
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on Initialized Capital - etjossem
https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/02/07/reddit-co-founder-alexis-ohanian-steps-aside-focuses-on-initialized-capital/
======
zerostar07
I wondef how they manage to increase revenue. Their self serve ad manager
looks like a joke.

~~~
hglaser
It's likely that the largest advertisers don't use the self-serve ad manager.
They call their rep who operates the system for them. This is why the self-
serve ad managers for AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc. are all pretty unloved.

~~~
kn0thing
Yes. The team has started making some good improvements to self serve, though,
and it'll keep getting better.

~~~
petecooper
For completeness, from kn0thing's HN bio (excerpt):

>Co-founder @Reddit. General Partner @InitializedCap.

------
rexaliquid
I've always appreciated the joy he brings to life. I look forward to see
whatever he invests in next.

------
staunch
Reddit is at a stage where it can attract as much help as it needs, so this
seems like a great thing.

The startup world has always lacked for investors smart enough to grasp new
stuff, brave enough to be first, and ethical/humble enough to attract the
great founders.

Looking forward to seeing the investments!

~~~
kn0thing
Thank you, staunch. I'm excited to be focusing on seed stage investing again
with Garry and the team. This is an amazing opportunity for us.

------
vxNsr
Interesting that he named his daughter after himself. I guess having a unisex
name had its benefits.

More importantly,I agree that reddit's public perception had changed a lot in
the last year, it went from seeming like a boys club where others were
tolerated to being totally nondinominational. Obviously there are still some
subs that are pretty insular but for the most part as they've grown they've
gotten nicer.

~~~
slg
The stories of Reddit's problems with harassment, racism, and sexism have
decreased over the last year but that appears to be mostly from the site doing
a better job of hiding it. There is still just as much hate on the site except
now it is just seething under the surface. I am sure that is better from an
investor perspective, but it isn't really a solution to the problems.

~~~
ythn
> There is still just as much hate on the site except now it is just seething
> under the surface

Yeah but if your vast majority of users doesn't see it or know where to find
it, who cares? I've been a reddit user for 2 years and never encountered the
subreddits you are talking about nor have I sought them out.

