There are only a few founders that I really like and Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian are two of them. These lads, with their bright-eyed charm and genuinely nice personalities, created Reddit in 2005 with the help of Paul Graham and Y Combinator. This video by ATotalDisruption tells that story quite well and is a must-see for all young entrepreneurs and media types.
Huffman and Ohanian are surprisingly candid in their video, describing their early days fumbling with ideas (a Sheetz sub sandwich ordering system was their first project) and then stumbling on a vision of Delicious merged with Slashdot. Ohanian closes the video discussing his late mother who died of cancer while Reddit was in the throes of growth. He was inspired by her memory to help build Reddit into more than just a sharing site and, as millions of users around the world well know, he’s succeeded.
“Reddit was not created to do good works,” he said. “But I can’t help but be really, really pleased with how much good Reddit has done for the world.”