Alexis Ohanian on Life After Reddit
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I'm Emily Chang, and this is the circuit. For two decades, Alexis O'Hanian has amassed a fortune betting on ideas others overlook. He co-founded Reddit when social media was in its infancy, found success as an early stage investor, and has helped launch the recent boom in professional women's sports. So you're running a VC firm, advising dozens of startups, raising two young daughters, trying to reinvent women's sports, all while maintaining a very public profile. What batteries are you running on? Because I want some of that.
I mean it's caffeine, lots of it, a few cups a day. And I really genuinely love what I do. And then when the thing that you love doing also compensates you really well for it, like why would I not want to do it?
O'Hanian has also been no stranger to controversy. I caught up with him in New York to unpack his exit from Reddit, hear the advice given to him by his wife, tennis legend Serena Williams, and to learn about his efforts to relaunch Dig as a social media platform where real people, not bots, are shaping what we see. Okay, so
Yes.
Are you ready for your AMA?
Bring it. Yeah. Oh yeah. And what's nice, you can say that. We failed to trademark it. So it's all yours.
So you have built your career around this idea of not waiting for permission.
Mm-hmm.
Where does that come from?
Uh I'm just a very impatient person. And I also I think the middle aged me Was empowered by the internet because you know, I managed to talk to my parents into getting me a computer. I managed to talk them into, you know, it was a big investment and then an internet connection. And even though they had no idea what I was doing on that computer, I found strangers on the internet willing to help me with learning how to code. And at the time, I mean, even just HTML-CSS web design felt so empowering because I could build a website, anyone in the world. World could see and have to really ask for any permission. And there was something really powerful about that that I got addicted to. And I'll also never forget.
Video games got me into programming, and I had downloaded the Quake 2 source code. I was able to change the power of the default blaster to instantly kill a monster, which doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But as soon as I was playing a version of this game that I loved, that I had just remixed, I had just changed the source code to make this thing do my bidding, it felt like a superpower. And so that feeling that software provided, and then the access to the knowledge freely given by experts to me, a dorky kid in my parents' house, was life-changing. And I think that altered my brain chemistry enough to think, okay, this tool can be so enabling, so empowering. And then by the time I was getting ready to graduate from high school, my dad, who had been a travel agent his whole life, he had started his own small travel agency a few years earlier, just before the rise of the OTA, the online travel agency.
So my poor dad's business went from making, you know, a little bit of money every time you sold a plane ticket to zero. They were slashing agent commissions because the future of travel agencies was dead.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:08
2
What motivated Alexis Ohanian to leave Reddit and start new ventures?
4:08–9:28
3
How did Alexis’s early experiences with coding and video games shape his career?
9:28–16:51
4
Why did Alexis named his VC firm 776 after the first Olympic Games?
16:51–53:22
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Circuit with Emily Chang
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