Disclosure
Ohanian resigned from Reddit's board in 2020 over hosted hate communities
“I left Reddit pretty publicly in protest back in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd, because it did not align with my views that the company would take such a stance in support of communities of color and black communities in particular, and also still have thou…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
The AI content glut will force platforms to verify human users
“AI and the glut of AI-generated content is now going to make proof of humanity much, much more important for UGC websites, because it will be really, really important, not just to keep down spam, but because users presumably want to see what humans have to thi…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Live sports will be the last human entertainment domain safe from AI
“Sports, sports will be the one last place for traditional entertainment where you are guaranteed to feel the humanity. No one will want to watch robots play basketball.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Google tried to acquire early Reddit for a YouTube commenting system
“It actually made us an acquisition offer. It was like an acqui-hire type thing, and Google wanted to roll Reddit into YouTube, and they were gonna make us this sort of YouTube commenting system.”
Assertion Partly supported
Reddit had just $8 million in revenue and 45 employees in 2014
“It was a company that had, I think, eight million dollars in revenue that year, 2014, that's public, despite being over a decade old, and dropping, because obviously advertisers don't want to be on revenge porn websites, and so maybe 40, 45 employees, no mobil…”
Assertion Partly supported
Reddit reached $175 million in revenue and 600 employees by 2019
“Four or five years later, when I stepped back to a board-only role, I think the business was probably 175 mil in revenue, probably like 506 hundred employees, so grown a lot, learned a lot from that.”
Insight
Underperforming employees rarely improve after two quarters of direct feedback
“If there are really systemic challenges with an employee, and you give that direct feedback, and you don't see material improvements, and you keep going through the same process quarter after quarter after quarter, it's not actually going to get better. You've…”
Assertion Supported
The United States is seeing a surprising rise in dumb phone sales
“United States is one of the few countries in the world where we're actually seeing a rise in the sale of dumb phones”
Insight
Crowds surface novel ideas but struggle to produce polished narrative content
“User generated content can do an amazing job servicing a novel idea, but A crowd cannot easily create that next step of content.”
Assertion Supported
High-end trading cards are achieving record auction prices post-COVID
“Trading cards boomed during COVID. They obviously took a big tank along with crypto and all these other speculative things after, but already have started marching back and we're seeing record high auctions for a lot of the high end stuff.”
Assertion Partly supported
The U.S. Open women's final consistently outdraws the men's final domestically
“Year after year after year, more Americans watch the U.S. Open women's final, which is the big American tennis match, than the men, and it doesn't matter. There doesn't need to be a Williams sister in it. There doesn't need to be an American in it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Y Combinator's first batch offered startups $12,000 for 7% equity
“We then, a month later, applied to Y Combinator, which he had just started, first ever batch, and back then it was 12,000 dollars for seven percent of your company.”
Assertion Supported
Paul Graham coined Reddit's 'front page of the internet' tagline
“What we eventually got to was this idea of creating the front page of the internet, and give Paul credit for that tagline.”
Assertion Supported
Condé Nast acquired Reddit for $10 million 16 months after launch
“And then, yeah, ten million dollar acquisition offer for 12 months worth of work at the time. We got it consummated in about four or five months. So 16 months in, it was just mind-blowing.”
Assertion Partly supported
Reddit's early $10 million exit helped validate Y Combinator for founders
“This ten million dollar exit was the first really big one for YC, and it helped give a seal of approval that then led to Dropbox supplying, which was the first real billion dollar company, and then that led to Airbnb. Once you did it twice, it really validated…”
Disclosure
Ohanian seeded his firm's internal software with 40,000 personal CRM contacts
“I took about 40,000 contacts that I had amassed in a personal CRM over my career, made it searchable, and then let founders click a button to draft an email for me to basically edit and approve and send that would come from my inbox”
Disclosure
Seven Seven Six software lets portfolio founders ghostwrite partner social posts
“We've built our own version of it into Cerebro. And so I This lets our content team, but also our founders ghostwrite entire tweets, LinkedIn posts for us.”
Assertion Supported
Almost all top-earning female athletes globally are professional tennis players
“And if you look at the list of top earning athletes every year, the only women are almost all tennis players.”
Opinion
Serena Williams applies intense athletic perfectionism to her everyday family life
“Regardless of whether it's on the court or off, she is the hardest critic on herself, and so that same instinct that drove her to want to be better, she always says there'd be no Serena without Venus. She always had to be a little better in order to keep up wi…”
Assertion Supported
Waffle House installed a plaque commemorating Reddit's origin in Charlottesville
“He put a plaque in at the booth in Charlottesville on Route 29 at that Waffle House where I had this Waffle House epiphany that led to Reddit.”
Alexis Ohanian