Steve Huffman, the Reddit founder who came back to sell the conversation

Steve Huffman

Photo: Steve Jurvetson / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 12, 1983 The Plains
Occupation	Engineer

Steve Huffman runs a company whose product he does not write. Every post and furious argument on Reddit comes from someone else, and the defining question of his second spell as chief executive is who gets to profit from all of it. Artificial intelligence companies want the archive; the people who built it, many of them as unpaid volunteer moderators, want at least to be asked. Huffman’s answer has been as consistent as it is unpopular with part of his own user base: the conversation is Reddit’s to protect, and Reddit’s to sell.

Among the founders of the big social platforms he is a rare case, a man who let his creation go and then came back to steer it onto the stock market. That detour explains much of how he governs, with the impatience of someone who once sold too early.

Huffman was born on November 12, 1983, and grew up in Warrenton, Virginia, where he started programming at the age of eight. At the University of Virginia he studied computer science, competed in intercollegiate ballroom dancing and shared a room with Alexis Ohanian. In their senior year the two drove to Boston to hear the programmer and investor Paul Graham speak. Graham rejected their first idea, food ordering by text message, but asked them back, and from that session came the site Graham described as “the front page of the Internet.” The pair joined the first class of Graham’s incubator, Y Combinator. Huffman wrote the code in Lisp, and Reddit launched in June 2005.

It caught on faster than either founder expected, and on October 31, 2006, the two sold Reddit to Condé Nast for a price reported at between $10 million and $20 million. Huffman stayed on until 2009, then left and in 2010 co-founded the airfare search engine Hipmunk with the writer and developer Adam Goldstein, serving as its chief technology officer. Concur bought Hipmunk in 2016. When SAP Concur closed it in January 2020, the company turned down an offer from the two co-founders to buy it back.

In 2014 he said publicly that selling Reddit had been a mistake, and on July 10, 2015, after Ellen Pao resigned as interim chief executive during one of the most turbulent stretches in the site’s history, Reddit hired him back to run it. His first priorities were unglamorous ones, such as official mobile apps. He also tightened the rules, banning content that incites violence, quarantining offensive material and removing communities that existed only to “make Reddit worse for everyone else.” Neither founder, he wrote, had created Reddit “to be a bastion of free speech,” a line that sat awkwardly next to Ohanian’s own use of that phrase in a 2012 interview. In April 2018 Reddit shipped its first major redesign in a decade, replacing a look Huffman had called a “dystopian Craigslist.”

The criticism of Huffman has followed a recognizable pattern. In November 2016 he admitted to quietly editing comments in a subreddit run by Donald Trump supporters, so that insults aimed at him pointed at the forum’s moderators instead; he restored the originals within an hour and apologized. In June 2020 his open letter on racism, “Remember the Human – Black Lives Matter,” drew a public rebuke from Pao, who said the platform had long condoned racism, and days later Ohanian resigned from the board, asking to be replaced by a Black director. The sharpest break came in 2023, when Reddit began charging for heavy use of its API. Third-party apps such as Apollo shut down, thousands of subreddits went dark, and The Verge described the response to his Ask Me Anything session as “seemingly universal anger.” The common thread is less any single decision than a way of governing: Huffman treats Reddit as a company with users rather than a community with a company attached, and the moderators who keep it running for free have rarely let him forget the difference.

The bet paid off on paper. Reddit priced its initial public offering at $34 a share on March 20, 2024, and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the next day under the ticker RDDT. Filings put his 2023 pay package at about $193 million, almost all of it in stock and options. Weeks before the IPO, Reddit had signed a data licensing deal with Google, followed in May by a partnership with OpenAI, and Time put him on its 2024 list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. In early November 2025, after another strong quarter lifted the shares, Forbes estimated his fortune at about $1.2 billion, two decades after he co-founded the company.

His pitch to investors this year rests on a phrase he repeats in interviews: “There’s no artificial intelligence without actual intelligence.” In April, after a quarter in which revenue rose 69% to $663 million, he told CNBC that the market was learning that “Reddit is the fuel” for AI. Three months later revenue reached about $805 million, up 61%, yet the stock fell 11% in after-hours trading on worries about traffic from Google, whose AI Overviews keep searchers on the results page. “People want Reddit, they don’t necessarily want a summary of Reddit,” Huffman said, adding only that the company’s “thinking hasn’t changed” after reports that it was weighing cutting off Google’s access to its data.

The same logic runs through Reddit’s legal strategy. The company has sued Anthropic and Perplexity over alleged unauthorized scraping, and on July 31 a federal judge in New York allowed most of its claims against Perplexity and the data firm SerpApi to proceed. On September 30 Reddit announced that its RSS feeds would stop working on November 13 and that its public API would close by March 2027, citing scraping and abuse. Critics saw irony in a platform blaming bots while licensing the same material to AI developers; for Huffman it is one position stated twice: whoever wants Reddit’s conversations at scale will have to pay for them.

Away from the company, Huffman lives in San Francisco. He married in 2009 and later divorced, and has a daughter with his fiancée. He sits on the advisory board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, and has argued for net neutrality, warning in 2017 that without it internet providers could “choose winners and losers.”

His next test arrives on October 29, when Reddit reports its third-quarter results after the market closes and collects questions from its shareholder community on r/RDDT. Two weeks later the RSS feeds go dark. Both dates measure the wager Huffman has been making since he came back: that a site built by its users can be closed off, priced and defended like any other asset without losing the people who give it its value.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, reddit, Y Combinator, Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, tech entrepreneurs