The Beginning
“I was this nerdy kid in Columbia, Maryland and my parents didn’t understand technology at all. They had been convinced by my cousin to buy a computer for me. This was not a trivial purchase, but they were like – “okay, you know what? Let’s do it.” And it changed my life. [A]n internet connection came maybe two years after – and that was like, total game change. And when I think about all that has happened since then, it was just a direct result of having that good fortune of getting access, getting the support.”
First Computer
“[My first computer was the] 486 SX – the DX was faster, but my parents were like “no, that’s too expensive.” And it was still good enough, don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t play all the video games I wanted, but it was fine.”
“[The internet] made schoolwork feel so silly. I made websites for adults who didn’t know I was a kid, because I would go on these message boards for non profits and just say like “who needs a website?” I would make [web pages] for them, not for money, just for pride. I was doing this through high school.
[I]t was so empowering because I’d be doing this BS schoolwork and I’d come home and have adults who were grateful to my skills as a developer, and as a kid that was my ticket, that like flipped the switch in my head, and made me so hungry because I felt power.”
Web Skills
“[Being online I] was either playing video games or learning HTML to build websites about playing video games. Geocities, Angelfire [web pages] – I had them all. Tripod. For a minute there, I had a midi website. I would download these midi files, which were synthesized music files, of video game theme songs or movie theme songs and just host them.”
Quake 2 / Angelfire
“I remember my first Geocities site – it was a Quake 2 fan page. And like black background, really cheesy, animated gifs of fire, and rocket launchers and stuff, it was so lame. I had blink tags and pop ups.”
Metallica Black Album
“I grew up [a] hardcore Metallica [fan]. [My screen name on Reddit] kn0thing [is] from King Nothing, I just put a zero in there. Like, “cool, I’m a gamer, I can put a zero instead of an o.”
“[M]y life was dominated by metal pretty much until I got to college and then I felt like rock had just like fallen off, and then I discovered all the hip hop I was missing. I still tend to like [Nine Inch] Nails and Metallica from time to time. Those are the two that have stuck with me. Blueprint, Blueprint 2, Downward Spiral, Pretty Hate Machine. Man, I would play a lot of Quake 2 to PHM. I mean Trent Reznor, he did the soundtrack for the first Quake game, he might have helped with the concept for the second Quake. Yeah. And oh, fun fact: there’s a nail gun in Quake and if you look very closely, the branding on it is Nine Inch Nails. The N – I – Backwards N.”
Masters of Doom
[“Masters of Doom is] the story of iD software, and it’s not – like it’s a well written book, it’s not like amazeballs, but it was well written enough that I got into the story about the founding of this company that I played all these video games of that made me think, hey me and my friend (Steve Huffman) could probably start a company too.“
Starting Reddit
“So Steve and I lived across the hall from each other freshman year at the University of Virginia. I saw him playing video games freshman year and I got really excited because I was worried that no one else played video games. I needed someone’s coattails that I could ride on and Steve’s were perfect. And at this point, we knew we were going to start this company – [our first idea] was called My Mobile Menu. We knew we were going to start this and he had heard of [Y Combinator’s] Paul [Graham] online and knew he was giving a talk and it was our senior year spring break, so we thought “why not? Let’s just go to Boston instead of Cancun and hear this dude give a talk on how to start a start up.” Yeah, we were nerds. It’s true.”
Donde Quake 2? 