Check These Business Interviews/AMAs on Reddit

Posted: 25 Jan 2013 05:14 AM PST

Reddit has a type of post called AMA, which stands for “Ask Me Anything”. Basically famous/smart/weird people go there (either voluntarily or upon request) and answer to questions from the community.

Since there’s no moderation, the questions are very direct/interesting, and most of the time so are the answers. The format is a bit strange, but scan the text for the commenter name in bold, as those as the answers from the interviewee.

It might also sound like a small feature, but it really has a massive reach. For instance, they recently had an AMA with PSY (i.e., Gangnam Style), Snoop Dog, and even Barack Obama!

You can find a list of the most popular AMAs, broken down by category, here. I recommend that you check out the Business/Entrepreneurs category though, as there are many interesting Internet and tech moguls there.

For instance, here’s a snipper of the AMA with the founder of Imgur.com:

I created Imgur while I was a junior in college (Ohio University) and released it to you guys. It took a while to monetize it, and it actually ran off of your donations for about the first 6 months. Soon after that, the bandwidth bills were starting to overshadow the donations that were coming in, so I had to put some ads on the site to help out. Imgur accounts and pro accounts came in about another 6 months after that. At this point I was still in school, working part-time at minimum wage, and the site was breaking even. It turned out that OU had some pretty awesome resources for startups like Imgur, and I got connected to a guy named Matt who worked at the Innovation Center on campus. He gave me some business help and actually got me a small one-desk office in the building. Graduation came and I was working on Imgur full time, and Matt and I were working really closely together. In a few months he had joined full-time as COO. Everything was going really well, and about another 6 months later we moved Imgur out to San Francisco.

He also shared the stats of the last 30 days of the site:

Visits: 205,670,059
Unique Visitors: 45,046,495
Pageviews: 2,313,286,251
Pages / Visit: 11.25
Avg. Visit Duration: 00:11:14
Bounce Rate: 35.31%
% New Visits: 17.05%

That 2 trillion page views in 30 days. With a “t”. Not too shabby huh?

You’ll also find AMAs with Mark Cuban, Salman Khan, Stephen Wolfram, the Mozilla Team, Google employees and so on. Check it out. Here’s the link to the Business/Entrepreneurs category.