All right, this was not supposed to be a podcast. This was me calling Sam two minutes ago and being like, dude, did you hear the stuff about Reddit? And he's like, no, no, no, no. He put the finger up to my lips. Push record. And in fact, me and Sam, we should really never talk if we're not recording. I think that's the new lesson. By the way, I still have no idea what you're gonna bring up. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like a day's old.
Okay, so let me give you the background. Reddit goes public today. Interesting, fine. I don't really care. I didn't participate in the stock or anything. I wasn't really looking at the chart. But I did read Paul Graham's essay about Reddit. And he's titled the Reddit. It's on the YC blog.
Paul Graham has known these guys for nearly 20 years now. And so he wrote this post today that had so many little breadcrumbs that I thought there were like as I was reading this every paragraph was firing off like a connection to a different lesson learned. Like my brain of frameworks was literally like lit up like a Christmas tree with some of the things he was saying.
And I just wanted to like say them out loud to you. I wanted to imagine you. I'm imagining you eating cereal as you're reading this. And then you have like one bite it and like you you just. This is my goal. My salad. Look, it's half eaten because I was like, I got to put this down. I got to record this. And so we didn't play in this, but let's do it. All right. So I'm reading this essay. And I want to give you kind of like point by point of what I think is really interesting.
And by the way, Paul Graham is the, I guess we have to give context now because this is like a podcast. Paul Graham is the founder of YCominator. And Reddit was one of the first companies. Reddit was the first company in the first batch. But actually what's more interesting is in that post. Reddit is not only the first YC company in the first batch ever. It's actually the reason that YC exists. I don't know if you do this, but this is kind of cool.
So Paul Graham in this essay, he says, YC started because he went to the Harvard like computer club or something like that and gave a talk. Which by the way, is how many interesting things have started. I also believe this is kind of how Apple started wasn't there like a. He gave a talk or a demo at the home brew club. This is how Tim Ferriss started the for a work week. He taught a class at Princeton.
And there's this principle, which is if you ever want to learn something, try to teach it. And that that has led to many people writing books. So Tim Ferriss did it. Then he wrote a book near I.L. Same thing when he wrote his book hooked. Same thing. He's like, I first was just giving a talk somewhere to give the talk. I had to sharpen up my thoughts by the end of that. I was like, shit, there's something to this. And the same thing happened here.
Paul Graham gave a talk at the school. It's called how to start a startup. He gives us talk. And then from the talk, he's like, dude, I should create like a vehicle to invest in like these earlier younger founders. He's like, at the time, founders were thought to be like either older or just super young prodigies. But he's like, I think this college student age. I think that's where you could start companies from. So that's why he creates YC. So he gives the talk.
He meets with Steve and Alex's afterwards and he's impressed by another thing. So the second interesting thing. He gave this talk at Harvard, day and go to Harvard. These guys go to school in Virginia. They took a train up from Virginia to hear this talk because they used to follow his blog. So Steve loved his blog. He convinces Alex is, hey, come with me to go see this guy talk. They go up there. It's not like a show. There's no tickets. It's like, you know, 30 person room.
And he's there. And so Paul was so impressed that these guys came from Virginia. He's like, they wanted to meet for coffee. He's like, okay, no problem. You guys came from such a far away. I'll do it. There's a principle there in the like 80% of success is just showing up or like when in doubt, like just go just take the train take the flight. Just show up. Put yourself in positions for good things to happen. And that's what they did. And it's a high agency move.
They could have easily a not gone, you know, showed up and not told them, but they went there. They took the train. They told them. And this is the first of many high agency moves that they pull. All right, quick ad break to tell you about our sponsor, HubSpot. I know that growing pains hurt. And when you're a startup sales team, you know that pain all too well. Thankfully, there's HubSpot for startups. It's a special program that gives discounts to use HubSpot.
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He talks about later how they actually ended up rejecting these guys from YC. So he gives the talk, decides to create YC reaches out to the guys like, hey guys, I was inspired by meeting you guys. I actually created something called YC for people just like you should fill out the application. They fill out the application, but he hates the idea. So he rejects them. Their idea was ordering fast food off your phone.
