Steve Huffman

Steve Huffman (born ), also known by his Reddit username spez, is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co-founded the airfare search engine website Hipmunk, which shut down in 2020. Early life and education Steve Huffman grew up in Warrenton, Virginia. At age 8, he began programming computers. He graduated in 2001 from Wakefield School in The Plains, Virginia. At the University of Virginia (UVA), he studied computer science, graduating in 2005. Career During spring break of his senior year at UVA, Huffman and college roommate Alexis Ohanian drove to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend a lecture delivered by English programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham. Huffman and Ohanian talked with Graham after the lecture and he invited them to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator. Huffman came up with their original idea, My Mobile Menu, which was intended to allow users to order food by SMS. The idea was rejected, but Graham asked Huffman and Ohanian to meet him in Boston to pitch another idea for a start-up; it was at this brainstorming session that the idea for what Graham called the "front page of the Internet" was created. Huffman and Ohanian were accepted in Y Combinator's first class. Huffman programmed the entire site in Lisp. He and Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005, funded by Y Combinator. The site's audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself. Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million. Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.