The "solution" you are talking about is heavy-handed speech moderation

~~~
slg
These things never stay contained though. The hate subreddits feed off of and
seep into the rest of the site. In the old days someone had to make a
conscious decision to visit a site like Stromfront. You weren't going to go
there unless you already were interested in racist ideals. On Reddit those
ideals are mixed in with everything else. This makes it harder to notice you
are being exposed to hate and/or influenced by it. The end result is that
Reddit is a boom to recruiting for hate groups.

There are three main ways of interacting with Reddit: posting, voting, and
commenting. Hiding the obvious hate subreddits helped address the posting of
topics. That was an important step and I don't want to diminish it. Reddit has
tried to address the voting aspect with various tweaks to the ranking
algorithm but whether it has been effective is still debatable. They haven't
done anything as far as I'm aware to address hate comments. That is left
completely up to the users and moderators.

------
faitswulff
Full text:

Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian announced on Wednesday he will step down from
daily duties at the internet company and focus his attention on Initialized
Capital, the early stage venture capital firm that he co-founded and is known
for investments such as Coinbase and Instacart. He will continue to sit on
Reddit’s board.

Mr. Ohanian, 34, said the timing of his decision reflected a number of
personal and professional factors, including his marriage last year to tennis
superstar Serena Williams and the birth of their daughter, Alexis Jr. Mr.
Ohanian said the decision also reflected his confidence in Reddit’s renewed
growth, and his desire to focus his professional energy on investment
opportunities in emerging technologies such as blockchain.

“I had a pretty productive last year, personally, when it came to getting
married, as well as having a baby,” Mr. Ohanian told CIO Journal. “I came back
from parental leave at the start of January, and really started thinking about
where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be doing.”

Reddit was in stronger shape, he said, claiming that it boosted revenue
fivefold during the last three-plus years since he had re-engaged with the
company. Reddit, which has been ranked as the fourth most popular U.S.
internet site, raised $200 million last year and was in good hands with co-
founder Steve Huffman as CEO, he said. The company, launched in 2005 and
backed by Y Combinator, says it was valued in last year’s funding at $1.8
billion.

This year will see a continuation of the company’s strategy to make Reddit
more welcoming, according to Mr. Huffman. That includes an updated website,
scheduled to launch in the first quarter, as well as initiatives to
personalize the site for individual users, and to improve its chat
functionality. “We’re basically rebuilding the entire product,” Mr. Huffman
said. “We have a long way to go there.”

Mr. Ohanian has said that the future of social media lies in more authentic
communication. At a time of growing concern about social media standards, the
values of free expression and community can be at odds, though. “Our goal for
Reddit is to create a platform where people can express themselves
authentically and also to build a space where everyone can find their home —
we evolve our policy regularly to maintain the balance between those two
values,” Mr. Ohanian said.

The decision also reflected early-stage investment opportunities for
Initialized, which he co-founded in 2011 with Palantir Technologies veteran
Garry Tan. Initialized said it has more than $250 million under management,
and that its portfolio is worth more than $20 billion. Its investments include
Coinbase, Instacart, Zenefits, Opendoor, Soylent and Cruise Automation, now
part of General Motors Co.

Startups today are in the early stages of building the infrastructure for the
next wave of applications, many of which likely will run on decentralized
networks rather than a central server, according to Mr. Tan. He compared the
opportunity to early years of the internet, when basic infrastructure was
being built. “The big thing now is the people creating the infrastructure are
getting to share in the spoils,” due to the rise of cryptocurrencies, Mr. Tan
said.

“I want to have a chance to invest, often the first check, in companies that
are going to create the new internet,” Mr. Ohanian said.

Given its early stage focus, Initialized eschews investment theses and focuses
on fundamentals such as vetting software, products and founders, according to
Mr. Ohanian.

“There are clearly things around security and privacy and identity that are
going to be dramatically changed through technology, just because it’s now
possible,” Mr. Ohanian said.

One opportunity, he said, is that people may have direct control over the
currency in their possession, without having to rely on a third party to store
it. He views distributed exchanges as a way to make that possible.

He also said that such changes in trading and ownership will extend to other
kinds of digital assets.

“Crypto Kitties is probably the best-known example right now,” he said,
referring to the blockchain-based game. “I know it seems silly. But it’s a
demonstration of the fact that you can create a digital thing of which only
one can exist and be able to prove that it exists. Where people end up taking
this and what it ends up being, that I can’t predict. But the means of
exchanging those seems like an obvious next step.”

The ability to establish authorship opens up new opportunities, according to
Mr. Ohanian. “This idea that you can identify ownership or authorship is
interesting. We don’t have any really good solutions for this,” he said. “I
take a photo, it could end up in a million places on the internet tomorrow,
with everyone else taking credit for having shot it. It would have been nice
to have had that at the beginning of the dot-com boom. We weren’t capable of
having that. But we actually can have it now.”

~~~
komali2
While I appreciate you doing this, is this not "reprinting without
permission?"

EDIT: Downvotes could mean many things. The next person planning on hitting
the downvote button, could you spare for me a brief reply letting me know why?

EDIT2: Ugh, now I'm the "downvote edit guy." Obviously irrelevant now, but I
don't want to remove the first edit and screw over people saying "I downvoted
you because x," so, apologies for violating guidelines and making this mess.

~~~
kaffee
Why are you taking it upon yourself to say such a thing? You're doing free
work for the legal industry.

Fighting copyright monopolies is hard enough without adding Stockholm syndrome
to the mix.

~~~
gowld
Maintaining civil order is everyone's responsibility, not merely
professionals.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles)
Denying a citizens obligation to be active member of the social order reduces
us to passive objects in society.

Why are you fighting copyright monopolies? You are doing free work for the
any-copyright industry.

~~~
kaffee
Really, copyright is about "civil order"? Interesting. This is the first time
I have heard that particular justification for IPR.

edit: ok, that's not true. the MPAA/RIAA advertisements do equate piracy with
violent crime.

~~~
komali2
Well, perhaps not for many consumers, but I know artists for example that
regularly utilize copyright law to protect their creations.

------
bigtones
Better Non-Paywall version: [http://archive.is/CuG9c](http://archive.is/CuG9c)
{edited}

~~~
bch
This didn’t work for me.

~~~
devy
[https://www.outline.com/HGXjrL](https://www.outline.com/HGXjrL)

------
greenleafjacob
Isn’t it misleading to say Reddit is backed by YC now?

> reddit has had a long and complex history, starting as one of the first Y
> Combinator companies, then as a division of Conde Nast, and three years ago
> spun out as an independent entity.

Then they raised 50M in 2014.

~~~
dpcx
If that's the case then it should be considered misleading to note that they
were a division of Conde Nast.

But it's not. It's a historical fact that all three of those things happened,
and some people might not know how Reddit got to where they are.

