Reddit co-founder. Early women’s sports backer. An investor who operates like a founder. A famous techie who’s also a good guy when so many of his contemporaries are not. Alexis Ohanian is at least four great business stories rolled into one, but we found a way to get it all into today’s 1 Smart Business Story.  
 
Senior writer Sam Blum tracked Ohanian from the set of ABC’s Shark Tank in Los Angeles (Alexis is a shark this season) to the hip Manhattan coworking space The Malin to explore:  

Let me know what you think of Ohanian’s maturation at [email protected].

Reddit’s co-founder is older, wiser, and looking for opportunities to fund companies that build the kind of society he wants for his daughters.

BY SAM BLUM, SENIOR WRITER 

Alexis Ohanian will not stop calling himself the Reddit guy. The 42-year-old technologist and entrepreneur is sitting on the Sony Studios set of Shark Tank for the first time, occupying the coveted seat of an investor, or “Shark” in the program’s parlance.

Wearing a black suit and white button-down with a pair of Nike Dunks, Ohanian’s brawny 6-foot-5 frame is commanding. He’s sitting among the most prominent business personalities on television, includ­ing Lori “Queen of QVC” Greiner and Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary. And yet, Ohanian is tempering his feedback to the show’s contestants with the kind of self-effacing charm you might not expect from a guy who helped unleash one of the more chaotic hubs of the modern internet.

Ohanian later tells me that Shark Tank’s producers asked him to refer to himself as the Reddit guy in an effort to acquaint the average viewer with his work as one of the social media giant’s co-founders. After all, Ohanian doesn’t inspire the same recognition and fanfare as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg—the kind of industry titans who might be more familiar to middle-American families tuning into ABC on a Wednesday night.

Not that it matters. Ohanian takes his turn as a guest Shark with the kind of tenacity that suggests he is in the right place. Over the course of the afternoon, he invests in an airline for dogs and a women’s jujitsu brand, to name a few deals. He does so in a way befitting his evolution from internet geek to venture capital pro. Certain pitches have “mimetic energy,” he explains. He also calls himself “chronically online,” revealing that he is inescapably Millennial.

When considering where Ohanian stands in his generation of entrepreneurs, a few comparisons come to mind. There are definitely glimmers of Mark Cuban, the former Shark Tank celebrity investor. Cuban got his start founding a software startup in the ’80s, is known as a champion of DEI, and was once the public-facing owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Ohanian also has shades of Paul Graham, the British American computer scientist who co-founded Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that gave Reddit its first check in 2005. But Ohanian appears less concerned with cementing himself as an iconoclast and more interested in what he considers a social obligation to try to make the world a little bit better for the disadvantaged.

Ohanian’s career path shifted about five years ago, when he found himself at a crossroads. As demonstrations against racism and police brutality gripped the country in the summer of 2020, he resigned from the board of Reddit in protest. He cited the company’s failure to stamp out racism and hate speech on the platform as the primary reason, and implored the company to replace him with a Black executive. (The company followed through, appointing Michael Seibel, a veteran Y Combinator investor, to its board in 2020.) As the father of biracial children, it was family that ultimately compelled his decision, Ohanian explained in a Twitter thread at the time.

Ohanian, whose career sprang from cyberpunk roots and an activist streak related to principles like net neutrality, is engineering a glow-up—or something like it. His new TV role increases the likelihood that more people will recognize him beyond being the husband of tennis superstar Serena Williams, but lately Ohanian has been on a tear. In the past few years, he has launched an influential VC firm that is changing the business of women’s sports; founded women’s track and field league Athlos, and teamed up with Digg founder Kevin Rose to revive the once dominant website.

“I was in rooms where I couldn’t convince my fellow board members of things that I felt were really, really good for business and good for society, like banning hate communities or banning violent communities,” he explains.

That same year, Ohanian founded Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture fund that brings together “builders from diverse backgrounds,” as the company describes on its website. It’s a VC firm built around Ohanian’s ethos of diversity—a belief system that’s become increasingly politicized and rejected by the likes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump.

Ohanian’s firm is named after the year of the first Olympic Games. It may also be read as a nod to his wife, a four-time Olympic champion, and their first daughter, Olympia. Through Seven Seven Six, Ohanian seeks to prove a point he feels has been lost amid Silicon Valley’s ideological shift to the political right: Business centered on DEI is still a good way to build an empire. Many of Seven Seven Six’s portfolio companies are run by diverse founders and executives. That includes Doji, an AI shopping app for fashion founded by Dorian Dargan and Jim Winkens, as well as Opal, a hardware maker founded by Veeraj Chugh and Stefan Sohlstrom, which is striving to reinvent the webcam for the modern age.

