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.
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.
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.
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.
