Reddit, a forum-style social media app created in 2005, just reached its peak earnings this year, with the platform valued at $21 billion.
However, CEO Steve Huffman said it wasn’t an easy path to success. In fact, when the co-founder joined the Prof G Pod podcast Sunday, he admitted his employees just weren’t up to par.
When the business started, he said, there was a culture of “idealism.”
“Wrapped up in some of that idealism was also, like, not working very hard,” said the entrepreneur, who has a net worth of $50 million.
Huffman, who went to a private high school and the University of Virginia, took a break from Reddit in 2009 when he spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica and launching a new travel website called Hipmunk. He rejoined as CEO in 2015.
A big change for Reddit, he said, was that it “wasn’t running as a business. We were really idealistic, and I think in many ways the idealism has been very good, but we were also idealistic about not being a business—which is not a great way to run a sustainable business.”
The tech tycoon remembers telling employees: “Look, we have to work really, really hard. We’re in a competitive space.”
The platform, which has rivaled even the likes of Elon Musk‘s X and Mark Zuckerberg‘s Meta, has attracted at hundreds of millions of users.
“If we don’t work really hard and work really smart and make this thing successful both from a user point of view and business point of view, then we don’t get to do this, and we’ll never achieve our mission,” added the CEO.
Huffman turned the company around after rejoining and the new version went public in March 2024. Since then, the stock is up 147 percent.
Huffman said that privileged Silicon Valley bros are used to this “idealism.”
“In the Bay Area, broadly, is this—it’s almost an entitlement of, ‘I work at these companies, but I don’t have to work very hard and I’m here for myself,’” he said, adding that some of his employees used to take ideas from other companies.
Tech billionaires have in recent months cozied up to President Donald Trump, including “special government employee” Musk; Trump campaign donor Zuckerberg; and Jeff Bezos, who donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. All three attended the Jan. 20 celebration.
Huffman, on the other hand, has previously banned a Reddit page dedicated to Trump and kicked alt-right extremists off the platform.
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