those things happening on Reddit I thought were uh bad for business bad for morale and bad for the world and so that's when we had to start wrestling with hard decisions we couldn't say hey just everything goes I was watching it die like we were there watching it eat itself this was 2015 Steve Huffman one of reddit's co-founders had just returned as CEO after watching the site he built from scratch struggle to survive when I came back to the company um employees they wouldn't wear our swag in public but then I would ask them I
was like okay if this is so difficult for you why are you here like why do you work here and they'd say because I love Reddit because I love what it does for people because I know that 99% of Reddit is amazing and there's nothing else like it and Reddit has changed my life and that's what I'm fighting to protect I was like great then let's protect that and so that's what we got to work on Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit with his college roommate when he was just 21 years old in the nearly two decades
since he and the site have both grown up a lot earlier this year Reddit often referred to as the front page of the internet had its IPO it was valued at $6.5 billion I'm Reed Hoffman your host I was eager to talk to Steve Huffman about reddit's unconventional business but first I wanted to talk to him about the scale of reddit's impact on our digital culture Steve I've been I've been looking forward to this for months welcome to master of scale thank you um excited and honored to be here you know how do you think
about uh reddit's role in the online ecosystem and what are the things that it's for and is an essential part of and part of the internet Treasure of and what is it not for the saying I say a lot is that like Reddit is people and and so the idea of Reddit is that it both reveals people uh and empowers people and that was one of the important ideas that was in our mind you know back in 2005 when we started Reddit and it's still one of the ideas we we come back to often you
know we start from a principle of uh free expression or free speech um but there's I think also a there's a parallel principle which I think is really important which is this kind of idea of like decorum right how are you speaking how are you treating others um separating um you know behavior and beliefs and so we try to spend a lot more time on Behavior Uh than we do on beliefs and so that gets us into our content policy so when we started 2005 there basically was no content policy um you know we thought
anything everything should be allowed like who are we to say what's not allowed um easy to take a position like that when when you know this really wasn't any bad behavior on the platform you know maybe some spam here or there but we just didn't have difficult decisions to make now our our policy is much more robust uh and constantly evolving so no hate harassment bullying no spam nothing illegal no inciting or glorifying violence uh no involuntary sexualization nothing involving kids um there's a lot of kind of sub rules and and and things like that
but we've um I think had to adapt as we look at like how are people using the platform maybe in ways we didn't intend and adapting that while still trying to preserve the core idea that people should be able to converse and debate and argue and talk about more or less whatever they'd like I think you know probably the most common brand for internet discourse is it's uncivil um you know that there's a lot of polarization you know hate speech Etc what are the things you do to try to encourage the the kind of the
positive aspirations of human discourse okay it's a great question uh and I think I have a couple ways of thinking about it so first is the general way when we think about people and how people behave when two people uh are together in person they generally get along even the far left and the far right like to to take Extremes in the United States right now um chances are in their day-to-day life the vast majority of what they're going through or would talk about they have in common right maybe their parents maybe they're sports fans
maybe they watch the same TV shows or movies and so that's just one I think just fact it's like people generally get along when they're together in person on Reddit every conversation you have is in the context of a community um you're not just yelling Into The Ether uh communities have rules they have written rules they have Unwritten rules so this kind of idea of decorum there's a social pressure to behave according to the rules of that Community right if you don't you'll be down voted uh and and you'll you'll be silenced by your peers
which by the way getting feedback from your peers like that is way more powerful than getting feedback from you know the company or the man um right when your friends tell you hey you're being rude that's very different from your parents telling you being rude or you know the government right what things would you kind of suggest is is is things to do to kind of improve you know kind of online interaction culture I think a lot of it comes down to incentives and so if if you look at the incentives of social media a
lot of it is about there's there's a strong kind of there's a strong attachment to your real world identity and status and so people are saying things I think not necessarily because they believe them but because they want to be perceived as believing them in the real world and they want to be accepted by other people who they perceive to believe these things and so there's a there's a kind of a Showmanship or performative aspect to it and I think what what happens is there's this kind of drift to the extremes right at has the
up vote um Reddit also has the down vote and so that's where Community can reject uh reject behaviors um or whatever they don't like I think this is really powerful because if you're extreme or polarizing chances are you'll get just as many Downs as you do UPS and so it kind of cancels out whereas I think Elsewhere on the internet you just get a lot of UPS because it's it can be you know more attention grabbing or emotional or whatever and so on the the controversial stuff sits at zero points right UPS minus downs and
