How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live Episode! Reddit: Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman

Episode Date: August 31, 2017

With $12,000 and a mascot named Snoo, two former college roommates designed a web site they hoped would become "the front page of the Internet." Today, despite growing pains, personal issues and persistent trolls, Reddit has over 300 million monthly users and is valued at 1.8 billion dollars. Recorded live in San Francisco. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. Support for this podcast comes from American Express Open. If you listen to how I built this, you're curious about ideas, and you probably have some ideas of your own.

American Express Open can help you with money and know-how. So you can turn those ideas into action. Visit open.com to get business done. Every single person I know texted me and said, you got to go back to Reddit. And it just felt like at the time I had no choice. It wasn't even kind of a CEO mentality. It was more of just like an engineer who knew how Reddit works.

And watching these trolls run rampant on Reddit, I remember just thinking, I know how to fix this. I too know the mind of a troll. And if you just give me access to the code, I can fix this. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's special live episode, how two college roommates built an internet community that's become a virtual nation

with a population bigger than Brazil. So if you're one of the 300 million active Reddit users, you probably think of it as this incredible place, a home where you can find your tribe, groups of people talking about the weird stuff you're into. But if you are not into Reddit, it can seem like this super intimidating insiders club that's kind of hard to penetrate. And if you land on the homepage and you're not familiar with it, you might think you've accidentally stumbled onto the internet, circa 2005, because you're kind of hard to penetrate. because that is what Reddit looks like. It's a discussion site filled entirely with user-generated content, which means depending on the time of day,

anything from photos of cats wearing Renaissance-era costumes to serious discussions about U.S. foreign policy. And this simple little site is also worth a ton of money. Actually, its most recent valuation put it at $1.8 billion. And all of this from an idea that Steve Huffman and Alexis O'Hanian came up with on a road trip to Boston during their senior year of college in 2005. Now, since then, Reddit and the founders have been through a lot of ups and downs. Reddit's users nearly shut it down in 2015. At a certain point, parts of the site were hijacked by trolls who used it to spread hateful messages.

And even Alexis and Steve went through a long period when, they stopped speaking. But recently, Reddit started to hit its stride again, to be specific, a $200 million cash infusion from investors, with plans to make the site into a more user-friendly place. And a couple weeks ago in San Francisco, I sat down with Alexis and Steve in front of a live audience to hear about how they came to invent what's become known as the front page of the internet. First of all, Steve, I just wanted to begin by asking you, I think a really important question, which is you are wearing a purple sweater with a dinosaur on which a robot is riding the dinosaur. That's right. Can you talk a little bit about your sweater? With pleasure. Thank you

for asking. Yes. So the advice that you're often given is dress like the person you want to be. And so I went to Google and I typed in awesome sweater and clicked on images. And I just scrolled down until I found something that spoke to me. I'm not making this up. And then I found this. Cool. Great. Okay, now we can start the interview.

So how did you guys meet? Steve, tell me the story that you remember. Sure. As I recall, we met first year of college at University of Virginia on our first day. Wah-hoo-wah. And so I arrived before Alexis, and we were on the same hall, and our rooms were across from each other. And everybody's rooms had their names on the door. And so mine said Steve and David, and across the hall were Alexis and Mike.

And my first thought was, this is sweet. There are girls in our hall. And so needless to say, when I met Alexis, my first emotion was disappointment. I was elated because Steve was playing PlayStation 2. So I was happy to meet you. We got over the fact that I was not what he expected and became fast friends. Fast friends and like super close friends, right? Yeah, yeah.

We talked about our gaming rigs, played a lot of video games together and lived together for years. I think the college shared many intimate experiences in college together that we will not go into detail about. And yeah, we're best of friends. And what did you study? I was a history and business major. So nothing to do with... Yes, humanities. Nothing to do with technology at all.

No, I mean, I took programming classes in high school and I fancied myself a programmer until I met Steve and realized I was not going to be a programmer for a living. You were a computer science major. Exactly. And so I had always grown up wanting to be a business major until I met Alexis. And I decided that engineering is the path for me. So when you guys were at, you know, in college, were you, I mean, were you talking about business, starting a business, doing something together? Was that something you would talk about during your video game sessions? Eventually, I would say the first three years were really just video games. Okay. And it was our last year.

