The Next Web NYC - Steve Huffman, Reddit

The theme of today is momentum. So I'm going to spend ten minutes talking to you about the last year or so at Reddit since I returned. And then Boris and I are going to do a fireside chat and we'll see if you can get me to say something stupid that I regret again. So a brief timeline. My college roommate Alexis and I started Reddit 11 years ago in 2005. We sold very early in 2006. We both left the company in 2009. Reddit spun out to become an independent company again in 2012. And then I returned last year in 2015. And so what precipitated my return last year was that Reddit had no momentum. Actually, if anything, it had momentum to the grave. We were in a bad shape. The users were in open revolt. The moderators of our largest communities had basically shut their communities down. So the site was basically nonfunctional. And the morale at the company was as low as I've ever seen at any company. And in fact, I don't even know if morale could get lower at other companies because people would just quit. But at Reddit, people stayed because they loved, you know, even though the company was in a bad place, people stayed because they loved Reddit, the platform, the idea of Reddit, the things that we do for people. But it was a tough time. And we lacked alignment. It was hard to tell, like, why we were there. It was hard to articulate that. It was something we could feel. But we didn't know our place in the world. We were getting just killed in the press. Weren't telling our own story. People were really it was an easy narrative to pick on Reddit and basically say, you know, everything is going wrong. So in my first meeting with the employees at Reddit, this is July 9, 2015, I told them, I'm going to make you proud to work at Reddit. And I want the world to be proud that Reddit is in it. I'm not sure if they heard me. I'm not sure if they heard anything I said, to be honest. It was kind of a blur that day. And I was the third CEO that year. So it's hard to tell, you know, why bother. But it's no matter. I probably say that every day anyway. So they've heard me say it, you know, 500 times by now. Later that day, I had my first meeting with the leadership team that was at Reddit at that time. I had never met anybody. And I asked everybody, please, can you just introduce yourself? Tell me what you do and what your biggest challenge is right now. And so we went around the room. And each person did that. And there was about, I don't know, call it 12 people in the room. And each person had this, like, major issue. And I was just like, man, I thought things were bad from the outside. Like, what is going on? And I was just having, like, big time, like, questioning, like, what am I doing? Like, this is going to be tough. And I remember thinking during that time. I had all the times in my past where I've had these moments of despair where it seems like nothing is going right. And then, you know, always a month later, six months later, whatever, a year later, I look back and it's just like a memory. And so I kept telling myself, all right, this is tough. It's going to be a long road. But a year from now, this will just be a memory. And I just kept repeating that to myself every day. And actually that turned out to be the case. It is now kind of a distant memory. All right. So one of the ways we got through this was by really defining Reddit's mission and values. And you know, when I was younger, when we started Reddit, I would say things like mission and values. I was an engineer pretty much my entire career until this job. I always thought mission and values were just like this MBA bullshit, like, just business person speak for, you know, just busy work. But it's actually very, very important. And defining Reddit's mission was actually kind of tough for us. Because Reddit is a big place. It's a lot of things to a lot of people. You know, hundreds of millions of people every month come to us for news. They come to us for entertainment. They come to us for relationship advice. They come to us for sports and fashion. And when they're having suicidal thoughts. And it's hard to articulate what it is that Reddit really is. But we were finally sort of gravitating towards, like, Reddit is the place, is the home of conversation online. What we deal in is human connection and bringing people together. Mentally I believe that every person in the world has this desire, this sense of, wants to have this sense of belonging, belong to a tribe. And that's what we provide. And so our mission is really to bring everybody in the world together on Reddit so they can talk about whatever it is they want. And then when we start thinking about values, values are funny. They're tools. They're tools for making decisions about what to do, who to hire, how you want to operate the company. And values can document who you are and they can also document who you want to be. And I think it's really important that you be honest with yourself about, you know, what they are. And so we have five values. The first is our most important one. I probably say this one every single day. It is to evolve. Reddit's 11 years old. It's not the same company it was 11 years ago. The context around us has changed. We've changed. The scale has changed tremendously. The breadth and depth of everything we do has grown tremendously. And we need to continue to evolve with it. It's never acceptable to say, but this is how we've always done things. That's like those words are actually literally forbidden at our company to say. But it was something I had heard a lot and I really just wanted to stamp that out. Our second value is remember the human. It's important for us to remember that there are people on the other side of the computer screens that have real feelings and needs. And we should be respectful of that. Remember the human could be summarized as don't be an asshole. Both internally and externally. It's very important to us. Our third is sign your name on it. Which basically means do your best work. And I know when you look at Reddit on desktop web, you're like, it hasn't aged particularly well. But I wanted people to understand that that's like that is what it is. But that's not what it has to be. And if you look at our modern work. On our new computer. On our native web apps. Or mobile web apps. It is our best stuff. And it's some of the best stuff on the internet. I'm very, very proud of what we've done. Our fourth value. Everybody does the dishes. That means literally everybody does the dishes. We don't have a maid. I want everybody to clean