Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No, everyone has great ideas, but what makes a difference, especially online, or just in life, is actually doing it; getting that first version out there.
Reddit was created for people to speak freely and authentically and also for us to protect and value privacy. We're sort of the anti-Facebook in that regard.
I try to help founders as much as I can, but so many of us we won't even take meetings with people who still just have an idea, because everyone has an idea.
I do genuinely believe that, when given and presented with all the information and all the actual facts, the vast majority of people will make the right choice.
The reason why I think Reddit is still around and some of our competitors are not is because we were really adamant about maintaining the integrity of the site.
Raise $500 for a thing you care about because you actually get the experience of taking an idea and actually doing it. There are fewer and fewer excuses not to.
Republicans want to keep the open Internet safe from big government. Democrats want to keep it safe from big corporations. I say we agree to agree and move ahead.
So much of Reddit as a product was built on the shoulders of giants... We did some novel remixes of it but, at the end of the day, it was that: Grit and good luck.
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.
Pitch tip: Speak confidently about your product, but be able to admit when you need more information, and get it to the people you're pitching quickly after the meeting.
If I can accomplish anything in the next however-many years, it is this: To help a generation realize, or to think of themselves, not just as consumers but also creators.
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.
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.
I've been learning how to soft-scramble eggs. And once you've had an amazing soft-scrambled egg, you cannot go back. It takes a little bit more work, but they're really great.
The Internet is too transformative for incumbents to not want to try to stifle or curb it - incumbents in the sense of multinational corporations, governments, take your pick.
It thrills me to write reference letters for enterprising founders who are looking to get visas to start their companies here, to create value and jobs for these United States.
I'd like to see the word 'entrepreneur' knocked off its pedestal. Being 'entrepreneurial' is something I look for not only in founders to invest in, but also employees to hire.
The biggest threat to the Internet is, frankly, always going to be complacency. I want to see more and more of us activated and people thinking of themselves as defenders of it.
The Internet is, as a communication platform and a learning platform, unparalleled because whether you want to learn something or share something, it's simply a few clicks away.
I hate phone calls so I believe in a telephone armistice. To me, the idea of calling someone unprompted is basically saying, 'Hey, stop whatever you're doing and talk to me right now.
At the end of the day, how many ads did it take to convince you to use Facebook or Twitter? It wasn't marketing or advertising that convinced you to use these services. It was their value.
You can throw - and we've seen plenty of these kinds of companies - millions of dollars in advertising for a website or a service, and in the end if it's not useful no one's going to use it.
Can we imagine the United States without electricity? No, that would be pretty hard. Likewise, we can't really imagine being without an open Internet. The cost would be so grave, so serious.
Until we actually get legislation that protects our rights online, we will continue to fight against stupid, lobbyist-bought legislation. We want bills that protect us, not ones that destroy us.
The problem is these politicians have very, very big interests in being re-elected, and the money that gets them there is provided by people who don't necessarily have the interest of the public in mind.
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.
Because it's so empowering, I want people to think about being entrepreneurial regardless. They don't have to start companies, but that's what makes them great employees, that's what makes them great citizens.
I think we are a better and a more efficient society when people actually get to do the things that they really are passionate about, and really are amazing at, because it's going to mean better stuff for us, too.
Having ideas and doing them - that's what entrepreneurship comes down to. That's something that makes you not just a great founder who I want to invest in, but also a great employee or someone I want to work with.
As long as people are using the Internet, people are going to do stupid stuff, and people are going to do bad stuff. And by the time that robots are sentient, they're going to enslave us anyway, so it won't matter.
Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.
The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.
The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.'
Love making jewelry? Awesome! Find blogs that inspire you, follow people on social media who have great taste, start an Etsy store, and borrow a friend's DSLR to take some beautiful photos of your craft. All of this costs $0.
Reddit offers the opportunity for us as humans to connect on a much deeper, broader level because users have an alter ego and aren't tied to a social network of friends with whom they want to share how perfect their lives are.
If you imagine Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you can get all those requirements checked off and have all those amazing things that we need to just live lives, but actually get to do the thing that you're really passionate about.
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.
If you've never seen people taking the pledge of allegiance for the first time as U.S. Citizens, it will move you: a room full of people who can really appreciate what I was lucky enough to grow up with, simply by being born in Brooklyn.
What makes Reddit special is that people feel free to express themselves. Where we want to draw the line is where that feeling of being able to express oneself freely starts to infringe on someone feeling like they can express themselves.
On my father's side, I'm descended from immigrants, one of whom was a Syrian refugee from the Armenian genocide, and my mother was an immigrant from Germany whose visa had expired and, for a year and change, was undocumented here in the U.S.
The Internet is such a tough marketplace because everyone is a click away from going back to a cat photo, or going back to whatever else they were doing. You have to win them over, and do it quickly, and do it by making something people actually want.
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.
Maybe libertarians especially like Reddit because it is a perfect marketplace of content. Every Redditor is created equal, whether you're the highest karma Redditor or a brand-new Redditor with 10 karma points. No submissions or votes are more equal than others.
My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, 'You bastards.' I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call 'The Waffle House Epiphany': I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a dent in the universe.
Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.
My entire career has been built on the understanding that I am not only not the smartest person in the room, I am definitely not the smartest person in the world. And I am instead going to try to create as many opportunities to connect those great ideas and help them be great.
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.
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.
I went to high school in Ellicott City, Maryland, and I felt pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. It just took time away from my doing things on the Internet - like creating clans in Quake II or starting a Web design nonprofit. In school, I was just a kid. Online, I had authority.
I hate phone calls, so I believe in a telephone armistice. To me, the idea of calling someone unprompted is basically saying, 'Hey, stop whatever you're doing and talk to me right now.' If you find yourself in the middle of something, getting an unprompted annoyance is incredibly frustrating.