Notes on the State of Virginia's (Tech): What Reddit's IPO Reveals About the University of Virginia's Efforts To Be World Class
Why did Silicon Valley really start in California and not Virginia or Boston?
“Property is what you do when you have no other ideas,” the German-born Texas billionaire told me with a sly smile. In short order he became our landlord for our genetics lab which has since become one of the more impressive companies in our country. My other cofounders met one another in Virginia but they started the company with me in the Lone Star State.
To be honest I have never been terribly interested in property. I have nothing but ideas—and the will to see them alive in the world. I am not “monkish” as Thomas Jefferson would say. I want to see my ideas out and about, prancing, in their final form of inventions and industry.
Ideas are kind of what America has, too. The Delaware company, the dollar, maybe even democracy itself. The greatest of ideas belongs to the immortal Jefferson “all men are created equal.” From those ideas knew come our prosperity and strength. There’s too much talk of 1619 and not 1776 — and certainly not any discussion of 2119 or 2026.
It’s fitting then that Thomas Jefferson’s school — the University of Virginia — is where the ideas for Reddit had their start. Two of the three founders — Steve Huffman (Computer Science ‘05) and Alexis Ohanian (Commerce and History, ‘05) — went to UVA before decamping for Boston and Y Combinator where they picked up the late Aaron Schwarz and Sam Altman.
I might also have asked why it was that so much of what started in Virginia didn’t stay there. In addition to Steve Huffman, who lived in Warrenton, there’s Facebook’s cofounder — Sean Parker — hailed from Herndon, Virginia. Facebook’s current market cap? $1.28T. Harvard, of course, gave us the predations of Facebook but had the University of Virginia been an investor who knows what direction the company might have gone? America Online was headquartered at 8619 Westwood Center Drive in the Tysons Corner CDP, near the Town of Vienna. AOL was quickly running out of room in October 1996 for its network at the Fairfax County campus. In mid-1996, AOL moved to 22000 AOL Way in Dulles, unincorporated Loudoun County, Virginia to provide room for future growth.
Over the years the University of Virginia itself has played host to Reddit’s founders — Alexis Ohanian credited the local Waffle House for his change in career — but, as far as I know, has gotten little in the way of upside from what promises to be a $6B+ IPO.
Over the years I’ve impressed upon Reddit’s executive and board members to embrace this Virginia past. It’s fallen on deaf ears. I similarly encouraged both Adam D’Angelo of Quora and Steve Huffman of Reddit to begin offering genomic sequencing to their patrons. “Think about the amount of interesting data you could get by cross referencing Quora answers and genetic results!” I say into the void. I’d wager that many Redditors or Quora users have already gotten at least partially sequenced through 23andMe or AncestryDNA, anyway.
Still Huffman continues to draw inspiration from Charlottesville. Huffman visited the campus in 2023.
“Studying computer science at UVA had already accustomed him to working among intimidatingly credentialled people, so even the Harvard and MIT engineers he worked with later didn’t faze him, Huffman said jokingly.
“Actually, I thought UVA had the perfect balance of theoretical and practical,” he said. “I felt like I had just a better foundation than a lot of those other folks as a result. So I’m really, really thankful for my time here.”
Huffman likely wouldn’t have sold his stake in Reddit had he had the backing of his alma mater but I’m told that the first real state school is heavily invested in real estate instead.
Which is not to say it’s been a bad investment — just an incomplete one. Virginia has a rich history which could and should be brought up to date. She could, if she wanted to, extend her ideas well into the future with practical applications inspired by her illustrious sons.
I had been coming to Virginia since my childhood — I had family in the intelligence community — and I found myself immediately at home with its polymathic culture and the speed with which the server farms went up as the real farms seemed to be sold. Some of the smartest people in the American imperial order find their way to the DMV and as the Ukraine war got underway, I found myself with several portfolio companies deployed abroad.
There’s a lot of talk about 1619 but I’m more interested in 2119 — some five hundred years after slavery’s introduction. To be sure, slavery remains a live issue — there’s all kinds of labor trafficking in our own time through illegal immigration and racketeering — but Jefferson’s thoughts — he left quite a bit of material and I read Notes on the State of Virginia when I first settled in Northern Virginia — struck me as more robust than I had read in the newspapers. The detailed description of Virginia’s flora, fauna, agriculture, history and political power really impressed upon me that my education as a native Bostonian was woefully insufficient. There was perhaps even more powerful center of the country. Virginia was to become as Jefferson put it, “the future bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere.”
A visit to Monticello showed me that Jefferson shared the Enlightenment veneration of the natural world. He enjoyed dining with young and old alike and kept abreast of the goings on at his university. His filing system was especially of note and I read all I could about Jefferson’s teacher at William and Mary, the Scottish-born William Small, and soon descended into a study of the Scottish enlightenment. Ever the indebted patriot, Thomas Jefferson sold his library to Congress after the British burned the Capitol.
Jefferson’s plans for the University of Virginia show you what can happen when those Enlightenment ideas find an eminent host. He held his “feasts of reason” at Monticello with the early classes of Virginia students. Jefferson believed that self-government was only possible through the “illimitable freedom of the human mind” which sought to hold government accountable. At his university “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
There have been other attacks on the University of Virginia. As a federal informant I worked to expose some of the strange foreign intelligence operations targeting Jefferson’s school — including both the fake rape hoax and the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. It’s been underexplored the degree to which both attacks were a joint Likud-Russian operation. You’re welcome.
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Virginia’s hard to penetrate social life reminded me a lot of the clubbiness of my native Boston.
I have often thought about what happened in the Boston of my youth to occasion all these companies starting — Y Combinator, Reddit, Facebook — and why each in turn went to San Francisco. The most obvious answer is that they were trying to get closer to the Chinese slave empires. It’s seldom mentioned the Chinese tie in with Paul Graham’s wife, Jessica Livingston. Nor is there much introspective in my native Boston about how many Brahmin institutions were funded with opium money.
Just as the cell phone industry catapulted Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence committee to wealth, so, too could the biometric revolution help Virginia take its rightful place of categorizing and promoting integrity and human excellence.
Virginia was founded on addiction and slavery but the ideas are powerful and long lasting. I take foreigners and family alike to Jefferson’s Memorial. As an undergraduate I read the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams and was particularly struck by their concept of a “natural aristocracy” as opposed to a predatory elite:
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.
Reading deeper I read The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University. Jefferson wanted Charlottesville to be the center of republican thought. It can be again if it embraces its role as a center of science and technology informed by the liberal arts.
Can we draw out that natural aristocracy with a liberal education—and with DNA helping to guide us to be the best versions of ourselves?
I don’t really go for the self-flagellation of recent years — what people has a past that is anything but dark? — and the uses of DNA to dredge up what Jefferson called the “dead hand of the past.” DNA ought not be used as cudgel to beat people with but as a way of drawing out the best characteristics from that natural aristocracy in the service of the commonwealth.