Reddit’s Steve Huffman: Online platforms ‘can’t just sit on their hands’

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Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. There was things happening on Reddit. That

I thought we're 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 Hoffman, 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 Employees they wouldn't wear our swag in public.

you know, what was going on and what was being written about Reddit. But then I would ask them. It's 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 ninety nine percent 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 fat. And so that's what we got to work on.

Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit with his college roommate when he was just twenty one years old. In the nearly two decades since, he and the site have brown up a lot. Earlier this year, Reddit. Often referred to as the front page of the internet. had its IPO.

It was valued at six point five billion dollars. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe that? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely not ball. But well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it. This

is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman, your host. I was eager to talk to Steve Hoffman about Redit's unconventional бізнес. But first, I wanted to talk to him about the scale of Reddit's impact on our digital culture. Steve, I've been looking forward to this for months. Welcome to Master the Scale.

Thank you. Um Excited and honored to be here. How did you think about uh Reddit's role? on the internet and 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?

A saying I say a lot is that like Reddit is people. The idea of Reddit is that it both reveals people And empowers people. And That was one of the important ideas that was in our mind.

Yeah, back in two thousand five when we started Reddit. And it's still one of the th ideas we we come back to Often. Yeah, we start from a principle of free expression or free speech.

But there's I think also uh 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? Separating. Behavior and beliefs.

So we try to spend a lot more time on behavior. Than we do on beliefs. And so that gets us into our content policy. So when we started right in two thousand five, there basically was no content policy. Yeah, we thought everything should be allowed. Like who are we to say what's not allowed? Easy to take a position like that when Yeah, 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 It's much more robust. And constantly evolving. So no Hate, harassment, bullying. No spam, nothing illegal, no inciting or glorifying violence.

Uh no involuntary sexualization, nothing involving kids. There's a lot of kind of sub rules and things like that, but we've 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 to 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.

You know, that there's a lot of polarization, you know, hate speech, et cetera. What other things you do to try to encourage the positive aspirations. of human discourse. Okay.

It's a gr 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. Chances are

in their day to day life. The vast majority of what they're going through or what talk about They have in common. Right. Maybe they're parents, maybe they're sports fans, maybe they watch the same TV shows or movies. That's just one I think just fact. It's like people generally

get along when they're together in person. So On Reddit. Every conversation you have is in the context of a community. You're not just yelling into the ether.

communities have rules. They have written rules. They have unwritten rules. So this kind of idea of the quorum. There's a Social pressure. To Behave according to the rules of that community?

Right. If you don't, you'll be downloaded. And you'll be silenced by your peers. Which by the way. Getting feedback from your peers like that. Is way more powerful.

Thank you. feedback from, you know, the company or the man. 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 kinda suggest as Things to do. To kind of improve. Online interaction culture. I think a lot of it comes down to

Incentives. And so If we look at the incentives of social media A lot of it is about 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 Perceived or believed these things. 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. Redd has the up though. Um Reddit also has the down vote.

And so that's where community can Reject behaviors. 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 kinda cancels out.

Um, whereas I think elsewhere on the internet, you just get a lot of ups. Because it it's it it can be you know, more attention grabbing or emotional or whatever. And so On Reddit, the the controversial stuff

Sits at zero points. Right, ups minus downs. And so we get a kind of a better outcome there. It's humans behaving more humanly. I think that's really powerful. And

They don't get credit for it. The only thing they get is a little bit of karma on Reddit. Which, you know, I guess is worth more than zero, but You can't take it with you. You know, a CO 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 and all that kind of stuff and Yeah, that's interesting too. But I was kinda I'm curious if there's anything else that's kind of very Reddit ish.

About your dashboard. Oh, that's interesting. So th y look, there are dashboards. With Yeah. revenue and users and of course there's another layer of metrics that

We really care about, you know, number of advertisers from this companies and retention. Yeah, customer attention and new user attention, all these things. But For better or for worse. I use the Reddit app. A lot.

And so Been working on Reddit for nineteen years. A lot of how I think about Reddit. It comes not from the numbers, but from the feel of using the app. I feel like it's a

I am My intuition is constantly being refined. And that's what I take to the team. He's like, Hey, I think I see a an issue here. And so

F Kind of product. Development point of view. I think we went through a phone 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 our system. From a spreadsheet.

