- Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit in 2005 as part of the very first Y Combinator batch with a $12,000 check from Paul Graham.
- He sold Reddit to Condé Nast for roughly $10 million in 2006 at age 22, a decision he has since called the biggest regret of his career, as reported by TechCrunch.
- He returned as CEO in July 2015 after the Ellen Pao crisis and took Reddit public on the NYSE at a $6.4 billion valuation in March 2024, detailed by CNBC.
- Under his leadership, Reddit inked AI data licensing deals with Google worth roughly $60 million a year and a follow-on agreement with OpenAI, hitting a market cap near $28 billion in 2026.
The Front Page of the Internet, 21 Years Later
In April 2026, Reddit sits on a market capitalization of roughly $28 billion. The platform counts more than 91 million daily active users, crossed $1.3 billion in annual revenue last year, and posted its first full year of profitability in 2024. For a company that spent almost two decades bleeding money, the reversal is staggering.
The engine behind it is not advertising. It is data. Reddit’s 2024 deal with Google to license its content for AI training at around $60 million a year, followed by a similar agreement with OpenAI, turned two decades of human conversation into one of the most coveted datasets on the internet. Sitting at the top of it all is Steve Huffman, the 42-year-old co-founder who once sold the company for $10 million and spent a decade learning what it was really worth.
A Virginia Kid Who Taught Himself to Code Before Middle School
Steve Huffman was born on December 12, 1983, in Warrenton, Virginia. His father was an engineer, his mother a teacher. At eight years old, he started writing BASIC programs on the family computer. By middle school, he was building HTML pages and dissecting how the early web worked.
He enrolled at the University of Virginia to study computer science. There, in a dorm room, he met a history major from Brooklyn named Alexis Ohanian. The two became friends, then roommates, then co-conspirators. They spent senior year sketching business ideas on napkins.
”Reddit is the last place on the internet where people actually talk to each other. That was true in 2005, and somehow it’s still true now.”
The Weekend That Turned a Food-Ordering App Into Reddit
In March 2005, Huffman and Ohanian drove to Boston to pitch Paul Graham at the first-ever Y Combinator batch. Their idea was MyMobileMenu, a service that would let you order food from your phone by texting the restaurant. Graham listened, then passed. He told them mobile would eventually be huge, but not yet.
He also told them not to go home. Come back with something else, he said. Huffman and Ohanian spent the train ride north reworking a concept Graham had hinted at: a website that surfaced the best links on the internet, voted on by its users. That weekend, they built the first version. Y Combinator wired them $12,000. Reddit went live in June 2005.
22 Years Old, $10 Million, and the Deepest Regret of His Career
Sixteen months later, in October 2006, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for a figure widely reported around $10 million. Huffman was 22. He pocketed a few million dollars and a W-2 from a magazine conglomerate that had no idea what it had bought.
He stuck around until 2009, then left to co-found Hipmunk, a travel search startup, with Adam Goldstein. SAP Concur acquired Hipmunk in 2016. During those years, Reddit staggered under corporate ownership, cycling through executives and crises while its community kept growing in spite of the neglect.
”We sold too early. That’s a mistake I’ll be unwinding for the rest of my career.”
July 2015: The Ellen Pao Revolt and the Founder’s Return
In the summer of 2015, Reddit caught fire. Interim CEO Ellen Pao fired popular employee Victoria Taylor, who had been the human bridge between the site and its AMA program. Moderators shut down hundreds of the largest subreddits in protest. Pao resigned within days. The board called Huffman.
He came back as CEO in July 2015, spun Reddit out of Condé Nast into an independent company, and raised a $50 million round that included a personal check from Sam Altman, then president of Y Combinator. A year later, Huffman admitted he had quietly edited comments mocking him in a pro-Trump subreddit. He apologized publicly, kept the job, and never touched the database again.
The Long Road to the IPO and the AI Data Bonanza
From 2015 to 2024, Huffman rebuilt Reddit the hard way. The company hit a $10 billion private valuation in 2021, then watched it evaporate as the ad market cratered. Reddit was unprofitable every single year of its existence. On March 21, 2024, it finally went public on the NYSE under the ticker RDDT at $34 a share. Shares opened at $47 and never looked back.
The real turn came weeks earlier. Reddit had signed a content licensing deal with Google reportedly worth around $60 million a year, followed by a similar agreement with OpenAI. Two decades of human conversation, suddenly, was the rarest fuel in the generative AI economy. 2024 became Reddit’s first profitable year. By April 2026, the market cap had climbed near $28 billion.
”Our community didn’t build Reddit so three companies could train models on it without asking. That had to change.”
Reddit Answers, and a Platform Learning to Speak Back
Huffman is now betting that Reddit’s next act is not a feed but an answer engine. Reddit Answers, launched in 2025, mines two decades of threads to respond to questions in natural language, citing the humans who wrote the underlying posts. International expansion is accelerating in Europe and India, and Huffman has hinted at AI-native moderation tools that would let communities enforce their own rules at machine speed.
The bet is that the most valuable thing on the internet is still a real person typing a real opinion at 2 a.m. Huffman spent twenty years learning that lesson the expensive way. He does not intend to sell it again.
