He could have been studying, but instead, in a University of Virginia college library in 2005, Alexis Ohanian plotted out an idea for a user-ranked news site. "I thought: People should say at parties, 'I read it on Reddit.'" Today he jokes, "To the best of my knowledge, that has never really happened." But the news links site he created today is a hallmark of social aggregation. When he and co-founder Steve Huffman left the company in early 2010, they took with them lessons learned from managing a large, amorphous audience they'd empowered to rate the news to populate the site's homepage. With that, they created Y Combinator-backed Hipmunk, a radically simplified travel search site. This year, Hipmunk was a darling of the South by Southwest Interactive festival, taking top honors for the SXSW Accelerator's Innovative Web Technologies competition. Ohanian, along with Hipmunk co-founder Adam Goldstein, talked with Inc.com's Christine Lagorio about the lessons they took from Reddit in founding Hipmunk—why simple design, cute mascots, and massive amounts of user-respect drive their success.
via inc.com
Woohoo! Thanks, Christine (@lagorio). OK, now back to trying to make the world suck less...