Reddit grew for nearly two decades before going public in March with a valuation of around $6.5 billion. Although the social media forum now has 91 million daily active users, its success was not a given. In fact, Reddit's co-founders were rejected by startup accelerator Y Combinator early in their entrepreneurial journey.
“So, Alexis [Ohanian]my co-founder and then-college roommate and I applied to Y Combinator,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on Thursday. Their original idea was to create a way to order food via cell phone – which wasn't the norm in 2005.
Y Combinator rejected the idea but asked Ohanian and Huffman, then 22 and 21, to work on something else. They came across Reddit, which funded Y Combinator with a check for $12,000.
The idea for Reddit was born from two websites: Delicious and Slashdot. Delicious was a site that allowed users to save and share bookmarks; Yahoo acquired it in 2007. Slashdot.org still exists as a social news site that covers science and technology news; Reddit's co-founders were impressed by the community but wanted to expand beyond the tech space.
Reddit “was something like Delicious plus Slashdot, but both done better,” Huffman said. “Honestly, I think that's broadly what we built. But for 19 years, we've been revising it and tweaking it, following our users and adding features.”
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For example, Huffman pointed out that Reddit's “most important feature,” the ability for users to create their own communities, was not introduced until three years after its launch.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Since its IPO, Reddit has delivered earnings that beat expectations for two consecutive quarters. The company signed AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI earlier this year that allow Google's Gemini AI and OpenAI's ChatGPT to use Reddit posts in their training data.
Huffman said AI offers “tremendous opportunities.”
“I’m very proud that Reddit has played a role in the development of these technologies,” he said.
Related: Reddit traffic nearly triples in 8 months, posts rise to the top of Google search