Inside the founding of Reddit 📚

Reddit is home to the best and worst of the internet. Political propagandists and puppy-lovers call the site home, with 1.2M+ subreddits spanning the globe. The site has driven hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to worthy caused... and disseminated thousands of leaked nude celebrity pictures.

A lot has happened over the company’s 13-year history.

Inc Magazine writer Christine Lagorio just published We Are The Nerds, a deep-dive into the founding story of Reddit.

The fifth most popular website in the US has humble beginnings. Part of Y Combinator's first cohort (back when it was run out of Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston's house in Cambridge), Reddit was the brainchild of UVA's Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman.

Only two years after launch, the small team sold their company to Conde Nast... only to see the site engulfed in controversies, corporate restructuring, and in-fighting that threatened to bring the entire site down.

Christine spoke with hundreds of community members over the course of 6 years to bring the untold insightful, somber, and wholesome history about the "front page of the Interent" to light. Get a copy here. 📦

And for the Reddit-addicts out there, here's a secret tool that lets you pretend to be working while browsing Reddit. We won't tell your boss. 🤐

WE ARE THE NERDS

We asked 34 customers what Viktor does for them. Not one said chatbot.

They kept using words like colleague, coworker, team member. One CEO called it the glue holding their e-commerce business together, which is a lot, but also… you see why. It lives in Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so instead of jumping between tabs, you just ask for the thing. Pull Stripe against HubSpot, check Sentry alerts, spin up a campaign brief, build a landing page, send a report upstairs. It all happens there.

It has already hit top 5 on Product Hunt with 130 comments, is SOC 2 certified, and your data does not train models.

One user said it was the first time AI felt like a real coworker, which is either exciting or slightly concerning depending on your week.