Reddit, Inc.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian applied to Y Combinator in 2005 with an idea for a mobile food ordering app called "My Mobile Menu." Paul Graham rejected it. He then called them back and told them they should build "the front page of the internet" — a social news aggregation site where users voted on links. Huffman and Ohanian built Reddit in three weeks. It launched in June 2005. The concept was simple: users submitted links, other users voted them up or down, and the most popular content rose to the top.

Conde Nast Publications acquired Reddit in October 2006 for a reported $10-20 million — less than 18 months after its founding. Conde Nast gave Reddit relative autonomy but limited resources. Reddit was spun out as an independent subsidiary in 2011, eventually becoming a standalone company with Advance Publications as its primary shareholder. It would take another 18 years to reach the public markets.

In January 2021, users of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit coordinated to buy shares and call options in GameStop — a struggling video game retailer heavily shorted by hedge funds. The buying pressure drove GameStop's stock from approximately $20 to a peak of $483 in two weeks, causing billions of dollars in losses for short sellers including Melvin Capital, which required a $2.75 billion bailout. The episode demonstrated that online communities could move financial markets in ways that regulators and institutions had not anticipated.

Reddit announced in 2023 that it would charge third-party developers for API access — fees so high that most third-party Reddit apps became unviable. Thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. Reddit held firm. The API restructuring had a secondary benefit: it positioned Reddit to monetise its archive of 18 years of human conversation for AI training. Reddit signed a $203 million data licensing deal in January 2024 — including a $60 million per year agreement with Google and approximately $70 million per year with OpenAI, giving both companies access to Reddit's real-time content for AI model training.

Reddit went public in March 2024 at $34 per share — a valuation of approximately $6.4 billion. The company reported $1.3 billion in revenue for 2024 — up 62% — though still with a net loss due to IPO-related costs. In 2025, Reddit achieved full-year GAAP profitability for the first time in its history, posting $530 million in net income on $2.2 billion in revenue — up 69%. The company that Paul Graham had told two founders to build, sold to Conde Nast for under $20 million, and had survived 19 years without profitability, had become one of the most successful internet businesses of the AI era by owning the one thing AI companies desperately needed: authentic human conversation at scale.