It was sometime around that. I remember the first conversation we went to that hockey game in D.C., but I don't remember when that was. Was that our last year? It was junior year. Because as a history major, I thought the only way I was going to have a career was to go to law school. And I obsessed. I spent all my time in the library, obsessing over my grades, studying for the LSAT,

and then on a Saturday morning, walked out of an LSAT to go eat waffles. And I went to a waffle house. It's a great place for epiphanies and waffles. And I had both there that morning and realized if I wanted these waffles more than the LSAT, I probably shouldn't be a lawyer. And then needed something to do with my life. And so naturally, I went to my smartest friend and said, hey, Steve, you always have these great ideas for technologies, He's like, let's try to make a business out of it.

And did you have an idea? I did have an idea. Another business unique to the Mid-Atlantic is Sheets gas station. And Sheets had at the time, you could get subs, sub-sandwiches. Because where else would you want to get a sub-sand-wage rather than the gas? You know, you want to get a gas station subsamilip. Have you had one guy? Look.

They're good. They're good subs. and Sheets had an electric POS turmoil so you could go in there and order from a touchscreen which at the time was actually pretty cool and so I'd sit there pumping my gas thinking there's an electronic ordering system inside if I could just convey my order to that machine

the fella inside could be making my sandwich and then I wouldn't have to wait and so that was the idea for my mobile menu this would have been like a pre-app because this is pre- iPhones. It would have been on a Blackberry or a cell phone or something? Yeah.

This is what we learned later that the idea was actually ahead of its time. Come on. The cell phones, iPhone didn't exist. The cell phones didn't have apps. We had a great name, though. What was the name? My mobile menu. Oh, perfect.

Or, mm. Great. I spent days working on that guy. Days. I even made the little logo for that too. Did you really? Yeah. It was just three Ms.

So did you guys, how did you decide to pitch this idea? Not very effectively. We had this fantasy of I would work for my job. I worked for a startup all through college. But in Virginia, during that time, we didn't call them startup. We called them small businesses. And so I worked for the small business all through school, and I had a job offer to continue on after I graduated.

The plan was I would work there during the day, and then Alexis and I would work on my mobile menu in the evening. And we had considered asking my parents for funding, but we actually didn't even know how to do that. So we didn't. But then we had a life-changing spring grade. Yeah, so this is spring break of senior year. So what was life-changing?

What happened? We went to Cancun. No, we were the only kids in Virginia who didn't because Katie saw that Paul Graham was giving a talk. So my girlfriend at the time knew that I was a Paul Graham fan. Paul Graham. Paul Graham is, well, was the founder and the lead of Y Combinator and wrote essays evangelizing startups and kind of nerd culture and engineering. and how basically you can build yourself a new life on the internet starting companies.

And so I was a fan of his. And we learned that he was giving a talk at Harvard over our spring break called How to Start a Startup. So Alexis and I decided to go. So Paul gave his lecture, which at the time is really he just stands there and stares into his paper and reads an essay. Nevertheless, at the end of the talk, Alexis, basically dragged me up to the front of the room to meet Paul. And Alexis as he does, introduce himself to Paul.

You said, Hello, Dr. Graham. Could you please sign my friend's book? And I had my dog-eared copy of his Lisp programming book. And it would totally be worth the cost of buying you a drink to get you to come out with us. We came all the way from Virginia, and we have a startup we want to pitch you.

And he agreed because you boys came all the way from Virginia. I think he was shocked. We had trained. Yeah. And agreed to meet us later that evening. So you take him out, so he agrees to go for a drink with you. And we sat down at a cafe Algiers. I hope it's still there in Harvard Square.

It is. I walked by it not too long ago. And we pitched him. We had a whole plan. You pitched him my mobile menu. Mm. And what was his response? He said, this will be the end of lines.

And I was like, like, no, Paul, actually, I don't think you understand. What I want to do is get my sub when I'm pumping gas. And he went off. He was so hyped. And we left there feeling amazing, because this was like one of your idols who said that we actually had a really good idea. So we got back to Virginia. And a couple days later, Alexis said to me, hey, Steve, you should send Paul an email thanking him for meeting us. And so I did.

and he responded back. He's like, oh, are you those two guys from Virginia? I just announced this new program called Y Combinator to invest in people like you, you should apply. So he did. And you're thinking we've got a sure bet because he already told us it's going to revolutionize lines. Exactly.

And we gave the interview of our lives when they invited us back up there. Yeah, although there was a moment where I was explaining to Robert Morris one of the probably best engineers, programmers on Earth, what a web server is. Now, he already knew. But I took it upon myself to really tie it up. We nailed it. We nailed it. And then they said they were going to call us later that night.

