Reddit might not exist today if Alexis Ohanian hadn’t walked out of his LSAT exam just 20 minutes in and headed to a Waffle House.
Sitting there, over breakfast, he had a revelation; he didn’t want to practice law; he wanted to build something bigger: a community.
How Reddit Was Born
Back in 2005, while studying at the University of Virginia, Ohanian, who today is married to tennis great Serena Williams, ditched the law career he had spent months preparing for. Instead, he chose a different path — a decision he later explained on Wired’s “Uncanny Valley” podcast.
“So I’d walked out of the LSAT. I had studied for it, I was getting ready for it,” Ohanian said. “And then 20 minutes into it, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just gonna invent a career and be an entrepreneur.”
With the help of his college roommate, Steve Huffman, now recognized as Reddit’s other cofounder, they first set out to break into the mobile food-ordering business. The duo even pitched their idea to investor Paul Graham, who went on to create the venture capital firm Y Combinator, according to Vanity Fair.
Graham was not impressed with their food-ordering concept, but he saw enough promise in them to offer a second chance if they came back with something stronger.
“We’re passing,” Ohanian recalled Graham saying over the phone. But the next day, Graham called back with a twist: “Listen, we still don’t like your idea, but we like you guys, so if you’re willing to change your idea, we’ll fund you.”
Their second attempt became Reddit, a community-based forum where users submit content, whether images, articles, posts, or videos, that is gamified through the platform’s Karma system. With upvotes and downvotes, users push content to the top of specific subcategories known as subreddits, making visibility itself part of the game.
In June 2005, Ohanian and Huffman received a small seed stipend from Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program, then designed for very early-stage teams.
On Oct. 31, 2006, Reddit’s rapid growth led to an acquisition by Condé Nast, the publisher behind titles like Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Bon Appétit.
Ohanian and Huffman sold Reddit to Condé Nast for $10 million in 2006, according to Wired, which is roughly equivalent to $15.95 million in 2025 dollars for one of the world’s most trafficked websites.
Reddit added comments a few months after launch in December 2005, and opened user-created subreddits in 2008, changes that helped define the site’s community model.
Aaron Swartz joined later in 2005 when his project, Infogami, merged with Reddit; he is often credited as a cofounder following that merger.
Reddit now stands among the ranks of the American Big Tech dream, alongside Google, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Amazon—companies launched by college students and dropouts who chased innovation in the digital space.
In March 2024, Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange, and it was a major success, with shares surging 48 percent above the initial offering price on their first day of trading, according to Reuters.
Since its 20-year run, Reddit has generated more than $1.67 billion in total revenue over the last twelve months as of mid-2025, according to Electroiq. The platform’s annual revenue reached $1.3 billion in 2024 and is on pace for even higher numbers in 2025, having reported $500 million in revenue in just the second quarter.
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