so I think there's a a we get a kind of a better outcome there it's humans behaving more humanly and I think that's really powerful the only thing they get is a little bit of karma on Reddit um which you know I guess is worth more than zero but you know you're not going to you can't take it with you so you know a CEO what do you look at as like a dashboard for you know what's going on with Reddit I mean obviously there's questions around uh you know revenue and engagement lot kind of
stuff and you know that's interesting too but I was kind of I'm curious if there's anything else that's kind of very Redi is about your dashboard oh that's interesting so look there are dashboards with you know uh revenue and users and of course there's another layer of metrics that uh that we really care about uh you know number of advertis number of advertisers from this companies and retention you know customer retention and new user retention all these things um but For Better or For Worse I use the Reddit app a lot and so uh I
I for been working on Reddit for 19 years a lot of how I think about Reddit it comes not from the numbers but from the feel of using the app my intuition is constantly being refined uh and that's what I take to the team it's like hey I think I see an issue here um and so I'd say in in from a kind of product development point of view I think we went through a phase at Reddit which I think a lot of startups go through where they actually put their intuition aside and they only
look at numbers I think it's really hard if not impossible to run any company or system from a spreadsheet and I think there's a little bit of this kind of false uh uh ideal about well we're going to be so scientific and disciplined and you know ex um you know put metrics on everything um and test everything but you you you lose some of the most important information which is like is it working is it good how does it feel like do I enjoy this do I see other people enjoying it um and so for
the last couple of years I've actually been working really hard to give the team permission to listen to their gut more that's been a real uh honestly I think the company's getting much better at it but that has been a real um you know piece of work over the last couple of years no I couldn't I couldn't agree more that it's kind of a combination of it's kind of like combination Art and Science combination of intuition and data you know and and hitting both is is what's actually in fact very important right looking solely at
data I think at best you can optimize to a local maximum to do something new you have to have some vision for the future and then you have to take a few swings at it of course you'll be wrong uh along the way um but to get there you have to make a few leaps um now now and then there's the other side of that which is you do want to test your intuition and see okay I have this belief uh this hypothesis if we build this it this way users will like it and so
we build it and then you have to wait a little bit to see do they like it and there's a really important step I think in there which is do I like it um and I know we've built stuff that Reddit over the years where we didn't like it and but we pressed on and so like for example we used to be very aggressive on mobile web when you come from search external search about getting you to like log in and it's like yeah I made the numbers work but we all hated it and then
our users hated it even our investors hated it uh and so it didn't pass the first test which is like we didn't like it how do we build better towards a shared context where we have increased trust in you know information in you know kind of like you know what is the state of the world what is something we should you know can you know build Bridges versus polarization what do you what do you think the the the the techniques we should do to try to build in that direction the mistake I think we continue
to make is at at at kind of all different levels um I see people do it I see companies do it I see the media do it I see government do it is they keep trying to take more control I don't like what people are saying or I don't like what I'm hearing or I don't like the way this conversation is going therefore I need to take more control hold on even tighter um and I I I think the solution is um to to to resist that urge um because that control that manicuring the message
that kind of pushing people into the desired outcome is what creates that sense of distrust that sense of I am being manipulated I am being controlled I am being constrained you know I'm thinking around the discourse that's had around you know vaccines which you know frequently got idiotic um you know or things you know some some online discourse you know q and on Etc what are the things you think are are key for making those approaches that still that do that don't aren't exerting control but are building trust and shared reality transparency um I think
we in that era and honestly we still do I think like we lacked transparency I think broadly I think for a leader to be credible they have to share the bad news along with the good news um because anytime somebody is telling you only good news um you know there's something missing because there's always trade-offs and I think as a general rule of thumb the more kind of uh emotional they are the more suspect the message should be but I I I sense there's always this fear and this is one of the things that drives
me nuts is this distrust of people like oh people can't handle the truth that creates more distrust yeah I know you have to give trust in order to get it um which that that structure of that sentence I think is really important you have to give trust to get it you have to if you want people to behave like adults you have to treat them like adults yeah if you want to have good friends you have to be a good friend that that sentence structure is just as as I just clued onto it because it's
just one of the things I use a lot in my day-to-day life Reddit is not a generative AI company but reddit's name does come up a lot in conversations about the business of AI That's because it's such a rich and dynamic Trove of data so many human interactions that could be used to train large language models and indeed Reddit has struck deals with with Google and open AI so I wanted to talk to Steve about both the opportunities and threats to his business from generative AI at the minimum I think we can all agree large