So you guys are high-fiving each other and you're ready for the call? And we got the call. And I picked up. Hello? And he said, I'm sorry, we're rejecting you. And that really sucked. That really sucked. We were going to prove them wrong, though.

We went out drinking and we were going to prove them wrong. So you went out drinking and you were like, to hell with those guys. We're going to make this thing anyway. And then the next morning, on the way back, he called. Paul Graham called. Yeah. And it's like, hello? We got to play cool.

Hello? And it's Paul and he's like, we still don't like your idea. It's like Why would you call to say that? We'd like you two And if you change your idea We'll invest I got to get

I got to play cool All right we'll think about it We'll get back to you And I think at that point We were already convinced We needed to get off this train And accept that offer In that moment

My Bumble menu Died So quickly And we got We showed him Train right back. We literally jumped over the tracks and caught the next train going north. Yeah, went right back, sat down with Paul.

So you go and you meet Paul and what? What do you start doing? You start like brainstorming with him? Basically, yes. And so we were talking about things we could build. And there was a couple of websites that we both liked at the time, one of which was delicious. And so delicious, it was a social bookmarking website. And there was a page on Delicious is called Popular.

And on Delicious slash Popular, you could see things that were being bookmarked that day that were popular. And things that were being bookmarked more often would hang around a little longer. The thing is, when you bookmark something, it's because you can't finish it in one sitting. So it's reference material, it's things you can't get through, things you want to come back to later. So Delicious Popular was basically this really cool index of the most boring content on the internet. on any given day. And then we also left Slashdot. Slashdot, news for nerds, stuff that matters.

It's still online. And Slashdot had this incredible community. You go there for news every day, but really the magic of slash dot lived in the comment section. And so the idea was, can we take the mechanics of delicious, user submitted and kind of this billboard top 40 effect

and combine it with good content and a good community? And that was the genesis of Reddit. And this was a chance to basically get $12,000 from an investor we really trusted to just try something for three months. And at worst case, you know, at the end of the summer, maybe we just would have, I don't know, gone back to Virginia. I mean, did you come up with a fully formed idea by talking with Paul? Because, I mean, going from my mobile menu to what became Reddit is a radical change. I mean, did you come up with that concept?

You went back up to Boston and started brainstorming, and that came out of it? I have that notebook. It's in my desk at work. The notes I took during that first meeting. And I had actually written down in that notebook, the front page of the Internet. That's what we were going to build.

PG is terrible at naming companies, but when he nailed it with that phrase, it was special. He said to you, you should make the front page. Make the front page of the Internet. Yeah. And we said, okay, and so we did. Yeah.

It was easy as that. We thought we were, we thought we had gotten away with something, right? Like, here was this vague concept that we had sort of agreed to work on over the span of an hour. And here was 12 grand to just spend three months working on it. Just to be clear, you meet Paul in spring but break of 2005. So roughly March, maybe early April of 2005. From what I understand, you launched Reddit in June of 2005, like two and a half months later. We actually only worked on it for about three weeks before we launched it.

Yeah, so I didn't write the first line of code until June. And I had never built a website before. And we were kind of Paul's special projects a little bit because of how we got into YC. And so he would email us daily with just ideas and things like, I think it's two best pieces of advice where your name is awful and you need to get rid of that little bug. Yeah, still have that email. That went in the book. I really. He actually had a lot of really good ideas during that time.

You wanted to name at Reddit? Yes. Alexis wanted to name at Reddit. Had you, I mean, it's a great name. Oh, thank you. Yeah. You like it more than mm? Yes.

A little better than me. We couldn't afford SNU, which was the name we wanted, which was actually Paul's idea. The idea was people would ask, oh, what's snoo? And we'd say, exactly. It's what's new online. And so instead, Alexis was like, they'll say, what's Reddit? I hope people would say I read it on Reddit. Unfortunately, snoo.com cost $4,000, which we didn't have.

It was a third of our fund. So couldn't afford it. Named the mascot Snu instead. And then Reddit was available. Totally was free. So, R-A-D-D-I-T. And that and the mascot were my key contributions. Top my LinkedIn profile.

Yeah. So in that sort of those beginning, the beginning period of time, Steve, you were coding, you were doing that sort of tech side. The real work. And what were you doing? Were you handling this design? This was the running joke at Y Combinator because I was the only non-technical founder. And it was a very curious thing for all involved.

