By October 2006, sixteen months after founding, Reddit had grown into an essential heartbeat of early tech culture, clocking roughly 70,000 unique daily visitors and 700,000 daily page views. But operating high-traffic servers on a shoestring $100,000 seed budget left the founders perpetually on the brink of hardware exhaustion.
Condé Nast, the storied publishing conglomerate behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, stepped in with an acquisition offer. While the precise purchase price was never officially disclosed, the team agreed to the sale and relocated across the country from Massachusetts to Wired’s San Francisco offices. Inside the corporate parent, Reddit was largely treated as an eccentric, low-overhead experiment, allowing the small engineering crew to operate with uncommon autonomy.
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