Door dash. But there was no smartphones. So there is no door dash. They basically had to go to cell phone carriers and fast food chains and like do it all manually so that you could do it like over text message. SMS back then. And you have to set the context even here about them showing up, which is Paul Graham's a big deal now. You know, Paul Graham funded Airbnb Dropbox, whatever.
He's a big deal back then. He had just sold a company for I think 30 or 40 million dollars, which was a big deal back then. And I guess he had some extra money and he was blogging, but he wasn't like a big deal. It was like a this was like a very like this is like the occur hackers for programmers who are entrepreneurial, which is almost like as ridiculous as when Twitch was coming up.
You're like people watch video games online. It's like this guy's just blogging about this type of internet stuff. That's not even that cool or interesting. It was very small market.
By the way, Twitch also in that first batch and Emmett best friends with Steve, the guy who created Reddit. All right. So anyways, more principles. So the first one is if you want to if you want to actually learn, try to teach giving a talk is actually a really good gateway into either books or companies or whatever.
If you can't articulate in a 45 minute talk a bunch of really insightful things that get other people excited. It probably won't work as a as a as a book or company and in reverse, even if you're not planning to do it, it's a great way to generate sharp ideas is to go try to teach a class.
Second thing taking the train showing up. All right. Great. Now here's the next one. Trusting your gut. So like I said, he's inspired by these guys. He creates YC because he meets these guys, but their idea he hates he hates the order food off your phone. He's like, that's too hard.
And he says at the time I didn't realize that the game I'm supposed to be doing is sort of betting on people not ideas I thought at that time I'm supposed to be betting on ideas and I hated their idea. So they rejected him. And he's like, you know, Jessica his wife who he credits as having like the best kind of like people detector.
Of anybody he knows she was like, Oh, you rejected the muffins. He's like muffins. And she's like, yeah, that's what I call those guys, Steve and Alexis. They're like so endearing. They're like a little poodle like you know, they're like a little puppy. You call the muffins. She's like, Oh, that's sad. I like the muffins. He's like, yeah, but I didn't like their idea. She's like, I feel like we should have the muffins in YC like they're they're the reason you created this. Why why would you not accept them. So he calls them back up. They're on the train right home to Virginia. And he says.
Guys, I want you to be in YC, but like we got to go on a fund you only if you're going to change your idea. And how much was funding with it $15,000? Yeah, like nothing. Yeah, so basically like a summer. Yeah, exactly. But it was the somebody believing you and you was the real currency there.
They're on the train right home from Virginia. They just get off at the next stop and then hop on the next train going back up north again. They like immediately sees the opportunity, which is another kind of like again, these were all like little breadcrumbs of successful things successful like successful action successful behaviors that it doesn't surprise me that a reddit comes out of something like this on his side. It was trusting his gut.
He wanted these guys involved. He should bet on people not ideas early on. And for them, it was being willing to hop off the train and just take the next train up north again. So he gets there. Now here's the next interesting idea. The some of the best ideas are found not thought of discovered not thought of. So Paul Graham had been blogging and his blog was not too big of a deal back then is is, you know, okay, not not what it is today.
But he noticed that a lot of his traffic to his blog was coming from a website called delicious. Do you remember delicious. Yeah, was it really a website or was it like a bookmark was like a bookmarking tool is a way to save the stuff you liked like bookmark for later for yourself.
But they had one little side feature called delicious dot com slash popular and slash popular was basically an aggregator of all like what is it what are the most popular bookmarked things that day. It was a side feature sort of a throwaway idea for them. But what Paul Graham notice was he's like, damn, I can actually a lot of traffic from the slash popular tab of delicious not the main product. It's the side product.
And so he took that he's like, guys, you need a new idea. Here's an idea. The delicious slash popular thing is cool. What if there was just a page that was like the front page of the internet. It's like what are all the most interesting links of the day that you should go check out. Just take the side thing and let's make it the main thing.
That's a pretty wild thing to think about because back then, so they started in 2005, which meant Google was only eight years old and AdWords was probably new. I don't remember when Facebook was started, but right around then like internet advertising. I guess was still pretty new.
