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As a college student, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian quit Twenty minutes later, he took his law school entrance exam and made a life-changing decision at Waffle House: He was going to become an entrepreneur. A few months later, he and his co-founders received funding from Paul Graham, and the $40 billion social platform was born. Reddit’s co-founders join the ranks of companies like Google, Facebook and Databricks that have direct roots in their college experiences.
Many successful entrepreneurs have humble beginnings: Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his dorm room, and Steve Jobs founded Apple in his parents’ house.
However, for Alexis Ohanian, Reddit all started at table 19 at his local Waffle House.
In 2005, the millennial co-founder was about to graduate from the University of Virginia and thought he had his graduate career all mapped out: spend the next three years in 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 walked out of the LSAT. I had studied for it, I was getting ready for it,” he revealed wired’s uncanny valley podcast. “Then 20 minutes later, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was going to invent a career and be an entrepreneur.”
But waffles and hash browns weren’t enough to guarantee success from the start for Ohanian and his roommate, Steve Huffman, now CEO of social platform Reddit.
The two twenty-somethings’ original business idea was to create a mobile food ordering business. They pitched the project to investor Paul Graham, who later founded Y Combinator, when he wasn’t on spring break in Cancun to attend his Harvard lecture, “How to Start a Startup.”
“We’ll just go over there,” Ohanian recalled Graham saying on the phone. But the next day, Graham said he would put money into the project on one condition: “Look, we still don’t like your idea, but we like you guys, so if you’re willing to change your mind, we’ll fund you.”
Following Graham’s advice, they quickly pivoted to creating a community-based social media forum, and Reddit was born. The company currently has more than 110 million daily active users and a market capitalization of more than $40 billion.
“It all started at Waffle House and the rest is history,” Ohanian said wired.
While Gen Z may question the benefits of going to college, Ohanian and Huffman may never have met and founded Reddit without the college experience, and that experience isn’t unique to them. Many top scientific and technological talents met on university campuses and later founded world-renowned companies.
