Biography | Steve Huffman — Hancock House, Where the Roommate Partnership Began

The usual Reddit origin story starts in a Boston summer.

The partnership started on this Grounds.

Huffman studied computer science at the University of Virginia and graduated in 2005.

As first-years he and Alexis Ohanian were assigned rooms across the hall in Hancock House, a McCormick Road dorm.

Virginia Magazine and later local reporting both name that house.

They became roommates.

In senior year they drove north on spring break to hear Paul Graham speak in Boston, then applied to the first Y Combinator batch.

The university still lists Hancock House among the McCormick Road first-year residences.

The pin is the dorm, not a private home.

Hancock House stands on the west side of the central Grounds, a short walk from the Rotunda.

Huffman left Charlottesville for Cambridge that summer with a computer-science degree and a rejected food-ordering pitch.

The site that replaced the pitch launched weeks after commencement.

Hancock House is still student housing.

Stand on McCormick Road and you see a working dorm, not a plaque.

The cover is the Rotunda from 2007, a short walk from Hancock. No clear Commons photograph of the dorm itself is available.

The portrait is Huffman in 2018, not a student picture from these rooms.

Photo: terren in Virginia, CC BY 2.0 (Rotunda); Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 (portrait), via Wikimedia Commons.