exreddit
exreddit on Hacker News
> He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.
Image hosting used to be expensive, so forums avoided it and image hosts were scummy and filled with ads. Imgur was a first mover when cloud hosting and CDNs meant it could be relatively cheap for a small shop to do quality image hosting.
Meanwhile, reddit was a forgotten subsidiary of Condé Nast working out of a corner in Wired's SF office. Jedberg will chime in, but when imgur was founded, reddit's handful of engineers were busy keeping the site from falling over. They didn't have time to build out image hosting.
Figured I'd share this since its comp info you don't normally see. A lot of people made a lot of money today. I got 150,000 options for Reddit very early after it was spun out. With today's price, that's $7.5M, but I didn't get all 4 years of vesting, the pay was below-average, and my money was tied up. During the same decade, the faangs were up 12x on average, but the pay was better, and my money would have been liquid. Reddit might not hold up for 6 months, either.
It's not great from the employee side, either. I got 150,000 options for Reddit very early after it was spun out. With the current target price, that's $4.6M, but I didn't get all 4 years of vesting, the pay was below-average, and my money is tied up. During the same decade, the faangs were up 12x on average, but the pay, even at Amazon, was better, and my money would be liquid. Reddit might not hold up for 6 months, either. The IPO feels like a cash-out because the company's profitability metrics have never been great, and the LLM hype is the best shot at getting something.
The board at the time was I think Yishan, Alexis, and someone from Advanced. Maybe Sam Altman. Ellen Pao was the natural choice because she had the most business experience of all the staff, but it wasn't the right experience. She was always more of an investor, and she got her job there by investing money in reddit and asking for a job in return. She headed up BD and what turned into reddit labs for a while. She built up a reddit labs team, but they never found the next big thing for the company.
Part of the API drama goes back to her time doing BD, making partnerships with apps, and possibly buying apps.
I doubt there was a master plan to making her CEO, but I believe Alexis's line was "it's her job to lose." At the end of the day, she was bad at making friends, was an awkward fit for the company, and was more experienced in politics and climbing the ladder than running a company.
Good background on her: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletc...
It's sad that 4chan is the best case outcome.
> We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
Maybe they should have shipped better apps and mod tools so they wouldn't be in this mess.
It really depends what the stats look like. If people hop to other subreddits, it'll fail. If traffic is down more than 50% for a week or two, the board will remove Spez.
Vine is no more, Twitter is a punchline, and TikTok took Vine's idea and ran with it.
Imagine the return of /r/creepshots and /r/jailbait, but on defaults.
He already has reddit employee < 20, but this would seal the deal.
I still can't get over that I looked at the morning's news, saw something about this, recognized the same, and was like "I know that guy!"
Congrats on the viral hit and all the free press. Josh is a great guy.
I doubt there's much value here to squeeze. People lose interest in these things pretty fast. By the time it's productionized, it might be too late, and it ruined a fun hobby. The big value is he has a platform to launch something else, or enough attention to land a pretty good next gig.
> independently wealthy
He should have a sweet reddit IPO coming his way, soon.