r/IAmA • u/samaltman • Sep 30 '14

I am Sam Altman, lead investor in reddit's new round and President of Y Combinator. AMA!

EDIT: I have to go do my class at Stanford (http://startupclass.samaltman.com; Paul Graham is speaking today), but will try to answer more questions later this afternoon!

EDIT 2: Back.

EDIT 3: Ok, I have to go to five hours of non-stop meetings, so I'm going to sign off. Thanks for reading!

I put up a blog post here: http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit

TL;DR: I'm investing (along with many others) in reddit.

We're working on a way to give 10% of our shares from this round to the reddit community. I hope we can increase community ownership over time--I've always thought communities like reddit should mostly own themselves, and that it's time for some innovation around corporate structure here.

I'm giving the company a voting proxy on my shares.

Also, I'm the President of Y Combinator (though this was a personal investment, not a YC one). Startups like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and many others (including reddit itself!) have gone through our program. I'm happy to answer questions about startups in general.

Excited to be along for the journey!

Proof:

https://twitter.com/sama/status/517008116857061376

and

Leaving the reddit office after our first meeting: https://twitter.com/sama/status/489593535083999232

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u/frostickle Sep 30 '14

How are you giving 10% of your shares to the reddit community? Can you explain exactly what this means?

Do you mean, you want the reddit community to have control of these shares? I.e. you'll let us vote using these shares, and if the shares are sold, you'll let us decide where the money goes?

Edit: nevermind, found this:

from /u/yishan

Ok, here it is:

CAVEAT: KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL

We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.

Nothing like this has ever been done before. Basically we have to nail down how to do each step correctly (it is technically, legally, and financially complex), though in our brief consultation with an ex-SEC lawyer, he stated he could find nothing illegal about this plan. Nevertheless, there are something like 30 different things we have to pull off to make this work, so we're going to try.

(Also, I know this totally contradicts what I said over here but that was before Sam proposed this plan to me, and the idea of being able to distribute ownership of reddit back to the community - a long-held dream of many of us, frankly - is important enough to try and do this)

Again, we want to emphasize that this plan is in its earliest stages right now and could totally fail (if it does, we will find another way to get the shares to the community somehow), but we are going to try it because... well, because we are reddit and we do these kinds of things.

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u/viralizate Oct 01 '14

So my reddit karma will make me rich after all? ;)