Three Years After Their Acquisition, Reddit Founders Move On

Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have just announced that they’ll be leaving the company come October 31, when their contracts expire. The news doesn’t come as a huge surprise — it will have been three years to the day that Condé Nast acquired Reddit, and the founders likely had a three year contract as part of the deal. Reddit’s post notes that while co-founder Chris Slowe’s contract also expired he’ll be staying on board.

Reddit was funded by Y Combinator and launched back in 2005, emerging as the most popular alternative to Digg. As with Digg, stories are presented based on how many people have up and down voted them, but the two sites have distinctly different communities. Reddit was acquired on October 31, 2006 by Conde Nast, and has since made some major changes like releasing the site’s software as an open source project.

So what’s next for the founders? Huffman writes that he’ll be heading out to Virginia to spend time with his new wife (always a good plan) and Ohanian will be working on his ‘uncorporation’ breadpig, and will also be doing a three month stint in Armenia as a Kiva Fellow.