CEO & Co-Founder, Reddit
Museum of Reddit Part 1 | Steve Huffman
Steve looks back and comments on some of reddit's community posts.
Steve Huffman is the Co-founder and current CEO at Reddit and is also the founder of Hipmunk.
Steve founded the social news site reddit in 2005 with his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian. Reddit has since grown into the largest social news site and one of the largest communities on the Internet. In 2015 he came back to reddit as CEO after years away from the company.
Watch DraperTV Now: http://drapertv.com
FOLLOW DRAPERTV:
Facebook: / drapertv
Instagram: / draper_tv
LinkedIn: / meetthedrapers
X: https://x.com/strea...
About Steve Huffman
During Reddit’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Huffman described cost discipline as the company’s “single most important management lever” and noted that Reddit’s authentic human content is a key value proposition that the company aims to preserve. He acknowledged that AI and smarter agents represent a new frontier in preventing abuse and manipulation on the platform, and suggested that Reddit’s historically permissive account creation will need to evolve. On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Huffman reported a seventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth over 60%, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40% and record cash flow over $300 million, and stated a goal of reaching 100 million daily US users. In a Fast Company interview, Huffman described Reddit’s content as “like oil for the modern internet,” serving as a foundational resource for training large language models. He said Reddit’s policy is that commercial use of its data requires commercial terms, while non-commercial use will be treated flexibly. Huffman also discussed Reddit Answers, an LLM-powered search feature that provides verbatim quotes from users for questions with multiple perspectives. In a separate interview, Huffman expressed views on economic policy, stating that the U.S. treats supply problems as pricing problems, citing rent control as an example that leads to fewer homes and higher rents. He also advocated for unconditional cash transfers, saying “just give people money and let them do what they will,” and commented that “we’re supposed to die” when asked about life extension.
Transcript (16 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
I
Interviewer0:00
I think that part is very important, yeah. And then so speaking of the things, the good and the bad that Reddit has done, I actually went on to the Museum of Reddit, yeah, and there are some moments that I wanted to go through with you and then we'll go open up for questions. So it's kind of a little history timeline of Reddit. It's going to be bright, yeah. So the first one was in February of 23rd of 2009, a user created Imgur because they were sick of seeing Photobucket links on Reddit. And now Reddit does its own imaging service, correct?
S
Steve Huffman0:37
Yes, Imgur is still there, but yeah, we host the majority of our images now ourselves.
I
Interviewer0:42
Where were you when Dowsr9 created Imgur?
S
Steve Huffman0:51
I remember seeing that post. I left right at the end of 2009, so I probably just probabilistically was employed at Reddit when Imgur was announced. But I remember, I remember actually my feeling at the time. I actually do remember now. I was at Reddit and I was happy they existed. I did not want to host images. I did not want to have the liability of hosting images because at that time Reddit, we didn't have to deal with copyright or like child porn or any of that stuff because everything was external. And I knew that was a big burden on a lot of GIFs. Now I was a little naive in that. Now my thought has changed in that sort of stuff, in terms of you shouldn't let the fear of like difficult challenges prevent you from doing what's correct for the business. And so now we host our images and we just deal with that stuff, right? You know, we have a big community team, big trust and safety team, and legal team that just kind of deals with it. And as a result, or in exchange, we get our own images, which is very valuable. But I remember being a big, big fan of Imgur when they launched because I felt like they were doing us a favor.
I
Interviewer1:59
They were doing us a favor, yeah. And some of these you probably weren't CEO during, actually majority of them you probably probably not. We'll see. So, Reddit Secret Santa was created November 10, 2009. Have you ever participated in Reddit Secret Santa?
S
Steve Huffman2:16
I have. You're going to explain what it is, right? Yeah, so Reddit Secret Santa, it's not something that we do officially. It started off as a project from the community. It's the largest, it's the world's largest gift exchange. So the biggest one we do is over Christmas, so we actually do a number over the course of the year. And you basically sign up, you get paired with a stranger somewhere in the world, and you send them a gift. We're not prepared necessarily, you know, but basically you get an address and you send them a gift, and then you receive a gift from a stranger. It's very cool. We've had a lot of people participate, pretty much every country in the world. It's a really kind of fun, I think globally uniting event we do.
I
Interviewer2:56
And when you participate, do you remember what gift you got or gave?
S
Steve Huffman3:02
I got most recently a Westworld-themed cutting board. What a giggle from the audience. It was cool. I said I was in the West when I got the wood-burned cutting board. It was sweet and I use it. And the most recent one I gave, I gave somebody in the Bay Area Warriors tickets.
I
Interviewer3:23
Oh, nice. Probably very appreciative of that.
S
Steve Huffman3:27
Yeah, he was.
I
Interviewer3:32
Hi, today I'm going to show you how to make a Lego snow trooper, guys. Okay, first you get a spare, it should look like this. Then you get this part has like stuff on it, and then this back you don't really need, but then you just put that on. If you get this, you put that on the guy so it looks like... then you get a head. Not like that, do like that. Then put it on the guy. Next you get... they have like a cross on the top, you put it on him. You get... actually I don't really care what color they are, but get gray glasses. You get any gun, I'm using this gun. And then that's the Lego snow trooper. Thanks for watching. This was a video that a user just submitted saying that his son makes these Lego videos and that he doesn't get any views and he's constantly refreshing looking for views. And it was kind of a great example of how the good nature of Reddit, people just went on and started watching this kid's Lego video. I don't know if you remember this video.
S
Steve Huffman5:04
I don't remember this specific one. I'm sure I saw it at the time, but this is actually a common thing. This just happened like a week or two ago. Somebody found a YouTube channel for this guy who does like wholesome movie reviews or something, or video game reviews, and he just had like tens of views. And like, this guy's awesome, we should like watch his stuff. And now he's got like a huge following. And this is what I mean by like 99% of people are good, right? They just want to like spread a little joy and help their kid with a couple views on a Lego tutorial.
I
Interviewer5:37
Next one is the world is greeted with Grumpy Cat in 2012, September 23rd. I think everyone can get behind Grumpy Cat. Gotta get famous now today, so the business, yeah. But it actually has helped create a lot of businesses. You saved its... created many, including probably Amazon. We send Amazon a lot of traffic. And speaking of the business of Reddit, when did you guys go from not monetizing to monetizing?
S
Steve Huffman6:08
Um, we actually started... okay, so there's maybe I'll answer two questions. When did we start monetizing? That was actually probably as early as 2005, 2006. When did we start monetizing well? That was 2015. We've had ads on the site since almost the beginning, but we've gotten a lot better at it the last couple of years. And we haven't had to add any new placements, it's just the ads have gotten better and more relevant to users.
I
Interviewer6:35
Do you have tools to help advertisers create better ads?
S
Steve Huffman6:39
We have a team for that, actually, of brand strategists. Because Reddit advertising, Reddit is so different. When you're advertising in many other places online or in the real world, the strategy is often you're basically yelling your message at the customer and you have to do that enough times so that they remember your company or your brand or whatever. And on Reddit, it's conversational. And but you can, if you come in yelling and if you come in like not sensitive to what community you're talking to, you'll just get killed. And so when we get, you know, brands signed up for this experience and like, hey, this is your customer, this is like real, you know, valuable opportunity for you, we'll actually help them craft the message and the campaigns. And that's worked out really well for both of us.