Do they want to think about advertising they were just thinking what's a cool thing that should exist on the internet. What's a cool useful product. That same idea I heard again many years later when I met Ryan Hoover. Ryan Hoover was the founder of product. Most people don't know is before that he was he was blogging. And then I reached out to him and I was like, hey, I really want to hire you. I tried to hire him. He wanted to join my team was like.
He didn't pass the interview process for some whatever reason so they were like, we don't think he's got enough experience or something. I really liked Ryan. I was like, hey man, so sorry, like let's keep it touch. I feel like our paths are going to cross again. Three weeks later, he emails me about an idea. He's like, hey, maybe instead of a job, I should start something.
And he tells me he goes, I go, he goes, like you, I like to go to hacker news every morning. Back then, that was my routine. We both used to go to hacker news every morning. Still is. But my favorite tab is not the main page of hacker news. It's the side page, the show section where you can go. It's like a show and tell where you could show what you're building.
Because if you go to hacker news, you click show. It's only like links to cool products that people are just like, hey, I want to show you guys. I made this. I want to show you guys. I made this. He's like, what if there was something that was just the show tab? Let's make the side thing the main thing. And so that's what product and became and product and then became this sensation and Silicon Valley ends up selling the company for $20 million.
And you know, it was just this success for Ryan. And so this is like Reddit kind of had that same idea, that same thing where it took the side page of delicious. And so there's something to this, which is. One great place to discover ideas is look at your invoices or look at your PNL look at the cost section. I think that's one great place to find investments or ideas.
Another one is look at your traffic referrals. And if you ever notice referrals coming from someplace that's interesting. Another one is what's a side feature your favorite side feature of a different app that actually could be a standalone app in itself.
So there's something to that philosophy. One bit one quick story Scott Belsky. I talked to Scott Belsky Scott Belsky is a famous entrepreneur and investor. He told me that when he was in his early 20s, he had a website and he noticed that he was getting a lot of traffic from this brand new website called Pinterest.
And so he reached out to the founder of Pinterest and was like, Hey, what's this thing? Tell me about it. And he wasn't getting a lot of traffic like 100 people a day or something like pretty small. And the guy was like, Yeah, it's just this thing I'm working on. I'm going to raise a little bit of money on a $3 million valuation. Do want to invest. Scott goes like, Well, I only have like 50 grand in my name, but I guess I'll give you $15,000. And he did that went on to make probably $100 million.
And that same week, he started getting traffic from a website called stumble upon. And he goes and does the same thing. So he talks to the guy stumble upon that they're not raising, but he becomes friends with Garrett camp who goes on a couple years later to found Uber. And he invest in Uber as well. $15,000 also made something like $100 million because both times he was getting traffic from these brand new websites that he thought were interesting.
Exactly. That's what I was saying. These are breadcrumbs that it's not specific to the Reddit story. This is everywhere. And those are perfect, perfect examples of of the same, the same principle. It's kind of like the art of noticing. Like if you can notice, you know, where you're getting traffic or notice that, hmm, this keeps growing every month. You might find something earlier than everybody else. So that's another one.
All right, everyone, a quick break because I want to fill you in on a little experiment that I'm doing. I've got a new project. It's called money wise. It's a personal finance podcast for high network people or young people who are on their way to becoming a high network. When I made a little bit of money, I didn't even know how much money I should be spending each month, should be $10,000, $30,000, $50,000. And I didn't really have a lot of people to ask.
So I created a podcast called money wise because I wanted to figure out what are some of the things that people who have a lot of cash and who have a high net worth. What do they do with it? The first episode is with a friend of mine. He sold his company for $200 million when he was 31 years old. He gets super transparent about his monthly expenses, his portfolio, how it impacts his happiness, everything.
And so I want you guys to check it out. It's called money wise. That's one word you can find it on my Twitter bio. I'm the Sam par or you can just type in money wise on Apple Spotify and YouTube. All right, back to the pod. Hey, let's take a quick break to tell you about the HubSpot podcast network. If you like podcasts like this, you should check out some other cool podcast. One is called Business Made Simple. So it's by Donald Miller. And it's brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network.
