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Reddit has been growing for nearly two decades and went public in March at a valuation of about $6.5 billion. The social media forum site is now 91 million With over 100,000 daily active users, success was far from assured: In fact, Reddit’s co-founders were rejected by startup accelerator Y Combinator at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey.
“So, Alexis [Ohanian]”My co-founders and then-college roommates, he and I, applied to Y Combinator,” says Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said: The original idea was to create a way to order food from your mobile phone, which wasn’t common in 2005.
Y Combinator rejected the idea, but asked Ohanian and Huffman, then 22 and 21 years old, to try something else: They came up with Reddit, which Y Combinator funded. A check for $12,000.
The idea for Reddit came from two websites: Delicious and Slashdot. It was a website A service that allows users to save and share bookmarks. Yahoo acquired it in 2007. Slashdot.org Still exists As a social news site covering science and technology news, Reddit’s co-founders were attracted to the existing community but wanted to expand beyond tech.
Reddit “was like a cross between Delicious and Slashdot, and we made both better,” Huffman said, “and I think that’s exactly what we built, honestly. But over the course of 19 years, we’ve been iterating on it, adding features in response to our users’ needs.”
Related: ‘A huge opportunity’: Reddit CEO aims to bring AI to 1 billion Reddit searches
For example, Huffman noted that Reddit’s “most important feature” — giving users the power to create their own communities — was introduced three years after it launched.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Photo: Spencer Pratt/Getty Images
Since going public, Reddit has Publication Revenue that Exceeding Expectations The company signed AI licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI earlier this year, allowing Google’s Gemini AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to use Reddit posts for training data.
Huffman said there is a “huge opportunity” for AI.
“I’m very proud that Reddit has contributed to the development of this technology,” he said.
Related: Reddit traffic nearly triples in eight months, posts appear at the top of Google searches
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