrote essays evangelizing startups and evangelizing the programming language Lisp.

What about Paul Graham appealed to you?

Well, okay, so that's a bit of a long story as well. When I was young, when I got the internet in my room, I got the internet, internet, we didn't have local internet access until I was, I think, like probably 14 or 15 years old. 'Cause we were in basically, not quite rural Virginia, but we didn't have internet. We didn't have local internet access.

In small business Virginia.

Yeah, small business Virginia. So when I finally got internet, I had, you know, I had dial-up access in my room, and I remember the first thing I searched for on probably AltaVista at the time was how to be a hacker. And I wanted to learn how to be a hacker, like how to break into computers and stuff. And the first essay that came up was by Eric Raymond called How to Be a Hacker. And he was writing about how to be a hacker in the sense of the word of Like how to be a very good programmer. And that was a very formative thing to read on basically my first day on the internet. And one of the things he said in there is you should learn how to program in Lisp. Lisp is an old programming language. I think it was created in the '50s. Actually, I think it started really as almost a thought experiment. And it was one of the most advanced programming languages then, and it's still one of the more advanced programming languages even today. And he had a line in that essay that said, you should learn how to program in Lisp because even if you never use it, it'll forever change the way you think about programming. So then I start searching around for Lisp, and then it's not long that you stumble across Paul Graham. 'Cause he—