Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman were University of Virginia undergraduates when they met Paul Graham, the startup guru who had yet to found Y Combinator, and pitched him on an order-ahead service called "Redbrick" that was named for the ubiquitous red brick architecture in Charlottesville. He initially liked and later rejected their idea, asking the duo to come up with something else instead.
That something else was Reddit, the "front page of the internet" and still a web leviathan capable of great and terrible things. The above mini-documentary about Ohanian and Huffman, produced by A Total Disruption on their Wizard channel and highlighted by Laughing Squid, certainly emphasizes the potential for good over the potential for bad. It's worth a watch — and let's just hope that, as onetime Reddit CEO Ellen Pao put it, the humans defeat the trolls in the end.
