Alexis Ohanian

Thank you. But to be fair, this thing has grown far beyond what Steve and I started in that Medford apartment with. Sure, we can take credit for starting the planter box, tilling the soil, adding seeds, and watering, etc, but it's since grown into a freaking ecosystem.

Hopefully that metaphor wasn't too strained and you catch my drift.

Steve and I had applied to the first round Y Combinator with a different idea (Steve wanted to be able to order fastfood from his cellphone and pick it up when he walked in and I thought it could be a brilliant business). We were rejected from YC, but the next morning PG called my cell and offered us the chance to come back as long as we changed our idea.

We jumped at the chance, took the next train back to Boston and met with him for about an hour. He pushed us to drop mobile (it was 05) and think about a web app that we'd personally want to use every day. We left that meeting with a phrase in our heads that PG crafted "front page of the internet." Then it was just up to me and Steve to make it.

At the time, we were intrigued by delicious/popular, which was an interesting byproduct of their bookmarking service. Incidentally, we didn't learn about digg until weeks after we launched. It goes to show how much our ignorance helped, because you may remember all the blatant digg-clones that came and went before digg did -- Steve and I weren't trying to just copy, we were thinking about solving this problem from a clean slate.

I need to get better at distinguishing between the many varied reddit communities. The culture & community on r/NBA is very different from the culture on r/aww and reddit is just the platform that enables such varied discourse. Steve and I always debated about subreddits vs tagging and I'm happy he won, because although it's taken longer to grow and develop, it's resulted in this marvelous variety in communities all using this common platform. So in a way, all of these varied communities are what we'd hoped for, but we've still got a ways to go until the reddit platform really is the ubiquitous way online communities share and discover content.

Subreddits for all the things!

Steve and I knew we were doing something community-news-related for Y Combinator (at that point, we were still finishing college and hadn't moved to Boston for YC). I was hellbent on having a mascot, because I wished more websites had them. I was bored in marketing class (go figure) and doodled up the alien for no other reason than I thought it looked neat.

Plus, if we had a futuristic time-travelling alien mascot, it implies that the site couldn't fail (because how else would the alien have travelled back in time?).

This story came after the mascot, which PG wasn't a huge fan of, but I wasn't going to relent and it was our startup anyway; though I think that time-travel backstory was Steve's idea.