Reddit thrived for nearly two many years before going public in March at a valuation of about $6.5 billion. Although the social media forum site now boasts 91 million each day energetic users, its success was not assured. In fact, Reddit’s co-founders were rejected by startup accelerator Y Combinator early on in their entrepreneurial journey.
“So Alexis [Ohanian]my co-founder, my college roommate at the time, he and I applied to Y Combinator, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman he told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on Thursday. Their initial idea was to create a way for people to order food from their mobile phones — which was not the norm in 2005.
Y Combinator rejected the idea, but asked Ohanian and Huffman, who were 22 and 21 at the time, to work on something else. They came up with the idea for Reddit, which Y Combinator funded A check for $12,000.
The idea for Reddit got here from two web sites: Delicious and Slashdot. Delicious it was a website which allows users to store and share bookmarks; Yahoo acquired it in 2007. Slashdot.org it still exists as a science and technology social networking site; Reddit’s co-founders were interested in the community that existed there but wanted to expand beyond technology.
Reddit “was kind of Delicious plus Slashdot, but make both better,” Huffman said. “I think that’s pretty much what we built, honestly. But over the course of 19 years, we’ve iterated on it and improved it, and kind of followed our users and added features.”
For example, Huffman noted that Reddit’s “most important feature,” the ability for users to create their very own communities, was introduced three years after its launch.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Since Reddit went public published earnings This overcome expectations for two consecutive quarters. The company signed AI licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI earlier this 12 months, allowing Google’s Gemini AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to use Reddit posts in their training data.
Huffman said artificial intelligence creates “enormous opportunities.”
“I’m very proud that Reddit has played a role in developing these technologies,” he said.