Founded by Huffman and Ohanian in 2005. It is considered to be the gateway of everything interesting going on in the world. It is just like a paper that is more reliable, personalized, timely, participatory, and good. Google is a place where you find things and It is a place where people vote up for good blogs, funny videos, or anything else that is trending or basically good. So, let’s know why is Reddit called Reddit?
A little information about Reddit
The headquarters are in California. It has been written in JavaScript and photon. It is ranked as the 18th-most-visited website in the world in February 2021; and that’s not it, it is the 7th most-visited website in the US as well.
42-49.3% of Reddit’s user base comes from the US, 7.9-8.2% from the United Kingdom, and 5.2-7.8% from Canada. There are a lot of people who use Reddit as a daily part of their life especially adults aged between 30 to 49 years.
Why Is It Called Reddit?
If you pronounce the brand name, you’ll find a lot of differences in the spellings but zero difference in the pronunciation of “Read it with Reddit”. “Read it” here has been taken as a past. Like, I have read it on Reddit. It just keeps you updated with the world and that’s why the founders decided to name it Reddit.
In 2005, Reddit’s foundation has been laid by the students at the University of Virginia – Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, with Aaron Swartz. It has been acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. After 5 years, in 2011, Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications made Reddit its independent subsidiary.
They have raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman in 2014. Their total investment valued the company at $500 million by now.
It raised $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with its parent company Advance Publications hold the majority stakeholder in July 2017. In February 2019, a whopping $300 million funding by Tencent took the company’s valuation to $3 billion.
History
The idea and the development at the beginning originated from the college. During the spring break, Huffman and Ohanian attended a lecture by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham in Boston, Massachusetts. After speaking with Huffman and Ohanian, Graham gave an invitation to the duo to apply to his startup “Y combinator“.
“My Mobile Menu” idea was not a success in its initial stage. Its purpose was to let users order food on their phones by SMS. So, they started working on different ideas for their startup, and eventually, a new idea with potential came out of it. This idea had a future and Graham called it “front page of the Internet”. Huffman and Ohanian were accepted in Y Combinator’s first-class for this unique idea. Ohanian says –
“Before the social web, we had little idea of what people actually thought about us—now we know, and when like-minded people band together, they wield a really big stick.”
The team started to expand and they included Christopher Slowe in November 2005. Reddit merged with Aaron Swartz’s company Infogami between November 2005 and January 2006 and this made Swartz an equal owner of the resulting parent company.
Story of the founders
- Steve Huffman – He was born in November 1983. He is known as “spez”, his Reddit username. Steve Huffman is an American web developer and entrepreneur and he is also the co-founder and CEO of Reddit (social news plus discussion website, which has been ranked in the top 20 websites in the world).
- Alexis Ohanian – Alexis Ohanian was born in 1983 as well. He was born in New York and is a Billionaire right now. Alexis Ohanian is the chairman of Reddit and he is an American entrepreneur and investor as well.
- Christopher Slowe – Christopher Slowe is an American businessman who was born in November 1978. He made the CTO of Reddit after he returned to the company in 2015. Christopher Slowe gained his Ph.D. from Harvard University and went on to co-found Reddit.
- Aaron Swartz – Aaron Swartz was born in 1986. He was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and also known as an Internet hacktivist. He was the youngest in the founder’s team.
Conclusion
It is a place where you can see what people are fond of and what are things, they find interesting. It is growing rapidly and it has a huge fanbase in the USA. As a lot of people do not know much about it but those who know, are quite fond of its way of working. So, let us know how did you like the story behind why is Reddit called Reddit?