Reddit grew up almost two decades ago will go public in March around one Estimated $6.5 billion. Although the forum's social media page now boasts 91 million active daily users, its success was not certain. In fact, the co-founders of Reddit were rejected by startup accelerator Y Combinator at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey.

“So, Alexis (Ohanian)my co-founder, my college roommate at the time, he and I applied to Y Combinator,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on Thursday. Their initial idea was to create a way to order food from mobile phones – which was not the norm in 2005.

Y Combinator rejected the idea, but asked Ohanian and Huffman, who were 22 and 21 at the time, to work on something else. They came up with Reddit, which Y Combinator funded with one $12,000 check.

The idea for Reddit came from two websites: Delicious and Slashdot. Delicious it was a website that allows users to save and share bookmarks; Yahoo bought it in 2007. Slashdot.org still exists as a social news site covering science and technology news; Reddit's co-founders were drawn to the community it had, but wanted to expand beyond technology.

Reddit “was kind of Delicious plus Slashdot, but I make both better,” Huffman said. “Honestly, I think that's pretty much what we've built. But for 19 years, we've been iterating on this and tweaking it, and following our users and adding features.”

Related: 'A huge opportunity:' Reddit CEO aims to bring AI to 1 billion Reddit searches

For example, Huffman noted that Reddit's “most important feature,” or the power it gives users to create their own communities, was introduced three years after launch.

^{Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images}

Since going public, Reddit has posted earnings that beat expectations for two consecutive quarters. The company signed an AI licensing agreement with Google and OpenAI earlier this year, allowing Google's Gemini AI and OpenAI's ChatGPT to use Reddit posts in their training data.

Huffman said there is “a huge amount of opportunity” with AI.

“I'm very proud that Reddit has played a role in the development of these technologies,” he said.

Related: Reddit traffic almost triples in 8 months, posts rise to top of Google search