language models uh are incredible at text and words I think llms across the board um are going to revolutionize and hopefully reduce the amount of time we spend doing this kind of drudgery like word processing so I think a tremendous amount of opportunity there the other interesting Dynamic with Reddit is of course our Corpus has been used as a training set for all of the major llms um uh we're getting closer to the with our permission part um that's been a been a little bit of a journey but I'd say taking the business relationships out
of it um or the you know IP conversation out of it I'm very proud that Reddit has played a role in the development of these Technologies you know that's that's part of our validation of our belief in the open internet which is we'd like these things to be accessible and and and use to uh Advance the state-ofthe-art so that part is interesting now of course the part that I think is General across uh IP holders we can't give it away for free um because that undermines the the IP creation incentives the IP creation business um
so whether you're talking about content on Reddit or uh newspapers or books or music or movies um there's a lot of human thought and work went into the creation of that IP and AI one of the things we've learned with these models is they need to be continually training kind of absorbing new human intelligence right you can't have artificial intelligence without human intelligence and so I think practically there's a there's an ecosystem there's a balance here that's really important which is if the human intelligence isn't compensated fairly then the AI will eventually lose access to
it it'll dry up there'll be no incentive to create new art music words whatever it is and so I do think there needs to be a a a balance there that I guess that's a big picture small picture or much easier to explain which is hey you're building these huge for-profit companies you are enriching yourself in what world is it fair to basically take or steal resources for somebody from somebody else to enrich yourself with no compensation and so that uh is an issue and I think that's probably those those two aspects of are are
you eliminating human creativity and are you uh committing like business malpractice by just taking all of the content you can find without permission and using it to to enrich yourselves um now now there's another aspect of it for Reddit which is let's say we answer the the the business questions which we have with a couple of folks you know go Google and open AI being uh the two big ones um we still have other constraints which is um you know protecting user privacy uh right deletions right you can delete stuff off of Reddit um you
know we want to make sure those requests are forwarded on um we don't want uh any company to use Reddit content um to reverse engineer the identity of our users or to use it to better Target ads against them that's not what we're trying to do so again that's kind of like the business thing which is like can you use Reddit data to you know make search engines better make search experience better um but continue for example to send traffic to Reddit um which has been the balance or kind of the relationship between us and
search engines for a very long time so you know I think we're getting there um certainly I've gotten there with a couple um and I think we're in a good place um and we'll kind of see where things you know land with everybody else all right so let's let's go to the the Reddit scale story um let's start with the origin story so uh Alexis my co-founder uh college roommate at the time he and I applied to y combinator y combinator is an incubator for startups that's been the starting point for many successful companies this
was in the first this was the first batch of like combinator in 2005 we applied with a different idea uh it was ordering food from cell phones um a good idea I think would we have made it successful probably not uh we're probably a little ahead of our times and probably a little ahead of our skills um but Paul and Jessica so Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston at y combinator liked us so after rejecting us on the food idea they basically invited us back to work on something else and so uh Paul had half this
idea which is he really liked delicious um delicious was a website just a website back then uh social bookmarking um and he liked the dynamic there's this kind of side effect on delicious where if people are bookmarking the same uh page over and over you could uh see what were the most popular things bookmark on delicious it's called delicious/ poopular and then I had the other half of the idea which was Slash do I loved slot SL do still around slashdot.org um it was kind of headlines on the surface um chosen by editors though um
but what was really amazing about Slash was the community that existed in the comments about any particular headline and slash dos constrained to Tech what if it there was no editors and it wasn't constrained to Tech and so it's kind of a delicious plus slash dot but make both of them better that was the idea for Reddit um honestly I think we I mean that's pretty much what we built but for 19 years we've been iterating on this and tweaking it and kind of following our users and and and adding features like for example the
most important feature we ever built was for users to create their own communities we didn't build that until 2008 you know almost three years later there was a sale to kast what what happened there kast uh or advance advance is is really the parot company I I'll use those words interchangeably when they came along wanting to buy Reddit you know there they're kind of scratching a couple itches one was I felt like it well that's fulfilling the prophecy like that was what supposed to happen we build this thing and now we get to sell it
um and then two like we are a really small team in that era and I mean that's was all I could do to keep the site outline it felt like the bottom could fall out any minute now that was incorrect uh I just didn't know what product Market fit looked like um the fact that this thing was growing despite us hanging on by our fingernails so the thing was actually probably far more powerful than I realized but I was like well we better you know find find safety um you know before we run out of
