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Reddit Co-Founder, Dropbox CEO To Speak At IST Startup Week

Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston will share their career arcs and wisdom at Penn State next Friday as part of IST Startup Week. Huffman’s talk, titled “Steve Huffman: From Reddit to Hipmunk” will chronicle the 31-year-old’s beginning at reddit to the co-creation of Hipmunk, an airfare search site. Huffman’s presentation will run from 2:00 p.m. to 2:50 p.m. at the HUB’s Alumni Hall. Shortly after, Houston will present “Dropbox: A Conversation with Drew Houston,” also in Alumni Hall at 4:00 p.m.

Huffman created reddit, the popular user-maintained news and social media website, with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian in 2005, the same year that he graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in computer science. Ohanian stopped by campus last year to speak about his new book. A humble startup at first, reddit now boasts over five billion page-views and 100 million visits per month. Conde Nast Publications, the media mammoth that owns The New Yorker, Wired, and a host of other media sources, acquired reddit in 2006.

Four years later, Huffman, who was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2012, created Hipmunk in an effort to quell the hassle of finding cheap online plane tickets and hotels. It was quickly named one of the Top 50 Websites and Top 1o Smart-Phone Apps by Time magazine. He also spoke last year on campus as part of the same event, in a talk titled “Evaluating Success and Recognizing the Best Time to Sell.”

Houston, meanwhile, graduated MIT with a computer science degree in 2006. Frustrated by carrying around a USB everywhere he went to access files, he joined forces with an MIT peer and eventually founded Dropbox, a project that began the year after graduating, much like Huffman with reddit. Houston gained Fortune recognition, and was named a “40 Under 40” in 2014. That same year, he and Dropbox co-founder Arah Ferdowsi were named TechCrunch’s “Founders of the Year.”

Houston’s talk will be one of the concluding presentations in a week full of events during the annual IST Startup Week. Check out the rest of the schedule here.

Photo: Arsineh Houspian via The Age 

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About the Author

Ben Berkman

State College, PA

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