Let's start with a big milestone. Reddit went public last year after nearly 20 years as a private company, and you've personally been at the helm for most of that journey. How are you feeling? How have things been since the IPO?

Look, we're feeling great. Our first year was a good, solid showing, and we're really happy with how our first year out of the gate went. Maybe it's cliché, but even though we're celebrating our 20th birthday very soon, in a week or two, it truly feels like we're at the beginning. I look at Reddit and I see all of this opportunity, all of these improvements that I think we can make, all of these things that we want to do.

We're happy to have finally made that transition to being a public company. But it's funny. We had the IPO, and we had a little celebration with our employees, friends, and family. That was Thursday and then Friday. And then on Monday, it's okay, back to work. That's where our mindset is. We've got a lot of work to do.

If you had to distill it down, what are the one or two core motivators that keep you just as excited as ever about Reddit and the future of building a special company?

I think with Reddit, we have this opportunity to literally fulfill the promise of the internet, which is to connect people around the world around their shared interests and beliefs, regardless of where they are or what language they speak. We've made some progress, right? We have about 100 million people on the platform every day. But I think about the internet population, which is a couple of billion every day, and I feel like we're not even close to finishing our work.

Reddit is a special platform. It's organized around communities. It's powered by people. People are, I think, authentic and honest on Reddit in a way that they aren't anywhere else, online or offline. So I think about the opportunity to provide that for literally everybody. That's our mission: to empower communities and make their knowledge accessible to everybody. And that "everybody" represents an absolutely massive opportunity that we're really only at the beginning of achieving.

How do you think about the next chapter over the next three to five years? How do you take those 100 million people and get to 200, 300, 400, or 500 million? What are the core focus areas for an internet that is very different from the one you and Alexis started building around in 2005?

I think of Reddit in these different chapters. The first chapter of Reddit was Reddit as a link aggregator. In 2005, we were trying to solve the problem of, "I'm trying to find interesting content on the internet to read." This was before social media. This was before news feeds. RSS was a new technology then. Back then, you had some blogs or publications you liked, and you'd click around, but things couldn't go viral yet. There was no way for things to go viral. So a list of interesting things every day felt novel.

Then we've been in this era for the last decade or so, which is the "Reddit is not social media" era. Social media is organized around friends and followers and famous people, and it's performative and shallow. Reddit is the alternative to that, the antidote to that, if you will: a place where people are real, where they organize around their interests, and where people actually don't know who you are. I think that's a really powerful idea on Reddit.

And now we're entering the AI era, and this is the era of "Reddit is not AI." Reddit is the human platform. The whole rest of the internet might get rewritten by AI or powered by AI, and honestly, that's fine. I say that without judgment. But people will still want to talk to other humans, and that is the core Reddit product. It's humans talking to other humans about all manner of things. Developing Reddit as the most human place on the internet, where you can connect with anybody around your interests and passions, is the goal. That's been the goal for a long time, and it's still what we are tirelessly working toward.

One thing that's been fascinating to observe as an outsider is that Reddit, by virtue of all its user-generated content, has become a non-trivial part of the AI revolution. When you think about LLMs and the amount of infrastructure these companies need to build on, how are you and the team thinking about Reddit becoming a core part of the infrastructure layer of the AI revolution?

Yeah, there's a certain irony there that you're touching on. I just described Reddit as the most human place on the internet, and those 20 years of human conversations are being used to create and power AI. Reddit is one of the largest sources of training data for all of the major large language models. That's not lost on us.

But even before AI existed in the way it does today, we long believed that, first and foremost, Reddit is a platform for humans to connect with each other, and that's still our primary objective. It's always been important to us, for example, that Reddit be open, and it's still the most open platform on the internet. You don't have to be logged in to see what people are talking about on Reddit, and this is really important to us.

The content on Reddit has been used for research over the years to better understand people and to better understand Reddit. We've been very supportive of that, and in fact, we still are. And now it's also being used to train AI models, which wasn't part of our plan, but here we are. In that process, we've put more guardrails on what our data can and can't be used for. If it's going to be a commercial use, it requires commercial terms, but we're still open to doing non-commercial agreements for research and things like that. And of course, though Reddit is for humans, we can use the technology ourselves to make Reddit better, safer, and easier to consume.

The ecosystem changes daily, it feels like. The things I know for sure are that Reddit is for people, and that Reddit is a really powerful source of information and knowledge for people and for AIs. We want to make sure we adapt all parts of our platform and business toward both of those things.

If we fast-forward three, four, or five years, what does success look like for Reddit?

I want everybody around the world to be enjoying the community experience on Reddit. You can come to Reddit to have a few laughs, to get advice, to make decisions, to find that human connection. That's what I think of as the promise of the internet, and part of our job is to fulfill that. At the same time, of course, we're trying to build an amazing business so that we can keep working on our mission. The business follows the users. I don't think I need to belabor that point. I think Reddit is an incredible business.

As it relates to AI, a lot of that is very hard to predict, because things are changing so rapidly. But I think one huge opportunity for Reddit and the internet is for Reddit to unlock its corpus for people who have questions that Reddit has the answer to. We launched a product called Reddit Answers late last year. It's still early days, but I think it's fascinating. We at Reddit are learning how interesting our corpus is.

You can go into the app and tap on Answers at the bottom, or go to reddit.com/answers, and ask it a question that has a subjective answer. We can now answer questions that I think were previously very difficult to answer on the internet. For example, one of the things I did the other week was see a show at the Sphere in Vegas, and I could ask Reddit Answers, "What's the best seat at the Sphere?" It summarizes all of this. There's no right answer. What there is is 100 opinions. So we can bring to the user all the people answering that question and what their viewpoints are, and everything's grounded in what actual people said on that topic on Reddit. I think it's really, really powerful.

Reddit has been deeply integrated into the infrastructure of the modern web for the past 20 years. When you think about the next phase of the internet, what does it look like from your vantage point, and what role do you want Reddit to play in it? Or is it perhaps the obvious one, as you said, of being perhaps the last place standing on the internet where people can have real human connection in a non-performative fashion?

So I think you did answer the question, which is that it's hard to predict how the internet's going to change and how the world's going to change. We just know that it's going to change. But one thing that I know is going to be constant is that people want to talk to other people. They want to be with other people. Human beings naturally create community. Community is a byproduct of people being together, and people need that connection and belonging. It's part of what makes people people. It's what separates us, I think, from a lot of other animals: we create that sense of community and belonging. Reddit reveals that, and we build on that. I don't think that's going away.

I think there's also this idea of Reddit as a knowledge source, literally answering your questions, though I think that's probably oversimplifying it. Revealing all of the subjective points of view, which are sometimes messy, around any topic is, I think, really, really powerful. So those are the things that we're really focused on. Around us, I think everything is going to change. But I know people want to talk to people, and I know people will find a tremendous amount of value in that historical conversation, that corpus of conversations on Reddit.