The first thing that strikes you about Alexis Ohanian is the sheer scale of the man. “I’m a big boy,” he confirms, putting his height at 6ft 5ins, his shoe size at UK 14, and his weight — not that I’d asked — at “probably 280 pounds”, or 20 stone.
I’m craning my neck up at Ohanian in a corporate bar inside the west stand of Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football Club. Ohanian, first known as the co-founder of online forum Reddit and latterly as the husband of tennis star Serena Williams, is pleased to hear that I’ve been a regular at this ground for nearly 30 years. “Up the Chels, man.” But he’s put out when I tell him this is my first time watching the women’s team.
This is partly because Ohanian has become, in recent years, one of the world’s most passionate investors in women’s sports, starting with the launch of Angel City FC in Los Angeles and more recently the purchase of a 10 per cent stake in Chelsea Women. That deal valued the team at $263 million and Ohanian is expecting a decent return, to rank alongside some of his best tech investments.
We leave the bar, head up a flight of stairs and enter a boardroom looking out onto the pitch, where the players are warming up and Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” is blaring out over the tannoy. Ohanian, 42, tells me: “I don’t think this is at all sensational. I really think the first billion-dollar women’s club should be Chelsea.”
I’m interested to hear more about Ohanian’s belief in Chelsea Women, as well as his other sports and tech investments made through his venture capital firm 776. But first I want to talk about Reddit, one of a handful of websites that has shaped our modern digital lives, and about Ohanian’s starring role in one of Silicon Valley’s messiest break-ups.
He was born in New York. His father, who was of Armenian descent, worked as a travel agent, while his mother, who had emigrated from Germany, worked nights as a pharmacy technician. He did well in school and made it into Virginia University, where he studied history and commerce.
Here, Ohanian met computer science student Steve Huffman, who became his close friend, room-mate and video-gaming partner. Together, in 2005, Huffman and Ohanian forged a plan to set up a website that would become “the front page of the internet”. Alongside their acquaintance Sam Altman, now known as the boss of Open AI, they were among the first young entrepreneurs to receive funding from Y Combinator, the now-renowned start-up accelerator and investor.
“It was my baby,” says Ohanian, recalling his devotion to building up Reddit — a website that is made up of a collection of more than 100,000 user forums, or Subreddits, from r/HarryPotter and r/UKPersonalFinance to r/BreadStapledToTrees, a picture-based page that lives up to its name.
These pages are managed and updated by unpaid volunteers called Redditors, who post ideas, links, news, pictures and videos to contribute to the greater knowledge of their online community.
The year after they launched Reddit, Ohanian and Huffman thought they had struck gold when Condé Nast, the esteemed magazine publisher behind Vogue and GQ, agreed to buy their fledgling website for $10 million. They joined the company to carry on building Reddit, which was relocated to San Francisco by its new owner, but both departed to pursue new projects in 2009.
From afar, they watched as Reddit floundered, and then agreed to return to run the business — Ohanian as executive chairman and Huffman as chief executive, in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
It was a story as romantic as they come in Silicon Valley: two university friends, getting the band back together. Around the same time, in 2015, Ohanian met Williams by chance when they were both in Rome at the time of the Italian Open. Two years later, he asked Huffman to be a “groomsman” at his wedding. Meanwhile, Reddit was on the march towards an eventual share sale and public listing.
But behind the scenes, tension was building. In June 2020, as much of the world was in lockdown and America’s streets were filled with Black Lives Matter protests, Ohanian blindsided Huffman by publicly announcing his resignation from the board. “I could no longer feel proud about what I was building at Reddit,” he tells me.
Unbeknown to outsiders, Ohanian had been trying to persuade Huffman and the Reddit board that the company ought to be banning certain forums and content. He had issues with several racist groupings, as well as a Subreddit dedicated to videos of people dying (really: r/WatchPeopleDie).
Ohanian says Huffman and the rest of the board thought they should not intervene on “free speech” grounds. He recalls that one of the arguments for keeping r/WatchPeopleDie was: “‘This is really helpful content for people suffering from PTSD.’ And I did not believe it. I may have literally even said: ‘That’s bullshit.’
“Having dinner conversations with my wife, there were board meetings I came back from almost feeling gaslit,” he says. “I was like, ‘Am I the asshole for wanting to ban a community for watching people die? Like, is it really that important for free speech, the business of Reddit, to exist?’”
In the event, Reddit took r/WatchPeopleDie offline in 2019, having previously “quarantined” it in 2018, after videos of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand were posted.
Still, Ohanian formed the view that he would be unable to fully change Reddit’s content policies from the inside. And so he resigned publicly. Within weeks, Reddit unveiled a new “hate speech” policy and outlawed hundreds of pages. Ohanian’s view now seems to be that Reddit made the right decision, but only because he gave Huffman no choice by openly airing his concerns.