Aside from naming the company and drawing the mascot, I had the important responsibility of everything else that wasn't technical. From like ordering the pizza to, no, I'm serious. to like keeping the spreadsheet with all the receipts to haggling cell phone bills down. And, you know, it has to be an eagoless job as a founder because you just have to get this done. Because any time, anytime an engineer would spend doing something that's not like technical is a waste of time. And I like to think over the years proved my worth. But back then, that was a very common question. Very common question at YC.

And how did you get people to post stuff at the beginning? Funny you asked that. We cheated. So we had a special version of the submit page. So for most users, of which there was none, they would see title and URL. And so that's how they would submit. And to be fair, the submit pages actually changed very little since then.

And for Alexis and I, it was title, URL, and username. So you would put in the link you wanted to submit, and you'd make up a username and hit submit, and it would register that username if it didn't exist, or submit as that username if it did. And that's why the first 100 or so Reddit users were either characters from World of Warcraft or pieces of furniture in our living room. Not very creative. Both at level 60 that summer, though. It was the level cap and Warcraft back then.

So how did you get the word out? I mean, how did you actually get real users? Well, so Paul did that for us. He was like, hey, you guys need to launch, you need to launch, you need to launch. And I was like, okay, we're almost ready to launch. And then he wrote an essay where he linked to Reddit without telling us. I had my computer, and then I had a little screen next to it where I could see the error of things going by, and all of a sudden one day, it just starts growing really fast.

And I was just like, what is going on? And what happened is Paul just launched us. And so that's basically how it happened. So our first real users were actually Paul Graham fans, people who are reading his essays. And that kind of set the tone for the early days of Reddit. You'd have to be scrappy because right, in 05, there was no social networks to speak of. Facebook existed, but it wasn't beyond your college network. And we emailed every one of our friends. I remember two of them, Morgan and Connor, thank you, actually signed up and started using it.

But most people just didn't care. And you would just beg, try to beg bloggers to write about you. And I'll never forget, though, a changing way was the name of some random person's blog. And it was the first random person who ever took the time to write about Reddit. And I found this post years later. I mean, it took a little work with the way back machine. And if you look, it was some random typepad blog, right?

The first two comments are from you and me. I don't know if you remember this. But we actually left him a comment. I was just like, oh, thank you so much. This is so great. If you need anything, let us know. We're the co-founders. And it's in, especially in 05, it was a really isolating experience to put something out in the world

and feel like no one cared. And so the first time someone cared felt amazing. That's how I found this guy's website a decade later. was because there was enough of it still seared in my brain because someone cared and we reached out and thanked them for it. And this was old school just giving a damn to try to get anyone to write about us

or talk about us at all. Did you have a business model in your mind? I mean, you had $12,000 so like did you think, well, we'll eventually get advertising? Because there was, I mean, web advertising wasn't what it is today. It existed. It was not a priority for us.

We did have ads. We had some better ads. But did you have a sense of how you were going to make it sustainable? Not really. We weren't really thinking in those terms, to be honest. Because of the way we got into YC, we barely, I mean, we didn't even really think of ourselves as a business. This was more of an adventure we were on. We didn't have a target destination, a North Star mission we were building towards.

It was how do we, you know, get by every day with. without looking stupid in front of Paul Graham. And then once we, in August, a few months in, once we had real users, it became, let's just not let the users down. And that was our mentality for actually quite a while. After Paul Graham wrote that essay and linked to Reddit, is that the moment where it took off? No, no.

That was the moment when we started getting real traffic. It was in August is when we started getting real users. I remember that day. We used to, Alexis and I were submitting all the content, and we had a rule back then that all of the content on the front page had to be less than 24 hours old. And the front page was 25 links long. So if there were fewer than 25 links submitted that day, there would be fewer than 25 links on the front page, independent of quality.

And so sometimes we'd go to the site and there'd be like seven links there, and it would just be white space. And so I had taken a day off for whatever reason. In the late afternoon, I remember thinking, shoot, I haven't thought about Reddit all day. I bet the front page is completely dried up. It's completely blank. And when I checked, it was full of content from usernames that I'd never seen before. And so that was the day when we realized that this is a thing.

These are real users. We're not just propping it up with our fake accounts anymore. And that was a really special day. I still get really kind of excited when I think about it, because that's when our motivation changed, and that's when Reddit was really bored, I think. That summer that you guys launched in 2005, Alexis, your life kind of sort of went off the rails, right?

