I'm Emily Chang and this is the circuit for two decades. Alexis o'hannian has a master of 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 vac 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, why would I not.
Want to do it.
O'hannian 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 trademarket, so it's all yours.
So you have built your career around this idea of not waiting for permission? Where does that come from?
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 and getting me a computer. I managed to talk them into you know, it's a big investment, and then an Internet connection, and.
Even though they'd 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 HTMLCSS web design felt so empowering because I could build a website anyone in the world could see and didn't have to really ask freting permission. And there was something really powerful about that that I got addicted to. And I'll also never forget video games got me in a proming and I had
downloaded the Quake two 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 door key 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 by the time I was getting ready to graduate from high school, my dad, who had been a travel agent in 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 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. And I watched software, This technology, the Internet, that I thought was just a fun toy, altered my family's entire trajectory, and I saw what it did to my dad and his business.
Thankfully he endured.
They pivoted and he figured out a way, never asked for a bailout, He just adapted the business. And I said, well, I want to be on the other side of this disruption. And so those forces shaped me entirely from middle school to high school and I just haven't gotten over it.
I guess you named your firm seven seven six after the first Olympic Games. Yes, what is the thesis here? In twenty twenty five AD.
It was a nod to my daughter Olympia. I didn't want to name the firm after her, literally because my wife pointed out if we had another kid, and spoiler we had another kid, that kid would be jealous.
So good call.
And then the nice story that ties into it is in that first Olympics, the first event was a foot race, interestingly enough, that was run by a number of folks, you know, the best athletes in the world, and there was this cook who heard about the event. True story gets called up. Besides that, I'm going to go compete, runs this event and he's the first ever Olympic champion. He wins the race a cook. My god, what a
great story, and it is. It's also an even better story when you realize he wasn't the best athlete in the world that day. He was the best athlete who got invited. The Greeks didn't invite a whole ton of people who just were outside of the Greek world, millions of people, many of whom were probably faster than that Greek guy. But worse, you know, women were not even allowed to watch the Olympics back then, let alone participate, so they were missing out in greatness in their own midst.
And the lesson for us that we've.
Architected the firm around is this idea of You know, when I reflected on my own career at that point five years ago starting this firm, I thought, well, damn, this feels like I'm kind of.
Celebrating the cook, and yes, very proud of it.
But our job, especially as the earliest investors in many of these ambitious ideas, is to not feel in any way comfortable with the fact that we've done enough to seek out greatness everywhere, and whether that is in the ideas, whether that's in the founder. We have to push ourselves because otherwise we're just celebrating that cook and this idea of always being on the starting line, that's our I ripped off the Jeff Bezos day one thing, but that's
our version of it. And I know, I mean, I have the I have seven seven six tattoo to my body. This is the last literally literally on my bicycle. This is this is the last company I'm going to start. And I'm so proud of what we do and how we do it. And I do believe.
You know, if I got to leave my daughters.
In the morning to go work on the farm, I want a really good reason why. I do love the time I spend with them, and I'm choosing to work. But I'm choosing to work because I think one it's going to be financially beneficial for the family, but also more importantly, because I want them to be really proud of that and to see these are the things dad does to be useful and to have an impact and again provide outside returns, but at the same time do so in a way that aligns with values and in
a way that I hope makes them really proud. When they're teenagers and they can ask me hard questions, I want to have the best answers possible.
Yeah, you and your partners are on track to meet with a thousand founders or have a thousand meetings with various entrepreneurs over the course of the year. No, what makes your playbook different from everyone else's, Like, why should they take your money?
The fact that you know that number is one of the reasons why. Because I've built an entire operating system called Cerebro that runs our firm, so we actually have data. We know where we spend our time, we know how many intros we make for founders, we know our median response time to founders. We literally put them live on the homepage because it was so frustrating to me that our entire industry kept talking about how useful they were and oh, how value add they were, but they never
actually provided evidence. If I was out pitching my company and all I did was use adjectives to convince investors why people love my product, I'd get laughed out of a room. They'd say, just show us the data. What are you using all these words for? And yet every VC does exactly that. We're making the case to founders,
So I let the data speak for itself. And we want to build a culture of accountability to our founders, to each other, and just build with software in order to scale our networks in order to scale our distribution, in order to scale all the things that software does really well.
Most VC investments don't pay off, like most go to zero power law. How do you know when to take a ride and when to pass?
This is the this is the billionaither question, especially at early stage, it is overwhelmingly the founder. I have just become more and more confident in that fact the more time I've spent being an early stage investor, and I've been very lucky to be in early check in amazing companies. I mean, Coinbase, instacart, row Health, Flock, Flexport, Patreon, the great, great companies. The commonality there always comes back to the founder, often the CEO, but at least one founder who is
really the one that you're betting on. And it's understanding how much they empathize with the customer, how relentless they're going to be in building the taste that they have, And that kind of comes back to the empathy.
