BIG INTV: Alexis Ohanian Says We Can Build A Less Toxic Internet

0:03From WIRED, this is Uncanny Valley, The Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond. In his three-minute and 20-second high school commencement speech, Alexis Ohanian kicked things off by throwing a lot of love at his 2001 graduating class and punctuating every few sentences with a challenge or some words of wisdom. The size of your impact should not be measured in media coverage or the number of figures on your paycheck, but rather the effect you have on the world around you. As it turns out, Ohanian's advice to his class was also a preview of his future. The now 42-year-old Reddit co-founder created a social network that once called itself the front page of the internet.

0:40And despite leaving Reddit, he's never stopped being an entrepreneur. Over the past two decades, Ohanian has invested in, advised, and mentored a wide range of early-stage startups. At the same time, he's used his celebrity to advocate for paternity leave, net neutrality, and inclusivity in tech, among other causes. In March of this year, Ohanian announced that he's jumping back into the world of social networks. Along with Kevin Rose, his former competitor, and the creator and former CEO of the social network Dig, the duo has repurchased the platform for an official relaunch.

1:18Alexis Ohanian, welcome to The Big Interview. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. We are delighted. So we always start these conversations with a little bit of rapid fire, a little bit of warm-up. Okay. Are you ready? Yes, I've had my coffee. Okay, good. Look at this. My partner, Caitlin, got me this mug. Always be winning. Always be winning. We're winning today. We're taping this on a Monday. We're winning on Monday morning. Alexis, what is your most active text thread? Most active text thread with my wife and our nannies. Amazing. That sounds right. Okay. Yeah. Parent of two over there.

1:50I get it. It's a fun time. Two young kids. Yeah, that's definitely the most active one. ChatGPT or Cloud? You know, I dabble between both. I like ChatGPT for a lot of the, I'd say I use ChatGPT more, but I feel like Claude does a much better job writing and programming. Fair. And ChatGPT was trained largely on tons and tons and tons of Reddit data. So I guess I should use it more. Well, we're going to talk a little bit about that later. Now, I hate to do this, but you did work at Pizza Hut in high school. I did. Nothing I hate about that. I worked at Tim Hortons, so I agree. I don't have Timmy's.

2:25Favorite pizza topping? Jalapenos. Ooh, bold. First video game purchase. Oh my God. With my own money? Yes. Oh my gosh. I would have saved up for, it would have been a PC game. It was probably this helicopter action sim called Comanche Maximum Overkill. It's a helicopter game. The Comanche is like an Apache sort of attack helicopter. I don't know how prolific it was, but that was my first like, oh, I'm buying a game. This is, I just got in this computer, this 486SX monster. I was so excited. Now you're really making me want to look and reload this game on YouTube. Well, now I'm thinking about how my first game was probably something like Sim Tower.

3:10And sometimes I get these cravings. I like crave building those condos. New York or San Francisco? Oh, New York. I was born in Fort Greene. Come on. Oh, amazing. American football or soccer? Ooh. I'm forever going to be a diehard American football fan. That was what I played the sport. I loved. I've come to love the beautiful game, but I definitely, I was indoctrinated in NFL. Favorite Reddit AMA. Ooh, gosh, I don't know. You know, one of the ones that's always stuck with me was the vacuum repair guy. That one's a sort of legendary one. And I think it exemplifies some of the best of Reddit because, it was just this random vacuum repair guy who had a passion and knew a lot about vacuums and his AMA was engrossing as hell.

4:00Well, and now everybody using ChachiBT can get really good vacuum repair advice. Exactly. All right. Wimbledon or the U.S. Open?

4:10U.S. Open. I'm a New Yorker at heart and I just love the crowd, that energy. And also I, the U.S. Open night match energy definitely inspired Aflos in a lot of ways. So I got to give it its flowers. All right. Final question, lake or ocean? I'm not really a water creature. I guess ocean. I'm definitely an earthbender. I like being solidly on the ground, but yeah, I guess ocean. Ocean is more fun. Okay. All right. I'm going to ask you a little bit about your background. I want to spend most of our time though. You have a few things going on right now, so I want to spend most of our time on that, but I think it's instructive to hear a little bit about someone's childhood in terms of informing who they are now.