I mean, it's a pretty difficult summer for you. What was it going on? Well, two months after we launched, my girlfriend had a pretty serious accident falling out of a five-story window in Germany. I immediately flew out. She spent about four or five months, in a coma. And finally, thankfully, actually came out of it, came back to the States by December

that year and actually has made a near full recovery, which was remarkable. But it was a hard, that was hard to say the least. And a month later, my mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. And so, you know, you go from feeling invulnerable at 21 or 22 and start like just months into starting a business and, you know, feeling like you were going to take over the world. And then being really hit in the stomach and realizing, no, no, it's real life. And I knew at some point, I'd had an amazing life up in that point, very, very lucky. And I knew at some point the come up and this was going to come. I just didn't think it could happen all at once.

And I'll never forget the first meeting I had back with my mom. The first words out of her mouth were, I'm sorry. She felt so bad because she got cancer. That is the kind of woman she was that she was always thinking of me, of other people ahead of herself. And that in a lot of ways came to define my entire experience at her. It's still this day is imbued in what Reddit means to me because it is the best of her. I know that because of everything she gave me in confidence and motivation and support and unflinching love, that I could never fail, that Reddit could never really fail because she released me of any of that concern.

And so, you know, starting a startup sucks. It really sucks. But it ain't that bad compared to what you do if you're going through chemotherapy or you're like my father supporting. someone who is and it was, you know, a gift that I'm still grateful for because it keeps perspective on every trauma, everything that I face because nothing's really actually that bad. When we come back, why Alexis and Steve decided to sell Reddit and how it took a toll on their friendship. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Live, recorded in San Francisco. Hey, welcome back to this live edition of How I Built This Recorded in San Francisco. Francisco. So it's 2005 and Reddit has just launched and the site is growing really fast.

And so around this time, one of the founding partners of Y Combinator Jessica Livingston suggested that Alexis go to New York to help spread the word about Reddit. And one of the meetings on that visit would be life-changing. She said, just go down there, tell a couple people that you're in town on a press tour and see if they'll meet you. for coffee. And so I crashed on a friend's sofa and had meetings. And one of the meetings was a freelance reporter. And I thought I was pitching her for a story, but we actually kind of hit it off. And she ultimately was like, you know what? I don't feel like we should, I don't want to write a story because like, like, I think we're friends. Like, let's not make this a business thing. Like,

let's just stay in touch and be friends. And I was like, okay, cool, whatever. Like, I'm just here on a press tour. And, you know, I got a lot of stuff going on. So I got to go. And, I don't know. A few weeks later, I get an email from this guy named Koroche Karam Kani, who is the head of BD at Kande Nett, the digital arm of Kondaynast. And he explained to me that his wife, who was an editor at Wired, had heard from one of her writers, Rachel, the one I met, about this company called Reddit, and he wanted to have a quick phone call. And during that call, he basically pitched this idea of making a white label Reddit called Lipstick

as like a test sort of project. And then, you know, five months later, we're talking about acquisition. I mean, I think you glossed over the five months where I was the head moderator of lipstick.com. You were an expert. Expert at celebrity gossip, you know. So, I mean, it's pretty amazing. I mean, it's like a year and a half after you start Reddit, you sell it to Conday-Nast. or somewhere between $10 and $20 million.

So presumably... That is accurate. It's right, okay. So was that the reason where you guys, like, you were 22, 23, and you were thinking, cool, we can, like, walk away with a couple million bucks? Basically. Yeah. I mean, God, this was 16 months of work that was going to mean more money for me

than my entire family had made, my mother and father had made their entire lives. Like, are you kidding me? My mom at a GED. Like, this was not, this seemed like a joke. The best phone call of my life was calling her up saying, hey, mom, it was worth it. Like, all of that support, all of that everything, like, we did it. And that, I would never, ever trade that phone call.

That will be the greatest phone call for the rest of my life. So I regret from a business standpoint, yes, we sold it early, but I have no regret whatsoever as a decision because I got to make that phone call. And she lived to see that. So once that happened, you guys become employees of Condé Nast, I guess, right? Yep.

Yeah. Not in four times square, though. They didn't put us in the fancy cafeteria. So we, yeah, but that's where we worked. I'm right there on the corner in that organic building for three years. That was your commitment. You had to stay there for three years, and then you could do whatever it was you wanted to do.

That's right. And we both loved Reddit, but when our contracts ended, I can't speak for Alexis, but I left because I wanted to start another company that was involved in the exchange of money so that I wouldn't have to contrive a business model. Because on Reddit, we hadn't quite figured out ads, right?