It's one thing you have to have that foundational empathy for the customer.
Then it's also crucial to have the taste to say like this is good enough for this isn't good enough. And then timing is the one thing we can't control where we still factored in, and I have to be sympathetic to that because you know why Combinator rejected the initial idea, which was my Mobile Menu or MMMM for short. It was a this is two thousand and five. I came up with that name too. See you didn't like it,
but that's okay. And the idea was you could order food from your phone, but again it was it was five, so no smartphones. Was a text message, and because I'd worked in Pizza Hut and we would get those orders in the kitchen that would come into the printer, it just made sense to me that, you know, why not just send the message, have the customer send the message. Had that go through anyway? Why c thankfully rejected it
because it was too early. The tech was going to be too hard to build into restaurants especially, and they said, come back with some other idea in the next day.
As it goes, you know, we came back with this idea and met with Paul and ended up being read it software in a browser first, not on a phone, and so timing killed my company, but in the best way possible because we didn't spend the next God we would have spent the next four or five years trying to build, and then the smartphone revolution would have happened and we probably would have run out of money before then. So timing's one thing we have to try to anticipate
best we can. Knowing the founder can't affect that, but really it's a bet on the founder.
Can they pull this off.
What's your snapshot on where venture capital is at the moment. It's been a really difficult environment.
What's your take?
So, like you said, it's a power law business. So a disproportion number of the returns that first fifty six xdpi fund that came from Coinbase Instacart, there were probably another fifty investments in that first fund that went to zero, and that's fine.
It's the power law.
So just like the power law dictates returns in venture, especially early stage, power law also dictates how venture firms stack up. And I think you're in a business where there are these outsized mega firms, right, the sequoias, the and reasons, but also the sort of newer generations like the thrives, and they will continue to get more and more capital as they clearly are you know, the big dogs with the war chest that can double down in those big winners at the later stage, and then at
the early stage. There are firms I like to leave seven seven six is one of them that can win against all comers and that have a clear value proposition and want to be the best early and we'll tell down.
In the bigger winners.
We just wrote a check in the Stoke SpaceX competitor
that's been doing well that we had seeded. But like there's a middle of VC firms that are just as the kids would say, mid that are probably going to have a really hard time because they can't get into the deals that the biggest and baddest firms can easily get into and have the capital to get into, and they're not able to get in or maybe even identify those early stage companies that we feel like we have an edge, and so I think it's gonna be a hard time for them, but also for.
The industry as a whole. Look the biggest trend.
I had a chat with Sama at the robin Hood Summit, that's the Foundation proud board member here in New York. I was interviewing him and one of my clips with him went viral because he said it's only a matter of time until there is a one person billion dollar company, and that has stuck in my head.
It's echoed in my head actually for years since.
You know, for pure software businesses, for sure, founders will need less and less capital going forward, which is a threat to venture. I think again, if you're in that middle, you're gonna have a hard time. If you're where we sit, and you know you can still be that first check. Really, what it means is less dilution. As founders can get to profitability sooner, they don't need to take on more funding, which means you're not getting deluted, just like they're not
getting included. And I think I think it ends up still being a big win. And then it's interesting. You know, venture now has spent a lot more time in the more costly spaces. So just like I said, we did our first space tech investment five years ago, we're doing more hardware than ever. You had a great interview with Palmer Lucky. I was very proud to have been able to invest in mod retro Is Electronics and Ssumer Electronics company.
Hardware has always been something that's really excited me as a software guy because it's always felt a harder as the name would imply, but it's as a software guy, you're very in awe of.
Folks who build with atoms. I'll speak for myself.
Software feels easy by comparison, and I love the fact that Venture is now pushing itself to be more ambitious so that we get to invest in companies that are building reusable rockets or video game consoles or supersonic jets.
Are the things that we do.
You were in the inaugural dominator class, Yeah, two thousand and five.
With twenty one years ago, almost twenty years ago.
With Sam Allman's good crew, Steve Hoffman, your co founder, a Reddit.
The Twitch guys, Twitch guy's Justin Emett.
What advice would you give founders today that's different than what you got back then?
Oh?
Boy, lots Well obviously look why c's changed a lot since then. The easy one is the advice that I would keep the same, which Paul Graham put it on everyone's shirt, and I think it still holds true, which is makes something people want.
In twenty years.
Now, I can say, having started multiple companies, seated many many more, that founding principle never goes away. And if anything, in this new world where attention is so scarce, and you have to work so hard to get your first hundred, first thousand, first one hundred thousand, whatever customers. Making something that people truly want and best case scenario getting them to prove it by paying money. That's the thing you
wake up for every morning. Even in building the Formula one of track and field with athlos all we tell our team day over day over day, no matter how much press we get the day before, no matter what big moment happens with a brand partnership, or we have
to re earn attention all over again. The next morning everyone has forgotten the internet has moved on earn it again, and that mindset, whether it's earning it again with our athletes, with our brand partners, with our fans like that never goes away, and so that is more important than ever.
