- As a college student, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian walked out of his law school admission exam 20 minutes in—and made the life-changing decision at Waffle House that he was going to become an entrepreneur. Just months later, he and his cofounder received funding from Paul Graham, and the $40 billion social platform was born. Reddit’s cofounders join the ranks of companies like Google, Facebook, and Databricks to have direct roots to the college experience.
Many successful entrepreneurs have humble beginnings: Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in his dorm room, and Steve Jobs built Apple at his parents’ house.
However, for Alexis Ohanian, the start of Reddit all began at table 19 of his local Waffle House.
As a soon-to-be graduate from the University of Virginia in 2005, the millennial cofounder thought his postgraduate career was all planned out: Spend the next three years at law school and eventually land a high-paying, secure job. However, just 20 minutes into taking the law school admission test (LSAT), he knew he had made a mistake.
“So I’d walked out of the LSAT. I had studied for it, I was getting ready for it,” he revealed yesterday on Wired’s Uncanny Valley podcast. “And then 20 minutes into it, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just gonna invent a career and be an entrepreneur.”
But waffles and hash browns weren’t enough to guarantee Ohanian and his roommate, Steve Huffman— the now-CEO of social platform Reddit—success from the start.
Ohanian and Huffman turned rejection into a successful venture
The two twentysomethings’ initial business idea was to create a mobile food-ordering business. They pitched it to investor Paul Graham, who later created Y Combinator, after skipping their spring break trip to Cancún to attend his Harvard lecture, “How to Start a Startup.”
“We’re passing,” Ohanian recalled Graham saying over the phone. But the next day, Graham said he’d pour money into the project under one condition: “Listen, we still don’t like your idea, but we like you guys, so if you’re willing to change your idea, we’ll fund you.”
Taking Graham’s advice, they soon pivoted to creating a community-based social media forum, and Reddit was born. The company now has over 110 million daily active users and a market cap of over $40 billion.
“It all started with a Waffle House, and the rest is history,” Ohanian said to Wired.
Fortune reached out to Ohanian for comment.
These founders met in college
While Gen Z may be questioning the merits of going to college altogether, without the university experience, Ohanian and Huffman would have likely never met and created Reddit—and it’s an experience that’s not unique to them. Many top tech minds met on college campuses and later went on to create world-renowned businesses.
At Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg met his cofounders, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, and built the foundation of the social platform now known as Meta (now worth nearly $2 trillion).
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as computer science students at Stanford University and later collaborated to build Google (now under parent company Alphabet, worth over $2.5 trillion).
Stanford is also where the founders of the $62 billion data software company Databricks met—as well as the creators of the $5 billion AI voice firm SoundHound AI.
