We don't have one male friend who isn't a little obsessed with Allison Williams. So who's the lucky guy who managed to snag the "Girls" star?
That would be CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen. The pair were first reported to be dating by Page Six two years ago today (March 8). According to the New York Post, the couple met while Williams, a 2010 Yale graduate, was filming the pilot for her hit HBO series.
Van Veen created the popular humor site with high school pal Josh Abramson while a freshman at Wake Forest University in 1999. According to a 2005 profile in The New Yorker, the friends grew up in Timonium, a suburb of Baltimore, and had known each other since sixth grade. College Humor began as "a kind of nerdy diversion," where they'd collect jokes and funny photographs.
In 2006, the boys sold a 51 percent stake in Connected Ventures, the parent company of CollegeHumor, to Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp for an estimated $20 million, while continuing to run the site.
According to a 2010 profile in New York Magazine, Van Veen loves pranks, "such as when he hung IN-N-OUT BURGER COMING SUMMER 2010 signs in Union Square for April Fool’s Day." "He describes this hobby as 'selectively putting an obscene amount of effort into absolutely trivial matters,' adding, 'the ideal end result is somebody scratching their head and saying, ‘It has to be real, because I can’t imagine why anybody would bother doing this’," explained New York. The magazine also revealed that he's a fan of the game "Would you rather." He is partial to Lean Cuisine and Twix bars.
Per Van Veen's own website, he resides in the West Village. Shortly after moving to New York in 2004, his colleagues participated in an IM interview with Gawker, in which he was asked whether he planned to use CollegeHumor as a site to get ladies. "We're going to start at the heart of NYC- taxi drivers and hot dog vendors first. Then we'll work on the other professions," Ricky joked.
Van Veen struck up a friendship with John Mayer in 2010, and these days he and Williams are likely to be seen hanging out with Mayer and his latest love interest, Katy Perry. Just this week, the foursome took a hike in the Hollywood Hills.
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