July 11, 2005 - the day we learned about digg

I know I've told this story on stage more than a few times and even wrote about it in my bestseller, Without Their Permission, but sometimes even basic truths needs repeating. Sunlight will always win in the end.

I wrote this email minutes after discovering digg, which was three weeks after we launched reddit. I still have it and revisit it for a laugh from time to time. We were so young. Steve and I had just graduated from UVA a few weeks earlier. This was almost 10 years ago. Wow.

You can tell I was nervous. As soon as I learned about them, I sent this company-wide email out (to Steve) and we took an emergency meeting in the conference room (kitchen) to discuss the venture-backed, celebrity-founded, Silicon Valley startup that would be our chief rival for the next few years: digg.

Fortunately, we'd already launched (back on June 23rd) and Steve & I were building something fundamentally different -- a platform for communities, rather than a single community's democratic frontpage.

I'm so proud of how a little project two naive college kids started grew to become the platform that sets the global agenda, but we have so much more to go and now we have a much larger and more capable team of amazing people with whom to do it!

Onward to the next 10 years.