And what he does is he makes it easy to take the mystery out of growing your business. There's an episode that you should check out called what you should put in a job description to get the perfect hire. And in this episode, Donald Miller looks at the whole hiring process and how important it is to emphasize both the positive attributes and the drawbacks to future candidates. And you'll learn why being self-aware as leader will help you avoid hiring disasters.
So check it out. You'll listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcast. All right, here's another principle that I found interesting. The name Reddit was not meant to be the name of the site. They wanted to call it snoo.com SNOO.
And today the Reddit mascot's name is snoo. And Reddit was kind of like their placeholder name for it. It was the working title and it was like, we're going to change when we actually launched this thing, we're going to change it. But like for now, this is snoo.com was too expensive.
So they couldn't afford it. And this is so common. Like we're so often wrong about names. Some people get really precious about names early on. But Paul Graham advised these guys to just like just pick a name that kind of like feels right works right for you right now. You can change it later if you need.
But also he urged them to ship it fast. He's like, I think we could build a fast version of this. And Reddit actually launched in three weeks after they went through the after they got admitted to YC, which is incredibly fast. And then from there, they just started iterating. That's awesome. That's amazing.
Next thing. Do you know how they got their early traction? Have you heard the story? It's a good one. Yeah, basically Steve Huffman and Alexis, I believe what they did is they just created a bunch of fake usernames and they just would submit constantly like different links to look like many people were participating because the way that a site like Reddit or any community works is you typically have like 99% of people going to view stuff and only 1% of people actually submitting stuff.
So they had to submit content in order to create supply. Exactly. Exactly. Nobody wants to be nobody wants to come into a dead room and just start dancing. Right. Like if you go to a nightclub, there's nobody on the dance floor. You're not going to go either.
So they had to fake it till they make it. Right. I think that's kind of the principle here was fake until you make it gone right. And this was they were the they were the users. I think they talked about like they created I think 30 different accounts.
And they would just not only submit the links for Reddit, but they within comment and they would comment as different personalities. And I think Steve talked once like he's like the first day I logged on and the comments under a link were not for me was like this. Hallelujah moment. It's like holy shit. We did it. We got enough of that critical mass that chicken and egg problem. We solved it. We got the ball rolling and importantly. They also set the culture. You did this. I thought really, really well when you launch trends. I got to see you launch trends from a idea.
To a three four five million a year rep recurring revenue product. And all it was was a Facebook group. And in that Facebook group. There was a research for 14 to the Facebook group. I think it was actually the main product. It was. And you were so damn active. And I was like, oh, this is how you build a community. Every day you would go in there and you'd be like, hey, what's up guys. I was just thinking about this interesting thing. I'm like, no, you the fuck you weren't.
You were like, you were like, I have to stoke this fire. Otherwise this fire is going to go out right now. And I used to write posts on other people's behalf. I don't know if you've ever if you did this at the time.
I think you asked me, you're like, hey, can you post this in the group? I'm like, did I ask you that? And then you could be face to this huge thing. And I was like, okay, I guess that's well written. So like sure. So you got us. You were basically our fake accounts. Yeah. And I got I couldn't remember if this was pre MFM days. So if this was pre Sean being famous.
And I would like get other popular people and write on their behalf and be like, hey, just post this. And yeah, it worked out really well. Hey, can you go comment like your message 40 of us, he'd like, please go comment on this thing. This baller just joined and I want this to feel really active for him.
Like I want him to I want him to feel overwhelmed. I'm like, okay, what do you want me to say? You're like, say this. And I went and I would go comment that. And then that guy would be like, wow, what a community. This is fantastic. And like that first impression was so good because of that. That's what the reddit guys did. And I found by the way, you have to do that. I have I've had to do that in that case to about 2000 people with Hampton. I only had to do it to about 300 people.
And so the numbers that you actually have to do that for like the new members or whatever the community is a website visitors. It's actually not that high. Do those numbers sound so high? You did it for 2000 members. That's crazy. I don't remember exactly, but that doesn't see. But now trends, I think had 20,000 members. But I remember it was sort of like the first 150 days. Yeah, you were you were tending to that fire. You would not let it just go out.
