Don’t be perfect, just keep getting better.
The site [Reddit] has 300 million users, some of whom love it so much they’ve tattooed the logo on their bodies. And yet, it didn’t have a native mobile app until 2016. Internally, it’s staffed like a three-year-old company—it hasn’t done most of the things even an early startup would do today—and yet it’s continued to grow into the ninth most trafficked site on the internet. “I’m the one responsible for how ugly Reddit looks. It’s only in the last two years that we’ve even thought about design. We didn’t even have a data team before. It’s amazing to think what we could have done over the last six or seven years.”
...the best communities have a full-time dedicated resource acting, essentially, like the host of a never-ending party. This is the role he cast himself in early on at Reddit, exerting relentless effort keeping conversations going, keeping topics fresh, responding to people’s concerns. “It’s actually a lot of unglamorous work. Imagine what it would be like to talk to everyone at your party, while serving the drinks and apps, while bouncing the riff-raff, while DJing, while making sure everyone’s having a good time,” he says. “If you’re not putting that degree of effort into running your community, it’s not going to take.”
Whenever you’re choosing a co-founder or hiring people to lead big parts of your company or your vision, you have to make sure you can have hard conversations. You’re inevitably going to have a bunch of conversations that you would never ever have with a friend—and I think that a lot of new entrepreneurs don’t anticipate that.