up after themselves. And then more broadly, it's supposed to capture that we're a small company. About 140 people. There is a lot of work to do. And we don't have enough people to do it. Which means everybody needs to do somebody else's job. There's nobody behind you going to clean up your mess. You have to literally clean up your own mess and help other people clean up theirs. And then finally the fifth value is act like an owner. And this basically means put the company first. One of the problems we had when it came to Reddit is we had what I would describe good people doing bad things. People who they looked out around them at the company and their attitude is basically, you guys are crazy. This is bullshit. I'm going to protect my team. I'm going to run my team and insulate them from all this crazy stuff. Which is a noble thing. But it also built walls within the company and prevented us from actually doing things. And what's important is that people think broader than themselves with their team and think about the whole company. You know, as our strategy, you know, changes, you know, as we go, as we're trying to, like, fulfill our mission, people have different roles to play. Some people are in the center of the action and some people are in support roles. And that's okay. Right? That changes over time. And we want everybody really committed to what we need to do on any particular day. And so we started saying these things. We started saying them over and over. And it didn't fit with everybody. In fact, we lost a lot of people in the last year. But we've hired a lot more. And I would normally advise companies, you know, you shouldn't bring in that many new people in that short amount of time. But for us, it was very important. Very effective. And to bring in this wave of optimism and new perspectives and new blood and new energy that really kind of get things going and get us that momentum we need to carry us forward. And it's been very effective. And I'm very, very proud of what we've done. We have teams now that didn't even exist before. We have a team called Trust and Safety which is dedicated to fighting abuse and harassment. We have a ‑‑ that's the human team. We have an engineering version of that team called Anti‑Evil which tackles those same problems at scale. And that's made a big difference on Reddit in the last year. Our community team is now no longer ‑‑ because we have the Trust and Safety team, our community team can focus on doing actual community work. Being the human face of Reddit. Helping people get on board. Resolving disputes. Making Reddit a friendly and welcoming place. Our biz dev team exists. It didn't even exist before. So now we can actually talk to all of you guys. So if you have something for us, please be in touch. You know, it's 2016. So we decided we'd build mobile apps. I don't know if you've heard about phones. But we finally have a presence on them. And it's some of our finest work. And it's funny. We released our mobile apps in April and now they're already 40% of our screen views. Which I'm very, very proud of as well. And our ads product has come a tremendous way. You know, last year where we had to sell the same people over and over and over again because all of our customers were leaving, now they stay. Our quarter over quarter turn rate went from 30% to 70% in the last year which is something we're very proud of. And now we're one of the only places we're going to sell mobile apps. And we're one of the only places online where you as an advertiser can actually make a genuine connection and authentic relationship with your customer rather than just yelling at them all the time. So the last year has been incredibly long and difficult. But you know, chipping away at it every day, I think we've made a lot of progress that I'm very proud of. And now we're in a position where we can actually kind of build our dreams and execute towards the things that we want to do. And, you know, carry this momentum that we acquired in last year into the future. So that's all I have to say on that. Boris, are you ready to grill me? Maybe. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. So we're going to get the chairs up and then we can get comfortable. But not too comfortable. Yeah, right. So you mentioned the chair. You mentioned the thing you regret regretted or that I might ask you a question you regret answering. Yeah, let's do it. I think that we have some history there because we were in Amsterdam. We had a chat as well. And I asked you about your monetization strategy. And then we talked about ads. And I asked you, how are you going to make a difference in ads? And you say, well, we know everything about our users, everything, every last detail, all your secrets. Remember? I do remember that very well. Painfully well. Right, right. So because some people wrote about it. Maybe else I don't remember. Thanks for the I'm happy to provide you the assist. And of course, you know, what I said tongue in cheek back then was really what I was trying to convey is that Reddit is a special place where you can convey all the different facets of your personality. Right. It's not just your kind of real world identity. It's all of your interests. And. And that's one of the special places. One of the special things about Reddit is you can truly be yourself in every dimension, which also means that, you know, we we have all this unique data about like what you know what you like to do, what you're interested in. And it's so it makes Reddit kind of a special place in that regard. Yeah, for sure. Because it's one of the things that's special about Reddit is that it brings out like everything in people, the good, but also the bad. Yeah. That has that change. So over time because it's a big topic for Reddit. I think as it changed since last year, it's something we think a lot about. You know, we always want people to be genuine and authentic and real. And that's what that's what makes right at work. That's what I think has created all the loyalty that we have from our users is that you're getting a real reflection. The challenge sometimes, of course, is. aren't perfect and clean and wonderful. And so sometimes you see that on Reddit. I think very much Reddit is a reflection of humanity and of the tone of the world. And so we're always trying to balance letting people freely express themselves, but do so in a way that doesn't cause others to feel unwelcome or unsafe or leave, which would be the worst. Because that's a huge difference between Reddit and Facebook, where Facebook is more the sanitized version