Yeah. So it was only about six months that I had to do that. What's the other point? All right. Next one. Okay. Talent filters. So one thing Paul Graham says he goes that the reason Steve showed up at that talk was because he followed my blog, which was about Lisp. Lisp is this like obscure programming language that I think Paul Graham created. If not created popularize, but I think he created it. And he's like to think about Lisp is.
He goes it's one of those languages that few people will learn except out of your own intellectual curiosity, meaning it's like. It's not you don't learn it to get rich or to get famous or any of those things. If you go through the right of passage of learning this thing and being interested in it. You are just wired a certain way and you are somebody who pursues your intellectual like your intellectual interest and pursuits.
It's like I guess pretty elegant. If you do code and Lisp, it's like really elegant in certain ways. But again, it's like cursive or calligraphy. It's like you don't need to learn calligraphy. But if you do, you probably have like eye for design, right? The Steve job thing. Right. Sure. So same sort of thing. So he's like. So that could be kind of interested that there are probably like a dozen things that I can think of that are like this.
Amazing talent filters. We talked last week about that startup cognition that came out and raised a bunch of money and they have this like AI software programmer that's like, you know, better than chat GPT that writing code. And that guy was like in the math Olympiad, right? He was like his sport when we were playing basketball and soccer and stuff like that.
He was like, you know, sitting there at a on a stage, buzzing in and answering like really hard math questions or the spelling bee. It's like things that you do. If you can become obsessed and degenerate degenerately obsessed about certain things. You're wired a certain way and you are almost like predisposed to success. Then, you know, it's like all I got to introduce you to the idea of the stock market. Trust me.
All you're like fucking world of warcraft grinding is going to apply really, really well over here. You just have to get exposed at the right time. Here's a list poker. Yeah. Board games. Yes. It sports specifically individual sports. So if your world class like an into like a swimming track of field cycling, wrestling, those types of things.
All right. The video games one is obvious. Let me give you a wild card magic. I'm not talking about like cards, but like tada like that type of magic every 12 year old boy. I don't know any 12 year old boys who did not think magic was the shit and bought a magic set for sure. If you could trick me on levitating or make a coin come out of my ear, like that took a lot of hard work. I'm going to do it.
eBay flipping was another one back in the day like you know sneaker flipping and eBay flipping was definitely another one. Being a moron and going on a mission. Another one. Right. Being from the countries, the Ukraine, like a war torn country that you have escaped from great filter.
Right. There's like, there's a bunch of these. All right. Next one. One of one of the best principles my, my trainer and coach taught me was that the best products are simply you pushed out. That's why I feel about this podcast. This podcast is just me pushed out to the world. And for whoever likes me, they're going to like this podcast. And it's going to feel very second nature to me to create this podcast. Because it's just me. And so.
Program says almost the same principle without he doesn't have that catchphrase, but he has the same thing about about Reddit. He goes. Reddit is Reddit was successful because Steve has two things. Number one, he likes ideas for the sake of ideas. Like he likes ideas just for the sake of interestingness, which is really what red it is. Like you go to Reddit, not because it's the top news story, but because it's like mildly interesting or it's fascinating in some obscure way.
And that's what makes Reddit really, really special. And that's the type of stuff that Steve really, really likes. And so naturally in that direction, which is like not obvious actually like I think the obvious if you were like writing a business plan, you would have made Reddit a lot more like, I don't know, the homepage of CNN today, right. The important stories, rather than the quirky interesting stories that are only just they scratch your intellectual itch and nothing really else.
Dude, that's kind of a weird way to say the product is just pushed out of you. Like just a jack-o-lated straight-up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just got to squeeze really hard, grunt a little bit and pop it just going to be pushed right out of you. You're going to make your any and outie. All right. That's all you're really doing when it comes to entrepreneurship. All right.
I like you. All right. The next one that he says there, he goes the other thing about Steve, he has that. But then the second thing is he has a very anti-authority streak. So he liked the idea of creating a website that didn't have editors because at the time in the internet, all websites that were like editorial news, link submissions, they had this like small class of like the gatekeepers who decided what's in and what's out.
Reddit does not work that way. Over time, they have like a self-democratic mod thing. But there is no person at the company who decides what gets posted, what gets featured, what gets shown. And he's like those two factors are just like inherent in Steve himself. And so of course the product is an extension of the founder.
