The Underdog Story of Reddit

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, this was not supposed to be a podcast. This was me calling Sam two minutes ago and being like, dude, did you hear the stuff about Reddit? And he's like, no, no, no. He put the finger up to my lips.
Push record. And in fact, me and Sam, we should really never talk if we're not recording. I think that's the new lesson.

**Sam Parr** (0:18)
By the way, I still have no idea what you're gonna bring up.

**Shaan Puri** (0:29)
Okay, so let me give you the background. Reddit goes public today.
Interesting, fine. I don't really care. I didn't participate in the stock or anything. I wasn't really looking at the chart, but I did read Paul Graham's essay about Reddit and it's titled The Reddits. It's on the YC blog. Paul Graham has known these guys for nearly 20 years now.
And so he wrote this post today that had so many little breadcrumbs that I thought they were like, as I was reading this, every paragraph was firing off like a connection to a different lesson learned. Like my brain of frameworks was literally like lit up like a Christmas tree with some of the things he was saying. And I just wanted to like say them out loud to you. I wanted to point out some things.

**Sam Parr** (1:11)
I'm imagining you eating cereal as you're reading this and then you have like one bite in and like you just dropped the food.

**Shaan Puri** (1:19)
Look, it's half eaten because I was like, oh shit, I gotta put this down, I gotta record this.
And so we didn't plan this, but let's do it. All right, so I'm reading this essay and I wanna give you kind of like point by point of what I think is really interesting.

**Sam Parr** (1:31)
And by the way, Paul Graham is the, I guess we have to give context now because this is like a podcast. Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator and Reddit was one of the first companies.

**Shaan Puri** (1:41)
Reddit was the first company in the first batch. But actually what's more interesting is in that post, Reddit is not only the first YC company in the first batch ever, it's actually the reason that YC exists. I don't know if you do this, but this is kind of cool. So Paul Graham in this essay, he says, YC started because he went to the Harvard like computer club or something like that and gave a talk. Which by the way, is how many interesting things have started. I also believe this is kind of how Apple started. Wasn't there like a, they gave a talk or a demo at the home brew club. This is how Tim Ferriss started the four hour work week. He taught a class at Princeton.
And there's this principle which is, if you ever want to learn something, try to teach it.
And that has led to many people writing books. So Tim Ferriss did it. Then he wrote a book. Neer Ayal, same thing when he wrote his book Hooked. Same thing. He's like, I first was just giving a talk somewhere. To give the talk, I had to sharpen up my thoughts. By the end of that, I was like, shit, there's something to this. And the same thing happened here. Paul Graham gave a talk at the school called How to Start a Startup. He gives this talk. And then from the talk, he's like, dude, I should create like a vehicle to invest in like these earlier, younger founders. He's like, at the time founders were thought to be like either older or just super young prodigies. But he's like, I think this college student age, I think that's where you could start companies from. So that's why he creates YC. So he gives the talk.
He meets with Steve and Alexis afterwards and he's impressed by another thing. So the second interesting thing, he gave this talk at Harvard. They didn't go to Harvard. These guys go to school in Virginia.
They took a train up from Virginia to hear this talk because they used to follow his blog. So Steve loved his blog. He convinces Alexis, hey, come with me to go see this guy talk. They go up there. It's not like a show. There's no tickets. It's like 30 person room and he's there. And so Paul was so impressed that these guys came from Virginia. He's like, they wanted to meet for coffee. He's like, okay, no problem. You guys came from such a far away. I'll do it.
There's a principle there in the like 80% of success is just showing up or like when in doubt, like just go, just take the train, take the flight, just show up, put yourself in positions for good things to happen. And that's what they did. And it's a high agency move. They could have easily a not gone, you know, showed up and not told them, but they went there, they took the train, they told them. And this is the first of many high agency moves that they pull. He talks about later how they actually ended up rejecting these guys from YC. So he gives the talk, decides to create YC, reaches out to the guys like, hey guys, I was inspired by meeting you guys. I actually created something called YC for people just like you. You should fill out the application.