A Reddit spokesperson said the company has a “long track record of strengthening our sitewide rules over the past two decades”. The spokesperson said Reddit was working on a policy to prohibit hateful content before Ohanian’s resignation, which they denied had prompted a change in policy.
Ohanian says his strength of feeling was intensified by his marriage to Williams, a black woman, because “you see the discourse every day and you see how violent it is, not just on Reddit, but broadly”.
Ohanian says that at the time, he imagined a future question from his daughter, Olympia, who was then three years old: “‘What did you do in this situation? And what were you doing to make things a little better for me and people like me?’ And I wanted to be able to give her a great answer. I don’t think it should require having a black daughter to do that. But when you have one, you really feel even more strongly.”
When I ask Ohanian if he still considers Huffman a friend, he says: “Uh, gosh … The last time I saw him was in Paris randomly at a speaking gig [some time before Reddit’s 2024 float]. And I went up to him and I congratulated him — he’d just gotten married … I was like: ‘Congrats, man.’ And that was it.”
But meanwhile, Reddit goes from strength to strength. Now with more than 100 million daily users, making it one of the biggest websites in the world near the likes of Google, YouTube and Facebook, it is fast becoming an essential platform for public figures and organizations. Even the UK government launched an official account earlier this year.
Ohanian retained only a small, undisclosed holding in Reddit, which has proved a success on the public market, attaining a market valuation of $37 billion. At the start of November, thanks to his shareholding in the business, Huffman became the latest US tech mogul to attain billionaire status.
This was after my interview with Ohanian, but I emailed to ask him how much of a financial sacrifice he’d made by leaving the Reddit board and whether he had any hard feelings about Huffman’s billion. His answer: “The price of a clear conscience is invaluable!” He also estimated his net worth at about $350 million, and said of becoming a billionaire: “I’ll get there!”
At 776, Ohanian says he aims to back businesses that will succeed, but he also places an emphasis on finding companies that benefit society in some way. The portfolio includes Angel City, CoinTracker, which helps crypto investors manage their tax returns, and Feastables, the ethically sourced chocolate brand fronted by YouTube’s Mr Beast.
Meanwhile, Williams is busy establishing herself as an entrepreneur and investor, including through her venture capital firm Serena Ventures. I ask Ohanian whether they talk shop at the dinner table. He says: “I learnt early in the relationship that I should not give unsolicited advice to my wife.”
In the Chelsea boardroom, I ask if he sees himself as a tech bro with a conscience. “Ah, I’ll take that,” Ohanian says with a smile. “I’m definitely a tech bro. I guess it’s to be determined whether I have a conscience.”
While he has the CV of a tech titan, he clearly doesn’t fit the Silicon Valley stereotype, possibly because he didn’t live there long.
Still, he offers a defense of his West Coast peers when I suggest that some outsiders might feel that not all tech bros have consciences. He tells me that many tech leaders of his generation, including the slightly older Elon Musk, were “ruthlessly bullied and ostracized and alienated” for liking computers in their youth.
Now, with tech companies standing as the biggest in the world, Ohanian says: “The nerds are running everything. But I think on some level, a lot of these grown adults are still the vulnerable, hurt kids … who haven’t fully processed the power and influence that they have, and still feel like the bullied nerd.”
Ohanian tells me that, despite his enthusiasm for computers and gaming, he wasn’t much bullied at school — possibly because of his size, possibly because he played and watched sport. This, neatly, brings us back to Chelsea and women’s sport.
He says that “Serena tried to talk me out of” launching Angel City in 2021 because she had witnessed how difficult it was to build up women’s sport in the same way as men’s games. But, he adds, “tennis is the perfect example of: if you get people’s investment, you can actually get significant and equal returns.” He credits former tennis champion Billie Jean King with campaigning for equal prize money and opening the door for people such as his wife and her sister, Venus, to earn millions on the court and through sponsorship deals.
“There’s a remarkably strong business case for investing in women’s sports,” he says. “Yes, I have two daughters and, yes, I’m married to Serena Williams. But I will never make this investment case from a standpoint of charity or feminism.”
Clearly, though, it’s not all about money. Ohanian tells me that his family was recently interrupted while having dinner in Denver by a woman who wanted to thank him for his investment in women’s sport. “That’s the stuff I want my daughters to see,” he says. “That’s the stuff I want to be known for. Because it is outstanding business success, but in a way that I feel really proud of.”
With that, he is told that kick-off is imminent, and we’re not sitting together for the match. The next morning, after we’ve watched Chelsea beat Manchester City, Ohanian emails to say: “Glad we got the W and welcome to the Chelsea women’s fan club — can’t just support the men.”
William Turvill writes about the business of media, technology, telecoms, entertainment, and more for The Sunday Times of London