Kind of false. ideal about well we're gonna be so scientific and disciplined You know, put metrics on everything. 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? 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. Honestly, I think the company's getting much better at it, but that has been a real 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 kinda like combination of art and science, combination of intuition and data. You know, and and hitting both.

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. Along the way.

But To get there you have to Make a few leaps. 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. 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 it's a really important step. I think in there, which is do I like it? And I know we've built stuff at Reddit over the years where We didn't like it.

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, it made the numbers work, but we all hated it. And then our users hated it, even our investors hated it. And so I 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, build bridges versus polarization. What do you what do you think the Techniques we should do to try to build in that direction. The mistake. I

Think we continue to make Is At kind of all different levels. I see people do it, I see companies do it, I see the media do it, I see government do it. Uh state 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. I think the solution is

To resist that urge. 'Cause that control that manicuring the message. Kind of pushing people into the 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 I'm thinking around the discourse that's had around you know, vaccines which, you know, frequently got idiotic, you know, or things Some online

discourse, you know, Q and on, et cetera. What are the things that you think are are key for Making those approaches that still That aren't exerting control but are building trust in shared reality.

Transparency. Yeah. Um I think. 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. Because any time. Somebody is telling you only good news. You know there's something missing because there's always trade-offs.

And I think it's a general rule of thumb the more Kind of uh emotional They are. The more suspect. The message should be.

But I sense there's always this fear and this is one of the things that drives me nuts. Is this distrust of people. Oh, people can't handle the truth. That creates more distrust. Yeah, no, you have to give trust in order to get it.

Which To 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.

If you want to have good friends, you have to be a good friend. I that that sentence structure is just That's that's I 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 Google and OpenAI.

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. Are incredible.

at text and words. So I think LMs. Across the board.

reduce the amount of time we spend doing this drudgery like word processing. So that's very exciting. 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. We're getting closer to the with our permission part. Um That's been a But been a little bit of a journey.

The business relationships out of it. Or the you know, IP conversation out of it. I'm very proud that I read it. H

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 used to advance the state of the art. So that part is interesting. Now of course part that I think is general across

IP holders is We can't give it away for free. Because that undermines Uh IP creation.

incentives, the IP creation business. So whether you're talking about content on Reddit. Or newspapers or books or music or movies. 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 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 they're Needs to be a a a a a balance there. That I guess that's the 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 s basically take or steal resources for somebody from somebody else? to enrich yourself with no compensation. And so that is an issue and I think that's probably Those those two aspects of

Are you are you eliminating human creativity and are you Uh committing like business malpractice. I just taking all of the content you can find. without permission and using it to to enrich yourselves.

Now there's another aspect of it for Reddit, which is Let's say we answer the The business questions, which we have with a couple of folks. The two big ones. We still have other

Constraints. Yeah, protecting user privacy. Right, deletions, right? You can delete stuff off of Reddit. Yeah, we want to make sure those requests are forwarded on. Um we don't want

Any company to use Reddit content. 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 kinda like the business thing, which is like

Can you use Reddit data to Yeah, makes search engines better, makes search experience better. Like continue, for example, to send traffic to Reddit. Which has been the 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. So it might have gotten there with a couple.

And I think we're in a good place. And we'll kind of see where things land with everybody else. Still ahead, I talk with Steve about Reddit's scale journey and how becoming a public company has changed. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

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Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada.

It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more at our YouTube channel. Alright, so let's go to the Reddit scale story. Let's start with the origin story.

So Alexis, my co founder. 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 the first batch of like Combinator in two thousand five. We applied with a different idea. I was ordering food from cell phones. Good idea, I think. Would we have made it successful?

Probably not. We're probably a little ahead of our times and probably a little ahead of our skills. But Paul and Jessica so Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston at Y Combinator like Us. So after rejecting us on the food idea,

They basically invited us back to work on something else. Paul had half this idea. Which is he really like delicious. Delicious was a Just a website back then.

Social bookmarking. And he liked the dynamic. There's this kind of side effect on Delicious where if people were bookmarking the same Page over and over you could See what were the most popular things bookmark on delicious. So it's called Delicious slash popular.

And then I had the other half of the idea, which was slash talk. I loved Slash. Slash. Still around Slash Lot.org. There's kinda headlines on the surface. Chosen by editors, though. But what was really amazing about Slash that was the community that existed

In the comments. about any particular headline. And slash dots from constrained attack. What if it there's no editors and it wasn't constrained attack? And so it's kind of a delicious plush slash dot.