Probably the biggest thing I would change is ooh Okay.
So in two thousand and five, it was an eclectic group of folks in that first YC batch. It was not normal to want to do a startup in two thousand and five, and that was the genius of YC. They realized this opportunity before everyone else did.
Let's give for us.
It was twelve thousand dollars for two college kids to go build a company. Maybe it could one day be worth billions. Sam is the one exception. I think Sam very much. He knew exactly what he wanted to build. He knew I think he had a roadmap to what tech could be in the world. Speaking for myself, I was just happy to not have a boss. I was just happy to build something that I cared about every
day and build something that just seemed fun. I think the founders for today need to know just how much responsibility they have, and actually most of them do in what they're building. We can't hide from the fact tech is undeniably the highest leverage industry in our world. And you can look at the market caps of the biggest companies in the world, or you can look at just the fact that this technology shapes so much of our world.
And so what I would tell founders is look, and again, most of them have They're.
Way less naive than I was twenty years ago.
They are very aware of this fact, and so I would say, move decisively, move earnestly, be aware of what you're building, and know that like this responsibility starts right now. For building something that is going to have a very big impact in the world and if you are successful, that's undeniable now.
And I think.
Hopefully it also raises everyone's game up because we can no longer just sort of dismiss it as like, yeah, sure, you know, we build an app for cute cat photos that people vote up. And it is I think very clear just how big this all really is.
Your portfolio isn't as heavy on core AI as some other No investments in the frontier labs that I can see. Did you miss it or are they missing something?
Look, I think as an early stage investor, those frontier labs have been priced out for a minute. We may or may not have some shares in Anthropic, though directly on the cap table, not those weird seven layer deep SPVs that I've seen flown around.
Okay, well that is an you do have shares an Anthropic, yes.
But you know, for an early stage VC, I think where I've gotten most fired up is at the application layer.
So I seated Flock it was like a decade ago. Athellis is another one.
Both computer vision startups back in like twenty fourteen fifteen, when it was still really basic computer vision. No one really called it ai because we still hadn't obviously crossed the threshold. But why those were compelling is that they were solving a real palm people were willing to spend money for, and it was, you know, a simple enough
technology that like you could do today. Where we've gotten really excited is a good example of a company like Doji, based here in New York that is brought to life this fashion avatar, the.
Thing we've all wanted since clueless.
In this case, you take a few selfies, you take a couple full body photos, and you have a beautiful looking avatar that you can now drop in a URL for any shopping website at Khulou Vuitton. It could be old Navy and see yourself in those clothes here instantly.
And so that was a company we had funded pre launched when it was just an idea, and a couple of founders Thrive actually just invested quite a bit of cash in that company in their latest round and we're hopeful like that ends up being where Again, if you go back to what makes a consumer app viable and popular, it's a lot of the same funding principles that have made Reddit successful and It's about building a great product that people love, and I think those foundation folks are
going to keep thriving on some level. Obviously a lot of money is going into all that to keep building. But where I get excited is how our users actually going to fall. I love the product that does something so damn well that even when Google launch is there, I think Google had some version of like.
Oh yeah, try on your clothes.
No startup has ever actually been killed by Google launching a product because they don't understand how to create a really amazing user experience in that way.
And if anything, it just gives you more validation.
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 Emily, you should talk. You've got a prolific career yourself. I mean, I think, what is it? I mean it's caffeine, lots of it, A few cups a day, and I really genuinely.
Love what I do.
I told you I hang a responsibility over me. That's probably not healthy, but it fuels me to do more, do better, really earn what I have, or try my best to And like I said, I mean, I do genuinely love it. And I think they're that adage, that cliche about oh, if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. And I truly feel lucky that I've lived that. I've lived it basically
since college. And it's a hell of a drug. 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?
How has being a dad of daughters changed the founders that you're drawn to and the problems that you think are worth solving.
I'd like to think that I had a perspective before. It's crazy, it's only been eight years since becoming a dad, but I really can't think of what I was thinking back then, Like I feel like a very different person now in how I see the world, And so I don't know how much I'd attribute to I don't know. I think undeniably having a couple daughters, especially black daughters, just gives me a different perspective on navigating the world.
And so look, at the end of.
The day, I'm looking to make investments to generate the biggest returns. And I think it is a very obvious thing that our industry at tech has been largely defined by dudes and you know.
A lot of white guys.
But what's really interesting here to me is the more touch points I get into different industries, different cultures, just different things. For someone in this role, both as an entrepreneur and an early stage investor, I am trying to learn from every experience I have. This is probably to a fault, and my wife's commented on it a few times because apparently it's not a normal thing. I am trying to pay attention to everything because I'm trying to learn.
I'm trying to connect some.
Dot to something that goes back to some business that I have started or I have invested in.
And I think that's probably what made.
