In 2003, University of Virginia gaming roomies Alexis Ohanian (History Major) and Steve Huffman (CS major) were starstruck with the entrepreneurial dream. Their make-the-world-a-better-place idea at the time was a food-ordering app named mmm😋(MyMobileMenu). During their senior year, Steve's girlfriend told him that Paul Graham(PG) was coming to Boston to give a talk about startups during their spring break. Steve knew PG through his book On Lisp, but Alexis had no clue who Paul Graham was. Steve decided it would be worth their time to travel all the way to Boston to get his book signed and maybe learn a thing or two about how to get mmm off the ground.

This coffee chat would change the lives of Alexis and Steve and make them millionaires in their early twenties. They spent the time pitching mmm(not to be confused with mmhmm) and how they were going to make waiting in line a thing of the past. PG got excited. Two hours into their conversation, Paul invited them to interview for the new startup incubator's first-ever batch he was building called YCombinator.

After spending a year researching their food delivery concept, YC and PG gave the Reddit team about 2 weeks to launch "the homepage of the internet." Reddit was launched (without the founders knowledge or blessing), traffic was spiking …but Steve as you can imagine….was not too happy about how it all went down. Every day, Alexis and Ohanian would use the admin view they created on the website, allowing them to quickly attach a new fake user to any new post they create. They posted dozens and dozens of new links every day to make the website seem more legit than it was.

On a superficial level, the hundreds of fake users lent Reddit the credibility that they needed, but on a deeper level, it did two critical things: 1- It set the tone for the website. 2- Made people feel they were part of something real.

Ali Abouelatta • 👾 Reddit