At first, he and co-founder Steve Huffman planned to make the world suck less by inventing a phone-based sub sandwich ordering app … in 2005. But after a spring break meeting with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham — before Y Combinator existed — and an initial rejection from Y Combinator, Huffman and Ohanian decided to create “the front page of the web.”

And Reddit, the site that had 47 million visitors last month, was born.

“Content was being created — even back in 2005 — by such a broad array of sources that no one source could really lay claim to that,” Ohanian said. “Unless it aggregated everything.”

So the pair took the ideas behind two popular sites of the day– Delicious, an early social-bookmarking site, and Slashdot, the first truly large geek community focused on news and ideas — and combined them. When they joined YC, the two worked day and night on the first version of Reddit.

“The only outdoor experiences we had,” Ohanian says, “were in Azeroth, the fictional world of Warcraft.”

The site launched accidentally after three weeks of work, after Paul Graham criticized the pair for not launching earlier. They got a beta version live, and Graham — unbeknownst to Ohanian and Huffman — linked to it in a blog post, giving Reddit its first thousand visitors.

Here’s the whole story:

As is well-known, Huffman and Ohanian created fake users and much of the early site’s content. But not for long.

“The day I woke up and Reddit was working on its own was just the most incredible feeling,” Huffman says. “It was, like, holy shit … we’ve got a thing that’s making a difference in people’s lives!”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dice Holdings has purchased iconic tech properties Slashdot, SourceForge, & Freecode from Geeknet for $20 million cash, the company announced today.

“The acquisition of these premier technology sites fits squarely into our strategy of providing content and services that are important to tech professionals in their everyday work lives,” said Scot Melland, the CEO of Dice Holdings, in a statement. “The SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis, and this significantly extends our company’s reach into the global tech community.”

We heard back in May that Geeknet was looking to sell its online media properties to make its stock more valuable. In 2011, the three online media properties generated about $20 million in revenue.

Slashdot and SourceForge are the two big properties being sold off, while Freecode is quite small. Slashdot, a user-generated tech news and analysis site, attracts 3.7 million uniques per month. SourceForge, a site for developing and downloading open-source software, attracts 40 million monthly uniques. Freecode, an index of Linux and cross-platform software, has about 500,000 unique visitors each month.

With its online media business sold off, Geeknet says it will focus all its efforts on growing its ThinkGeek site, a place to buy all kinds of geek merchandise.

Pile of cash via stockshoppe/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Geeknet announced today that it is considering selling off some of its iconic tech properties, including software sites SourceForge and Freecode as well as curated technology news site Slashdot.

The company’s board of directors said it’s reassessing its media business initiatives in an effort to make Geeknet’s stock more valuable. The announcement also comes a week after the company reported losing money for the first quarter of 2012 with a net loss of $2.1 million.

Geeknet’s properties, which also include retail site ThinkGeek, took in 46 million unique visitors in March — meaning it doesn’t fail to gain traction with its main audience.

That said, it’s a bit baffling to think about the logic behind Geeknet selling Slashdot, especially considering all the spin-off sites it launched recently. Last month it debuted business intelligence-focused site SlashBI, followed by yesterday’s launch of its cloud-focused SlashCloud site for IT professionals. The company has also recently beefed up the main Slashdot site as well, with a new video game section as well as video channel Slashdot TV.

“We are focusing more investment in GeekLabs to deliver more unique and innovative products in ThinkGeek and our Media team has launched a number of new initiatives designed to improve traffic, monetization, and international revenue as the year progresses,” said Geeknet chief executive Ken Langone in the announcement. “Our primary objectives are unchanged, and we remain focused on delivering growth in revenue, profits, and cash from operations in 2012.”

To assist with its strategic view of these properties, Geeknet has retained DeSilva+Phillips Corporate Finance as a financial adviser. The review may not result in a sale, the company points out. However, it’s apparent by the release that if the price is right, they will end up selling.

Slashdot, the original gangster of web-based news for nerds, has just launched yet another site: SlashBI. The “BI” stands for business intelligence, and this news, while still somewhat nerdy, will appeal to the enterprise types more than the, ahem, neckbeard types.

It’s a new audience for Slashdot — one with ample money from corporate coffers that needs to be spent on IT projects. If we didn’t know better, we’d swear these Slashdot guys were trying to make money or something.

Mere weeks ago, Slashdot also launched its YouTube-for-nerds-themed video site, Slashdot.tv. The video site features the kind of typical Linux/security/science fare one would typically expect from a Slashdot-branded web property.

SlashBI, on the other hand, is a different sort of animal.

“We’re going to publish every business day with a mixture of news and analysis from journalists, business leaders, analysts, etc.,” wrote Nick Kolakowski, senior editor at Slashdot parent company GeekNet, in an email to VentureBeat.

“SlashBI is a complementary destination to Slashdot, designed to not intrude on the latter. The new site allows us to give our audience something extra — namely tons of news and analysis on everything B.I.-related — without infringing on the news-for-nerds aspect that made Slashdot so popular in the first place,” Kolakowski continued.

SlashBI so far brings a smattering of news about big data, open-source in the enterprise, cloud technologies, and storage for systems at scale.

Hilarious stock image courtesy of .shock, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Screw those stupid cat videos; Slashdot TV has arrived, and it might actually make you smarter.

While most video aggregators these days lean heavily in favor of the cute, the bizarre, and the clickbait-y, Slashdot TV lives up to the site’s “news for nerds” tagline. On the front page of the new property, we see fascinating car tech, Linux running on a TV, and our good buddy Bre Petis demonstrating his newest Maker Bot 3D printer. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?

Of course, like any good aggregator, Slashdot TV will feature tabs for popular and recent clips, but it also has the lovingly curated Editor’s Picks section. The site divides vids into handy categories, such as Linux, science, and security, and it includes content from SourceForce and Think Geek, which share a parent company with Slashdot.

In a post about the new hotness, the editors write, “You may have noticed that we’ve posted quite a few original videos on Slashdot in the past few months. Rather than being the work of a few rogue editors with newly-acquired Christmas cameras, this was part of the groundwork for a new site we’re launching today. SlashdotTV.”

Videos are embeddable (except on WordPress, unfortunately) and shareable via the usual social sites. A commenting system should be coming soon, as well. And yes, the site does include some preroll advertising. They gotta pay the bills too, y’all.

Slashdot was founded in 1997 by Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, currently of the Washington Post. The site is owned by GeekNet, and its current editors are Jeff “Soulskill” Boehm, Clinton “unknown lamer” Ebadi, Timothy Lord, and Rob “Samzenpus” Rozeboom.

Image based on photo by Alterov, Shutterstock