August 28, Thursday: Most individuals exit the exam room with a sigh of regret. For Alexis Ohanian, exiting the LSAT after only 20 minutes was the first step in creating Reddit, which is now worth more than $40 billion. Ohanian told Fortune that his life-altering choice started not in a classroom but at table 19 of a Waffle House.
Ohanian, who was a student at the University of Virginia at the time, thought his destiny was in law school. But sitting down to a plate of waffles and hashbrowns, he went a different direction which was entrepreneurship. "I ate at a Waffle House and said I was just gonna go create a career," he said. Months afterward, he and his roommate Steve Huffman got backing from investor Paul Graham, and Reddit was created.
Turning rejection into opportunity
The trip wasn't easy. Ohanian and Huffman initially pitched a mobile food-ordering startup to Graham, cutting their spring break short to go see him give his Harvard lecture How to Start a Startup. At first, Graham turned them down. But a few days later, he called back with an offer: "We still don't like your idea, but we like you guys. If you're willing to change it, we'll fund you."
That shift changed their trajectory. Rather than food delivery, they created a community platform where users could post, comment, and share, a community that expanded to today's Reddit with more than 110 million daily active users.
College friendships that formed tech giants
As Fortune reported, Ohanian and Huffman are among a larger trend in which legendary companies trace their origins to college friendships. Zuckerberg's dormitory project evolved into Meta, and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin crossed paths at Stanford.
For Ohanian, however, it began with a brazen walkout and an order of waffles. "It all began with a Waffle House, and the rest is history," he told Wired.
