Well, I should clarify that. I mean, I'm still going to spend half my life on this site and maybe I'll even try building up my karma again. But from now on, I'll be doing it as an amateur.
My time here has been wild. I've made friends with startup founders and web cartoonists and have been lucky enough to shake hands with redditors from Adam Savage to Marc Andreessen to the thousands of creative and wonderful people who joined us in DC last October. I've watched the site grow from a mere link-aggregation portal into a true community — the best forum on the Internet, if you ask me.
When I started in November 2008, revenue was a trickle. The site survived on t-shirt sales and Conde Nast's love. Today, reddit is signing big advertising deals, does brisk business every day via the sponsored links system, and (thanks to all you reddit gold subscribers out there) has proven that endless advertising isn't the only way for a website to pay its bills. Traffic is skyrocketing, articles are written about reddit nearly every day, and the four new programmers joining the team this spring should have a huge impact on speed, stability, and features.
I'm so proud of what our scrappy, brilliant skeleton crew has been able to accomplish, and I know that the best is yet to come for reddit, but I nonetheless feel that it's time for me to move on. At this point in my career, I want to work at a place where the programmers go all the way to the top, where the policies coming from HR and IT and everyone else are designed with nerds in mind, not magazine publishers.
And so when Google approached me recently with a dream offer, I realized that it was time for me to make my pilgrimage. (I think that every programmer should work there at least once in his or her career.) If you'd like to hear more about this adventure as it unfolds and keep in touch with me as I exit the reddit spotlight, you can follow me on Twitter. (This is my first time tweeting, so let me know if I do it wrong.)
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| Me with some of the toys, art, and postcards you sent to reddit from 81 countries on all seven continents |
