Alexis Ohanian
speaker
292 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Jun
Alexis Ohanian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
My ADD brain switched pretty soon thereafter. But this was a woman who, no matter what, was going to support whatever I was doing. And then when it just so happened to be a tech startup, she was like, great.
Literally the first person to buy our merch, the first person to post on... God, there are comments from my mom on TechCrunch circa 2005 that no one else would notice, but I know because I can see her username. And it's the most...
crazy german mom english you can imagine but uh it's the sweetest thing and like she was a ride or die and so that was the that was the bar i had and so even when those things came up i just knew i can't quit now here's where i up was i mean intense compartmentalization And it was what I felt I needed to do at that time, which was let me just use work as therapy.
Let me just work my ass off because I cannot work anyone. And if I've got her pulling for me, I will crush any competitors. I know my co-founder wasn't really equipped to have those conversations or really be a support at all. But I mean, we were kids, right? And so I just decided work is the therapy. And for the next
10 years, you know, really did not think about, explore, delve into anything other than I'm just going to do my work and I'm going to... Obviously, I took as many AirTran trips home as I could to spend time with my mom and dad on weekends, but like...
let me not go any deeper than yeah here's this shitty thing i'm going to compartmentalize it and just focus on the tasks at hand and there were areas look i i think compartmentalization gets a bad rap i do think there are areas where it's actually tremendously helpful but with some now my my my take is a little bit more nuanced where i think with some work
It's good to go into the box to rearrange some stuff, to sort through some stuff, to organize it. But I actually think there is a value to having some stuff in boxes and to compartmentalize, because I also don't want to spend my days reliving and rehashing and just analyzing those experiences. I'm not doing her any favors.
Her greatest joy was seeing me be successful as a CEO, as a startup founder, and whether it was Reddit or anything else. That's what mattered. And so it's a shame, right? She hasn't gotten to see me get married. She hasn't gotten to see me have kids. She hasn't. She'd have been an amazing grandmother. She hasn't gotten to see me build a lot of businesses I've built.
She saw me, though, live my dream. And when I decided it was time to build my own venture firm, I took the lessons from those days of Y Combinator. Because... Jay, I agonized over a $200 plane ticket on AirTran to Baltimore because we only had $72,000 in the bank. We didn't raise that much money. This is a very different era.
But even if we had raised the normal round today, it would be maybe a few million dollars. I still don't want a CEO deciding, God, this is going to hurt our burn. Do I really want to take that trip? And we built a program in 2776 specifically to say there are tens of thousands of dollars a founder can use that we are paying for.
It's coming out of our fees for their wellness, their development, any caregiving needs. Like we've had founders use this to pay for a babysitter and a date night with their partner. Awesome. We've had founders use it for you know, therapy for executive coaching, for surfing lessons, right?
If it, if it helps them find their focus, find their balance, be better founders for early stage companies, that's often the entire business is the founder. And if Y Combinator had had a program like that, I think it would have made all the difference. And it's not to slight them. They didn't know what they were doing. They were building the firm for the first time.
But I want to do 776 differently. And not because it feels good, but because I actually think it will drive better outcomes. It will mean better leaders, better managers, better founders, which will lead to healthier organizations, which I think will lead to more returns. And these are the ways that we're trying to learn from those experiences.
And I speak with founders to this all the time, especially at the early days, but it never goes away. But especially at the early days, so much of the company takes on your neuroses, your like, you are setting so much of the culture and don't even realize it.
even just the way you show up on a zoom call right because you're the founder you're the ceo like you are dictating so much of how other people are going to move and once you repeat those behaviors over and over again what you've done is created a culture intentionally or not and so your baggage your challenges the things that you're not addressing and working through to be your best are going to be inherited by your team and and that's again none of this is
This is the soulless capitalist talking here, right? I think there's a fantastic emotional argument for it and a health argument for it. But I always try to come first from just the business argument because if it makes sense for business, then it's a no-brainer. Then obviously, if it's going to be for your health and wellness involvement, then you should do it.
But I do think it has a bottom line impact. I really do.
Oh, I got that. So here, I'll give you an example. Let it illustrate it. so like two years into conan asked when there's the meme in uh the silicon valley show of resting investing so normally when a founder gets acquired they just hang out at the company and just they don't do anything and they earn out and they leave But again, not me, crazy. So like, I want to keep shipping.
I want to keep building things. And instead of actually making the case for the engineering team to go and build, in this case, it was a mobile app. So if you can believe it, in 2009, 2010, there was this new thing called the iPhone. And some people were talking about how it was going to be the future of computing.
Now, I was one of those people who, hook, line, and sinker, was like, this is a big deal. And if we're building Reddit to be the destination for what's new and interesting on the internet, we need a mobile app. Now, engineering team did not agree, because the way things had always worked, it was fine on the browser. It worked great on the browser. The company was growing.
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