Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian quit the LSAT after 20 minutes, had a Waffle House epiphany to ‘invent a career,’ and founded the company.

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  • While still in college, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian left his Law School Admission Test after just 20 minutes—and reached a pivotal decision at a Waffle House to pursue entrepreneurship. Merely months later, he and his partner secured investment from Paul Graham, giving rise to the social platform now valued at $40 billion. Reddit’s founders are among those from firms like Google, Facebook, and Databricks whose origins are directly tied to their college years.

Numerous accomplished entrepreneurs started modestly: Jeff Bezos founded . Mark Zuckerberg created , and Steve Jobs constructed .

Yet for , the genesis of everything traces back to table 19 at his .

In 2005, as a University of Virginia senior, the millennial cofounder believed his post-graduation path was set: attend law school for three years and then secure a well-paid, stable position. But only 20 minutes into sitting for the Law School Admission Test (), he realized his error.

“So I’d walked out of the LSAT. I had studied for it, I was getting ready for it,” he disclosed on . “And then 20 minutes into it, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just gonna invent a career and be an entrepreneur.”

However, waffles and hash browns alone couldn’t assure Ohanian and his roommate, —the current CEO of Reddit—immediate success.

Ohanian and Huffman transformed rejection into a thriving business

The two young men’s first concept was a mobile food-ordering service. They presented it to investor , who later , after forgoing a Cancún spring break to go to his Harvard talk, “How to Start a Startup.”

“We’re passing,” Ohanian remembered Graham telling them on the phone. Yet the following day, Graham offered to invest on one condition: “Listen, we still don’t like your idea, but we like you guys, so if you’re willing to change your idea, we’ll fund you.”

Heeding Graham’s counsel, they quickly shifted focus to developing a community-driven social media forum, and Reddit came into being. The firm now boasts more than 110 million daily active users and a market capitalization exceeding $40 billion.

“It all started with a Waffle House, and the rest is history,” Ohanian told Wired.

These founders connected during university

Although Gen Z might be entirely, had Ohanian and Huffman not had the college experience, they probably would never have met and founded Reddit—a common story. Many leading tech innovators met on university grounds and proceeded to establish globally famous companies.

At Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg connected with his cofounders, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, laying the groundwork for the social platform now called (currently valued at nearly $2 trillion).

and met as students at Stanford University and later partnered to found (now part of parent company Alphabet, valued around $4 trillion).

Stanford is also the meeting place for the founders of the $62 billion data software firm —along with the makers of the $5 billion AI voice company .

An earlier version of this article was published on on August 27, 2025.

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