That I mean, yeah, that's pretty amazing. I think what's his name Jason Fried has had a big part of that in his podcast where he talks about being crazy or early on because if you start a little bit crazy, a little wacky, a little weird later on, things inevitably become more tightwired or conservative.
And so it's best to do it early on to establish that. And I thought that I've always felt that. But I didn't I wasn't articulate enough to phrase it in such a wonderful way. And that actually is a beautiful way of thinking. And exactly that way the mascot is this like goofy alien creature, right? And it's like, first of all, you don't have to have a mascot. You can have a logo without a mascot.
But he has like this alien mascot, but it's like the weird shit got baked in early. Once this thing got big, the idea of like, hey, we're going to introduce this new alien mascot. It'd be like, well, I don't know the number support that to the focus groups support that is just going to risk the traffic, blah, blah, blah. It's important that the weirdness gets baked in early.
I shared an office at third and Bryant in downtown San Francisco with Reddit when they were 13 employees, like shared an office building. They were on floor three. I was on floor four. And I used to get into the elevator. And if I would like, I was such a fan of Reddit. I was like, if I meet someone from Reddit in this elevator, I'm going to ask for like a picture with them. This is a big deal.
And you would see these guys wearing the reddit backpacks and sweatshirts. And I'm just thinking like, these are my heroes. And then it's just like this nerdy Asian guy with like a crappy mustache who's like five three getting the elevator. The book bag was like weighing him back and like, he's going to fall over and I'm like, sir, it is an honor.
I just remember thinking like, can you sign here just lifting up my shirt and asking if you could like sign on my chest? I was like, the tide has turned. I'm not exactly like a like a Jack alpha looking guy, but compared to this guy, I was and yeah, I'm like begging him like, please have mercy. Well, here's another good one. Alexis are handing tweeted this out today. It was a screenshot of an email he got from Chris Saka. And you know this is early on because his name is Christopher Saka.
Not Chris. He was still Christopher back then. And his email was like, he's still at Google. He was working at Google. So emails them out of the blue and Alexis tweeted out. He goes, shout out to Saka for being the first person before my mom, before our investors, before anybody else who saw what.
How big and successful Reddit could become. And here's what the email says. It just starts off. There's no high no hello. It just goes someday folks will be pleading with their hosting companies because they're being reddit or something like that. You guys are driving a surprising amount of traffic to my site. I wonder what site it was. He's working at Google at the time. I think he literally was just calling Google his site, which is legendary.
Yeah, and the whole email so far is lower caps. There's not one. Low case high is how you start to paragraph three, by the way. Anyways, he goes, anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you guy. Not only were you both impressive technologists. You both seem like well rounded guys with senses of humor. And I love this. He goes, humor should never be underestimated. All right. There's a wisdom in that, bro. We can say that for a long time.
That's awesome. How how does Chris in this email you think? I mean, he's not like a he's not a big wake yet. 25 is my guess. He's 48 now. And this is 24 years ago. So he's 24 years old. What Chris Sacco was 24 when he wrote this email. Right. No, sorry 20 years ago. So maybe he's 28 sorry 28. That's still like this is like a pretty baller email at a young age. All right. Go ahead.
So he's 28 years old. And he says, I would be thrilled to have you come visit us at the Google. Oh, all right. You lost me there. That was a stick. Yeah. Luckily, you've right you've racked up a bunch of points in our. Yeah, definitely took a hit. And then it's like, you know, come come. Then he goes, this is the best part, dude. I didn't even see this the first time. Here's the email ends. He goes, we can grab lunch sometime and it's
going to show you to some Googlers cool question mark. The next line cool period. God, I hope my emails never leak because I do shit like this all the time that is so just so bad and so great at the same time. That's all right. Again, he's got so many cool points that he could be deducted a few douche points and he's still way up on top. Like this is better than just being like, you're welcome in advance. Yeah, Chris sack of the type of guy to like introduce himself and say, please to meet me.
This is awesome. And then one more thing you have on here, Sam Altman owns 8%, which is like a billion dollars today. Before we even get to that, Reddit sold the company. So Reddit has had a ton of drama. I forget the guy's name. His name was Aaron something. So basically, yeah, Aaron Schwartz. So basically, if I remember correctly during YC that three month period, there was another guy named Aaron who was pretty brilliant.