It felt like we were swimming upstream. And I didn't realize how cool Reddit was. I thought, well, if you just build something, it'll just grow. That's how things go on the Internet. And I didn't realize that Reddit was so special that despite the fact that we didn't know what we were doing, and despite the fact that, like, at times we were very unproductive, it just grew. So once that time ended, you went and founded a new company, Hipmunk. Yes.

And Alexis... I went to the motherland. You went to Armenia, right? which is where your dad, your dad side of the family for a couple months. And were you just thinking I'm done with tech world? Like, I've finished? Ish, ish. I just wanted to unplug a bit.

And I felt really guilty because I had never been. And so I felt this tremendous guilt for not having this connection. And I had an amazing experience there and could just kind of hit reset. And then came back and I figured I was going to live in York for the rest of my days, helped draw a mascot for Hitmunk and Steve, but... And you kind of got involved a little bit with Hitmunk. Briefly. Yeah.

Yeah. And I do recall, actually, at this point, Alexis and I, by 2009, had lived together for eight years, from 2001 to 2009. And by time we left Reddit, we were not on the best of terms. Why? We hadn't... So we had been through a lot together,

and we had never really discussed it. We had never discussed our roles at Reddit. kind of the boundaries, who was responsible for what. We didn't really have a way of resolving disputes. And we didn't see a ton of each other. I moved to San Francisco right when we sold, but Alexis stayed on the East Coast to be with his family for about a year and a half. And so when our contracts expired, we just kind of said,

hey, you know, great, see you later. And left it that way. There was like unresolved tension. Yes. Yeah. Yes. I mean, look, there was a lot. that went on during that period, for sure.

But we never really exercise the muscles that founders have to exercise that best friends don't. And there are lots of founders, like it's great to be able to start a company with one of your best friends. But the conversations you have to have as co-founders are very different from the conversations

you have to have as friends. And we didn't have enough of the hard ones often enough, and it was just unresolved and festered. Like I don't think it was, I didn't feel animosity. but it was like neglect. And you kind of threw yourself into activism at that point, right? Yeah, I didn't want to see the internet get messed up.

I like spending time on it. I have a career because of it. And I was in the right place at the right time for Sopa and PIPA. Yeah. And I didn't have a job, so it was really helpful. Yeah. Can you talk a little about what that was about? I mean, you were super active in the Sopa campaign and net neutrality.

And what was it about at the time? Well-intentioned people, I think most of whom are well-intentioned in D.C. Writing bills for technology they don't really understand without people around them who are themselves technologists often lead to things like Sopa and PIPA. And those were two bills that were designed to stop copyright infringement that would have, in practice, basically broken the internet. One was a House bill, the latter was the Senate bill. And it was one of the best ways to ever get first exposed to D.C. because they told us all that it was going to be inevitable

when we got involved, and then maybe five or six months later, because of Americans picking up the phone and calling and the internet blacking out, they were unthinkable. Legislators were running from these bills, and it was a great demonstration of the power of people to actually affect change in D.C., which I didn't think was a thing. That's what you sort of dream of is how D.C. works, and I found a way to help.

And during the time, you were sort of full-on, at Hitmunk trying to get that company. Yeah, I mean, like starting any business, Hitmunk took all of my attention. Hitmunk, we should clarify it was a travel company. Yes, yes. So Hitmunk, we were in the glamorous business of slinging plane tickets and hotel reservations.

It's actually a lot of fun. We took a lot of pride on the work we were doing, and we built, I thought, a very nice product. And we always really enjoyed saving people time. But it was a brutal business. Travel is very cutthroat. We didn't realize that going in how difficult that would be. So that took a lot of our attention and stress during those years.

And you guys were just done with Reddit. You were not involved at that point at all. I eventually, Reddit was still wholly owned by Condonast at this point, but I was involved as a board member, but not in the day to day. And my day-to-nate connection died when we left. There were six of us, me, Alexis, Chris, David, Jeremy, and Mike. Chris and David came with me to Hitmunk eventually, and that was my last connection to Reddit, really. And so there was a time when I was at Hitmunk where I knew 0% of the people who worked at Reddit.

That was a little weird, to be honest. But also, my attention was so stuck in the Hitmunk, I didn't feel painful. It just kind of was what it was. In July of 2015, Reddit just goes nuts. It's just moderators start to shut down subreddits. What was going on? You were at Hit Monk. You're not at Reddit.

