The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #6

merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".

There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

And it showed no signs of letting up.

First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on...It was just incredible.

Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,

and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Cond Nast,

who makes an offer to buy the company.

Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

about like:
"How do I store this money?"

- Like a lot of money...

- Like a lot of money.

Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

- And he's how old at the time?

- 19, 20.

So it was in this apartment. They sat around

on what predated these couches,

hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit

they threw a giant party, and then all flew

out to California the next day,

and left the keys with me.

It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

he was the richest person around

but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little

shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."

It was barely larger than a closet.

The idea of him spending his money on

fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

He explains it as, "I like living in apartments so I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a new place to live. I'm not gonna buy a mansion,

and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

So it's really no big deal."

What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic

flows on the internet,

and what commands our attention.

In the old system of broadcasting, you're

fundamentally limited by the amount of

space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

On the Internet, everybody can have a channel.

Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.

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