Reddit is worth nearly $21 billion after last week’s megahit earnings report. Its CEO said its success took two decades, a big leadership change, and reminding employees that they had to work hard.
In the episode of the “Prof G Pod” podcast released on Sunday, Reddit’s cofounder and CEO, Steve Huffman, talked about the platform’s founding journey. He also answered a question about the biggest changes he made that had the most impact on the company.
He said the biggest shifts involved using common sense, debating whether the product was good, and being willing to change things.
“Another big change for Reddit was we weren’t running as a business. We were really idealistic, and I think in many ways the idealism has been very good, but we were also idealistic about not being a business — which is not a great way to run a sustainable business,” Huffman said about growing the company after he returned as CEO in 2015.
“Wrapped up in some of that idealism was also, like, not working very hard,” Huffman added.
He recalled telling employees: “Look, we have to work really, really hard. We’re in a competitive space.”
The CEO added: “If we don’t work really hard and work really smart and make this thing successful both from a user point of view and business point of view, then we don’t get to do this, and we’ll never achieve our mission.”
Huffman cofounded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, his college roommate, in 2005 and oversaw its 2006 acquisition by Condé Nast. He left the company to cofound the travel website Hipmunk before returning to Reddit as its CEO in 2015. Huffman was tasked with turning the company around after it faced a slew of challenges, including difficulty recruiting and bad publicity because of provocative content on the platform.
Reddit went public in March 2024, and its stock rose as much as 70% on its first trading day. Since then, the stock is up 147% and worth about $113 a share.
On the Sunday podcast episode, Huffman said the sense of “idealism” Reddit had in its early days is a problem in Silicon Valley as a whole.
“In the Bay Area, broadly, is this — it’s almost an entitlement of, ‘I work at these companies, but I don’t have to work very hard and I’m here for myself,'” he said.
Huffman added that tech employees, including Reddit engineers, had a tendency to take ideas from other successful companies. He said his engineers adopted Apple’s philosophy of “it’s done when it’s done” and used the phrase when he asked for product timelines.
“But then the version I get isn’t this artisanal, world-class product,” Huffman said. “It’s, like, late” and very poor quality, he added.
The CEO said that he, too, didn’t like being rushed as an engineer but that setting realistic deadlines was part of his maturation as a leader.
On Thursday, Reddit reported first-quarter earnings that sent its stock surging 19% after hours. Its revenue increased 61% year over year to $392.4 million.
One of the biggest drivers of Reddit’s success is that users treat the platform like a search engine for their queries and often add “Reddit” at the end of their Google searches. In the past year, changes to Google’s algorithm have both boosted and hurt Reddit.
On Thursday’s earnings call, Huffman said that the company expected “some bumps along the way from Google” but that the platform would always meet the needs of people looking for the “subjective, authentic, messy multiple viewpoints that Reddit provides.”
Source – https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-employees-werent-working-hard-ceo-steve-huffman-said-2025-5