And he got in trouble or rather before that his company wasn't working. So they merged with Reddit. So he kind of became a co founder of Reddit. A few years into the business. I think he got in trouble for doing something that is like a lot of people protest against, but basically he stole information from MIT. I think it was and they were going to lock him up for like 20 years. We just I think he basically gave access to I think scientific journals and I think it was J store.
Yeah, so I mean, yes, he's stealing. Yeah, stealing. That's the right word. According to the government, it was stealing according to him. And I'm on his side. It was like this information deserves to be free. Whatever. And he was going to get locked up for like years and he ended up killing himself. And this along with a bunch of other drama. They had a bunch of like drama early on. And in fact, they sold the company to Kandai Nass. I forget for how much.
So here's the thread. So Alexis tweeted this out the other day, which was which was cool because not the other day. Four years ago, time flies. He talks about selling it in 2006. So they started to have five basic sold it in 2006. So here's what he says. So he goes, Halloween is a surreal holiday because on Halloween, we sold Reddit to Kandai Nass, which was like not a tech company. It's like a big magazine publisher.
He goes, basically it was 16 months of work. I would be getting more money than my parents had made their entire working lives. And there were lots of things about management team building, whatever that I just didn't know and I would need to know. He said his mom was ill and he's like, basically, it was a $10 million exit. And he goes, I didn't know there were other options like raising money or doing other things. So we just kind of sold.
I think he said previously they each walked to Steve and Alexis walked away with $2 million. And then they ended up buying it back or getting Kandai Nass to spin it out and then ended up buying it back, essentially. Yes. And when they did that, they eventually raised money of which Sam Altman is credited with now owning 8% of the company. And Sam Altman, so Reddit has gone through all types of drama where like a CEO was fired and then a week later another CEO was fired.
Sam Altman was intermittent CEO for one day. He was fasting? Yeah. Interrupt CEO. He was the fast at CEO. Sorry, interim. And he was the CEO because he was in one of their investors and his fund owns 8%. I don't think Sam Altman owns 8%. I think he owns a percentage of the 8%, which now today is worth something like a billion plus. Right. Right. That's right. As if that guy, you know, I'm glad Altman has finally gotten a win under his belt.
You know, like he's been at it. That poor kid. God bless him. Yeah. Exactly. Other remarkable things. And not only did they sell too early, but they got a second ride back on the train. This is also 19 years in the making. I could take a long time. And by the way, the company is still not profitable. Like there's so many just crazy kind of mind bending things that if you're not from the Silicon Valley world, like none of this computes.
I think Reddit is the whatever, like the fourth biggest social network in the world or something like that. Well, I think it's like the 10th most visited website in the country, which is funny because if you go to like quote a normal person and be like, hey, do you use it? And they're like, either what's Reddit or no, I don't know how you know, use Reddit. Use all of Reddit. Use a lot of Reddit. There's a lot of Reddit going on for people who are users.
Reddit's my life. It's basically hacker news and Reddit is in Twitter. Those three things are just how I get information. They think they have like 75 million DAU or something like that. Anyways, they it's crazy that after 19 years is still not profitable. But everybody who built it made a lot of money. Have you advertised on Reddit? Dude, there's like no button. I remember trying to advertise five years ago. I remember being like, we should run Reddit ads. This is a great market.
And I went through like a three hour process and I was like, oh, I guess it's impossible to advertise on Reddit. I have to like send a telegram to somebody if I want to advertise on here. Now it's much better. But I've advertised a little bit on Reddit. And this was like five years ago. And it's like, so that feeling that Steve has of fuck authority, the users have that which doesn't exactly make it the most advertising friendly audience.
And I've advertised on their cheap. Very clicks were very cheap. Results very bad. They did not buy whatever I was selling. That's the slogan clicks cheap. That's terrible. Yeah. Join us. You do the math. All right. Well, that's sick. This was a good phone call. Are you ready to hang up on me now? Yeah. All right. I'm going to go now. Bye. All right. That's the call.