Seven Seven Six’s portfolio includes a wide range of companies, from high-tech firms such as the carbon removal startup Heirloom, to cultish consumer brands including Teenage Engineering, which makes digital synthesizers. It is one of the earliest investors in Feastables, the chocolate company started by YouTube sensation Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast.

The firm has $1.1 billion in assets under management, and Ohanian invested nine figures of his own capital in Seven Seven Six’s funds, a spokesperson says. Most of the deals that Seven Seven Six has participated in are at the seed level, and its fund sizes are what VC aficionados might call midlevel. In 2022, Seven Seven Six raised $500 million and, only a year later, was reported to be working on two new funds worth the cheeky sum of $776 million. An earlier $150 million fund from 2020 had a multiple on invested capital, or MOIV, of 1.9—meaning for every dollar invested, there was $1.90 returned—according to a source familiar with the deal.

But most important, Seven Seven Six has focused on a market that Ohanian believes is a sleeping giant: women’s professional sports. This investment area is something that Williams once tried to talk Ohanian out of. She understood better than most the systemic underinvestment that has plagued female athletes’ careers, and she thought her husband’s foray would be an uphill battle.

But Seven Seven Six pressed on; in 2020, the firm co-founded the L.A.-based Angel City Football Club of the National Women’s Soccer League, and it has a controlling stake in Athlos, the women-only track and field league founded by Ohanian in 2024 and incubated at Seven Seven Six. Ohanian is also a co-owner of Chelsea FC Women, the London-based powerhouse of women’s European soccer. (Earlier this year, at a business conference, the once-skeptical Williams lauded her husband for what he has done for women’s sports investment, saying, “He started a whole movement.”)

This is all part of a savvy business strategy, he says. “I would ­expect to see multiple billion-dollar women’s teams in 10 years,” he says. “There’s no limit to the ambition here.”

Ohanian says he’d really like to grow a reputation beyond being the Reddit guy, and suggests it’s already happening. “I was in Denver, and I was getting a late-night pizza,” he recalls. “I was leaving to get to my car, and this lady with a little dog says, ‘Hey, I know you.’ And I was like, ‘Do you?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, you’re the women’s sports guy.’”

The impulse to dedicate his career to things like women’s sports comes from his late mother, an undocumented immigrant from Germany, Ohanian says. He draws a parallel between the rule-bending ethos championed by so many tech luminaries and his mom, who overstayed her visa and managed to get sworn in as a U.S. citizen over a decade later. “Here you have an example of someone who games the system. Isn’t that the kind of thing that Silicon Valley normally would reward?” he asks.

It’s perhaps this venture fund, and indeed Ohanian’s appearance on a family-friendly television show, that crystallizes the Reddit co-founder’s path as a good guy in an era when so many prominent tech bros are breaking bad. As Mark Zuckerberg lauds “masculine leadership” and Elon Musk uses X as a conspiratorial bullhorn, it’s interesting to see Ohanian, who comes from the same scene as the early social media entrepreneurs, taking a vastly different approach to business—one that embodies a contrasting outlook on the world.

“It’s one thing to act in a certain way when it is the culture, and it’s another thing to keep doing that when it is not the culture—when it is not popular,” he argues.

Weeks after his Shark Tank taping, Ohanian is sitting in a lounge chair at the Manhattan co-working space the Malin. He showed up to the interview without a publicist, carrying an unopened Celsius energy drink. He has dark circles under his eyes, but his conversation is lively. The beverage seems to be for emergencies only; he says he needs a severe jolt of caffeine when he’s in New York City, surrounded by cabs and concrete. For what it’s worth, bigger questions are looming over Ohanian’s future, such as whether all of his recent endeavors can make a noticeable difference in a world that seems to be spinning off its axis.

In the years since Ohanian left Reddit over its handling of hate speech, the biggest social platforms in the world have stopped rigorously moderating content, instead allowing misinformation and violent imagery to flow freely: In January, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would nix all fact-checking across the platforms to reduce “censorship,” while Musk has eliminated some of the content safeguards that used to govern X, previously Twitter. The result is a flourishing misinformation environment that often accommodates the virality of gruesome highlight reels—video of the Charlie Kirk murder spread quickly in September.

Ohanian hopes to prove that more can be done on this front by resurrecting Digg. At one time Reddit’s main competitor, the social news aggregator dwindled into irrelevance after multiple sales in the 2010s. Ohanian is teaming up with an old rival, Kevin Rose, Digg’s original founder, to bring the platform back to life. Ohanian and Rose’s relationship goes back to when they were in their 20s, building competing social networks that sought to change the online experience.

