WE ARE THE NERDS
University of Virginia roomies and best buds Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian launched Reddit in 2005, graduates of Y Combinator’s initial class. Their site, a collection of communities of everyone from cupcake lovers to perverts, made them wealthy and famous—Huffman the code-writing maestro and Ohanian, creator of Reddit’s alien logo, its public face. Pressures over content and growth would split them from the company and each other. As told in We Are the Nerds, they reclaimed the helm when a series of escalating crises threatened Reddit’s existence. But could they ever repair their relationship?
Steve Huffman had been seeing a therapist for a few years, and perhaps thanks to the rising tide of Silicon Valley, that individual, Cameron Yarbrough, had transitioned from mere “therapist” to “executive coach.” At multiple sessions with Yarbrough, Huffman later recalled, he lamented his ailing relationship with Alexis Ohanian, and admitted that he had a litany of long-standing issues they’d been avoiding hashing out. Huffman knew that over their years of mild estrangement, each had grown even more different, but that didn’t change the fact that he missed his old friend. With Yarbrough’s encouragement, Huffman reached out to Ohanian.
Huffman tried to plan a dinner for them, but tracking down Ohanian and getting him to cement a plan was “a pain in the ass,” he said. So Huffman saw it as a minor victory when Ohanian appeared at 5A5, a Japanese steakhouse in the Embarcadero that Huffman loved, at close to the appointed time one evening in early 2015. Once Ohanian was seated across from him, Huffman couldn’t hide his frustrations. “Dude, I’m trying to make an effort and I can’t get you to respond to my texts.’ ”
Ohanian, almost invariably considerate and charismatic in person, apologized. As steaks and cocktails arrived, the men began to hash out what had happened back at Reddit so many years ago when Ohanian hired contract programmers behind Huffman’s back.
It’d been two years into their running Reddit within Condé Nast, which had acquired it in 2006,
