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But, for Alexis Ohanianstart of Reddit everyone starts at table 19 of his local Waffle House.
As an incoming graduate from the University of Virginia in 2005, the millennial cofounder thought his postgraduate career was planned: Spend the next three years in law school and eventually land a high-paying, secure job. However, it only takes 20 minutes to take the law school admissions test (LSAT), he knew he was wrong.
“So I walked out on the LSAT. I studied for it, I prepared for it,” he revealed to Wired’s Uncanny Valley podcast. “And after 20 minutes, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just going to invent a career and be an entrepreneur.”
But waffles and hash browns weren’t enough to warrant Ohanian and his roommate, Steve Huffman— the now-CEO of the social platform Reddit—success from the beginning.
Ohanian and Huffman turned rejection into a successful business
The first business idea of the two twentysomethings was to create a mobile food-ordering business. They put it to the investor Paul Grahamwho then created by Y Combinatorafter skipping their spring break trip to Cancún to attend his Harvard lecture, “How to Start a Startup.”
“We’re on our way,” Ohanian recalled Graham saying over the phone. But the next day, Graham said he would pour money into the project under one condition: “Listen, we still don’t like your idea, but we like you, so if you’re willing to change your idea, we’ll fund you.”
Taking Graham’s advice, they soon pivoted to creating a community-based social media forum, and Reddit was born. The company currently has over 110 million daily active users and a market cap of over $40 billion.
“It all started with a Waffle House, and the rest is history,” Ohanian said Wired.
These founders met in college
While Gen Z might questioning the merits of going to college in general, without the university experience, Ohanian and Huffman probably would not have met and created Reddit—and it was an experience that was not unusual for them. Many top tech minds met on college campuses and later went on to create world-renowned businesses.
At Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg met his co-founders, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, and established the foundation of the social platform known today as Meta (now worth almost $2 trillion).
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as computer science students at Stanford University and later collaborated on the construction Google (now under parent company Alphabet, worth about $4 trillion).
Stanford is also where the founders of the $62 billion data software company Databricks met—as well as the creators of the $5 billion AI voice firm SoundHound AI.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on August 27, 2025.