Me effective in that role building Reddit, because at the end of the day, you're just scrolling through infinite conversations trying to connect dots and understand community trends and all that sort of thing. And I think that's made me a very good investor. And look their companies. Oh there's one company hopefully we'll have announced by then. It's a robot that is a listing stylists or braiders in braiding natural hair. It's called Halo braid and this is a product.
Very excited to invest it in Yinko, who's the CEO. She's going to build the Dyson of natural hair. And that is probably an easy, very obvious example of a thing that I would have been maybe aware of before, but now that I've lived through just how long some of these braiding sessions are and tried my best to help I understand and there's Look, there's an incredible tradition there that's important to preserve, and it's not removing the human from it, it's just making her life much easier.
This can take six, seven, eight, nine, ten hours, like it can go for a very long time. And here's an entrepreneur solving a problem that probably a lot of other founders would not even be aware of. And yet again, I mean, you could take a quick search and realize just how big the industry is around all things natural hair.
And if you believe that robotics are going to play a much bigger role in our lives and in our homes the next few years, as most of us do, a lot of folks are going to look at you know, how do I build the next robot that's going to wash dishes or clean up some trash, Which is fine, that's a big problem. There are lots of people trying
to solve that. This is an industry laying in plain sight where you have a founder who's taking a different perspective that is not going to have real competition I think for a very long time and be able to dominate in a space that's going to be incredibly valuable. And so again it comes back to that starting line, how am I making sure we are seeing as many pitches as possible from as many sectors, as many founders, so that we're not just satisfied with the random cook
who won that day. We're really finding greatness everywhere.
You know who also talked about braiding hair on the circuit, Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuck did he spent time. Zuck is a great girl dad as well. Here's the other part too. I knew I was only having daughters. I will only have daughters, make sure of it, and I needed it. It was important for me. I think it softened me in really really important ways to understand, especially as an entrepreneur, you really get afflicted with this disease where you know, whatever, it's a thing you really think you're the most important person.
You really think you are the main character. And I think guys in particular we have we're a little more prone to this affliction. Okay, And becoming a father is one thing because in that moment, you're like, oh, I'm not the most important person like this little human is. But then when you have a daughter, it softens you
in another way that it's hard to explain. Now, I haven't had a son, so technically I don't know what to compare it to, but I know how much having these little girls has given me a different window, because you know, I feel like I can sympathize or empathize with my wife to a certain extent, but there's something about it being your child where now all of a sudden, like you really are connected to me in a deep,
deep biological and sentimental and just emotional way. And there's such a sweetness to these girls that just makes me feel I don't know, you see how I live my life publicly online, like I keep it a hundred with folks for better or for worse, because that's just how I'm wired but when I come home to them, I get that hug. It feels different, and these girls just they bring out the best in me in a way that I'd like to believe a son could.
But it's a little different.
And at the same time, I do feel like I never quite do enough as a husband or a dad. There is that tension, and I try to speak about it openly and plainly, because plenty of professional women have to deal with this day in.
And day output like dads feel that too.
Dads feel it too, And that was probably the best part about There were lots of great things about becoming a father, but one of my favorites was getting to know men who already really respected, wildly successful in so many industries, who then let me into this club once I became a father, and they started to tell me about the good times the bad times, And I'm like, guys, like this has been on your minds the whole time and you only talk to other dads about it, Like
this conversation needs to get normalized. So young men, before we even think about having a family, are seeing this other path to excellence that is yes, career driven as all hell, but also aware of the fact that like, probably the best thing I'll ever do is going to be these little humans that I helped bring into the world and raise. And so I like seeing that there's
definitely been a shift now in the meta. I feel like the last five years and you know, trying to do it all, Like everybody trying to do it all.
So let's talk about dig. Are you trying to make money? Are you trying to take on TikTok? What's the vision? Who's the competition?
Who is the competition for Dig?
Well, you know, Kevin Rose and I used to be arche Nemesis CEOs back in the day Reddit versus Dig.
I hated his guts. I hated his guts.
I had a gift of Kevin Rose. At a dignation event, someone had thrown a Reddit T shirt on stage.
He picked it up, he held it to the crowd.
They booed, and he blew his nose on the shirt and threw it to the side. And I used to watch this clip probably once or twice a week. And I have a folder I may still have it, a Dropbox folder where I would have all these things that just called up my wall of negative reinforcement. I had a literal wall when we were starting Reddit, right like when the Yahoo executive called us a rounding air, I put that on my wall. So every day when I went to the office, I could see this guy, You're
a rounding air. I won't name him, he's still in tech, and it would motivate me. And then, of course the day that reddits are passed Yahoo in traffic, I was like, all right, we'll see rounding air.
And so with Kevin, you know, it was an innocuous thing.
It wasn't like he but he did this and it was so important to me because whenever I felt like a little tired, I felt like I don't really want to do this thing. I gotta do, man, I watched that clip and I remembered why I need to prove him wrong. And so it was great. We buried Dig and I felt like great, victory, awesome, But I never actually met Kevin and on some level, look, Dig was first, honest to god, I did not know about it.
