This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube interview titled "The idea of Reddit | Steve Huffman" (created 2017-08-22) featuring Steve Huffman in conversation with an interviewer. Huffman recounts discovering Paul Graham and Lisp, meeting Graham, the Y Combinator application (initial rejection and subsequent acceptance to work on a different idea), and the brainstorming that produced Reddit by combining Delicious-style ranking with Slashdot-style community. He also references the first YC batch and other founders (Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Sam Altman) and comments on Reddit's early growth and traffic history.
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that you stumble across Paul Graham. 'Cause he wrote a lot of essays basically saying, if you start a company and write your software in Lisp, you will become a millionaire. That was like the thesis of Paul's first probably like 15 essays. And that's like, that was very, you know, an enticing dream.
Did you pick up Lisp then?
I did, yeah. I programmed Lisp.
Did it change the way that you viewed programming?
It did, in fact. And the first version of Reddit was written Written in Lisp, and I don't know. Like, for example, okay, so that's how I became a fan of Paul Graham. I saw he was gonna give a talk over a spring break, so Alexis and I went up to meet him, and I brought my dog-eared copy of dog-eared being an idiomatic expression for a book that's like worn out. The pages are so worn out they look like dogs' ears. Oh, I'm sorry, you folded them all over. Da da da. Yeah, yeah, because you whatever anyway. My beat-up copy of Paul Graham's Lisp programming book I brought to that talk. After his talk, Alexis ran up to the front of the stage, got his attention. Alexis is very, very charming. And he was like, you know, you should meet my friend Steve. I was very shy. And I got Paul to sign my book. And because we came all the way from Virginia and I had, like, this worn-out copy of his book, he agreed to meet us later that evening. That's when we talked about our startup idea. Then a couple days later is when he announced Y Combinator.
Talk about good timing.
Right. Well, when he announced Y Combinator, he basically told the story about how he went to dinner with a bunch of guys and felt bad for not investing in their startup and now I'm gonna start this thing called Y Combinator. He was like, Steve, you should send him a thank you email. I was like, OK. I probably would not have done that if he hadn't encouraged me to. So I sent him a thank you email. I was like, hey, thanks for your time and this and that. It was really cool to meet you. And he replied back with, well, I just started this thing called Y Combinator. You should apply. And so that's how it happened.
And then once you guys were in Y Combinator with the food ordering application—
Well, we were actually rejected.
You were rejected?
It was very frustrating because— We applied with our food ordering idea, an idea about which we had talked to Paul for an hour or two.
And then he said he was sad that he didn't invest in it too.
Yeah, and he invited us to apply knowing what our idea was. And then you got rejected. And then rejected us. So that was a little frustrating. And we took the train from Boston to Virginia. It's about an 8-hour train ride. And so we were on our, you know, we went up for spring break, we went back after spring break, we went up a couple weeks later to interview, we were on our way back. He called us and basically said, hey, that idea is just, that idea is not gonna work, but we really like you guys. So if you wanna be in Y Combinator, work on something else. And so we basically had a brainstorming session with them about what that something else might be. And that something else turned into Reddit.
What was that brainstorming session like?
We were basically talking about 2 things. Paul really liked a website called Delicious. Delicious, I think, is still around. It was a social bookmarking site. Delicious pioneered a couple of things. Tagging. This whole notion of tagging, I believe, was invented on Delicious. Also, the domain name for Delicious was del.ico.us. So it also started the trend of shitty country-specific domain names, being the first and probably worst example. But it was a popular thing. And Delicious was cool. So you would save all your websites that you wanted to bookmark in Delicious. And then you could tag them and organize them however you want. And it had this page called delicious/popular. And it would show you all of the things that are being bookmarked that day. So it was like a— it had this really kind of cool user-generated feel to it. The problem was, when you bookmark something, it's because you want to read it later. So that by definition means things that are long or maybe reference material, you know, that sort of stuff. And so Delicious/popular was this really cool user-curated list of the most boring content on the internet. And so our thinking was, well, let's take the mechanics of Delicious, this kind of rising and falling thing, but combine it with the community of Slashdot, of which I was a member. Slashdot was slashdot.org, news for nerds, stuff that matters. I was a big user of that. And Slashdot had this, you'd go there and you'd see all these news articles, but the real magic was in the comments. That's where the community existed. And so we're like, let's take the mechanics of Delicious and combine it with the community of Slashdot. And I think that's exactly what we've achieved now.
Exactly, yeah.
And I'm actually very proud of that, but back at the time it just seemed like so far away that we could ever build something as cool As Slashdot. Like, to me, Slashdot was a big deal. And I still have a very big place in my heart for them. And to think that we've built something as cool as Slashdot still actually is something that kind of blows me away a little bit.
Yeah, accomplishing that, realizing that you've accomplished what you set out to do is actually pretty awesome.
Yeah, and it's one of those things where so many things, even in the story up until the point I've told you so far, so many things have to go right. Just to get into YC. It's just incredible to me that we've made it 12 years later.
And that was the first batch of YC. So how was that batch?
Well, I think it was a strong batch because you had Alexis and I doing Reddit. 2 of the other companies basically merged into Reddit. There's only 8 companies. So 3 of them basically merged into Reddit over the next year. Another company was founded by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, who would later start Justin.tv, which turned into Twitch, which sold for a billion dollars to Amazon. It had Sam Altman, who is now the head of YC. So it was a strong batch.
You went through YC and you built Reddit, and then YC ended. How did Reddit exist at the end of that, and when did it really start scaling?
Reddit has had very few traffic pops. We never had that hockey stick graph.
The J-curve.
Yeah, we never really have had that. We've had some nice days. December 20— no, December 30th, 2015. So my kind of— long story. When I came back to Reddit, I'd only been back 6 months. We grew like 20% over Christmas. So that was cool, because that's like 40 million users.
Can you guess why that happened? No, we have no fucking clue. No idea?
But actually, that sort of thing is very rare. And so by the end of the summer, I don't know, we had maybe a few thousand users.
