I can only surmise from all the posts and interviews that Christian has done post that call but it simply seems like he tried calling their bluff on the $20 million number and/or was fishing for a buyout. He found the number ridiculous, the reddit admin told him that this number wasn't server costs but opportunity costs for lost revenue, Christian decided to poke the bear and ask if instead of him paying them 20 million dollars a year, they could buy him for 6 months of that "lost revenue" and then make that revenue for themselves. He was offering to be acquihired and was simultaneously calling their bluff about the API pricing
The reddit person seems to have thought that Christian was threatening them in some way??? I genuinely don't know what Christian could even have threatened them with. It seems to me they didn't understand the power dynamic at all of a small solo app developer talking to a massive corporation. Maybe they thought he was threatening simply shut his app down for that amount without telling anyone which might have avoided this ruckus? I'm sorry but I genuinely cannot fathom what they thought was going on
1 and 2 are different in that clearly the admin thought Christian was making a threat to their business whereas he was merely calling their bluff and possibly opening himself to business negotiations if reddit actually thought his app was worth that much. Through all this it feels like Christian did not communicate what he wanted effectively (though this seems to have been a throwaway line in a much longer call that got misconstrued gravely) and the admin was simply not equipped at all to handle negotiations
That seems like a fair read. Maybe I would restate as:
Reddit: If we had all Apollo's users, and showed them ads, we could make $20M/year more than we are making now.
What Christian meant to say: Ok, if that's really true, how about you buy my app and all my users for $10M? Then you can show them all the ads you want. If what you say is true, that's quite a deal for you. But my real point is that I don't believe your $20M number.
What Reddit heard: If you pay me $10M, you can have my app and all my users and I will stop making a fuss. Otherwise, I will badmouth you to my users and the press, encourage boycotts, and otherwise try to force your hand.
This read mostly makes sense to me. The only part I don't get is the part of the call where Christian says:
> I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
If Christian's intention was to sell the app and all its users to Reddit, then the load on the API wouldn't change, the only thing that would change is that Reddit would own it and the users would also see ads. So Apollo wouldn't "go quiet" under this scenario, and I don't understand the comment.
For some reason, in all their communication, the reddit admins have been VERY insistent that his app is one of the largest users of the API and that he needs to "optimise". My read is basically that if he sold the app, the external API calls all become internal API calls, they are free to either let the app work but with their own internal APIs or kill the app completely. It would be out of his hands and the issue of the volume of APIs being invoked would quiet down. Not sure if I'm being too charitable but from all the communication from both sides, this is what I'm surmising
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