Neither of us did.
I still had the email where I learned about it, and I send email to Paul Graham and I was like, oh, we have a competitors called Dig. This was probably six to nine months after a dig had launched, so they were first and.
I finally met him.
This is now years later, it's probably four or five years ago, maybe six years ago, and we absolutely hit it off, and I thought to myself, God, why did this take so long. He's a girl dad, I'm a girl dad. We thought about the world in much the same way. We were building basically the same company at the same time, with a similar view on community and product and all this stuff.
And if I'm being awesome myself, part.
Of the reason I hated him was this kind of like jealousy and a competitive spirit, and there was probably I saw a version of me in him, and he was getting things I didn't get. Remember, they were, you know, venture funded front of magazines. They were the king they were the champions. We were the sort of runty other company for five six years.
And so as I more understood where that.
Jealousy came from and how that jealousy was really rooted in respect, and then I came to realized, like, I actually love this guy.
He's great. Got to change everything.
And so yeah, he told me he was buying back the domain and I said, Kevin, this is a great idea. Can I do this with you and so.
So he is the goal to make money or to get for your jealousy.
Oh no, no, we're buddies now that but remember I have a wall of negative reinforcement. So the idea that we could build a platform in the AI age that has all the community tools that we know could be better with AI. So imagine a moderator's job is not ninety percent garbage and ten percent community management, but actually ninety percent community management and ten percent sort of garbage collection.
AI is what enables that those tools help scale the work of the moderators that on most of these platforms spend a lot of their time doing like digital grunt work that's not satisfying. And then also in this age of AI, can we build a community platform that is authentically human? People are realizing now just how much of our social feeds are fake. I mean it's striking. I'd say at a minimum it's a third. I think, wow, with dead Internet theory, I really it could be as
much as half are in some way compromised. And so that could be outright a bot that could be a human posting AI generated content sort of a scale, that could be an account that gets purchased in order to have the moderator rights in a community.
And so, what do you do in an age.
Where you know, because of AI, we are going to become more and more skeptical of every interaction we have. How do you reimagine a community first platform where you have verifiable humans without saying, oh, hey, you know, scan your retina?
And so I think dig can be that. And then yeah, on a personal level, I would love nothing more than to see if we could do it again again or better both.
I mean, how many founders get the chance to run it back in a similar product in a similar market. I mean you talk about Palmer is definitely one of them. There's a short list of folks who have done that, and it would be a lot of fun. It'd be a lot of fun to do.
If the engine of virality is extremism and day is supposed to be the antidote, how do you drive engagement?
I think what we found in authentic human online community is it's the last bastion of really high quality content and right now I don't think actually, I think most of it goes down in the group chats. I think that's where most of that happens today. And so whether you want to know an opinion about a movie, whether you want to know about a camera to buy. There is always going to be real, real value there as long as you can curate a space that people believe
is authentic and human. And Lord knows, we know the lms will pay money for that content because they know how valuable that is to train on. But what I worry about is there is this flywheel of if we know these models are train on content that are now largely bodied or AI generated, that authenticity loop breaks down real quick, and that trust breaks down real quick. And so I think we will need to find repositories of
real community that are verifiable and engaging. And I think the reason why people will want to come back to them is because you'll be surrounded by so much noise, so much slop. And the stop gap right now is in the group chats. But that's clearly not where it ends. There clearly needs to be some other version of you know, if you just want to show up and find a community of people who love cameras, where do you go to get authentic, real human reviews of those things.
Reddit is actually one of the oldest social media companies because it was founded in two.
Thousand and five, pre Instagram, after Facebook, pre Snap, pre snap.
Yeah, what do you make of how.
Far Reddit has come and how much work there still is to do?
Oh? I mean this is the startups of the infinite game. It's not a startup anymore, that's true.
Uh, I think there is. Look, I think everyone's playing an infinite game here. I'll put it this way. In the seventh cent and six portfolio, we have companies a year or two ago that we've had to have the hard talk with the CEO and say, look, your company was founded literally just two and a half years ago. Let's say, and you're a pre AI company, your DNA, it's a software company, but your DNA is from an era before we sort of normalized, you know, writing code
with some sort of AI assistance. The speed at which you ship, the way in which you build is from this bygone era. And that was just a few years ago. So imagine any pure software company older than that. That is a massive shift in how you work in order
to keep up with the modern era. And so I think any company, especially one a couple of decades old, is facing some kind of an existential threat or some kind of question that need to ask themselves, which is can this company be refounded as the type of company that moves like a company does today? Today we meet founders.
You know, it's a group of people that can sit around a box of pizza and they're able to get to tens of millions in revenue, and soon they'll get to hundreds of millions in revenue.
These are the outliers.
But it's undeniable that this sort of navy c of software development, the small, cracked team, is going to be able to punch way above their weight in this new era, and so it's very hard for the incumbents to adapt. We'll see, I think some will, but my gut is a lot of them won't, and it'll be fun to see how that unfolds.
