Beyond spez (and the fact that he is a greedy little pig boy), I’m curious about the corporate dynamics that prevent a company like Reddit from being profitable. From an outside perspective, they make hundreds of millions per year via advertising, their product is a relatively simple (compared to industries that need a lot of capital to build their product), and their content is created and moderated for free by users. Could any offer some insights or educated guesses? Additionally, I’m curious how this all ties into the larger culture of Silicon Valley tech companies in the 2010s.
On one level I definitely see the appeal of that way of innovating though. At the early stages of solving a problem, one solution might appear superior, but then unforseen problems come up further down the pipeline. Having completely disconnected groups work on the same problem in one way reduces the chances that everyone falls into the same trap.
In a sense, that’s how we work in the scientific community: You have different, more or less disconnected research groups researching the same problems, and even when someone publishes a solution, another group may realise that they are on the track of a better solution that they can publish a year later. We still collaborate quite a lot, but a lot of what a research group does is quite disconnected from the rest of the world until someone publishes.
Oh yeah, absolutely, I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense; particularly if you’re called Apple, which was the most valuable company in the world at the time, and therefore had insanely deep pockets. It absolutely makes sense that they would prioritize augmenting the odds of serendipitous events over cutting costs, because they’re far more likely to die of lack of innovation, than lack of funds. Really only saying that I didn’t like that part of it much for myself. But I agree, it did make a lot of sense for their situation.
Also, to be comprehensive, there are more things that I liked about the Apple culture, than things I didn’t like. They had an very extreme approach to individual ownership, which was very empowering, and which I’ve been missing since.