Alexis Ohanian

Cofounder of Reddit and Initialized Capital

• Born: April 24, 1983
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Reddit

Introduction

Alexis Ohanian founded the social news site Reddit with Steve Huffman immediately after the two graduated the University of Virginia. He later joined Huffman's travel search engine start-up, Hipmunk, and became a partner at the start-up incubator Y Combinator. Ohanian also cofounded the venture capital firm Initialized Capital.

Early Life

Alexis Ohanian was born on April 24, 1983, in New York City. He attended the University of Virginia, where he met fellow student Steve Huffman. Upon graduating in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in history, Ohanian, along with Huffman, approached the seed accelerator Y Combinator with an idea for a start-up. Paul Graham, Y Combinator's founder, rejected the first proposal but told the two to brainstorm another idea and try again. Ohanian and Huffman proposed an idea for a social news site and secured $15,000 in seed money to move to Medford, Massachusetts, living on a shoestring budget and coding for three weeks in order to create Reddit.

Life's Work

The social news site Reddit (styled with a lowercase r) premiered in June 2005, three weeks after Ohanian and Huffman began work on it. Social news sites like Reddit, Slashdot, and Digg are websites where registered users submit links to external sites (or the occasional text-only post, of which there are several specific traditional forms on Reddit) and other users can vote on their level of interest. A vote is meant to indicate not enjoyment or approval, like Facebook's “like” button, but the appropriateness and relevance of the link, particularly if it is submitted in a given category. By 2012, Reddit had tens of thousands of “subReddits” to which links could be submitted.

While Huffman was principally responsible for Reddit's code and engineering and the two worked jointly on establishing its feel and philosophy—in the early days, for instance, both partners contributed content to the site under false names in order to establish the illusion of activity and community in the six months it took to attract a real user base—Ohanian is the more social and gregarious of the two, and his primary responsibility was what Huffman called “strategic hanging out.” The first summer, for instance, when they were the only two people running Reddit, Huffman focused on the code and structure of the site. Ohanian took care of their expenses, paying the rent and bills, while dealing with the lawyers, paperwork, and other practical aspects of starting a business. When those functions were subsumed in 2006 by Condé Nast after it bought Reddit, Ohanian transitioned into a role combining marketing, defining the company vision, and acting as a liaison between Huffman and external contacts, whether Condé Nast or other employees.

Ohanian was also important as the public face and persona of Reddit. Although both Huffman and Ohanian responded to feedback e-mails, especially in the first year, Ohanian made a point of sending something personal to people who took the time to point out a bug, who helped with the site in some way, or who were especially enthusiastic in their participation: He would send a T-shirt, a handwritten letter, or another response that was clearly not automated.

In 2009, Ohanian gave a TED talk on Mister Splashy Pants, a humpback whale being tracked by Greenpeace in the South Pacific Ocean. Mister Splashy Pants was an interesting example of the convergence of social awareness, memes, and the Internet's sense of humor. Greenpeace had held an online poll to name the whale in order to personalize him as part of a campaign to raise awareness of the Japanese Fisheries Agency's plan to hunt fifty humpbacks. The name Mister Splashy Pants received a sudden spike in votes from someone who had disabled cookies in order to get around the one-person-one-vote limit. When this was brought to the attention of sites like Reddit, users flocked to the poll to continue voting for the name, and the Reddit logo was even temporarily changed to feature the whale with a doodle drawn by Ohanian. Mister Splashy Pants won the poll with 78 percent of the vote, and although Greenpeace leaders were wary—the name did not seem serious enough and they were afraid that it might trivialize their cause—they honored the results. In fact, the poll may have been even more effective than Greenpeace had initially hoped; “Save Mister Splashy Pants” clothes have been sold, and shortly after the poll the Japanese government, under the weight of publicity, announced that it was canceling the whale hunt. Movements to support Mister Splashy Pants continue to be tracked on Greenpeace's website.

Ohanian used the incident as an example of how social media can both effective and unpredictable—and, most important, that the unpredictability should be embraced, not feared. Social media are at their most effective when not overly controlled, allowing emergent phenomena.

Huffman and Ohanian left the day-to-day business of Reddit in 2009, because of a combination of factors; Ohanian was having some family problems at the time, and both cofounders were unhappy after having had to let go of an employee who had not worked out. Ohanian remained on Reddit's board of directors, however. He spent his first three months after leaving Reddit in Yerevan, Armenia, working with the microfinance nonprofit organization Kiva.

When he returned, he joined Hipmunk—the travel search-engine site started by Huffman—days before its 2010 launch. He played a role at Hipmunk similar to his role at Reddit, advising and marketing. Hipmunk received its seed money from Y Combinator, the same firm that provided Reddit with its seed money. Hipmunk was acquired by Concur in 2016.

Meanwhile, Ohanian continued to work closely with Y Combinator as its ambassador to the East. He met with and evaluated applicants on the East Coast and mentored successful applicants in the New York City area. He also established Das Kapital Capital, a start-up investment and consulting company launched in June 2010.

Since 2007, Ohanian has run Breadpig, a geek-centric vendor that donates its proceeds to charity. Breadpig is best known as the publisher of the xkcd book, collecting strips from the webcomic; sales of xkcd: volume 0 raised more than $50,000 to construct a school in Laos. In 2013 he published a best-selling book, Without Their Permission, and hosted the weekly online show Small Empires, distributed through The Verge.

Ohanian and Garry Tan launched Initialized Capital as a fund within Y Combinator around 2013, before spinning it off in 2016. Ohanian was made full partner at Y Combinator in 2014 but soon left to rejoin Reddit as its executive chair in charge of marketing, strategy, and communications.

Ohanian stepped back from helping run Reddit in 2020 when he and Huffman had a disagreement about how to handle some hateful messages posted on Reddit. In June 2021, Ohanian announced the launch of his new venture capital firm "776."

Personal Life

Ohanian is active in Internet free-speech causes and was involved in the nationwide protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in 2012, as well as speaking to members of Congress to explain problems with the bills.

Ohanian has revealed that at the time of Reddit's founding, he was going through the hardest part of his life and that work on the site helped keep him afloat. A month into work on the site, his then girlfriend had fallen out of a five-story window and had slipped into a coma. She eventually recovered, after the better part of a year. During the period when his girlfriend was recovering, Ohanian's family dog, Max, was put to sleep after a long struggle with illness; that same day, his mother had a seizure, likely induced by the stress of the loss, and her hospitalization revealed a class IV glioblastoma multiforme: terminal brain cancer. She died two and a half years later, on March 15, 2008.

Working at Reddit allowed Ohanian to travel, to visit both his girlfriend and his mother in the hospital, and to engage in deeply consuming and distracting work that allowed some respite from the stresses of his personal life.

Ohanian married tennis star Serena Williams in November 2017. The couple has two daughters, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. and Adira River Ohanian.

Bibliography

Bot, Sophy. The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality Is Changing Everything We Know About Life, Work, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Suisun City: Sophy Bot, 2011. Print. Examines hipsterdom as a product of Internet culture, and Reddit's role in that culture.

Gusto, M. Rage Comics. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2011. Print. A compilation of the meme comics popularized by Reddit.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print. Examines social media, new forms of creative expression, and their impact on media studies.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms theWay We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print. The impact of social media on the business world. Tremayne-Pengelly Alexandra. "Alexis Ohanian and Brent Montgomery Are Launching a New Collectibles Platform." Observer, 14 Feb. 2024, observer.com/2024/02/alexis-ohanian-brent-montgomery-launching-collectibles-platform/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.