Reddit Founder Steve Huffman At Web 2.0 Party, 2007 (Video)

It was 2007 and I was invited to a party for Reddit, thanks to Cathy Brooks, currently of Other Than That Studios, and then working with Loc Lemur on the Le Web series in Paris.

But this was in San Francisco, and a party held at Galaxy bar during the then-hot annual Web 2.0 Summit, and to celebrate Reddit’s relocation to SF from New York City. Here’s the video:

Reddit Founder Steve Huffman described Reddit simply: “Reddit. Well, if you don’t know, it’s a top 40 site. It’s like a top 40 list of headlines. So users submit what they think is interesting, and vote on it – keep track of what’s most popular. At that point, Reddit was two years old and initially funded by Y Combinator. The site was established in New York in 2005 and acquired by Conde Nast Publications in 2006. Huffman left in 2009, but said in 2010 that he still wish he’d owned it.

Now, Huffman is co-founder of http://www.hipmunk.com – where this blogger is a member.

And now, it’s the front page of The Internet.

As for the video itself, the idea was to give the pop culture observer an idea of what a “tech party” was like in 2007 San Francisco: a lot of beer, folks using smartphones, not many women but the ones who were there were cute, and a lot of tech talk. The two guys in the video were arguing about a particular method of data mining that could involve the use of the programming language Erlang. That’s as much as I elected to remember, because I was asked to not show the entire conversation – I removed about 2 minutes of video.

What was left was the part where the woman I met was making a makeshift non-disclosure agreement.

We closed down the party watching the San Francisco Giants baseball game. This was two years into the establishment of my own company, Sports Business Simulations.

But what strikes me about Reddit, in looking back, is just how simple it was as an idea. Elegant. It’s the simple, elegant ideas that endure.

Stay tuned.