Reddit, Inc.
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Founders
Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz · Founded 2005 · San Francisco, California
Quick Answer
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz in 2005 in San Francisco, California. The company is currently led by Steve Huffman.
Reddit began in 2005 after Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian joined Y Combinator and pivoted from an earlier mobile food-ordering idea into an user-ranked front page for the internet. Aaron Swartz became tied to the founding story after Infogami merged with Reddit later that year. Conde Nast acquired Reddit in 2006, and the platform later regained operational independence.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian came up with the idea for Reddit during their senior year at the University of Virginia and pitched it to Y Combinator's Paul Graham, who rejected their original idea but told them to build 'the front page of the internet' instead. The pair launched Reddit in June 2005 as part of Y Combinator's first-ever batch with $12,000 in seed funding, and Huffman became CEO while Ohanian took the executive chairman role.
Ohanian co-founded Reddit with Steve Huffman in 2005 as part of Y Combinator's first batch, serving as executive chairman and handling business development and marketing while Huffman and later Aaron Swartz focused on engineering. He left day-to-day management in 2010 to join Y Combinator as a partner, later becoming a prominent startup investor and public advocate for founders.
Aaron Swartz became part of Reddit's founding story when his company, Infogami, merged with Reddit in late 2005 at Y Combinator's suggestion, after Y Combinator had funded both startups separately. Swartz rewrote Reddit's codebase from Lisp to Python and later released the web.py framework he built for it into the public domain, before leaving to pursue other projects; he died in 2013. Swartz's broader career, including his advocacy for open access to academic research and his prosecution over downloading JSTOR articles, made him a significant figure in internet-freedom activism entirely separate from his Reddit contributions, and his 2013 death by suicide while facing federal charges remains a widely discussed case in discussions of prosecutorial overreach in computer-crime law.
Steve Huffman
Chief Executive Officer
Under Huffman's second tenure as CEO, Reddit revenue reached $2.2 billion in FY2025, up 69%, with advertising still the core business (about 95% of revenue) but data licensing emerging as a fast-growing, high-margin new line. His willingness to publicly clash with parts of Reddit's own user community over policy changes -- including the 2023 API pricing dispute that triggered widespread subreddit blackouts -- demonstrated a management approach prioritizing long-term monetization over short-term community goodwill. Huffmans approach reflects a broader industry tension between platform companies desire to monetize user bases and those same users expectations of the free, ad-light experience that originally attracted them. Media coverage of Reddit governance consistently returns to this fundamental tension between platform monetization and community trust as the defining strategic challenge of Huffmans tenure. This dynamic has become a recurring theme in technology-journalism coverage of Reddit strategic direction under Huffmans leadership.
Alexis Ohanian
Co-founder
Ohanian helped shape Reddit's early community identity and public profile before stepping away from management to become a venture investor and startup advocate. Huffmans approach reflects a broader industry tension between platform companies desire to monetize user bases and those same users expectations of the free, ad-light experience that originally attracted them. Media coverage of Reddit governance consistently returns to this fundamental tension between platform monetization and community trust as the defining strategic challenge of Huffmans tenure. This dynamic has become a recurring theme in technology-journalism coverage of Reddit strategic direction under Huffmans leadership.
Reddit, Inc. was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz in San Francisco, California.
The founders established Reddit, Inc. with the objective of solving core inefficiencies in Social media and digital advertising, laying the foundation for its current global scale.
Even as Reddit, Inc. scales to $1.1B, the organization maintains the founders' commitment to innovation and customer-centric execution.