At the end of the day, how many ads did it take to convince you to use Facebook or Twitter? It wasn't marketing or advertising that convinced you to use these services. It was their value.

Having that kind of endorsement and having Paul Graham's readership coming to your site and contributing to it and building the foundation of the community was just a really invaluable way to start Reddit.

There was a clear lesson here — and that was that the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants.

Do not be scared of the incumbents.

The first version of everything is janky.

You know that Estonia, based largely on how successful Skype was, built by Estonian developers, that was a tenth of the entire country's GDP when eBay bought it. That was like a decade ago, it was f****** Estonia, they were behind the Iron Curtain two decades earlier. They're now pushing for K-12 education in computer science in public schools. They've gotten the message. They know how much value that can bring.

The first step, and the thing that everyone has to do right on the Internet is make something people want.