Employee #1: Reddit | Y Combinator

Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies.\nChris Slowe was the first employee at Reddit. He worked at Reddit for five years, then Hipmunk for five years, and now he’s back at Reddit, writing code.\nDiscussed: YC’s First Batch, Meeting The Founders, Finishing a PhD While Working at a Startup, Keyser Söze, Reddit as Vocation, Maintaining a Life Outside a Startup, and Returning to Reddit.\n\nCraig : You’re back at Reddit now. What’s your role at this point?\nChris : It’s kinda two things. I started off working on some front page redesign stuff that we’ve got planned. I’m also working on a new version of our algorithm. Our current version is about eight years old. I also wrote that algorithm.\nCraig : [Laughter]\nChris : Practically speaking, we’re probably a hundred times bigger than we were when we wrote that, so that was my initial task. I’m also forging one of our new engineering teams, which we internally call “Anti-Evil.” We’re anti-spam, anti-abuse, and sort of anti-cheating. I guess we’re anti-everything. Pro-freedom!\nCraig : Right on. And prior to re-joining Reddit you were at Hipmunk. How was it working there?\nChris : I really enjoyed it. I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel companies aren’t technology companies. I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.”\nCraig : [Laughter]\nChris : It was like, “Oh, we’re having one of those calls.”\nCraig : “Let me get the nerds in here and they’ll figure it out.”\nChris : Yeah!\nCraig : That’s hilarious. Ok, so could you give me the rundown of how you ended up at Reddit?\nChris : Sure. I was in Y Combinator’s first batch, along with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. I was working at a different startup and we were doing desktop search. This was at a time before desktop search was a thing. What kind of killed us that summer was Apple coming out with Spotlight, then Google Desktop came out so we had a hard problem with so many players in the field.\nAt the end of that summer, my cofounder decided to go to grad school. This was the first YC batch so it was totally different. It was sort of a three month trial to build a product and see what happens. We were at the first demo day, which was actually kind of fun. Something like 20 people showed up.\nCraig : Wow. So how did you connect with Steve and Alexis?\nChris : By the end of the summer I had two free bedrooms in my apartment. I was good friends with both of them at that point. I think they originally planned to move back to Virginia but I believe Paul Graham talked them out of it. So they had basically given up on their flat and now needed a place to stay. My cofounder from YC, Zak Stone, was like, “Want to stay with Chris?”. And they were like, “Okay, great.”\nCraig : And at what point did you start working on Reddit?\nChris : I want to say like three months later. I was in grad school at the time and I had much more grown-up hours, where I would wake up at 7 or 8 in the morning, go to work, and come back then work on projects at night. Steve and Alexis would sleep in then work until like 4 in the morning.\nBecause I was up early I’d check Reddit and when it was down I’d knock on Steve’s door and be like, “Hey, site’s down.” After the third time that happened, he just showed me how to log in and start it back up.\nCraig : That’s great.\nChris : So I guess my first job at Reddit was in ops. But yeah, at that point it was still Steve writing code and Alexis doing everything else. We were friends and he asked me if I wanted to join, and I did. That was probably six months after Reddit started.\nCraig : You were still in grad school studying physics, right?\nChris : Yeah. That’s when I was in my fifth year of grad school.\nCraig : And did you have to pause everything to make that happen?\nChris : No. So I’d go to lab and work from 8 to 6 then come home, eat dinner, and join them in the living room to hack for a while. The nice thing is, I was given work that was sort of independent of what everyone else was working on so I wasn’t a blocker.\nI think the first thing I worked on was traffic monitoring. This was at a time before Google Analytics. It was like processing access logs and generating summaries and trying to figure out how to do this at scale. I must have rebuilt that damn thing eight times in the first four years.\nThe thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure or anything.\nCraig : So you were essentially working part-time?\nChris : Part-time in...