Reddit Turns 20: Where Are Its Founders and Early Employees Today?
Reddit’s story began in the same place as many other Silicon Valley startups: a college dorm room. The popular online discussion board was launched exactly 20 years ago by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It has since grown into one of the internet’s most beloved communities.
Huffman initially pitched an idea for a food delivery startup to Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator. Graham urged them to pivot, leading to the creation of Reddit (a play on “I read it”). Soon after, they brought on fellow Y Combinator participant Chris Slowe as an engineer and merged with Infogami, a startup founded by Aaron Swartz. In 2006, Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast for $10 million, and the original team departed shortly afterward. Five years later, Reddit was spun off as an independent company.
Reddit’s popularity grew with the rise of subreddits like “Ask Me Anything,” attracting millions of users and sparking both praise and controversy. Huffman returned as CEO in 2015, introducing the platform’s first content policy to address harmful content and misinformation. Since then, Reddit has grown into a $25 billion company. In its most recent fiscal quarter, revenue jumped 61 percent from the year prior. The company also recently rolled out A.I. marketing tools to tap into the value of its massive content archives.
It isn’t just Reddit that’s considered a piece of tech history; many of the site’s founding members also became iconic Silicon Valley figures in their own right. Here’s a look at what Reddit’s original founding members are up to today:
Steve Huffman
Huffman was just 21 when he co-founded Reddit, initially focusing on the platform’s technical development. After Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast, he stayed on for three years before departing in 2009 to launch Hipmunk, a travel search engine.
He returned to Reddit in the mid-2010s during a period of internal turmoil. Amid widespread user backlash and thousands of moderators taking their subreddits private, Huffman was asked to step in as CEO. “Reddit is more important to the world than Hipmunk will ever be,” he said in a 2024 podcast. “It’d be a real shame if Reddit didn’t live up to its potential—or even worse, died.”
Alexis Ohanian
In Reddit’s early days, Ohanian handled website design, business operations, user testing, and even created the company’s alien mascot, Snoo. Like Huffman, he left the company in 2009.
Ohanian soon transitioned into venture capital, co-founding Initialized Capital to back early-stage startups. He also had brief stints at Y Combinator and Hipmunk before returning to Reddit in 2015. In 2020, he stepped down from the company permanently, urging Reddit to fill his board seat with a Black candidate.
Today, Ohanian leads Seven Seven Six, a venture capital firm he launched in 2020 that now manages nearly $1 billion in assets. Beyond investing, he’s widely recognized for his marriage to tennis legend Serena Williams and his outspoken advocacy for paid family leave and greater visibility for women’s sports.
Chris Slowe
Chris Slowe first met Huffman and Ohanian in 2005 while working on a separate desktop search project for Y Combinator. At 26, he joined Reddit after the trio moved in together, balancing his early work on the site with a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard.
Slowe left Reddit in 2010 and spent six years at Huffman’s Hipmunk. He returned to Reddit in 2017 as director of engineering. “The team was always small, so we were and still are a group of friends,” he said in a 2016 interview. “There’s no other option than to be like comrades in arms in that case.” Today, Slowe serves as Reddit’s chief technology officer, overseeing site security, data compliance, core architecture and testing.
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was just 19 when he joined Reddit following its merger with his startup, Infogami. His contributions to the tech world began much earlier. At age 14, he co-created RSS, a web syndication tool that allowed users to subscribe to information from specific websites. He left Reddit in 2007.
Following his time at Reddit, Swartz became a leading voice in the fight for open access to information. He co-founded the digital rights group Demand Progress and served as a research fellow at Harvard, focusing on political corruption. In 2011, he was indicted for downloading 4.8 million academic articles from JSTOR without authorization. Although he returned the files and JSTOR did not pursue charges, federal prosecutors did. Facing the possibility of decades in prison, Swartz died by suicide in 2013 at the age of 26.