A lot was made of the fact that you weren't at.
The IPO, was it?
Yes?
Really, why weren't you there?
It was so funny. I was just asking. I was like, I personally don't feel like it was a thing. Why wasn't I there? Well, I wasn't invited. I did not expect to be invited. Though given back, given the fact that I resigned in protests in twenty twenty you know, that was a very public statement in order to get
the company to finally ban some of these communities. I'd already had opposition about communities like watch people Die and some of these really violent and racist communities, and yeah, you know that was the way to get the change. The good news is it got it done. Those communities got banned, and I think it made the business better, which was good. It was certainly better for society in my opinion. But uh, yeah, I didn't get the invite. But the good news is, so there.
Are some bad blood or hurt feelings or bruised.
Egos, not for me.
But here's the thing, you know, the way I look at it, I've got plenty more IPOs to go to. So it just wasn't this one.
And we did talk at the time, But why leave rather than lean in to fix what was broken?
Well, when you're in a boardroom, especially when you've been like the founder and face of a company for fifteen years, you're in a boardroom with four other people and they're all telling you why the watch people Die community is an important part of Reddit, and why we need to preserve that community in spite of your protests because of free speech, and because of how helpful.
It is for first responders whatever.
When you come out of a board meeting like that and you go home to your wife, as I did, and.
I'm saying, like, God, am I the crazy one? Like? Am I wrong on this?
Because like I know, so this community is full of snuff videos, suicide videos, murder videos, mostly of people in the developing world.
Because that's how that video footage gets leaked out.
And there are millions of people on Reddit who come to this and discuss it and share and bond. And that feels vile. That feels wrong. It's not something I'm proud of. I don't think it's a good thing for the business. I don't think it's a good thing for the community. I don't think it's a good thing for society. I'm trying to steal man this and the best argument I'm hearing back as well, it's important for free speech, and it'll help people who have lived in war zones.
And I'm like, I don't think that's real. But when you're told you know, and the room is very obviously against you and told no, no, no, don't worry about it.
You're wrong.
It is a weird, very surreal experience. And so when you can't convince a board for other people that the thing you've spent your life building shouldn't have a community that feeds millions of people content of people dying on camera, you know you've got an uphill battle, right you have
a different set of values. And then the really eye opening thing was, you know, it's one thing to have values, it's another one those get tested because I think if held up to public scrutiny, the response public was the same one, which was, well, this is an important free speech issue, et cetera.
We're going to stick with it.
I would have disagreed, but I would have respected the intellectual consistency. And instead, when the christ Church shooting happened and the media found out about watching people die, what was the response, We're banning violence, These communities shouldn't be here. That flipped the switch for me, because now I'm coming home to dinner, I'm like, so, I wasn't crazy, I wasn't wrong. It's just no one had the spine to
do something about it. And so now you know, a month or two goes by and again on the surface, you're publicly as a company saying we stand in solid area with black lives. We're changing our logo where we're writing a blog post and again I'm having this conversation with members of the board. There are thousands of communities here I literally cannot name because of the words in their name. They are so racist and vile. And these are active communities. These are not one off posts. These
are active communities normalizing. Hey, I can't reconcile a company that publicly is saying we're not about this, but literally harboring these communities. And so I took a lesson from christ Church and the Watch People Die community where what it took was a spotlight, what it took was sunlight. And so in that resignation, I could make public my request to have these vile, racist, violent communities banned, have myself replaced by director of color, and say you know what,
I'm out. But hopefully this finally gets the change. And the greatest blessing has been in the last five years since my God to have had the success that I have had. I am so lucky in industry after industry industries, right, I didn't belong five years ago to show up and make such headway, have such success and forget the money and the accolades to be this effective and in a way that aligns with values that I know.
When my little girl grows up and.
She asks, Papa, how did you make all this money, I can tell her and feel so good about it.
God, it feels good.
And so, you know, there is a part of me that probably thinks, maybe I should have done it sooner, maybe I should have left sooner. But more importantly, maybe I should make sure that I'm never again in a room with four other people that see the world so fundamentally differently than I do. And you know, Serena clocked it real quick. She was like, no, those people are crazy. Watch people die as a horrible community, And you're absolutely right.
And thank god I had one person in my life who at least was able to call that, and it just gave me a perspective. And I feel, like I said, I feel very fortunate that I'm never gonna have to be in a room like that again.
You were at the forefront of defending Section two thirty at one point. Do you feel differently now about content and platforms and accountability?
Not at all.
I think Section two thirty exists in this same world, right you can want section two thirty and also say, I like to use the analogy of like a platform like Reddit is like a digital Javit center.
Since we're here in New York.
