Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian are the two co-founders of the social news website, now owned by Conde Nast Digital.

The two co-founders started reddit after graduating from the University of Virginia in June 2005; the company were initially funded by Paul graham’s ycombinator.

The name Reddit was named by Alexis while browsing the University of Virginia's Alderman Library.

Their initial idea was to create a mobile phone application for placing and paying for food orders
But the folks at Y Combinator didn’t seem to think so. Luckily, YC’s Paul Graham saw potential in the duo. He sat down with them to brainstorm, and the idea for Reddit began to form.

The founders said they decided to start reddit after trying to solve the problem of not being entertained enough in the morning when we woke up; there wasn’t a good destination to find all the best stuff on the web. And it seemed like there were two possible solutions. One, we get a bunch of people to curate and figure out what the best stuff is, and that was going to be costly and time consuming. Or, they just let all of their readers do that work for us; I guess the latter worked for them

Check out Andrew Warner of Mixergy’s interview with Alexis Ohanian and Jessica Livingston who share some of the stories of how it really happened.