As I understood it, it was Steve who built Reddit and Alexis is the guy who did everything else (like draw the logo or act as community manager in the early days).
I remember Alexis giving a talk on exactly this, he emphasized the importance of letting the engineers worry about building things and not all the trivial things that might get in the way of the goal.
I'm not down playing his role or achievement but we shouldn't forget Steve just because he has a smaller public profile.
Yep. Steve & I debated just about everything (even business cards) but he actually built reddit and I did everything non-technical from logo doodles to ordering pizza.
I didn't have any input in the article, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find me writing/speaking about reddit and not also mentioning Steve in the same breath. One of my most-viewed writeups on the subject of 'why reddit won' hopefully indicates the amount of respect I have for everything Steve did: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...
There'd have been no reddit without him -- and it shouldn't come as a surprise that I jumped at the chance to join hipmunk a week before launch to do my part to help with its branding & marketing.
Yeah, he gave a humorous, somewhat tongue-in-cheek speech to aspiring founders (the speech was pretty controversial on Reddit, for obvious reasons). Paraphrasing what he said since I can't remember the exact words, he basically told them to come up with an idea, get it funded, hire some rent-a-coders, and relax on the beach with your profits. His expressed, slightly sarcastic view of founding a web startup was to do what you do as the architect and let the construction crew do what they do.
He actually made many good points, if you can sift through what his many jabs at the programmer types.
I remember Alexis giving a talk on exactly this, he emphasized the importance of letting the engineers worry about building things and not all the trivial things that might get in the way of the goal.
I'm not down playing his role or achievement but we shouldn't forget Steve just because he has a smaller public profile.