A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:07:45 · Chris Slowe, Pablo Srugo
[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. [00:07:53] S1: At the time the company was called Kiko and it was a calendar startup but they went on to do just TV shortly thereafter which got also got into a later YC batch and then Twitch. Sam Altman was in that batch doing his startup looped, if I remember right. It was a social location app, like basically the snap map but back in 2005 on feature phones. It had some pretty good solid bones in there or at least a bunch of people who were, I don't know, in Retrospect, all roughly the same crazy maybe is the way to describe it. pretty good at picking people. Paul Graham's pretty good at picking people.
00:08:36 · Chris Slowe
[00:08:36] S0: I think he did a pretty good job on the first on the first batch. I think the best way to describe the actual experience was the shared context of – there was no other room you could be in than that room where everyone was literally going through the same thing that summer. Everyone had just established a company. We were all learning how to build basically web apps live at a point when web two was just becoming a thing that was being talked about. No one knew how to build scaled web products or at least there wasn't a kit to do it. You're learning live and then being able to once a week at dinner, have a chat with some other people who were doing the same thing and being like, oh, I literally just solved that problem this week, here's what I did; first discoveries of some of the new things that come along with CSS, which to this day remains one of the worst toolkits imaginable. I'm sorry, I went back in engineering mostly by training. I got out of that early. I mostly have completely uninformed opinions on it at this point, which still are funny. From my standpoint, we were working on, sounds really mundane but desktop search. Me and my co-founder at the time were a couple of physicists who just couldn't find PDFs on our fricking hard drives that we had downloaded because the search toolkit that existed on a computer was pretty terrible at that point. We ended up trying to solve the general problem with search on desktop. This is about, I don't know, I think it was that fall that Mac OS shipped an update where they actually gave you the search bar. That's how far back in the past it was. I think we were competing with that stupid dog in Windows. It would appear and like, oh, you look like you're trying to run a search. It's like, yeah, this is completely useless.
00:10:18 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:10:18] S1: My life changed when I stopped clicking on files and I just open up the search and pull up a document. [00:10:24] S0: Yeah, it's like command, space, bar. Everything is command, space, bar at this point. Yeah, that was still a relatively new new idea. Of course, now at this point files locally really? Everything's in a browser window and it's probably stored somewhere else that you just have to find it. [00:10:39] S1: I guess my question is, when you joined, what was the MVP of Reddit? I mean, in Reddit it was actually almost known for not changing or at least not changing all that much, and so how similar was the first version of Reddit to what we see today?