Why Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Has Gone All In on Women’s Sports

I structured it like a startup. If you're building the next Reddit, normally an investor like me would invest, say, $5 million, $6 million to start the company. It would be expected that I would not have board control and I would give a majority of the shares to the rest of the team for free.

Thank you for having me, man.

Yeah. Well, it was because in March of 2019, I laid out the grand plan on Twitter. I said, 'Look, the World Cup is coming to the US.' Now it's coming again right now. But back in 2019, the Women's World Cup was coming. I was not a fan of the sport, but I knew I was going to catch some of the matches. I had seen a team in the NWSL sell for like $3.5 million that day, and I started ranting because I was like, 'This doesn't make sense.' I don't follow the sport, but I know who some of the stars are because they've transcended the sport. Why do I know that? Because they are big enough personalities thanks to social media. There are enough people following them, literally millions, that I now have heard about them. I know there's a legacy of greatness in American soccer for the women, not for the men. Sorry guys. The women are excellent and have always been excellent. Those are all data points that tell me, not to mention the fact that when the Women's World Cup is on TV, you have tier-one brands promoting it, tier-one media talking about it, and fans showing up in sports bars to watch it. All those things pointed to a league that should be able to create more value than a team worth $3.5 million. One of the players on that team, Megan Rapinoe, was worth at least that much in brand value alone. Like, what was wrong? By the end of that rant, I just said, 'Look, I'm going to either buy a team or start a new team because it could be worth a billion dollars one day, and this is the most obvious investment I could make.' Alex Morgan, to her credit, responded and said, 'I can help you with that.' I had her come down from Orlando, hosted her at my home for a day, and just took notes and asked her dumb questions. I was like, 'What am I missing? Why is this not viable?' She's as brilliant and impressive off the pitch as she is on it. Alex was straight up: 'Yeah, this makes no sense. It shouldn't be this way.' With her guidance, I looked into buying some teams, but I ultimately ended up buying an expansion. It cost a million dollars for an expansion fee back then. The most recent, I think Denver paid $150 million, so pretty good for four or five years later. I set out to invest and build Angel City FC, proving all the people wrong. When that tweet went viral, there were a lot of people who said, 'You're an idiot. No one watches women's sports. You're going to lose all your money.' But there were also a lot of women's soccer fans who were like, 'Please buy my team. We know what you're capable of in building Reddit. We think you can do a lot for this.' I give them credit too, but I love the haters. I screenshotted all those tweets of people who said, 'You're never gonna make any money. No one watches women's sports.' Every time we hit another revenue milestone or sellout crowd, I would post about it and tag them with their old tweet, thanking them for the inspiration. Frankly, it's been such a great investment that it's compounded now. I keep investing in emerging sports broadly, like getting in early on TGL and buying the first team, LA Golf Club, or starting a league of our own with this Formula 1 of track and field, Athlos. I'm obsessed, and I still think it's one of the best opportunities even as valuations have grown. We probably have another five years until they get to where they should be. I just want to keep building.

I did not. I was the founding control owner. The short version is I structured it like a startup. If you're building the next Reddit, normally an investor like me would invest $5 million, $6 million to start the company. It would be expected that I would not have board control and I would give a majority of the shares to the rest of the team for free. I did that, and it works great in tech. In sports, that's a terrible idea. That's what I did when I started Angel City. I was the founding control owner in the eyes of the league. So it's my ass on the line. Unlike building the next Reddit, if it goes to zero, no one cares. If your sports team goes to zero, the league says, 'Hey, we need money. You've got to fund this.' The league never should have let me be the founding control owner without board control or owning the vast majority of the shares. Instead, I very generously gave board control and 75-80% of the ownership away to the three ladies who served as the front end of the business: Natalie Portman, Kara, and Julie. I learned a lot from that. The league never should have approved it, but the NWSL was in a tricky place back then. They were just happy to take any money they could get from me. Eventually, the only real solution was to align control with the control owner, so we decided to find a new control owner. In this case, it was Bob Iger and Willow Bay. We ran a whole process, and I let myself get diluted down. I no longer have a controlling stake, but I'm still a shareholder and on the board, still very excited about it. I learned a lot from that process. For sure, the next team I started, LA Golf Club, I have board control and a vast majority of the ownership commensurate with the dollars put in. At the end of the day, the three ladies still played a role in getting it started and were handsomely rewarded for putting up no money. I'm not upset about it. The best outcome is that we've got Bob and Willow, they have board control, and it's good. It's rebuilt.

No, I think the real lesson is if you're founding a team and financing it, you should have board control and not give away 80% of the ownership for nothing. At least some of the great celebrity owners, like Eva Longoria, actually invested money into their ownership stakes. Having a large ownership group early on in women's sports was certainly helpful. I can't tell you how many headlines I saw with my wife's name in it because it was advantageous for our team to market that fact, even though Serena was not actually an investor. She's my wife, so equal economic party, but she is a tremendously powerful brand to put in an article in 2020 when no one was investing in women's sports, to say, 'Hey, this is a seismic shift.' DoorDash was our first front-of-kit sponsor, and we could say, 'Hey, it's worth a seven-figure deal because look at the celebrity attached to it.' The big lesson is it's kind of a moot point because no league in the world would ever let a structure like that happen. It was just that the NWSL was kind of a mess back in 2019, so it happened.

Yes.

Yes. A lot of folks were curious. My thinking is that the opportunity in American soccer was obvious in 2019, as I said in the tweet, because American men's soccer is so bad that you can market excellence. The US men have never done anything impressive in soccer; the rest of the world is really good. But the women are dominant, and marketing excellence is much easier than mediocrity. The idea that you can tell Americans, 'This is the most important soccer league in America and the world, and the American women you love cheering for overwhelmingly play in our league, the NWSL,' makes for a clear storyline. The English are interesting because they invented football and are dominant on the men's side. If you ask the average American sports fan to think of American soccer excellence, they think of women—Mia Hamm, Alex Morgan. They can't think of any men. Meanwhile, an English football fan thinks of Beckham, Rooney, etc. That works against the women's game by default because they compare them to the men. The WNBA had the same issue for decades, being compared to Jordan. The women's game is fundamentally different, like tennis—no one thinks a women's match isn't great because they aren't doing what Djokovic does. I think what broke through in England was that the English game has this aura of excellence on the men's side. In the last few years, England winning back-to-back Euros, the women bringing home the trophy, that shifted the culture. You're seeing American stars wanting to play in England, which brings awareness from American audiences. Chelsea has tremendous pedigree and a great trophy case. The women's club got spun off, which is smart. Rebuild it from first principles as its own thing, not a subbrand of the men's club. Aki is a tremendous president. Getting 10% of that was amazing. I think the World Cup will be a big unlock for women's football.