The Birth of Reddit and How It Became the Front Page of the Internet
2005 was a significant year in history. The world had made it halfway through a decade that wasn’t supposed to happen, the Gulf Coast was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, and George W. Bush began his second term as President. Many more events happened in this year that would shake up the timeline of the universe.
There is a place where you could find information and discussions between the many web users about all of these events. Reddit, “the front page of the Internet”, of course. In 2005, Reddit was created in the span of three weeks by two young minds who wanted to revolutionize the way media was transmitted to Internet users. Those two brilliant characters are Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and they have quite the adverse and exciting story to go along with their groundbreaking, unprecedented invention.
Alexis Ohanian was born in 1983, in Brooklyn, NY, with Armenian and German heritage. His grandparents came to the United States after the Armenian Genocide occurred. He moved to Maryland and graduated from Howard High School in Ellicott City, MD. He then attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. Steve Huffman was also born in 1983, but in Virginia. He also ending up attending UVA, arguably the best college in his home state. The two classmates met and began to brainstorm the nearly endless possibilities of ideas that they could produce together as highly intelligent undergrads at a school often referred to as a “Public Ivy” League college.
Ohanian shared his point of view on how this whole thing got started. He said when he walked into his dorm at UVA for the first time, he was nervous that no one else played video games like him. He looked over and saw Huffman playing Gran Turismo 2, approached him, and became roommates with him for the next 10 years. Ohanian at one point was studying to become a lawyer. However, when he was taking a prep exam his junior year, he decided to walk out and go to Waffle House. He pondered about how instead of going through law school and become one of many attorneys in the world, he wanted to “make a dent in the universe”- change it, invent something new that everyone could use. This thought is what he referred to as the “Waffle House epiphany” and sparked his knack to create something new for everyone.
In addition to wanting to make a mark in the world, Ohanian had told one of his professors that he wanted to make the world suck less. Alexis went to Singapore the summer after the Waffle House turning point. He participated in a “technoprenuership” summit and pitched an idea his best buddy Steve and him had thought up called MyMobileMenu- ordering food through a mobile device, similar to today’s Uber Eats or GrubHub. Steve had thought of this idea at an old Sheetz gas station, which had touch screens for ordering food in the adjacent mini-mart. Huffman wanted to order his sandwich from his phone while he was pumping gas, so by the time he filled up his car, he could take his finished food from the counter inside the food mart and be on his way. These two seemed to be attempting to change the fast food game very early on, demonstrating their creativeness and innovation at young ages.
The two then spent the next year filing the payments and researching competition, eventually to get a call from a man named Paul Graham, who Ohanian had never heard of. Alexis and Steve met with Paul in Boston and pitched their idea to him, only for him to reject it. Upon hearing this news, Steve and Alexis decided to drink their sorrows away. They “got drunk. Really drunk”.
Even though they were told that their idea was no good, there was a glimmer of hope. The two young should-have-been, could-have-been, would-have-been entrepreneurs then departed to return to Virginia, when they suddenly received an unexpected phone call during their hungover, lamentful train ride. The person on the other line was none other than Graham.
Paul told them that him and his company had made a mistake. He stood affirmative about how he did not approve of their idea, but he liked Steve and Alexis as people and innovators. He gave the two brilliant young minds a new task: create the front page of the Internet- a hub, a haven, a central place for all things that happened, are happening, and that will happen, and links and discussions that add to the context of these events. The idea for Reddit was officially born in Medford, Massachusetts in June 2005.
In order to complete this task, Steve and Alexis had to do some thinking about how to make a website that could be the first and foremost destination of all information within the World Wide Web. They eventually found a simple theory for their creation, as 22 year-old pre-social media-dominance era Ohanian wrote “the old model for news aggregation, when it was printed on a dead tree, wasn’t suited for the Internet age,” “An entire building full of editors, no matter how smart or tireless they are, can’t match the speed or efficiency with which” a robust Internet community can discover important news. Ohanian was definitely motivated to move forward in time, and fulfill his Waffle House Epiphany prophecy about making a dent in the universe. An wide-eyed idealist, Alexis says that he’s motivated by those minorities in the world that don’t get to express themselves due to their differentiating traits. Even though he believes that the web doesn’t completely erase all the characteristics that hold these people back, Ohanian still thinks that “the open Internet does technologically level the playing field for everyone,” and that one’s identity can be partially altered for better or for worse.
Despite the challenge of creating a website back in the early and mid-2000s due to less advanced technology compared to today, Reddit took just three weeks to be created. Steve and Alexis used ideas from popular websites at the time, including Delicious, which is an early social bookmarking site, and Slashdot, “the first truly large geek community focused on news and ideas”. Graham made a big-time investment in Huffman and Ohanian with his company called Y Combinator, a seed accelerator that got the ball rolling for the website. Graham also posted a link to Reddit in his personal blog post without telling Alexis and Steve, and the website received its first thousand visitors by clicking on their link.
Reddit grew rapidly after it was published, but not everything was right for Alexis and Steve. Ohanian took two huge blows within his circle of loved ones a month after manufacturing Reddit.
Ohanian’s then-girlfriend was in Germany during his time working on the site, and he got a call from her mother that she had accidentally fallen five stories off a balcony in Germany. She went into a coma and wouldn’t be released from the hospital until a few months after the fall. And this wasn’t even it for young Alexis. His dad called him and told him that his mother had a seizure and while in the hospital, doctors found a tumor in her brain. She had terminal brain cancer.
However, Alexis thought about both women and continued to process his and Steve’s project, which proceeded to get millions and millions of visitors over time. Ohanian, in his story told to Christine Lagorio of inc.com, stated “Waking up every morning with a company is a lot of pressure. But when you’re aware of what other people are waking up with, it’s a whole lot easier.” Alexis knew that he wasn’t the only one suffering, and others had it a lot worse, so he persevered and his and his partner Steve’s website continued to prosper.
Reddit went on to be acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006 for slightly under $20 million, sixteen months after the idea was born. This led Alexis and Steve to work on other projects as well as live out their 20’s. In 2007, Alexis launched Breadpig, a not-for-profit merchandise website whose proceeds go to charity, while Steve co-founded Hipmunk, a search engine for airfare, in 2010. This project was funded by Dr. Paul Graham’s Y Combinator company.
However, Ohanian and Huffman later acknowledged that it was a mistake to sell the website and decided to go back to it. Steve was named CEO of Reddit on July 10, 2015 and Alexis became the executive chairman. The original founders have been in command ever since. Reddit is now valued at over a billion dollars, and has only continued to grow. Ohanian stated that he has not been made happy, but comfortable by all the money him and Huffman have made from the website, and wants to continue to stay hungry and make the world suck less through his innovation and new discoveries.
