Vaibhav Sahgal: How We Scaled Reddit to 55M Users; Lessons from Zynga | 20VC #942

V, this is such a joy to do. I had so many great things from the wonderful Casey Winters before. But thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thank you for having me and, um, Casey's the, the true wonderful person here, let's, let's be honest. Learned a lot from that guy. So, uh, thank you, Casey, for the introduction.

He is wonderful. But I wanna start here with a little bit on you because you have this incredible, uh, duration at some of the most fantastic companies, both in growth and product roles. So, how did you make your way into some of the most powerful growth orgs with Zynga and Reddit today? What was that entry for you?

Yeah. I mean, mostly by accident to be, to be honest. Um, and I'll, I'll start when, in the beginning, I was a software engineer who just moved to the Valley, had worked for a company called Hi5. Um, I don't know if you know Hi5. Older social-

The video conferencing platform?

No. It, it was, uh, um... That was different. That was also, I think, Hi5. But this is a social network, older social network than Facebook, nearly as successful, as you can tell. Um, so yeah. So, so I started as a software engineer for this little startup no one's ever heard of. Uh, took a big chance, came to the Valley, um, and I was working for this product manager, his name was Mike Starbird, best, best name ever, even better guy, um, and, and he was my PM, I was the engineer, and, and we used to just work together. Um, and we were sending a lot of these emails. Some would say kinda spammy emails, but we were, we were basically sending these emails that, to users, like, telling them who they might know. And so this email was just full of a lot of different pictures and people's names and, like, "Hey, Harry, you might know these 20 people," or whatever. And, and the way the email was designed, and I was the one coding it up, it was, uh, the, the pictures were huge, and so we could only fit so many people in there and so many pictures in the, in the email. And I had an idea one night, I was like, "Hey, what if we just, like, reduced the size of the pictures and we put more, more people in there?" So I ran what, uh, is obviously now known as an A/B test for back then, I, I didn't really know what it was called, and I, I did that, uh, one night, and then the next morning, I came back, I looked at the data, and the click-through rate had gone up 20%. And I was so excited. I was like, "This is, this is amazing." Um, and then from that point on, I just kinda became a junkie for that process. I'm not saying that's all that growth is but, you know, I, the idea that you can, you can have some idea, whether it might be a lousy idea or whatever, test it against real people, um, have them tell you if it's good or not, give them a- a- and, and read i- in the data if it's good or not, to me, it's just romantic. And it's just, it's just really amazing. Um, and from that day on, I was just a junkie for it, uh, and, and I just kept, kept going deeper and deeper into it. So Hi5 doesn't exist anymore, moved over to Zynga, switched to product management, uh, which was essentially, you know, Z- Zynga at that time was basically this school for product management. And, of course, some bad habits as well, which took a while to shake off. Uh, but went through that university, essentially, um, which was amazing to get to do that. Uh, and then just, yeah, kept going deeper and deeper.