Alexis Ohanian tells the story of how a 1-hour brainstorm led to the idea for Reddit

And Paul calls and I pick up and he says, listen, we like you guys. We just don't like the idea. It's too early for mobile. If you're willing to kill this company a year in that you've been working on, we'll let you into the program. And it took us about five seconds. And we got on the next train back to Boston, sat with Paul for about an hour, and he just sat us down and said, all right, forget mobile. Build something on the web. What problems do you guys have every single day? And Steve was a heavy slash user. I read a bunch of tabs every morning of news websites, but neither one of us had a solution for really news, like a new kind of website that would be a front page for everything. And Paul had mentioned Delicious slash pop. Now, note at this point, I've not said the word Digg because we did not know about Digg, but we knew about Delicious Popular.

I mean, and in fairness, that was Kevin's inspiration for Digg. He always gave credit to Delicious, which was started here in New York by Josh.

Joshua schechter.

Joshua Schechter. Delicious.com, which was a bookmarking tool allowed. People just said, these were the things that were bookmarked the most today.

Yes.

And bookmarks were the signal.

Yes. And we noticed. So we had never used it, but Paul was talking about it, and we thought, you know what? There's an interesting thing here. The byproduct of people bookmarking reference material to look at later, like AJAX tutorials or like travel planning, was an interesting kind of zeitgeist, but it was only a zeitgeist for reference material, not for what was new. So, like, here's social bookmarking. It's doing its thing really well until Yahoo acquires it and kills it. And we needed to be something else that was a place for people to go to find the more ephemeral news of the day. And that's how we got started with Red.