I imagine it's some combination of building out a worldwide ad sales force, engineering to keep up with the resulting ad technology demands, and further enginee

I imagine it's some combination of building out a worldwide ad sales force, engineering to keep up with the resulting ad technology demands, and further engineering to keep up with the modern ML arms race. Plus as you grow you need infrastructure to support your much larger employee base (everything from dev tools to HR). Looks like their valuation has also grown in that time, from about 400 million 10 years ago to 10 billion in 2021 - not sure they have had a funding round since then but Fidelity recently cut their Reddit shares by 41% value, which would still put them at 5-6 billion. That's still a 10x+ return over 10 years. Having only 20 employees might sound desirable on paper, but you simply cannot do with 20 employees what you can do with a larger company. Having only a couple people responsible for an entire region of ad sales is not scalable in the slightest. Reddit has historically had an abysmal ARPU and part of that was because a sheer lack of people able to support the ad business. Reddit is now almost able to break even when I don't think they have ever previously been profitable (even with 20 employees).