Let's say you're all worried about student-loan debt and you need to have steady income. That doesn't have to be your everything.

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.

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

Let's say you're all worried about student-loan debt and you need to have steady income. That doesn't have to be your everything.

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

If you imagine Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you can get all those requirements checked off and have all those amazing things that we need to just live lives, but actually get to do the thing that you're really passionate about.

I guess if you include contractors that are six or seven people working on reddit, but when we got acquired there were basically three and then in the years since, we've added three more developer hires full time, and a community manger. But the site is still remarkably small.