Co-founder of Reddit, Initialized Capital
Reddit.com's Ohanian Cautions Against Paid Web Content
Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, discusses the role of technology in the Egyptian protests and the ...
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 (18 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
Meanwhile, social media, as you know, played a huge role in the anti-Mubarak protests. And today, for the first time in several days, Egyptians are coming back online. Here with more on social media's role in the revolts and for the social soul behind the social media is Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the website Reddit. So, last time we were on, we talked a little bit about this. You know, is it overstated to say this is the Twitter revolution, the Facebook revolution, but talk to me about this sort of foreign policy aspect that tech companies have taken on themselves with Google with the voice to tweet, Twitter. Tech companies want to be more involved.
A
Alexis Ohanian0:42
It seems very much so. And it's really easy to call this like a Twitter revolution, sort of like we saw in the protest in Iran last year, but really, you know, people cause revolutions, not tweets. But the technology is a really fantastic platform for people to get information out to get data out of places and then also to reflect that data back into places for people who can't see what is actually going on and companies like Google and Twitter have a vested interest in playing a role in this because they see this new medium of communication as something that needs to be spread and needs to be made as accessible. And so Google now basically lets you leave a voicemail if you're in Egypt that then turns into a tweet which any one of us can sort of then retweet or listen to.
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Interviewer1:21
Right. And that was important because literally a switch was flipped off in terms of access to the internet. So you had the government in Egypt recognizing that the social media was an enabler. Indeed.
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Alexis Ohanian1:35
Well, that there's really no filter and that anyone can get any information out to the world almost pretty much instantly. And it was a sort of scary proposition to understand that the Egyptian government could essentially flip a few switches and turn off all of the internet. Ars Technica did a fantastic report on it. And if any Americans were as curious as I was, it's not nearly as easy to do here in a country like the United States just because there are basically so many tubes going in and out. But it was a very real problem for them because there was content that they just didn't want to be seen and they were able to at least for the time being close it off.
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Interviewer2:05
So you're watching, you know, so many different media spaces, blogs and the like and what you see on Reddit. What was the bottom line for people here? Because as you said, there was interest in this. Could this happen here? Is there a switch on the internet in America?
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Alexis Ohanian2:21
Yes. Well, I mean, this is the sort of thing that's sort of come up here and there. But generally speaking, this is something that most of us are quite afraid of ever existing here in a country like the US. But with regard to the actual protests going on in Egypt, there were certainly a lot of sympathetic voices and a lot of very interested people and in particular, it's fascinating to see how different now Al Jazeera is being perceived than it was say back in 2003 when it was rather vilified. For most of us that live feed has been the source of raw data coming out of the country and arguably hey there is an appetite for international news. But that's me editorializing.
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Interviewer2:56
With the question though of tech companies launching their own foreign policy trying to enable, does that stop when a company becomes public? I mean look at Google and how it was unsure of how it should handle access to China. They finally took a stand but took them a while to get there.
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Alexis Ohanian3:11
Yes. Yeah. That is the trouble when you're sort of at the whim of shareholders. You've got to do what is best for them.
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Interviewer3:16
So, can Facebook and Twitter be the enablers and then go public?
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Alexis Ohanian3:20
You know, for the time being, yes, they can because they don't have to worry about any publicly traded repercussions. And for a site like Reddit, which is, you know, also privately owned, we can sort of get away.
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Interviewer3:31
Oh my god. And you can get away with things that may not necessarily be in the best interest of what shareholders would want, but is helping distribute out information as openly and freely as possible. So, Alexis, I know you focused a lot on sort of the democratization of information and of publishing with Reddit and some of your other businesses here in looking at what's happened in Egypt.
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Alexis Ohanian4:00
We've seen so there were a few of the non-violent protesters actually giving kisses to some of the riot police and some of those sort of iconic images definitely stood out. There was the image of the one protester holding an exhausted tear gas canister that said made in the USA and that was sort of just a reminder that you know aside from Iraq Egypt is I believe the second largest recipient of foreign aid from the US and so that right second to Israel second Israel correct and so those kinds of images really we're simple mammals they really crystallize larger things for us and if we look back to other large historical events whether it was images of the civil rights movement and seeing nonviolent protesters being attacked with dogs and fire hoses it wasn't until that image was sort of on the front page of the New York Times that a bunch of people started to realize, oh, hold on, maybe this really is a big deal. And that was almost a decade after Rosa Parks wouldn't give up her seat. The fact now that we can get those images and video out much faster than we ever could have and on a platform, a sort of front page of the internet that reaches frankly more people than the New York Times paper front page did and can do so without any editorialization. It'll just go on there and be seen.
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Interviewer5:00
So with Reddit, users can vote on the stories, vote them up, vote them down, make them more prominent or less so based on how they respond to it. That's truly democratized publishing. Today, in a few minutes, we're about to watch Rupert Murdoch, you know, head of News Corp, unveil this new iPad magazine and sort of try to meld publishing and technology together here. Does a media conglomerate doing it from the top down feed into this desire? I mean, or are we just so different in the way we want to consume information now?
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Alexis Ohanian5:37
Yes. I think we've gotten really spoiled. We want to get information as freely and as quickly as possible. And I always get a little worried when I see people trying to wall off content because it just doesn't seem like it's sustainable. If it's a really specific, really niche sort of thing where it's really valuable content, then okay, I could see people willing to pay a price for it. But unless that mode of getting it is really cheap and really easy, there's going to be some alternative online that will always trump it because it's free.
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Interviewer6:01
So whether it's Rupert Murdoch or whether it's, you know, Richard Branson of Virgin Mobile, it comes down to just the technology itself, how easy it is.
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Alexis Ohanian6:09
Yeah, we want it to be as accessible and cheap as possible, frankly.
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Interviewer6:13
Period. That's what All right, Alexis, thank you so much.
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Alexis Ohanian6:18
Thank you for having me. Always great to talk to you.