2min chapter

How I Built This with Guy Raz cover image

Live Episode! Reddit: Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman

How I Built This with Guy Raz

CHAPTER

How Did You Decide to Leave Reddit?

Reddit co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian left the site when their contracts ended. They went to Armenia for a couple of months, where they reconnected with each other. After leaving Reddit, you founded Hipmunk in San Francisco before moving back to New York. "I felt this tremendous guilt for not having this connection," he says.

00:00
Speaker 2
That was your commitment. You could say that for three years and then you could do whatever it was you wanted to do. That's right. And we
Speaker 1
both loved Reddit. But when our contracts ended, I can't speak for Alexis, but I left because I wanted to start another company that was involved in the exchange of money so that I wouldn't have to contrive a business model. Because on Reddit, we were still... We hadn't quite figured out ads, right? It felt like we were swimming upstream. And I didn't realize how
Speaker 2
cool Reddit was. I
Speaker 1
thought, well, if you just build something, it'll just grow. That's how things go on the internet. And I didn't realize that Reddit was so special that despite the fact that we didn't know what we were doing and despite the fact that at times we were very unproductive, it just grew.
Speaker 2
So once that time ended, you went and founded a new company, Hipmunk, and Alexis...
Speaker 1
I want you to motherland.
Speaker 2
You went to Armenia. Which is where your dad's side of the alley from for a couple of months. And were you just thinking, I'm done with tech world, like
Speaker 1
I've finished? Ish, Ish. I just wanted to unplug a bit. And I felt really guilty because I had never been. And so I felt this tremendous guilt for not having this connection and had an amazing experience there and could just kind of hit reset. And then came back and I figured I was going to live in New York for the rest of my days, called Draw Mascot for Hipmunk and Steve. And you kind of got involved a little bit with Hipmunk briefly. Yeah. Yeah. And I do recall actually at this point, Alexis and I, by 2009, had lived together for eight years from 2001 to 2009. And by the time we left Reddit, we were not on the best of terms. Why?
Speaker 2
We hadn't.
Speaker 1
So we had been through a lot together. And we had never really discussed it. We had never discussed our roles at Reddit, kind of the boundaries, who was responsible for what. We didn't really have a way of resolving disputes. And we didn't see a ton of each other. I moved to San Francisco right when we sold, but Alexis stayed on the East Coast to be with his family for about a year and a half. And so when our contracts expired, we just kind of said, hey, you know, great, see you later,
Speaker 2
and left it that way.

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