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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless it's really an emergency, I'm not going to bother you. And you can see people chafe at that. 'You're in the same office and instant-message each other? Why don't you just walk over?' That's the perfect example of how ingrained the status quo is. To certain people, it may seem lazy, but I would argue it's much more efficient and considerate.
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.
Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.
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.
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.
Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can't help being interested.
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.
To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.
I'm probably the worst Silicon Valley insider ever. I don't hang out with Silicon Valley people.
