A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:01:05 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:01:05] S1: People listening right now, they just hate you. Welcome to the product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. Chris, welcome to the show. [00:01:26] S0: It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. [00:01:27] S1: Reddit is a world known brand now. It's a $9 billion company, nearly a billion in revenue, over a billion MAUs. You're not just a CTO. I mean, you were the founding engineer. You were there from day one. I mean, it's a long story. We're 2024 now. This is 2005. We're going back almost 20 years. I'm excited to dive into those early days, just what it was like to start. The world was so different. You were in YCs first batch, right?
00:01:55 · Chris Slowe
[00:01:55] S0: Yeah, so actually I was probably – I wasn't there quite first day but I was definitely there within the first six months. Yeah, quick version of me is I was actually in grad school at that point, mid 2005. I had gotten roped into working on a startup with a friend, which at that point, to set the stage, nobody was doing startups in 2004, 2005 really. It was still pretty deep in the hangover from the original dotcom bust, which honestly, to go back even further, so I was actually class of 2000. I was in that boat of, I decided to go to grad school that fall. I had all these friends that were coming out to California and getting these great signing bonuses and these fantastic jobs. And then by September I always started grad school and none of those jobs actually existed anymore . <laugh> , hopefully I did crater. And I was like, so all summer I'm like kicking myself like, oh man, I should have like, I should joined , joined that startup and it's like, oh, that startup is no longer there because the market no longer exists. But yeah, fi four years later, I was kind of like halfway through grad school , um, hit that point of burnout that I think everyone goes through at some point in grad school school and did like a side project that turned into a startup. The nice results of that summer , um, was , uh, I learned how hard it is to start a company. Uh, my my company , uh, created that summer, but I had two free bedrooms in my apartment and , um, Steve and Alexis from Reddit , um, moved in. They were friends from that batch. And then I think it was probably two months or so before Steve kind of coaxed me to, to, to help out , um, and help out, turn it into first employee. And the rest, as they say is history
00:03:23 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:03:23] S1: It's history. Yeah, that's right. The other 20 years just that's easy stuff. [00:03:26] S0: Yeah, the next 19 years, whatever, things happened. It's mostly seen deleted like in The Simpsons. It's like, oh, I don't really know what happened in that intervening time stage. [00:03:36] S1: I have to ask, do you remember – I mean, this was a long time ago. Do you remember what the vibe was in YC back then because now Paul Graham is a legend, YC is within the world of startups the number one most well-known thing, not just accelerator, just brand I would say in general. Maybe Sequoia's up there, but that first batch, why did people even join? You know what I mean? Was Paul Graham a big deal? What was the idea?
00:04:00 · Chris Slowe
[00:04:00] S0: I mean, Paul Graham had a big cult following at that point. He was, I don't know if notorious is the right word. He had a a tech blog, he still has that I still have been reading all his years. He was also very big in the Lisp community. He wrote the two textbooks on Lisp. In fact, it was one of those things that I actually found out like I discovered after I met Paul and knew him for a while that the Lisp book that I had on my shelf was actually his and those moments I'm like, "Oh, my freshman year Lisp book from '96. This is actually Paul's. That's pretty funny." I'd say that the defining characteristics of YC in the early days was they actually would oftentimes chafe at the idea of calling them an accelerator because they were trying to do something that was much more straightforward of just – Paul's thesis was to use modern terms. If there was liquidity available for smart founders to go and start a company and if you could just set them loose, give them a little bit of seed funding and set them on their way, then that would create this rich ecosystem of startups that would actually thrive. I think that if any bet has been proven to be true, it's that one which is that we now know in Retrospect that startups have a 90 plus percent failure rate. It's an ensemble situation where you have to have a couple of successes pay off the long trail of failures. Like many things in life, the only way to become a good successful startup founder is to do it a couple times and learn how to learn the NOx live. It feels like the first time I read a management book when I was middle of my career, I remember reading it, being I don't understand what one of this stuff means. Then you go and you manage for a while and you get a couple scars and you come back and you read the book and it's like, oh, now I understand what this toolkit contains. It's similar with startups, like you start a company and it's like, oh, how hard could it be to start a company? Then you're like, apparently payroll's a thing. Who knew? Managing investors, like managing a board, you have to do all that stuff live before you really can appreciate what parts are are complicated and what parts just require some skill.
00:06:05 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:06:05] S1: Yeah, I mean, there's so many pieces of the puzzle when it comes – that's one of the frustrations almost is you start, you have this idea, you just want to deliver a product, and then you just find out all the little friction, all the little things you got to do to just build, get that idea into reality. Yeah, you only learn that by going through it. [00:06:22] S0: Definitely, yeah. On top of it all, one of the signs of successful company is you have to go through the phase of growing the team and then you discover that you – speaking from experience here, I spent my entire career as a software engineer effectively. When you go through that shift of having to actually – your output is not the software, it's the people who are building the software now and you become more and more removed from the actual day-to-day software development. At this point in my career, I've got 1,000 people in my org, which every time I say it, I just shut a little bit. It's like, that's a lot of people who are up looking at me for some guidance on what's going on. It's like, I'm just some guy who likes to write code but don't get to do that as much anymore. I threaten. I mostly threatened to write code. [00:07:05] S1: Take me back. I'm really curious because you're working on this other startup, you're in the same batch as Reddit, but how do you actually end up joining Steve and Alexis?
00:07:05 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:07:05] S1: Take me back. I'm really curious because you're working on this other startup, you're in the same batch as Reddit, but how do you actually end up joining Steve and Alexis? [00:07:13] S0: I mean, it wasn't much more complicated than what I mentioned. Legitimately that batch was very small. There's 10 startups that batch. The first company FlameOut happened within the first literal three or four weeks of the batch. I think we actually were down to nine within a few weeks. It was like tell us all this time. It was like the disagreement about equity division between the team or something, which again, in Retrospect, it just seems so silly. It's like you're divvying up a company that doesn't exist yet and arguing how much you own. [00:07:44] S1: It's a bad sign. [00:07:45] S0: It's a really bad sign. It's a sign of immediate lack of trust. It's like they don't actually trust each other enough, but that was a while first batch. I mean some of the folks in that batch, besides Reddit, there was Justin Kan and Emmett Shear at the company. Right, Twitch, yeah.