Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian was born on April 24, 1983, in Brooklyn, to a German mother and an Armenian-American father whose own parents had fled the Armenian genocide, and grew up mostly in the Maryland suburbs. At the University of Virginia he majored in history and commerce and, in 2005, pitched a "front page of the internet" idea alongside his roommate Steve Huffman to Y Combinator, the newly founded startup incubator; Paul Graham accepted them into its first-ever batch, on the condition that they drop a mobile-food-ordering idea and build something else instead. What they built in its place, in a few weeks that summer, was Reddit.

Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006 for around ten million dollars, and Ohanian moved on to other ventures, including the merchandise-and-charity company Breadpig and the venture firm Initialized Capital, before returning as Reddit's executive chairman in November 2014 and helping steer the company through a 2015 revolt by users and moderators that pushed out its next chief executive. He resigned from the board again in 2020, asking the company to fill his seat with a Black board member and pledging future gains from his Reddit stock to Black communities, including a million-dollar gift to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp. He launched the venture firm Seven Seven Six in 2021, has taken ownership stakes in Angel City FC and Chelsea's women's team, and became one of the most visible advocates for paid paternity leave in American business.

Reddit's founding pitch was openness itself, a place with almost no editorial gatekeeping, and for years that openness meant the site hosted forums built around harassment, exploitative images of minors, and racist and misogynist communities that operated for years before the company banned them. Steve Huffman later said flatly that neither he nor Ohanian had built Reddit to be "a bastion of free speech," walking back the very framing the platform had been sold on. Ohanian's own break with the company came only after George Floyd's murder in 2020, when he said he needed to be able to answer his young daughter, someday, when she asked what he had done, and concluded the honest answer required giving up the board seat he had held since co-founding the company fifteen years earlier.

How Ohanian's record settles, as a founder whose platform enabled real harm for years before it was reined in, as a venture capitalist backing other founders, and as one of the country's most public paternity-leave advocates, is still unsettled. He remains active across all three roles simultaneously, still investing through Seven Seven Six, still publicly raising his two daughters with Serena Williams, and Reddit itself, now a public company since its 2024 IPO, still carries the imprint of the platform he and Huffman built as students without much idea of what it would become.

Alexis Ohanian's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Reddit company
  Co-founded with Steve Huffman in Y Combinator's first batch 2005
• Breadpig company
  Merchandise and charity company 2007
• Initialized Capital company
  Venture capital firm co-founded in 2010 2010
• Seven Seven Six company
  Venture capital firm founded in June 2021 2021

• April 24, 1983 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
• 2005 aged ~22 Co-founds Reddit with Steve Huffman in Y Combinator's first batch
• 2006 aged ~23 Reddit is acquired by Condé Nast For an estimated $10-20 million.
• November 2014 aged 31 Returns to Reddit as executive chairman
• November 16, 2017 aged 34 Marries Serena Williams in New Orleans
• June 5, 2020 aged 37 Resigns from Reddit's board, asking for a Black successor Pledges future stock gains to Black communities, including $1 million to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp.
• June 2021 aged 38 Founds the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six
• March 21, 2024 aged 40 Reddit goes public in a $6.4 billion IPO Having sold his original stake to Condé Nast back in 2006, Ohanian is not among the shareholders listed as owning more than 5 percent of the company.

• Serena Williams b. 1981
  Tennis champion with 23 Grand Slam singles titles, widely considered one of the greatest athletes ever. married to
• Aaron Swartz 1986–2013
  Internet activist and Reddit co-founder whose work on open access and web standards left a lasting legacy. early collaborator, complicated by
• Tim Berners-Lee b. 1955
  British-American computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, revolutionizing global information sharing. invoked the open-internet ideals of
• Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984
  Co-founder of Facebook who built the world's largest social media platform and reshaped global communication. platform-building contemporary of