But make both of them better. That was the idea. for Reddit. Honestly. I think we I mean that's pretty much what we built. But for nineteen 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 two thousand eight. Yeah, almost three years later. And then there was a sale to Cond.

What what happened there? Uh kind or advanced. Advance is is really the parrot company. I u I'll s use those words interchangeably. When they came along wanting to buy Reddit. You know, but So they're kinda.

Scratching a couple itches. One was I felt like as well, that's fulfilling the prophecy. Like that was s supposed to happen. We build this thing and now we get to sell it. And then two Like we are a really small team in that Hera

And I mean that's all I could do to keep the site online. Now that was incorrect. I just didn't know what product market fit looked like.

The fact that this thing was growing Despite the Us hanging on by our fingernails. Probably far more powerful than I realized.

But I was like, Well, we better You know, fine find safety. Before we run out of a runway here. That said. Advance were

Really great owners. They never really meddled. The powers that be at Advance, who did the acquisition, who are still involved with Reddit today. They love red. And so.

Yeah, we got to continue working on Reddit. Continue to evolve it. continue to evolve it, kind of following our own intuition. I and uh Alexis and some others would end up leaving. Uh when our acquisition contracts expired.

But kinda asked for great stewards of Reddit and then they eventually realized that Ready. Needs to So they spun it out. And so

You know all things considered. I think that's I mean I how can I say it different at this from where I'm sitting today. Things worked out really Well, But

I think W 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. Yeah, you You kind of covered a little bit of why you left. What's the return look like? Yeah. So

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, Hip Munk. With another friend, Adam Goldstein.

Fun company, fun product. Bad business. Hipmunk was a travel focused search tool Steve started in 2010. It was a great product, by the way. I you know, uh if we if we had just built that product. We built the product in the 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. Instead. Yeah.

Raise a bunch of money, raise a bunch more money, doesn't that anyway. Um, lessons learned. It's hard to be small in Silicon Valley. So while I was gone Like I still used Reddit every day, still thought about Reddit. Could never turn that part of my brain off.

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 I mean I can see from the outside it's like R it's gotta change a few things. Right. They definitely need a content policy. We've got these troll subreddits who are just wreaking havoc. And the product's not evolving. And so

You know, ultimately. It 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 th 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 people we are aspirational about people. We believe we should follow our users. Right. They create the content, they rig the content, they create the subreddits, they self organize.

Uh they set the tone. But then we also learned Right, whether But you can't just completely you can't sit on your hands. I talk about free speech as the

founding principle of this country. And For a country it's essential. Democracy Cannot exist.

Without Free speech. 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 to democracies in particular the democracy in the US.

And federalism, right, is another important aspect of like We have we have our rules. But the subrates have their own rules. So Uh separation of powers, all these things.

But then there's other th like one of the big learnings is we are not a country. We are a community platform. And we're also a business. This is a place. That people

Have to want to be. By and large. You don't choose where you live on earth. But you can choose whether to be on Reddit or not. versus something else.

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?

Do we want to be proud of our work? Do we want to be proud of the the role that Reddit plays in the world and what it does for people. And so I think Just 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. Yeah. Totally. Um since we're on kinda The story of Reddit to scale.

So You know? Initial public offering. Yeah, that's that's obviously a huge step. How has that changed?

Anything at Reddit? How you operate or how you present or Anything else and how are things going? Well, so we went out in March. We've had two quarters. Two good quarters, I think if you ask me.

So You know, ask me again if we have a backcorder. Right now I feel pretty good. The thing is though we didn't just go out and march. We thought we were gonna go out in

April twenty twenty two. We didn't because the Yeah, world and market really changed in that era would have made it very difficult. But since April twenty twenty two, we've been running the company as a public company.

So close the books fast, you know, no mistakes, do our board meeting. Do you Earnings calls with the public company analysts. They just weren't. Public.

Kind of just just get into that rhythm. 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. We got really lucky. 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. Learn like what data you can and can't share internally and on what timeline and Th there's just a This is kind of a little bit of way of working and you know, get your costs in order.

you know, level up the discipline, all these things. And so we did all those. And so The company is Immeasurably better. than we were two years ago. Just so much more discipline. Execution is as good as it's ever been.

