How two college roommates scrapped their first startup idea – and built the front page of the internet instead
On a cold spring break in 2005, two seniors from the University of Virginia skipped the beach and headed to Boston instead.
Alexis Ohanian and his roommate Steve Huffman were on a train, laptops in their bags and one idea in their heads: a startup called “My Mobile Menu”.
It would let people order food from their phones – years before smartphones were mainstream.
They’d come to hear programmer-investor Paul Graham give a talk on how to start a startup. After the lecture, they worked up the courage to ask him for a coffee and a few minutes to pitch. And, of course, he said yes.
Throughout the casual conversation, they explained My Mobile Menu. Graham liked their energy so much that he later invited them to apply to his new accelerator, Y Combinator – which, at the time, was just a tiny, experimental program offering a small check, advice, and a network in exchange for equity.
Some of the best ideas often follow tough feedback
Weeks later, they were back in Boston, pitching My Mobile Menu again. This time, Graham’s interest was a bit more skeptical. The idea, he told them, had too many holes. The mobile ecosystem wasn’t ready, restaurants would be hard to sign, and the technology just wasn’t there yet.
That night, the rejection landed hard. They had spent so much of their time and effort on this already.
But on the train ride home, Graham called. The problem wasn’t them, he said, it was the idea. If they came back with a better one, Y Combinator would fund them. So the two 22-year-olds did something most people struggle with at any age.
They agreed to throw away their “baby” and start over. The next day, they sat down with Graham for an intense hour-long brainstorm.
Forget mobile, he told them, and build something for the web.
He went on to describe how the market wasn’t quite ready for what they were building, but the internet was already noisy and fragmented.
What if there was a simple page that pulled together the most interesting links, chosen by users, not editors – but a “front page of the internet”?
Out of that session, Reddit was born.
A story about timing, rejection, and the courage to pivot
The co-founding pair joined Y Combinator’s very first batch, launched Reddit in June 2005, and in the early days they even submitted stories under fake accounts to make the site look alive.
Within about a year, traffic was climbing, and in October 2006, Condé Nast bought Reddit for a reported $10 to 20 million. Two students, one pivot, life changed.
While Reddit’s story started well over two decades ago, perhaps the lessons remain just as clear for founders today.
- Show up in the right rooms
- Fall in love with the problem, not your first solution
- Treat rejection as feedback, not a verdict
- Be willing to throw away sunk costs
- Start small, launch fast, and fake nothing but momentum
From the outside, Reddit’s story can look like a lucky hit. But up close, it’s something more practical. Two young founders who were willing to get in the room, hear the word “no” – and completely rewrite their story in a single afternoon.