To anyone schooled in the history of tech-founder scuttlebutt, Ohanian and Rose might seem to make an odd pairing, considering they used to dislike each other. Each would keep tabs on the growth of the other’s company as mutual resentment brewed. “We were young, and we just didn’t really even know each other,” Rose explains. “We were just like, ‘Oh, this is the enemy,’ more or less.”

After Rose moved on from Digg, he started to think of Ohanian as less of a villain and more of a guy who lived a purposeful life, driven by heart. He’d see Ohanian on social media doing dad stuff, like taking his kids to the grocery store, and think he was “just the kind of person I would want to connect with at a deeper level,” he recalls.

“I just really had a lot of respect for what a great father he was,” adds Rose. “Some of the content he was putting out was about bringing along others for the ride and lifting all boats. I saw the work that he was doing around diversity and inclusion to be a beautiful thing.”

The duo now realize that what they have in common is greater than what differentiates them. (“We’re both girl dads,” Rose says.) Plus, the two entrepreneurs have a shared vision for fostering online communities in 2025, a vision that includes moderation of violent content. “I’m never going to have a debate with Kevin about, should this community called ‘Watch People Die’ exist?” Ohanian says.

Currently in beta, the new Digg looks an awful lot like the old Reddit. Its early users are spread out across various communities, which the company is keeping basic in its nascent stages. There are 30,000 users on the beta site, piling into communities around topics such as books, movies, and tech. Now, 20 years after Reddit’s founding, Ohanian says he and Rose can steer Digg with the benefit of hindsight. They want to use AI to moderate conversations and allow users to curate their experience on the site through a broad range of user-generated preferences. “If I’m about to hit enter on a comment that’s whacked out, I can get the immediate feedback that only about 10 percent of the people in this community are actually gonna see this comment because they’ve self-selected that they don’t have time for this shit,” Ohanian says.

If anything, Digg is an effort at restoring a semblance of order in online spaces. It’s still very early in its development—currently invite-only—and Rose notes that Ohanian is an ever-present factor in Digg’s renaissance as the duo spend time in the trenches together. “Now is a great time to reimagine this,” Rose says. “And to be able to do so from a blank slate and clean code base is rare.”

Ohanian’s granular involvement in Digg might speak to a certain identity crisis in his new role as investor: He’s not yet willing to give up the life of an operator. “I’m like an addict. I just can’t miss the highs and the lows of being a founder,” he says. If one views business like a video game, being an investor is like playing on “easy mode,” Ohanian says. It offers a very nice reprieve from the rigors of running a company. Still, investing is less thrilling than being in the thick of it every day—and Ohanian isn’t quite done chasing those thrills: “I never want to step too far away from being a founder, because I really, really enjoy it.”

Back at Shark Tank, Ohanian sounds like a cross between the most ambitious investor on the planet and a regular dude who’s just awestruck by the size of the Shark Tank set. It is, in fact, a very big set, resembling a James Bond villain lair. The ceilings are towering, and there’s a fake skyline in the giant (also fake) windows. But amid the Hollywood pageantry and the jockeying among Sharks for deals, Ohanian is undeniably in his element. “The reason I will never stop doing what I do, it’s like you get an education every single time you take a pitch,” he says.

After Ohanian has finished up a grueling, 12-hour day of fielding pitches, he slurps on a giant smoothie. He’s tired, but the other Sharks are singing his praises. Shark Tank regular Daymond John assesses Ohanian’s investor acumen in a way that speaks volumes about his personal character: “When somebody like Alexis says, ‘I’m going to step onto this platform,’ what they’re saying is, ‘I’m not going to be only about the EBITDA and the dollar and conversion. I’m going to put a lot of work in on everyday entrepreneurs … and I’m going to publicly put myself out there.’”

“Alexis doesn’t have to try to be Sharky or be different,” says Kendra Scott, founder of the eponymous cult jewelry brand that has made the Inc. 5000 twice. She is on set appearing in the episode as a guest. “He needs to stay authentic to who he is, and that authenticity is going to come through,” she says.

That doesn’t seem like it will be a problem for Ohanian. Whether his ventures can shift the cultural zeitgeist to propel women’s sports into the mainstream or make content moderation cool again will be revealed in the next few years. For now, perhaps Kevin Rose best explains why others are keen to join Ohanian for the journey: “Alexis is just, at his core, a fantastic human. You can just tell it’s in his DNA to be one of the good ones.”