Alexis Ohanian is one of the co-founders at Reddit. Upon their recent acquisition by Condé Nast (owner of Wired Magazine) in October, 2006, he shares with us his experiences. Congradulations again to them.

Now that Reddit has achieved the dream of some startups of getting acquired (Conde Nast/Wired), what are your future plans?

Steve and I both realized how fortunate we’ve been with Reddit. Our desire to keep working on the project is not only from how attached we’ve become to the site, but also because we want to keep trying to earn the success we’ve had. We couldn’t have done it without our users, so in a way, we still feel accountable to them. Somewhere over those 16 months, I’m not sure if it was when Steve was falling asleep with his laptop that this startup became quite personal. So for the time being, we are gonna continue improving and growing the site. We’re looking for some help doing it, too.

How did you stay motivated and gather support to work on a startup idea that was not completely fresh?

Steve and I met during our first year at UVA (University of Virginia). He was playing Grand Turismo and I, rather naively, had been worried college life meant giving up my video gaming habits. We were roommates throughout school and somewhere in our third year the “What if” conversations started.

Usually in between rounds of Soul Caliber, Steve would just pop up with another clever idea or identify a problem with a technological solution he’d thought up. After a lot of coaxing, Steve finally agreed to turn down a great job offer and live with me for an indefinite period of time without a salary building a website together. It’s a good thing that coming right out of school, we didn’t know what we were missing.

We’d applied to Y Combinator shortly after attending one of Paul Graham’s talks at Harvard on an essay called “How to Start a Startup." Alas, we ended up getting rejected on the project that we’d submitted (one of Steve’s ideas conjured up while he was pumping gas one day). That night, we drowned our sorrows in Mexican beer and enchiladas. We wanted to wake up the next morning with a chip on our shoulder, ready to prove Paul and YC wrong, but instead we had a hangover and a long train ride back to Virginia.

Fortunately, Paul called us back. He said we needed another idea, but that if we came back to brainstorm a new one, they’d accept us. It was at that meeting that we talked about building a “front page of the web” – at least that was the plan.

Few people know this, considering how often Digg comparisons come up, but we first built Reddit totally unaware of them. Ultimately, we think our ignorance gave us the distinctiveness that has helped us to this day.

In late July, once we learned about them and their significant head start, we turned our attention right back toward Reddit. The two of us focused on building the site we wanted to build, developing new features and keeping it fast and clean. Our team never grew beyond 4 (with Chris busy finishing a PhD) but traffic continued to grow. As it grew, we were always weary of getting in the way of our users – the ones we bragged about for making the site such a fresh and enjoyable read every morning.

The culture that has evolved on Reddit is in many ways as responsible for its success as the technical aspects of the site itself.

What are your thoughts between the entrepreneurship lifestyle and relationships? Were you seeing anybody back in Reddit’s early days?

I suspect that doing a startup is in many ways like getting married, except (for now) the success rate is still higher than starting a company. Wisely choosing a co-founder is probably nearly as critical as choosing a good idea.

Fortunately, I found in Steve someone who was not only talented, but also a great friend. He was also a level 60 priest, which made him good to group with, especially for slaughtering Horde.

Regarding relationships, if the startup lifestyle is good for one thing, it will test their strength and reveal how much they truly mean to you. The friendships that have weathered this experience are the ones I know will last.

Relationships aside, from the two of us (and our computers) we were undoubtedly strained as a result of the months we spent wholly engrossed in our website. The encouragement we received from those closest to us (coupled with the discouragement we occasionally got from others) was a great source of motivation. As the saying goes, expect the unexpected. No one can predict what will happen through the course of a startup’s life, either professionally or personally. Its how we reacted and adapted that made the difference.

Message to leave with:

With all this talk about the Oscar awards, I thought I'd end with the typical "thank you" laundry list. Hopefully I'll get through these before the music starts.

Thank you to all our friends and family who supported us throughout everything, Y Combinator, which gave us the chance in the first place, and the Reddit community without whom you'd have no reason to be interviewing me right now.

As for Steve, he isn’t just a brilliant programmer, he’s also a great friend. We complement one another very well and more importantly, was someone who I not only knew well, but trusted. When it feels like it's you against the world, you've got to be certain that your co-founder has your back. I think there's a mountain-climbing analogy in there, but I'll spare you.