Imgur launch
Reddit user MrGrim creates Imgur, an image hosting service. The user describes it as his gift to Reddit:
I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn’t force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It’s my gift to you. Let’s not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here 😉 I’ll be listening if anyone has some suggestions.
Becomes Open Source
0 CommentsReddit becomes an open source project. All of of the code, except for its anti-spam and cheating code, becomes freely available on Github.
Indicates $10M-$20M price range for Reddit
Ohanian keeps the exact amount a secret, but appears to confirm the price range.
People ask how much it was for, but I haven’t even told my girlfriend. I tell her, ‘You can Google it, and you’ll find it was between $10 million and $20 million.’
Reddit bought by Condé Nast
Condé Nast Publications acquires Reddit for a reported $20 million. All four Reddit employees relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital, which the company bought three months previously. Conde Naste:
Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same.
At this time the site has 70,000 daily unique visitors and approximately 700,000 or so page views.
Swartz merges Infogami with Reddit
Aaron Swartz merges Infogami with Reddit where he joins Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The four Reddit staff work out of a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Christopher Slowe joins
0 Comments
Christopher Slowe joins
Founded, funded by Y Combinator
Reddit is founded by Huffman and Ohanian both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia. In first year they had rooms across the hall from each other, and became friends through video games.
Huffman wanted to make a phone system to order subs while he was pumping gas at a local gas stand. Ohanian calls a lawyer and they formed a company called RedBrick Solutions, because Charlottesville is full of red brick buildings. In the spring of their senior year they go to Boston to see a presentation by Graham at Harvard called “How to start a start-up”. They were able to get Graham to meet them for drinks at a local bar where they pitched their phone idea. A few days later, Graham tells them to apply for his new investment fund, Y Combinator. The students travel to Boston to pitch, but are rejected. On the way back to Charlottesville Graham calls them to say he wants them to come up with another idea — a web app. They decide to match the mechanism of Delicious with the content of Slashdot to build “the front page to the web”.
Y Combinator gives them $12,000 and they move to Boston in early June, 2005. After a few weeks the site is not ready when Graham links to it from an essay, giving it site 1000 hits. Reddit was the first Y Combinator launch, taking a total of $100,000. To make the site appear popular they populate it with fake posts.