You're a private company that is hosting this infinite convention hall, and so you make the choice, oh, hey, we got the Pokemon convention over here, we have the Yankees conference over here, we have the Watch People Die conference over here. Like you're making an active choice around the communities that you harbor as a private business, and you have the right to say no, sorry, KKK, we actually don't watch you here because over here we're just trying to enjoy Pokemon.
And so Section two.
Thirty is an important issue because it protects platforms on the individual basis of the stuff gets posted. And that's like the random person walking into the Pokemon conventional saying something toxic that's different from hey, we actually are hosting the KKK here in our convention center.
Text shift to the right. How do you feel when you see tech CEOs who used to say and do one thing saying and doing something different?
Now, well, I just.
Told you that last story, right, Having values only really matter when they get tested.
So unfortunately it's not surprising. I do think I actually, okay, is it disappointing? You can't be disappointed after the stuff I've seen. You can't get disappointed.
The bar is low I'm going to get I watch people die, Please judge for yourselves.
How important for society and business? That is okay? So what do I think? I really believe that? And maybe I'm just a masochist.
I think having this culture shift, I actually appreciate c it in that it's a test for my own values. It wouldn't feel very good if the things I believed flapped so effortlessly in the political wins. I think there are issues in text shift to the right that I
actually agree with. This is by no means a monolith, like there are certain things that I think have been a good shift, But I do think overall, yeah, with this vibe shift, if you will, it makes it even more important for me to say the things I'm going to say, especially from the position of power that I have.
And so, like I said, if I have.
I think ten million people, like I said, saying, I mean, some just vile stuff about me on Twitter because I tell the story of my mom, who is an undocumented immigrant.
Fun I would rather have that statement in the public record, and I know that there are millions more people who actually would read what I have to say and be like, oh, that's fairly reasonable policy, And I'd rather use the platform I have to say those things and again continue to be tested by the fact that, you know, if I had tweeted that five years ago, it wouldn't have certainly
met that level of toxicity and criticism. So I think it's a great test of what one believes to be able to say those things in an environment where you have people saying awful stuff back to you.
But I don't know that stuff doesn't affect with too much.
You have daughters, But it's also a tough moment for raising suns.
Yeah, and ex truly.
Kids are being pushed to the margins across the board. Does that worry you?
I actually care more about the plight of young boys because look, in all I like Coilhood. Those are the guys that my daughters are going to have to choose from as partners, right, as life partners. I'm going to raise some kick ass girls. I need awesome young men for them to couple up with, right, And so I think in the pursuit of elevating young girls and women, we forgot or we in some cases pushed down creating
those pathways for young boys. And again, I statistically, my daughters are probably going to want guys in their lives who are great too, who are self assured, who are capable or are confident, who are able to do all these things and be high functioning contributors to society, and
so we should want that even as girl dads. And so I do think now that you have this tonal shift back, so there's more awareness of the plight of young boys and young men in particular, also at a time when I think there's enough data to show that in any population, having young men feeling hopeless and helpless is very bad for society young women. It's also not good if young women feel that way, but they tend to take out that marginalization in less toxic.
Ways than men do.
So I think we have a societal imperative to do more for these young men, especially at a time when you have many in a generation feeling like they're going to do worse than their parents, and when they are feeling all these I think very valid concerns, And again you can I guess kind of blame me for this. The conversation on social media has just it rewards the most extreme because it's either one side playing to their
base or the other side antagonizing the other. And it seems like the generation coming up now gen Z has run its course with social media. They're looking for alternatives. They don't want to see their self worth measured in followers like millennials, and I hope that gives rise to some other opportunities to actually communicate and share ideas.
But it's a big one.
We seem to be going all in on this narrative that tech's going to just make our lives better, and yet at the same time barreling towards a future where we have less interpersonal skills, less jobs, people can't focus on multiple things at one time. Is it reasonable to leave that tech which got us here will get us out.
I think so, and I think so one because I'm just a tech optimist, so I can't help that. I do think we have to build our way out of it. We talk about this a lot internally, to the skills that I want to make sure my kids have, and I hope our education system builds up in a whole generation of kids as well. Are a lot of the
things that make us more human. So those interpersonal skills, the public speaking skills, the empathy, the creativity, like raw horsepower intelligence is now commoditized, which is great news for.
Students like me. Like I said, it was a good student, it's not a great student.
I really hope this is going to take a much bigger shift, but I really hope. I think APPA School is a great example as we can start elevating those softer skills, those interpersonal skills, actually in the school day, so that those are the things kids are spending time doing. And if they can spend an hour having an AI tutor help them through all the fundamentals in what would have taken a human teacher hours and hours and hours and tons of bullshit homework and all this stuff, I
think that's a huge win for all of us. And so I'm still hopeful. And yes, there's all the memes of what is at the gen Z Stare. I'm really showing my age now, but there is what.
It's like a blank stare, the gen Z Stay. It's like a whole thing.
And so the good news is for that generation, any of the young people who are not wired that way have.
A huge advantage.
They are going to be head and shoulders above their peers when it comes to competition in terms of building companies are even working or all that stuff.