a Runway here that that said look Advance were really great owners um they didn't they never really meddled um the the powers that be at Advance who did the acquisition who are still involved with Reddit today like they love Reddit and so um you know we got to continue working on Reddit um continue to evolve it continue to evolve it kind of following our own intuition um I and uh Alexis um and some others would end up leaving uh when our acquisition contracts expired um but kany and asked were great stewards of Reddit and then
they eventually realized that Reddit needs to be independent so they spun it out um and so you know all things considered I think this I mean I how can I say different at this from where I'm sitting today things worked out really well um but uh I think as with many decisions we were very much living kind of in the present in that era so you know as part of the kind of the the Steve narrative Hero Journey you know you you kind of covered a little bit of why you left um what's the return
look like I left I left because I wanted to run my own company and so I no longer owned Reddit I was an employee so I started a different company hitmon uh with another friend Adam Goldstein fun company fun product bad business chipmunk was a travel Focus Search tool Steve started in 2010 was a great product by the way you know uh if we if we had just built that product we built the product in a summer we had just built that product and run it as a small company and then maybe sold that or
licensed that that would have been a good business yeah instead you know raised a bunch of money raised a bunch more money this and that anyway um lessons learned it's hard to be small in Silicon Valley um so while I was gone like I still used Reddit every day still thought about Reddit uh could never turn that part of my brain off um Reddit spun out became independent but also started going through crises and what I later learned when I came back is the strategy at Reddit was don't change anything but I mean I can
see from the outside it's like reddit's got to change a few things right they definitely need a Content policy we've got these troll subreddits who are just wreaking havoc um and the product's not evolving uh and so you know ultimately I came back to the company with a mission to help Reddit live up to its potential are there any kind of set of principles that or ways of thinking about that or what the lessons of scale were there oh gosh um so look I could start with quickly you know what didn't change we believed in
community we still do we believe in the agency uh of people we are aspirational about people um we believe we should follow our users right they create the content they rank the content they create the subreddits um they self-organize uh they set the tone um but then we also learned um right whether uh but you can't just completely you can't sit on your hands um you know I talk about Free Speech as the founding principle of this country um and for a country it's essential democracy cannot exist without free speech um and I think that's
a great place to start right a lot of our thinking about how Reddit works again we go to the real world and so a lot of things we look at we look at uh two democracies in particular the Democracy in the US and federalism right is another important aspect of like we have we have our rules um uh but the subat have their own rules um and so separation of powers all these things um but then there's other like one of the big learnings is we are not a country um you know we are a
community platform and we're also a business this is a place that people have to want to be you don't you know by and large you don't choose where you live on earth um but you can choose chose whether to be on Reddit or not U versus something else um and then you can choose whether to work at Reddit or work somewhere else and so this kind of comes back to the idea of decorum what do we want Reddit to be used for or what do we want Reddit to be not used for um do we
want to be proud of our work do we want to be proud of the the role that Reddit plays in the RO world and what it does for people and so I think this bringing some of that common sense and practicality and Humanity into the company was kind of really important in this kind of more modern era of Reddit since we're on kind of the story of Reddit to scale so you know initial public offering um you know that's that's obviously huge step um how has that changed uh anything at Reddit how you operate or
how you present or anything else and how are things going well um so we went out in March we've had two quarters two good quarters I think if you ask me um so you know ask me again if we have a bad quarter right now I feel pretty good um the thing is though we didn't just go out in March we thought we were going to go out in April 2022 um we didn't because the you know world and Market really changed in that era would have made it very difficult but since April 2022 we've
been running the company as a public company so close the books fast you know no mistakes do our board meeting do earnings calls with the public company analysts um they just weren't public but we were able to kind of just just get into that Rhythm um and so by the time we actually got out earlier this year I think we were really well practiced probably more so than the average I I know for sure more so than the average company who IPOs um we got really lucky U but now when I talk to any CEO
who's thinking about going public I tell them start doing earnings calls like now like just get into that Rhythm um learn like what data you can and can't share internally and on what timeline and there there's just a there just kind of a little bit of way of working and you know get your costs in order um you know level up the discipline all these things and so we did all those and so uh the company is immeasurably better than we were two years ago just so much more disciplined execution is as good as it's
ever been we've been able to grow revenue and users basically without growing the team size um uh which basically means costs have stayed level while we scale the rest of the company you know we had to learn how to do that but we did and my very very proud of the the work the team has done there um now I think reddit's a little bit different in that prior to going out we already had a bright Spotlight on us so we we been in the Press you know we read things we don't like or you
