A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:10:54 · Chris Slowe
[00:10:54] S0: I think a lot. A lot of the basics existed all the way back to that year. I'd say for that summer and for the first version of Reddit, it really was just a front page with a bunch of links. You could submit content, you could give it a title, and you could vote on it, and that was it. There was no conversations. There was no discussions. If I remember right, the first comments appeared later that year in December of '05, give or take, after I had started. It was a major addition. I remember also really clearly setting the tone for Reddit's culture literally one of the first comments that appeared was something like, "Reddit has comments now. I guess it's now just slash dot. We should all move on to the next thing." It was great while it lasted. It's like, oh yeah. I mean it's like eternal September all the way down. Voting plus comments goes back to 2005, basically. I think the next major edition we did was when we added subreddits closer to 2007, 2008. I would say that was one of those things that actually slowly started appearing where initially we had created a set of – we just started finding that the amount of content being submitted was so large, we had to have some an organizational principle around it and the original idea, we started breaking down topics. We curated in the first crack about 10 or so, now we call them communities but at the time we just called them subreddits because they're a chunk of Reddit around a given topic and that was things like science, politics, basically clear delineations that the community wanted to separate out.
00:12:24 · Pablo Srugo
[00:12:24] S1: When I look at Reddit, at least I think the most powerful asset you have is this incredibly strong community, and more so than maybe any other social network frankly is the defining feature to the point that communities now subreddits can move markets. It's pretty incredible. How did you get that going? Everybody wants to build a community, but it's so hard to do. I'm just curious in those early days, I remember stories of seeding the threads and stuff, putting things there to get conversation started, but do you remember how you guys got that going in 2005, 2006 because it's easy once there's content but it's hard when it's a blank page?