Reddit - Steve Huffman & Alexis Ohanian

The site is a collection of entries submitted by its registered users, essentially a bulletin board system. The name "Reddit" is a play-on-words with the phrase "read it", i.e., "I read it on Reddit."^[10] The site's content is divided into numerous categories, and 50 such categories, or "default subreddits", are visible on the front page to new users and those who browse the site without logging in to an account. As of May 2014, these include:^[11][12]

When items (links or text posts) are submitted to a subreddit, users (redditors) can vote for or against them (upvote/downvote). Each subreddit has a front page that shows newer submissions that have been rated highly. Redditors can also post comments about the submission, and respond back and forth in a conversation-tree of comments; the comments themselves can also be upvoted and downvoted. The front page of the site itself shows a combination of the highest-rated posts out of all the subreddits a user is subscribed to.

This was the first version of reddit that was actually online. This screen capture is dated June 23, 2005. I can only imagine what those first users were thinking...

Actually, I know what they were thinking because they were all friends and family of ours. Frankly, most were probably wondering why there wasn't a mascot on the site.

How did you go from idea to product?

The first three months were really intense at Y Combinator. The first month in particular, we went from this very vague idea to an actual site that went on live about three weeks later.

It was really just me and Steve sitting in this apartment, in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts. We would only go outside for Pizza and then we would go to Azeroth in World of Warcraft at night to give us some distraction and that was it.

And, it was just a lot of — a lot of doodling in our journals, a lot of chatting across the table from one another and just work.

I went to high school in Ellicott City, Maryland, and I felt pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. It just took time away from my doing things on the Internet—like creating clans in Quake II or starting a Web design nonprofit.

I was terrified that no one played video games in college. But when I arrived at my dorm at the University of Virginia, Steve [Huffman, Reddit co-founder] was playing Gran Turismo 2, and I was like, "Hey, what's up?" We lived together all four years of college, then almost five years after.

My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, You bastards. I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call The Waffle House Epiphany: I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a dent in the universe.

That summer, I went to Singapore for a "technopreneurship" summit. I pitched this business Steve had dreamed up—MyMobileMenu, which was mobile food ordering. When I got home, I opened a bank account, filed the business, and spent a year researching the competition. I was talking to business owners in Charlottesville, Virginia—we thought we'd begin locally—when I got an e-mail from Steve saying that Paul Graham was speaking up in Boston during our spring break.

I didn't know who Paul Graham was, but after the talk I said, "Hey, Dr. Graham," and told him it would be worth the cost of buying him a drink if he'd listen to us talk about our start-up. He said, "You came all the way up from Virginia? Sure." He ended up inviting us to an interview for Y Combinator, which no one had heard of at the time. The night of the interview, Paul called me and said, "I'm sorry, we're not accepting you." That sucked. Really sucked. So we got drunk. Really drunk.

The next morning, on the train back to Virginia, hung over, somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I get a call from Paul. He says, "I'm sorry, we made a mistake. We don't like your idea, but we like you guys." We got off the train, and I was able to sweet-talk the Amtrak lady into not charging us to turn around. In our conversation, Paul said, "You guys need to build the front page of the Internet." That was all Paul, and that became Reddit.

We built Reddit in three weeks. It was just Web links and text submitted by users, with Interesting or Uninteresting buttons that you could click on underneath. Simple: That's all it was. After a contentious debate, we added Comments. We knew our business was in our user base, that that was the most important part.
(...)

The acquisition by Condé Nast basically started with a Halloween party, where we met a reporter who introduced me to a freelancer for Wired who told her boss about us. That editor's husband was the biz-dev guy at Condé Nast. He worked on a licensing deal with us, and everything worked great. So we started talking money. Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can't help being interested.

Paul was thrilled. We were one of the first start-ups to launch in Y Combinator, and now we were the first significant acquisition. People ask how much it was for, but I haven't even told my girlfriend. I tell her, "You can Google it, and you'll find it was between $10 million and $20 million."

Before Reddit’s fame, he met a Wired reporter, Rachel Metz, who was interested in a story. Metz and Ohanian hit it off over Chinese food, to the point where Metz could no longer objectively cover the growing startup. “That was fine by me. No Wired story came from that, but I got a new friend in Rachel.”

But, that set in motion a very lucrative chain of events. Metz “happened to mention reddit to her editor at Wired, Kristen Philipkoski. Kristen, the wife of Kourosh Karimkhany, was doing business development for Condé Nast and heard from Rachel about a pair of plucky founders in Boston working on something interesting called reddit.”

Eventually, Condé Nast would acquire Reddit for an unknown (but pretty large) sum of money, turning Ohanian from a startup founder to investor overnight.