Reddit has a ton of revenue - $500 million per year. Considering the work of actually running the site is done by volunteers, what is baffling is that they cannot be profitable with this amount of money.
There is profitability and then there is VC-profitability. One of them normal people can understand and the other is absurd IMHO.
VC forces you to staff up, spend like there is no tomorrow, and have a huge return or GTFO.
$500M a year should absolutely support a company like Reddit (even giving the API away for free) but that’s not a 10-100-1000x return so it’s essentially $0 to VCs.
When Reddit says they aren’t profitable they really mean they aren’t profitable /enough/ coupled with their high headcount.
Working at a small startup (or a side project) will show you what can be accomplished with 1-10 or <50 people who are all committed.
