Reddit founded by Huffman and Ohanian via Y Combinator

Reddit was launched in June 2005 by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both 22 and fresh out of college. The pair had pitched a different idea to investor Paul Graham after attending one of his talks during spring break; Graham rejected it but invited them into the inaugural class of his startup accelerator, Y Combinator, seeding the venture with roughly $12,000. They relocated to Medford, Massachusetts, and Huffman built the first version of the link-aggregation site in Common Lisp before the team migrated to Python.

The concept was deliberately simple: users submitted links that the community ranked through upvotes and downvotes, with the most popular content rising to a shared front page. This crowd-driven model distinguished Reddit from editorially curated competitors and laid the foundation for what would later brand itself "the front page of the internet." Y Combinator's backing made Reddit one of the accelerator's earliest success stories, and the founders' decision to prioritize community-generated ranking over editorial control became the defining feature of the platform's culture for the next two decades.