But the cultures adapt quickly.
I think technology overall is still a force for good and I think part of unfortunately, what it requires is the pendulum has shift far enough that enough people are like, yo, this is broken, Like he needs to shift back.
Our kid's best friend is going to be ais though I know and I know you, and some will be I know you and Olympia spend a lot of time on chatchipt.
We do, and I want her to be exposed, and that's with parental supervision. But we'll do like a big question and I'll force her every night. Some nights she really doesn't want to do it, and she'll just look at the salt shaker and be like, where does salt come from? I'm like, Olympia, you were not thinking about this question all day long, Like you just looked at the salt and just want to get through it.
But it's fine.
We do a lesson on salt and fun and so chatcheapt ends up becoming this brilliant, always on tutor that can help explain stuff, and okay, but I want her to see it as a tool, not as a friend. I do think realistically, some portion of the population will probably opt into these AI relationships, And if I were in a ballpark, it maybe ten or twenty percent. I mean there's already you know, there's always that story that
goes viral. There's that married guy who's in love with an AI and he has a wife and a child, and the wife and child they're like, yeah, he's in love with his AI, and like that for sure is not a healthy thing. But I think if you talk to Sam Altman about this or any of those folks, they're all going to say, well, you know, users still need to use these tools as they see fit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think realistically ten or twenty percent of the population will have some deep affection for an AI. Now, how different is that from a deep video game addiction or a deep whatever. Like, I think it's a cousin of other things that our society has that's just found a new outlet. And then I think for eighty percent of the population it's a resource. In the best case, is the way I've used it personally is as a kind of executive coach to be able to give me and you really got you really got.
To tell open Ai to give it to you one hundred.
Don't be a sick of fan like give it to me real, but to give you feedback and give you this real time feedback loop on how you handle that, maybe a conversation or an email or just be a thought partner. I think that will be widespread. I think it'll be wonderfully healthy. I think it'll be a good thing and will help us be more effective. And then I do think from a career job standpoint, for sure, there will be a lot of change. My sister who's an RN, she asked me this for the last like
ten years. She's like, have you built a company yet to put me out of business? And I'm like, you will never not have a job here a nurse. You are a superhero and the work that you do is so physically unique, creative, empathetic, strategically it's the last thing that we'll build a robot to do. But there are plenty of jobs that are going to be changed, upended. But I do think there's no limit to human ambition.
Just like one of the biggest jobs in the world the kids aspired to you today in the United States is being a YouTuber or a creator thanks to you know, shout out mister beast seven seven six founder. Is this idea that didn't exist fifteen, twenty years ago or not really certainly not thirty years ago. And so yes, there'll be careers in jobs that don't exist, say that exist in the future that are thrilling and exciting and pay you.
And then look, let's get spacefaring. You know there is no shortage of ambition.
You think we should go to space.
Look like I.
Said early check in Stoke, it's a reasonable rocket company. I think there is a very significant importance for all of us on Earth to be very good at space, certainly as Americans. From even just a defense standpoint, it's really important for us to be there and have a big presence. And while I look to invest in space
tech first and foremost to benefit us on Earth. Love Earth, want it to be around for a long time, want us to thrive here, I also know that as we continue to I do think improve things long term and Earth. I don't hate the fact that we can become a spacefaring civilization. I don't hate the fact that we could have maybe not my daughters, but like granddaughters grandsons wanting to pursue things outside of this world. That's dope to me.
That sounds great, but not in lieu of Earth. Earth is still planning, really care about it.
So there's hope for eighty to ninety percent of us.
Yes, we still have to save this planet better. We still have to save this planet for sure.
Even NASA has shown so much innovation that we help use here terrestrially, and I don't doubt there'll be one hundred times more from the private space endeavors that are happening now.
They'll help us here on Earth.
Reddit said in a statement that it was widely agreed upon to ban Watch People Die in twenty nineteen, and that two thousand other communities were banned for violating Reddit's policy on hateful content in twenty twenty, the year o'hannian left the company. Reddit said Ohannian and the company's board of directors did not play a role in the decision to ban Watch People Die, and that quote policy decisions at Reddit are made cross functionally between our safety policy,
legal and other teams. Reddit is committed to the safety of our platform and the health of our community, which is why we have a long track record of strengthening our site wide rules. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Circuit. Check out the full episode to see how Alexis o'hannion is creating a new sports league and making a big bet on the fastest women on the planet. I'm Emily Chang. You can follow me
on x and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can watch new episodes of the Circuit on Bloomberg Television on YouTube or on demand by downloading the Bloomberg app to your smart TV. And check out other Bloomberg podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever. You listen to your shows and let us know what you think by leaving a review. I'm your host and executive producer. Our senior producer is Lauren Ellis, Our producer is Rob Moraskin. Our editor is
Grammercy Post. Thanks so much for listening. Watch new episodes of the Circuit on Bloomberg Riginals