Did you like check out Reddit and start to notice crazy stuff happening? So Reddit, a couple of things were happening over the course of 2015. Reddit had just raised $50 million. And the CEO at that time, Yishon basically had a midlife crisis and left abruptly. And so Ellen Powell took over And Reddit went through a series of crises that year Mostly content related on the site The toxic users had kind of gotten out of control

And so it was just kind of one thing after another And Reddit was just getting killed in the press And everybody just feeling like, what's going on? And at the same time, Alexis and I were kind of repairing things. I don't remember exactly how it started. I know from my point of view, I just had this thought of like, hey, where's my best friend? It's just around that time, you thought, I think this was probably like February of 2015.

Of 2015. It was like, you know, what? And what you decided that you were just going to reach out? Yeah, basically. I think we had dinner. And, you know, we started this process of like what happened. At that point, you know, we'd grown up. It was five years since we had left out of.

It was five years since 2001 nine. And we just started kind of talking through things. We agreed, I remember that first dinner, that, hey, we're going to put some effort over this, just repairing our friendship. And we actually saw my therapist, saw him together. Did two of you went to therapy together? We did. When Steve pitched me on it, he was like, look, my therapist has a really good idea. Let's come together.

Wow. I was like, sure, okay. So we were actively kind of working out things, and so we were in more close and, closer contact. And then things on Reddit are really starting to go haywire. And they reached the boiling point in July of 2015. The moderators who control their communities, all the communities on Reddit, you know, the many thousands of them are created by users and run by users that we call moderators. And they were upset, you know, for some acute issues and also just like just general frustration. And so they took their communities down. And it's

effectively turned Reddit off for a couple of days. Alexis and I were talking and I was just like Alexis, who was closer to Reddit at the time on the board, I was just like, look, you've got to get the site online. Like, just whatever you've got to broker a piece to get this back online because we were very fortunate that our largest competitor for years, Dig,

made a blunder a few years prior and basically committed suicide. In front of the whole internet, Dick was five times bigger than us. They released a new version of their software that was so disliked by users that the users came to Reddit. And so that could happen was a very real fear of ours. And at the same time, every single person I know texted me and said, you've got to go back to Reddit. Wow.

And that's kind of what got the ball rolling. All this all happened against a backdrop of Ellen Powell's resignation. She was very public about the abuse that was heaped on her. She wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, basically saying the trolls won. Around that time, the Southern Poverty Law Center releases this report that says some of the most virulent and violent propaganda, and then it would describe racist and misogynist and anti-Semites. And you go back to this.

Yeah. And I remember my friends because I made the decision to go back at my buddy's 30th birthday. And you also decided to go back. Yeah, we both came back full time then. But like getting Steve installed as CEO was something that really only one person in the planet could do. And it was Steve. You know, I remember my friends were like, why do you run into that burning building? And it just felt like at the time,

I had no choice. I really, really loved Reddit. And part of me, it wasn't even kind of a CEO mentality. It was more of just like an engineer who knew how Reddit worked. And watching these trolls run rampant on Reddit, I remember just thinking, I know how to fix this. I too know the mind of a troll. And if you just give me access to the code, I can fix this. And that was kind of my feeling.

I know we can do this. And I don't want to see Reddit, you know, taken over by these people. I mean, is it possible to fully remove the racist and misogynists, the, you know, horribly, you know, just cruel people? I mean, can you do that? Well, look, anything is possible. But that's not the goal. What we want Reddit to be is, in many ways, a reflective.

of humanity. And humanity is not perfect. But what you get on Reddit is an authentic representation of what's going on in the world. And we believe that is very, very powerful. And the good news is what one of the things that Reddit has taught me is that people are fundamentally good. And that people in large numbers want to help each other. When you put people together in the right context, they will do really incredible things. And there's no reason why that needs to be undermined by a bunch of athletes. But doesn't mean assholes don't exist, but we can make the conversation more balanced. And that's really been our focus. Consider 300 million people will visit Reddit this month. That's almost as big as the population

in the United States. Yeah. And the vast, vast, vast majority of those interactions and engagements are not, they're never reported by another user. And they're actually either benign or actually good. But if anything, it shows us how much more we have in common with each other than a part. Because when you're on R-slash-skinned-care addiction, you don't know anything else about the hundreds of thousands of other people talking about their acne scars other than the fact that you have this shared issue. And whether it's about that or putting arms on birds, R-slash-birds with arms, you find out that you're not the only one who weirdly wants to. that put the Rock's arms on a parakeet.

And that's okay, because all people of all creeds should be able to come together and put Dwayne Johnson's arms on a parakeet. Do you not agree? Yeah. You look skeptical. Yeah, I think I agree, yeah.