know I say something silly and it turns into a headline or you know this or that so we kind of had those experiences that kind of come with being a public company so two quarters in you know I'm enjoying life that's great you know ask me again when the wheels fall off but feel great right now well hopefully it's only like one wheel gets a little low pressure a little wobbly but look I think well the other thing that that worked out really well is we also did all of those things in shoppy conditions yeah
in shoppy market conditions so um you know that just find me a company that's that's uh worse run today than it was two years ago that's going to be hard right everybody had to like really you know the difficulty level went up and so I think everybody got more disciplined um no that's part of the good thing about uh if you learn well from challenges you can you can definitely get more robust and strong all right so lightning round what's the most Innovative funding source or strategy you've used righted it's PR pretty much always done
kind of traditional financings though I'd say our investors our largest investors the ones who have worked out the best are themselves non-traditional um uh uh folks who are really kind of True Believers in Reddit in the internet in people uh and it's really hard to see the future through spreadsheets um uh and so both I think with finding investors and hiring people the strategy that I found works really well is I keep meeting people and until I find that kind of values chemistry and you can tell in almost like 10 minutes it's like oh these
are my people and then I find deals come together really fast hiring not just we don't just get them in the door they end up staying with us for a long time what is the Habit that has helped you succeed the most I have a mantra that I use a lot now every every day um so that the the the thought is you know you aren't who you are you are what you do so uh if you want to if you want to be somebody who works really hard you have to actually work really hard
if you want to be somebody who goes to the gym you actually have to go to the gym um you want to be a good friend uh you know good good good spouse good colleague you have to actually do those things y um it it makes you philosophically very Arista tilian uh so you are what you do when you're feeling stuck about a big decision who do you talk to um probably Jen Jen Wong uh our coo so she joined us in 2017 uh on paper to run the business side of Reddit um so ads
and sales um and but you know she's really my partner in running Reddit and so we're in near constant communication uh and you know I was talking before about that values alignment uh you know I had that with her instantly but we have completely different backgrounds right she came up kind of through the Consulting media business world and I you know came up as an engineer product person there there are a couple people like her at Reddit but she's probably the first one that I call um and vice versa no it sounds like a great
collaboration and partnership um your work and your life and work is so online which your favorite way to unplug and recharge um I read a lot um uh I love my Kindle uh both because it's it's it's convenient way to carry on a bunch of books but it's also you know not online um so I read a lot I've got kids now play with my kids um and I enjoy going to the gym so life is pretty simple what's one book you think everyone should read oh goodness um there there's man search for meeting Frank
vict Frankle super famous book um uh he he was a concentration camp Survivor and surviving a situation like that you yeah you have to have a reason to live and so kind of the thesis of the book is you need to find a reason to live and it doesn't even matter what it is but you do need to find it and make that your reason for living um that one really helped me get through a difficult period of my life for I was very stressed uh and I and I was constantly chasing this idea of
like how do I eliminate stress and I think it's impossible to eliminate stress the and what that book kind of flipped around for me is the sort of stress that I have in my life is a result of the work that I do and the job that I have which is truly a privilege I have a special job I have my dream job and it's hard and so if I didn't have that stress what's the alternative I'd be bored and so that book helped me basically say thank you that I get to be stressed um
and so and then as a result I felt a lot less stressed you know it's funny how those things work out so that's a um uh that's a big one last lightning round question how would you like AI to change your future and I just want to acknowledge I've given five minute answers to every Lightning Run question so all good actually they were just meant to be kind of a provocation not not necessarily like 42 is the answer um the stuff that I want AI to do AI can do today so I'm just waiting for
Apple or Google to connect the dots and I think we're so close I just want to add items to my to-do list or take a thought and organize it by speaking cuz you know I'm constantly going around through my day I've got my phone in my pocket and I'd love to say remind me to do this thing or I have this idea can you you know just I I want to just you know it's kind of that whole getting things done uh idea like get things out of your head into your system I think AI
can get things out of my head into the right place uh much more conveniently right the best UI for computers is now speaking and that'll be when when we're actually there we're like a year away I feel like yeah it's very close I don't have I don't ask for much I just want to put things on my to-do list yes exactly all right well it's been a great pleasure and honor uh Steve thanks for joining me on Masters of scale it's really been my pleasure and honor Reed thank you so much for having me Steve
Huffman's scale story is a good reminder that not every unicorn IPO is some sort of hyperscaling overnight success it took Reddit almost two decades multiple ownership structures and a whole lot of Sweat Equity to get where it is today and all that hard work has given Steve a practiced hand for dealing with the site's next chapter of challenges from navigating AI to an increasingly fractured information ecosystem I'm inspired by his unwavering belief in people and the meaningful connections that can form when the internet is at its best I hope he can keep scaling those values
too I'm Reed Hoffman thanks for listening [Music]
