Steve Huffman: Reddit, Y-Combinator, Ask Me Anything (2020)

**Justin Kan** (0:01)
What's up guys, you're listening to The Quest, a podcast that inspires founders and creators to seek eternal growth. I'm Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and partner at Goat Capital. Every week, I sit down with icons and trailblazers from tech, Hollywood, sports, music, and more to uncover their human stories and bring you lessons in finding meaning and happiness beyond success. It's often easy to talk about winning, but I'm here to share the difficult stories that are often left out of the spotlight. I ask the questions nobody else asks, and you'll get the answers you won't hear anywhere else.
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Today, we are bringing back a special episode from the archive. So if you just joined us watching The Quest this year, you've probably missed some of our episodes from season one, and we wanted to bring back some of our favorites so you don't miss out. In this episode, we're bringing back my conversation from one of my very close friends, Steve Huffman, founder of Reddit. Steve and I go way back, ever since we were in the very first batch of Y Combinator together. In our conversation, Steve opened up about the Reddit origin story, his personal growth journey, how he's quit alcohol, and at times his very complicated relationship with the Reddit community. As always, if you liked the episode, make sure to smash that like button and leave us a comment on YouTube with your favorite moment, and you can check out all related content to thequestatjustinkan.club.
So, I want to start off with the question that I'm asking every guest, which is what's the Steve Huffman origin story?

**Steve Huffman** (2:34)
The Steve Huffman origin story, I wish I had a good one. If I were like a comic book character, this would be like one of those, you know, kind of knock off other series that was made to like kind of look like the Avengers.
I don't know what that is. Is that like Fantastic Four or like, you know, a step or two removed?

**Justin Kan** (2:54)
Yeah, it'd be like Alpha Flight or something like that.

**Steve Huffman** (2:56)
Exactly, okay, so I'd be one of those guys because I think you could substitute many people into all the things I'm about to tell you. Grew up in a kind of a normal home, had a good home life, did a lot of Legos as a kid, started programming when I was young, spent a lot of time on the computer, got access to the internet when I was, I don't know, 12 or 13 and programmed all through high school and college and kind of always looked up to the kind of, the bubble companies and in that experience and kind of found that like really inspiring or thrilling and then stumbled across Paul Graham.
So that story probably fits like just about every entrepreneur of my age in America, I feel like.

**Justin Kan** (3:45)
So I'm curious, I had my own experience with the, looking up at all these.com bubble companies and saying, oh, I could build that or I could build one of these companies. Like, what were the ones that you thought, that you looked at and were like, I wanna build something. Like that made you wanna build an internet company.

**Steve Huffman** (4:03)
You know, it was Amazon and eBay were the ones that stood out, and probably less because of like the business itself, but they were in the headlines. And so I would read the newspaper every morning and read about these companies just kind of like exploding.
And eBay, I think at the time, this was like probably, you know, this was late 90s, was more of the kind of cultural touchstone. Amazon was just selling books, like how boring, but eBay was letting people sell their like junk and whatnot and created this whole new market.