He wanted to go to Mexico to party with the rest of his friends. In spring break of their senior year, Paul was coming to Harvard to speak. Steve was reading the programming book, “On Lisp,” by Paul Graham (the founder of Y Combinator), as he planned to build the site in Lisp. Alexis had the company incorporated, and Steve got to coding. The duo hired a lawyer and got to building Reddit. He shared his frustration with Alexis, and Alexis’ response was, “we should totally build that.” This frustrated him, because he want to order while pumping gas to save time. He had already ordered food through a touchscreen without human service. He had the idea at the gas station Sheetz. Their junior year, Steve shared with Alexis a problem he felt strongly about: ordering food through his phone Alexis realized building one of these ideas was a much better path to making a dent in the universe. A computer science major, Steve was constantly coming up with software product ideas. One of his buddies, Steve Huffman, agreed. There he had his “Waffle House Epiphany.” He wanted to make a dent in the universe. He left, opting to eat out at Waffle House. Things were going well in that direction.īut one day, his junior year, Alexis got fed up with an LSAT practice test. He answered a first year college professor’s question of why he was there with, “I want to make the world suck less.”Ī History and Commerce major, Alexis was planning for a career in law. Chapter 1: Getting Paul Graham’s SupportĪs a college student at the University of Virginia, Alexis Ohanian was equally high-achieving and sharp tongued. I’ve spent the last few weeks using the Wayback Machine to dig it up. It’s actually a crazy story – one filled with apocryphal lessons about product growth. Just like no one can name the CEO, hardly anyone knows it was owned by Conde Nast for six years of its life. That makes it bigger than Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Netflix.įor being such a huge site, and one of the most important sites in tech, surprisingly little has been written about Reddit’s history. It is estimated to have over half a billion monthly active users. Over the course of its 17-year history, Reddit has grown to become a top 10 site in the world. It didn’t seem like a ludicrous valuation, either. Before the stock market’s sour turn at the start of the year, the company was set to IPO at something like a $15B valuation. Indeed, after Ellen Pao’s resignation in 2015, Steve has stepped into the CEO role and shepharded Reddit to a tremendous rise. The same Steve who coded the entire site in Lisp in a few weeks, after receiving a scathing email from Paul Graham as part of YC’s first batch (when it was still run out in Boston, not Silicon Valley). The famous husband of Serena Williams has cultivated a larger internet personality than the other co-founder of Reddit who is the actual CEO. Did you guess Alexis Ohanian? You would be wrong.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |