Biography | Steve Huffman — The Times Square Tower That Bought Reddit in 2006

Reddit did not stay an independent Cambridge project for long.

On 31 October 2006 Condé Nast Publications announced it had bought the site.

Huffman was twenty-two.

The buyer then occupied this tower at 4 Times Square, the Condé Nast Building, completed in 1999.

The deal was widely reported in the range of about ten million dollars.

Exact terms were not filed as a public-company disclosure.

Huffman and Ohanian had launched the site in June 2005 after Y Combinator's first summer in Cambridge.

A year and a few months later the magazine company owned it.

Huffman stayed on through the Condé years and left the chief-executive chair in 2009.

The cover shows the Times Square mast cluster that includes 4 Times Square, the address the buyer used at the sale.

Condé Nast later left Times Square for One World Trade Center.

The glass shaft still stands on 42nd Street.

A visitor finds a working office building, not a Reddit museum.

The purchase is the moment the front page of the internet became a magazine-company asset.

Photo: Doc Searls, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Times Square tower); Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 (portrait), via Wikimedia Commons.