of the world. And if you say something, if you post one nipple, your whole account will be deleted. That's very different at Reddit. And that's intentional, I figure. It's very much so, because if somebody, for example, if somebody only gives you good news, you can't trust them. So in the same way when people only present the perfect version of themselves, you don't really know what's real. But when you can see everything, then you know that this is a real person, this is a real thought, this is a real community. And that's where the authenticity comes from. Right. Can you walk us through some of the numbers? I remember we talked about mobile and the app about a year ago. How is this going? Things are going great. So we're about 250 million monthly visitors. I mentioned before, our mobile apps just came out in April, and they're already responsible for about 40% of our screenreaders. Which is incredible. They're 10% of our daily active users, but 40% of our screenviews. So the engagement there is tremendous, which I'm very happy about. Right, right. So if you look at the past 15 months, what have you done differently than before at Reddit? Well, you know, I was gone from Reddit for about five years. And I learned, I had developed a lot of bad habits at Reddit in the first five years. Because, you know, Reddit was basically the first, it was the first thing I did after college. And Reddit always grew. And so I developed these bad habits that if you just build something mediocre on the internet, it'll just grow. And so then I started Hitmonk, which is a travel company. And our natural state at Hitmonk was death, was zero users. And so we had to unlearn these bad habits and develop a bunch of new habits about how to grow a business in a cutthroat space. And so bringing that perspective into Reddit has been, very valuable in terms of really getting control of our growth, getting, having a deep understanding of why our users are there, what they're doing, you know, how to find more of them, why users are leaving and how we can prevent that. So basically, I would say that the largest lesson that I and we have learned at Reddit is discipline. Discipline. Discipline to make things. Think about what are you trying to accomplish? You know, I have a hypothesis, you know, building a product that tests that. Testing it. Actually seeing, you know, did this do the thing we thought it was going to do? And then repeating. So making sure, you know, in the early days, and I think this actually works well in the early days of startups, you're following your intuition, you're shooting from your hip, you're building every day the thing that, you know, you as the, you know, founder and probably the first user thinks is the most important. But eventually, you are no longer representative of your users. You know, for example, like, in the first couple of years of Reddit, most of the Redditors were, for me, right? They were young tech guys, actually, probably. And now it's so much broader. And so, like, my intuition is no longer an accurate reflection of the whole community. Right, right. So one of the values you said is evolve, right? The first one, actually. But I noticed still that, like, if I try to explain Reddit to somebody else or I look at somebody experiencing Reddit for the first time, there's a very high barrier to entry. Yes. Like, its own language. Yes. Is that something that you see changing or is it, like, intentional? It's not intentional, but it's very true. Yeah. One of the, to become a Redditor right now, you really have to want to be a Redditor. Especially when we're talking about on the desktop web product. Because it is a community. And so sometimes when you're walking into a community, you have to learn the social norms and what's going on. And so there's an adjustment period. I think one of the reasons the engagement on the mobile app is so high is because it's a much more visceral, and the barrier to entry is a lot lower. But we still have a long way to go there. It's something I think about a lot. The fact that Reddit has grown pretty consistently for 10 years is actually something of a miracle to me. When I think about what that kind of first user experience is for a lot of people. So when we make that better, when we make that friendlier, and when we connect you with your home on Reddit more efficiently, I expect growth will actually pick up quite a bit. Right. And what is your main goal now for Reddit for, like, the next five, or 10 years? I'm not sure how far you're looking ahead. So I'm very, very proud of the role that Reddit plays in people's lives. Something I said tongue in cheek a year ago, I think it becomes more true every day, which is we're talking about how Reddit works. And I said that users come for the cats, and they stay for the empathy. And so people literally come for the cats, the goofy cat pictures. But they stay for that community, that sense of belonging. And I think that provides a very kind of fulfilling role in people's lives for many people. And I want to provide that for as many people as possible. If you, like, closing, there's a discussion now around Facebook, whether they are a publisher or not. And they're very strict in that they're saying, no, no, we're not a publisher. It's just a platform. We're not a publisher. But then, of course, their effect on society is that of a publisher, because they're filtering what we see. So this is the discussion. If you look at Reddit, do you see yourself becoming a, so, a social network or a publisher? Or what is Reddit, really? Reddit, I mean, Reddit is home to thousands of communities. And those communities are choosing what they see and what they talk about. So to that extent, Reddit is very much a reflection of humanity. And it's one of the things, you know, Reddit sees this. Facebook sees this. I think you really see this on the whole internet in general, is we've created this new, very, very efficient way of communicating and sharing ideas. It's not just controlled by a few gatekeepers. And the result of that is a massive increase in the breadth of content and the breadth of conversation that can happen. And so I see our role as we're a communications platform, primarily, bringing people together. All right. Thank you for your time. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, guys. That was great. So it's a good kickoff of the day. Our next speaker, he's the founder of ReCaptcha and of Duolingo. And a fun tidbit about Duolingo is there are actually more people in the US learning languages with Duolingo than there are kids in the public.