We've been able to grow revenue and users basically without growing the team size. Which basically means costs at state level. Well we scale the rest of the company. We had to learn how to do that, but we did. And I'm very, very proud of the the work the team has done there. No, 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 ban 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've kinda had those experiences. That kinda come with being a public company?

So Two quarters in. Yeah, I'm enjoying life. That's great. Yeah. Ask me again when the wheels fall off. I feel great right now. Well, how long it's only like one wheel gets a little low pressure. Did all of those things.

In choppy conditions. in shopping market conditions. So Find me a company that's Worse run today than it was two years ago, that's gonna be hard.

But everybody had to like really You know, the difficulty level went up. And so I think everybody got more disciplined. No, that's part of the good thing about if you learn well from challenges, you can you can definitely get more robust and strong. Alright, so lightning round. What's the most innovative funding source or strategy?

You've used. Reddit's pr pretty much always done kind of traditional financing's though I'd say our investors Our largest investors, the ones who have worked out the best. are themselves non traditional. Folks who

are really kind of true believers in Reddit, in the internet, in people. It's really hard to see the future through spread sheets. And so both I think with finding investors And hiring people. A strategy that I found works really well is I keep meeting people until I find

That kind of values chemistry. And you can tell in almost like ten 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'em in the door, they end up staying with us for a long time. What is the habit? That is help you succeed. The most. I have a mantra.

That I use a lot now. Every day every day. The thought is You know, you aren't who you are, you are what you do. So

If you want to be somebody who works really hard. You have to actually work really hard. If you wanna be somebody who goes to the gym, you actually have to go to the gym. Wanna be a good friend, good spouse, good colleague, you have to actually do those things. Um

It makes you philosophically very Aristotelian. Uh so you are what you do. When you're feeling stuck about big decision. Who do you talk to? Probably Chen. Chen Wong. Mm.

Uh our COO. So she joined us in twenty seventeen. Uh on paper to run the business side of Reddit. Ads and sales. But

Yeah, she's really my partner in running Reddit. And so we're And near constant communication. And you know, I was talking before about that values alignment.

I had that with her. Instantly. But we have completely different backgrounds. She came up kind of through the consulting media business world and I

You know, came up as an engineer, product person. Yeah. And There are a couple of people like her at Reddit, but she's probably the first one that I call. No, it sounds like

A great collaboration and partnership. Your life and work is so online, what's your favorite way to unplug And recharge. I read a lot. I love my Kindle.

Both because it's It's it's a convenient way to carry on a bunch of bucks. But it's also you know Not online. So I read a lot.

I've got kids now, play with my kids. And I enjoy going to the gym. So life is pretty simple. Yes, exactly. And I love it. Exactly. What's one book you think everyone should read?

Oh goodness. Um There's Man search for meaning. Yeah. Victor Frankl.

Super famous book. He he was a Concentration camp survivor. And Surviving situation like that.

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. That one really helped me. Get through a difficult period in my life for I was very stressed. And I and I c was constantly chasing this idea of like how do I eliminate stress?

And I think I'm not going to be able to It's impossible to eliminate stress. Uh And what that book kinda flipped around for me. is the sort of stress

That I have in my life. As 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 Four. And so That book helped me.

Basically say thank you that I get to be stressed. As a result. I felt a lot less stressed. You know, it's kinda funny how those things work out. So that's a That's a big one.

Last lightning round question. How would you like AI? To change Your future. And I I just want to acknowledge I've given five minute answers to every lightning round question, so I've got to the listeners.

Kind of a provocation, not not necessarily like forty two is the answer. Um Yeah. 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 wanna

Add items to my to-do list. Or take a thought and organize it. By speaking. 'Cause 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 wanna just You know, it's kind of that whole getting things done. Uh idea of like get things out of your head into your system. I think AI can get things

out of my head into the right place. Much more conveniently. Right, the best UI for computers is now speaking. And that'll be When we're 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 want to ask for much. I just want to put things on my to do list. Exactly. All right, well it's been a Great pleasure and honor, 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 Hoffman'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. Masters of scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro.

Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Tucker Legerski, Masha Makatunina, and Brandon Klein. Additional production by Julia Ulini. Our senior talent executive. Stephanie Stern.

Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holliday Our head of podcast is Letal Malad. The scripted narration. Read Hoffman.

used in this episode was produced using Reese Beecher. With full consent and permission. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode, and to subscribe. Newsletter.

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