Okay. Would someone on R-slash birds with arms put guys' arms on a bird? Please. You're welcome. You're welcome. Someone here is going to do it. Silicon Valley is a place where dreams come true, Guy.

I want to ask you about your personal lives because a lot of people want to know about you or Steve. Yeah. So, first of all... Ask him anything. Yeah, I'm going to ask you anything. Yeah, I mean, you know, do you have a personal life? Have you been able to...

Because you work so damn hard. I don't think somebody walks around wearing a sweater, a robot riding a dinosaur without making a few friends. Yeah, I've got a personal life. Thank you. Okay, great. And Alexis, you are... Incidentally, mine is a lot more boring. I'm very much a homebody.

And you're... Yeah, I have a fiancé who's way, way more impressive. Serena Williams, your partner, you are expecting a child. Congratulations. I'm so excited, a little baby. Thank you. How did that happen? Well, guy, when a man and a woman love each other.

Yes. How did we meet? Yeah. A couple years ago, I was hungover, overslept. I was actually at a conference that I really didn't. want to be at, but it was a good thing I went because I overslept and I needed coffee and they sent me outside to sit by the pool and there was a table next to me where I sat or where I sat and there were four people there and I had my headphones on and I was just working on my laptop

and then one of them, this Australian guy, goes, I might as a rat by all table. I was like, what? I was like, oh, dude, it's fine. Like I'm from Brooklyn. I see you all the time. Thank you, but it's okay. And little I know he was trying to get me to leave because they wanted that table for the rest of the team. And then the woman who was next to him turned around and was like, oh, you're really not scared of rats? And I was like, no. And she's like, oh, what are you doing here? And I was like, oh, I'm at this, you know, tech conference. And she's like, oh, you're here to see speak. And I was like, I'm speaking. And And then someone else at the table was like, oh, what are you talking about?

I was like, I'm talking about Reddit. She had no idea what Reddit was. Did you know who you were talking to? At this point, I was like 90% sure. But I literally never watched tennis. I didn't care for the sport. I'm being honest. I really did not care for the sport.

I want to jump in here with my favorite Serena story. Okay. Not something we talked about ahead of time, but let's just do it live. This is trust. So this was... This is trust. It was like one of my first days on the job with Alexis. We were there, and it was a Saturday.

It was during Wimbledon. So Wimbledon was streaming on a screen near us, so Alexis could watch, we could watch. And Alexis gets this text, and it's just like, wall-to-wall kissy emojis. And I was like, is that from Serena? and just then I look on the screen and Serena is coming out of the tunnel on her phone. We still will never know.

We'll never know. And you know, it's delayed by a couple seconds, right? And I was like, did I just watch Serena Williams send you a wall of kissy emojis? Didn't know he was going to say that. Wow. That's incredible. And he was like, yeah, bro. So you guys are back at Reddit.

you are running this thing. You just raised a bunch of money. I ask this question of everybody who comes in the show, and I want to ask both of you to answer it. How much of what you think happened to you professionally is because of your skill and your talent, and how much of it is because of luck? Somebody observed this that I thought was very smart,

and he said, success is the product of intelligence, hard work, and luck. And you can't have a zero in any of those columns. You know, we started an internet company in 2005 when this, the kind of web 2.0, this second wave of smarter funding and smarter people were coming into the ecosystem. You know, sometimes the wind blows your way. I'll tell you this. If I went back 10 years ago and knew everything I knew now and had to start Reddit all over again, I don't know if we could succeed. Right? It's just, It's a fickle thing, these social sites.

And it's really all about the users and what are they into. And it's hard to say if we could do it again all over, even with perfect knowledge. Alexis. I'm personally heavy on the luck side. I don't want to totally remove agency because it's a ton of work. But I like that. You can't have a zero in any of the columns. And it's so easy to look back on it and just think all the dots,

connected, but there were other forces at play that make it all work. Alexis O'Hanian, Steve Huffman, founders of Reddit. Thanks, guys. Thank you, guys. And if you're wondering if someone actually put my arms on a bird, they did. You can type my name into Reddit to see it, or you can go to our Twitter handle at How I Built This, where my team has kindly posted a photo of my arms attached to a parakeets body.

Hey, thanks for listening to this special live episode of How, How, I built this. It was recorded in front of a live audience at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This episode was produced by Rumpteen Arablewe, who also composed the music. Special thanks to Neva Grant, Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkampur, and Claire Breen. Our intern is Lawrence Wu. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to a special live episode of How I Built This from NPR.