I guess if you include contractors that are six or seven people working on reddit, but when we got acquired there were basically three and then in the years since, we've added three more developer hires full time, and a community manger. But the site is still remarkably small.
If I were a snarky Reddit user though, I would say, hypothetically, that that would just be like reading Reddit's Front Page a day later. But I'm not going to go there.
Having that kind of endorsement and having Paul Graham's readership coming to your site and contributing to it and building the foundation of the community was just a really invaluable way to start Reddit.
If you look now, more than ever new entrants, new upstarts, are able to grow so much faster than they could before.
If I'm at the University of Georgia and I can't inspire this room full of students, OK, fine. I'm not going to take it personally. Maybe a little bit, but I'll be all right.
There is a much bigger issue with student loan rates, the cost of tuition; those are some huge problems that need to be resolved.
The goal shouldn't be to be the next Silicon Valley (there'll always only be one of those) - it's to be your own startup community.
Let's say you're all worried about student-loan debt and you need to have steady income. That doesn't have to be your everything.
It's a lot easier to convince uninformed people than it is to convince politicians.
I think the one advantage to a failed - recovering, but a pretty broken - economy, and a lot of broken promises, is that we've pulled the veils from our eyes way earlier than most people do, and realize "Hey, you know what, maybe I should try do this thing that I really care about, and why not spend the time now during my best years to get into knitting, or coding, or swamp boat sailing." And there's this resource called the Internet that's going to provide you with a stage and a library for all of those things.
Hundreds of these companies I've seen since the beginning stages - including Dropbox and Airbnb - one of them has actually been crushed by an incumbent. The Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks, they might be someone to acquire you, which is not necessarily a bad position to be in.
We were very, very lucky being in the first round of Y Combinator because that alone generated a lot of interest. A lot of readers of Paul Graham were just excited to see what was going to come up. And we were the first ones to launch.
What one realizes there is that we are not in control of the [reddit] community, in any way, shape or form. We have no power over it and so we've lost this total control.
The weird thing about reddit is that, for a community its size - now I'm no longer at reddit, but the public traffic numbers that they put out are, I think with the site about eight million unique visitors a month, or every 30 days, which is a fairly big site.
The social-media landscape changes incredibly fast, so you have to be open-minded and nimble to keep up with it.
