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

What one realizes there is that we are not in control of the [reddit] community, in any way, shape or form. We have no power over it and so we've lost this total control.

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.

We were very, very lucky being in the first round of Y Combinator because that alone generated a lot of interest. A lot of readers of Paul Graham were just excited to see what was going to come up. And we were the first ones to launch.

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.

Hundreds of these companies I've seen since the beginning stages - including Dropbox and Airbnb - one of them has actually been crushed by an incumbent. The Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks, they might be someone to acquire you, which is not necessarily a bad position to be in.

Nothing will replace good journalism.