Co-founder of Reddit, Initialized Capital
Around The Block - Inclusivity in Web3 with Alexis Ohanian
In this clip from Around the Block, Katherine Wu talks with Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and current founder of venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, about inclusivity in Web3 and why women are poised to play a dominant role in the future.
Today's conversation is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or investment advice. Actual results may vary materially from any forward-looking statements made and are subject to risks and uncertainties.
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About Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and founder of Seven Seven Six, has been speaking about his investments in women's sports and space technology. He described the SpaceX IPO as "a milestone moment" and said he has been excited about space tech for five to seven years, calling it an investment thesis that was "unthinkable a decade ago." Ohanian also discussed the state of venture capital, noting that 65% of VC money has gone to just 0.05% of companies, and said he believes it is positive for retail investors to gain access to companies that previously stayed private longer. Ohanian has continued to promote his all-women track and field league, Athlos, which he founded after the Paris Olympics. He said the league is modeled on NCAA track and field with a team-based point system and that athletes are given equity as partners. Ohanian described women's sports as "the only pillar of entertainment that is durable" and an "anti-AI bet," arguing that live sports are fundamentally human and cannot be replaced by AI-generated content. He also said he has been investing in women's sports for five to six years and called it an "institutional great asset."
Transcript (6 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
U
Unknown0:02
One of the things I worry a little bit about is that in overthinking incentive designs, we're not thinking enough about being inclusive. I think about why we have problems in Web3 today with people who just know how to game the system because they've been around designing incentives, and there are a lot of newcomers who want to be included but can't tell which projects are really trying versus which are engaging in lazy thinking. So, what are some of the best practices in even sussing out whether or not a community is something you want to be part of? When does your spidey sense go off that there's something here, like you say, minimally viable?
A
Alexis Ohanian1:03
It's going to be very unsatisfying because I think it's very qualitative right now. I literally invested in a company called Common Room simply because I wanted a kind of Salesforce for community management across platforms. I want more data-driven thinking around what is a healthy community. It took us years to build essentially a metric for that within subreddits so that we could see as communities were trending towards toxicity, where we could engage with community managers to actually help turn it around, or even understanding what does it take, literally how many posts per day is required for a community to just be thriving on the platform. So that's the kind of mindset that I'm approaching this with. I don't have a good answer for that yet because these communities, if we just look at NFT projects, they tend to live mostly between Discord and Twitter. There's still a lot to figure out in terms of how to define quality engagement.
But let's go anecdotally. I'm looking for folks who are putting intention and effort, actually just literally spending time. This is almost like an anthropologist who embeds themselves in a society and just kind of chills and watches. It's almost anthropological work. You're spending time in the Discord, you're spending time following the hashtag, you're just looking, you're just watching. And I think in particular folks with higher EQ will find even more success here because they have a better emotional intelligence when it comes to seeing are real bonds being formed. Are people... yes, there's in-jokes, there's memes, there's culture, but what are the stories people are telling to one another? What are the stories about what this project means for them? What are they doing? Are they creating their own... I guess it depends on licensing issues. Are they creating their own versions to wear on their chests? Are they getting tattoos? Are they doing the things that show a stronger sense of tribalism and identity in the best ways?
And also, is the team behind it really building something? Being an early-stage investor, this feels again like a bit of an unfair advantage because I'm looking for a lot of the same characteristics one would look for in an early-stage company where they don't have a product yet or it's a basic one. You're really betting on the team and the vision and the roadmap and if they're capable of executing on it. And I do think, look, the muscles that one needs to do investing, especially early-stage investing, are going to be exercised by a whole ton of people now. I joke but I'm kind of serious that everyone is a VC now, and certainly everyone in crypto, and I think that trend will continue.
And then one little bit of optimism, in spite of the fact that, and I didn't do enough to fix this, but in spite of the fact that Reddit is still quite a male-dominated platform, women... they punch above their weight. There's far more women moderators versus men. So these are the people who do the volunteer work on Reddit of community building and management. And think about that: on Reddit, women are way more active on the moderating side. And that to me is such a strong indication of why it is in everyone's selfish best interest to at a minimum get more women into Web3 and into these companies as early as possible. Because I'm speaking out totally just from personal belief, I don't have any evidence behind this, but I just really think women are much better equipped to do community management and community building than men. If you want to win and community is core to what you're doing, you're going to need a lot of women to help you get there.
U
Unknown4:56
I was going to say, you kind of mentioned earlier, which is that if you want to make products that are inclusive, you just got to design it to be inclusive. Stop making these... and I harp on this so many times. Crypto is so intimidating because there are so many barriers. These barriers are on education, it's a barrier because of capital and entry. The education thing is just huge. I honestly cannot harp on this enough: if you want to make products for people to use, it just needs to be intuitive.