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A new team at Reddit

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: A new team at Reddit

#291

Post by strlen »

asaramis wrote: post #228
sama wrote: post #85

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…

Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit? I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringi…

Ellen was also an EE major as an undergrad (at Princeton, which is known for its hard sciences, IAS et al...), a partner at a firm that has invested into many other consumer audience startups (i.e., I'd think she knows very well the difference between a site like Reddit and BI), and a reddit user prior to her role at reddit.

Finally, why should we hold a law degree someone has obtained 20 years ago against them? (Fwiw, this is a background quite similar to Peter Thiel: years in "the elite", until finding a better home).

Re: A new team at Reddit

#292

Post by stefan_kendall3 »

hugs wrote: post #284
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I loathe the place. Not for any of the reasons you just listed. (“scary”? SF??)

I was born in New York City, grew up in L.A., started a company in SF, and live in Chicago, but the only place I've ever been held up at gunpoint was in San Francisco at 4th and Mission.

I mean you were on Mission street. I raise an eyebrow to the "loathsome gentrification" stories that pop up pretty regularly.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#293

Post by NDizzle »

ryanSrich wrote: post #186
gojomo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally such a resignation is about being-overruled (board no-confidence), rather than just the particulars of one decision. With ~sama's revelation that Wong preferred a Daly City HQ, the battle-lines could have been: Pro-Daly-City: "more space, cheaper, less-cool, longer-runway, more employees who've self-selected for willingness to do Reddit muckwork vs. glamorous SoMa networking, outsider perspective" Pro-SF: "…

Do you have anything to support your claim that top talent prefers SF? Just curious.

It's not necessarily top talent.

It's young / youngish single people who are willing to kill their bodies with insane hours at the office that most startups are after.

Those people are generally in SF, or at least the kind of people who can actually afford to live in SF on ~$100k.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#294

Post by x0x0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #234
kenrikm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience you always loose employees when moving offices. It's a really weird feeling just after the move and takes a while to get back into the grove.

Last place I worked, we moved just a few blocks away, from a really, really awful crappy warehouse in Sunnyvale to a pretty spiffy new facility also in Sunnyvale. I don't think we lost anyone due to that move. So, lesson is to make sure your new office is awesome and not that geographically far from your old one?

Not geographically far can limit you to a tiny distance if you have commuters on caltrain, bart, and muni. Lots of people scoff at the change going from a 5 minute walk from the transportation depot to a 15 minute walk makes, but that made me leave a company. Of course, virtually nobody doing that walk fails to understand, but execs drive.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#295

Post by redthrowaway »

cma wrote: post #276
sama wrote: post #85

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…

Re: "he had the original product vision for the company" I thought Alexis et. al. originally started a company doing something else at the beginning of their application and acceptance to YCombinator, and Paul Graham had the idea for reddit and convinced them to do it instead of their original plan. When Aaron Swartz was fired (edit: used to read quit) and the other founders of reddit tried to remove his founder stat…

Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea, but liked them, so he suggested the "front page of the Internet" idea.[1]

And Swartz was fired, not quit. He went to Germany then didn't show up for a couple weeks when he got back. [2]

[1] http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/reddit-co-founder-speaks-power-open-i...

[2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html

Re: A new team at Reddit

#296

Post by x0x0 »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #278
golergka wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last company I've worked in moved headquarters 6,500 km. Most of the business-critical employees and developers moved with it. All this drama about relocating office a couple subway stops seems ridiculous.

Daly City is a world away from 520 3rd. There is nothing of any kind worth mentioning in Daly City. There is culture, entertainment, education, recreation, and all the benefits of real city life steps away from Reddit's current office. In addition the building at 520 3rd has a tradition of housing famous Internet companies.

and, more importantly, bart is only convenient in a very narrow corridor of sf, so this could be turning 15-25 minute commutes into hour plus commutes, spanning two transport systems in sf. A recipe to make your employees hate it.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#297

Post by panjaro »

I've always had a gut feeling that Sam Altman is not what he acts like. Just because Paul Graham says he is great doesn't mean he is. It's just his personal belief and could be just a propoganda.... Nothing can be believed in this world anymore, news are not actually news, People don't mean what they say, they say what they don't mean, they act different that the reality and internet world is going crazy, unethical, greedy and more... Start ups are just made to make money, People are easy to fool, one guy comes up and make millions, says start up is great and all the people like Donkeys and Yaks start a 'Start-up'. Why? To make money.... doesn't matter what their action's effects are, they are just crazy to make money. They are dishonest, greedy but they call themselves successful...why, because they earned money... Bring on the Artificially intelligent machines, get rid of the humanity... sooner than later...

Re: A new team at Reddit

#298

Post by bradleyjg »

jchendy wrote: post #190
SamReidHughes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9.7 in San Francisco miles is a long commute.

I've never lived/worked in SF, but I had pretty much the same thought. Living in NYC, 9.7 miles is an almost unfathomable distance.

When Citibank built the tower in LIC, I'm sure there were people that weren't happy, but I doubt they lost many employees. That's about 7 miles driving distance from wall street.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#299

Post by cma »

redthrowaway wrote: post #295
cma wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: "he had the original product vision for the company" I thought Alexis et. al. originally started a company doing something else at the beginning of their application and acceptance to YCombinator, and Paul Graham had the idea for reddit and convinced them to do it instead of their original plan. When Aaron Swartz was fired (edit: used to read quit) and the other founders of reddit tried to remove his founder stat…

Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea, but liked them, so he suggested the "front page of the Internet" idea.[1] And Swartz was fired, not quit. He went to Germany then didn't show up for a couple weeks when he got back. [2] [1] http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/reddit-co-founder-speaks-power-open-i... [2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/200…

Thanks, edited the part about quit. I didn't mean their idea was an infogami in the sense that it was functionally similar to infogami, but rather just that it something that similarly never worked out.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#300

Post by brianpgordon »

jo_ wrote: post #48
brianpgordon wrote: post #26

Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.

I'm guilty of abhorring UI changes. Very rarely do I see them as justified. I largely prefer incremental UI changes rather than grand overhauls. The latter seems to be a minimal increase in functionality and a maximal increase in glitz. I think Reddit has been taking the incremental approach, especially when it comes to rolling functionality into the main engine from all the (now less useful) browser plugins. That sa…

There are a lot of usability issues but the most blatant anachronism in my opinion is having to refresh the entire page to check for orangereds. Long polling has been ubiquitous for a decade, and nowadays everyone is using WebSocket for push.
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