4:53So you were born in Brooklyn, as you said, Fort Greene, interestingly. But you were raised in Maryland, right? In a suburb. Yeah. One of the first planned communities in the United States. Wow. Deep cut. Yeah. Mom was German. Dad was Armenian. Yep. So talk to me a little bit about your childhood. Talk to me about those two backgrounds for your parents and sort of how did that inform where you are today? Sure. So I was born in Brooklyn. We briefly lived in Ridgewood, Queens for a minute there. Ridgewood is hot right now. Is it? It was not in the 80s. It is the place. My dad know. It's okay. All right.

5:30So my mother was an au pair who overstayed her visa because she was in love with my dad. So thankfully, ICE wasn't there to deport her. Eventually, they got married and she got a green card. But my mom was undocumented there for a few years on the down low. and my father, he was American born, but to Armenian parents and obviously survivors of the genocide. And so, yeah, this had a pretty big impact on me. You know, they ended up leaving the city because, you know, public schools were not great. My mother, you know, was sort of working different jobs here and there, but she was ultimately a pharmacy technician down in Maryland.

6:06She got a GED, but that was her highest level of education. And then my dad was a travel agent, which was a career. yeah totally agree but so he started doing that in baltimore so moved when i was like six or seven and we'd still go visit family i had aunts and cousins and uncle up in uh the city we always go for holidays and i was very jealous of how cool living in new york would have been yeah but uh but it ended up being a really good childhood just because you know it's good schools and and i could you know bike around and hang out with my buddies all day just biking around the burbs and i think because I was so bored, that's what got me into computers.

6:42And I think the advantage of having a recent immigrant for a mom and watching her go through that whole process of, you know, trying to assimilate into the country and eventually becoming a citizen. And I remember even helping her study for the test, um, you know, gave me a perspective on the one hand of like what it meant to really want to be here in West Germany at the time. West Germany was a great place to live. Like it wasn't like she was fleeing anything. She just was really drawn to America and really really love my dad. And then on the flip side, you know, my father's family obviously came here as survivors.

7:16So my birthday is April 24th, which is the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. So it's a very unique, let's say, day to be born as an Armenian. And I remember my great-aunt Vera pulling me aside and basically walking me through in detail the story of our family, the story of what happened, you know, like in detail, telling me about the death march, the headings, like things that, you know, were a part of our family history that were the reason why we ended up here and basically saying, listen, like you have a tremendous responsibility to make the most out of what you have. She really squarely said, like, you know, make the most of this.

7:55And Aunt Vera was an amazing woman. She was a public school teacher in New York for her whole life. Did not have any children herself. Technically my great aunt Vera. So my father's father's sister, my father's aunt. Um, and so she saved up for me and she was the reason why I didn't have to take on any student loans to go to school, go to college, MBA. And, um, and, and so she really, really made a point of this. And I think that I'll never forget that conversation. And, and I think it really imbued me with a desire to want to do as much as I can to earn it and try to pay it forward and whatnot.

8:27And I think in particular, what was so interesting was even seeing, you know, my mom didn't speak English as a first language. Her English was pretty good, but she still had a strong accent. And it was so infuriating for me as a little kid to see the way people would treat her basically as if she was dumber simply because English wasn't her first language. And again, this is a white woman in America. But seeing that, clocking that as a young kid and being so incensed by it, I think drove me in a lot of ways as well. And I think probably helped create a little bit of empathy because I figured, okay, well, if it's like this for her, then what is it like for so many other people who don't, you know, look like her?

9:04And I think it's affected a lot of the ways that I move to this day. And I think for the better. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's, that's an origin story right there. Where did Reddit come in? So I'd walked out of that LSAT. I made it, I'd studied for it. I was getting ready for it. And then 20 minutes into it, I walked out, went to Waffle House on 29, decided I don't want to be a lawyer. Like I just walked out of the LSAT. Like, this is clearly not for me and decided I was just going to invent a career and be an entrepreneur and did not have an idea. But I had a roommate who was an engineer who was much better than me.

9:38I could program, but I was not a great programmer and basically spent the next six months convincing him to join my company. And that was originally to build our first project that incorporated this company called Red Brick Solutions, LLC. Charlottesville is full of red bricks. So I thought, oh, this is a good name for and incorporated it in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And initially we were going to let people skip lines by ordering food from their cell phone. I mean, okay. It was ahead of its time. And actually Steve had casually mentioned this because he hated waiting in line at the Sheetz gas station when you could go in and use a touchscreen.

10:15And so it made sense that, okay, if they already have touchscreens installed, and this is like 2003, that like why do you need to have a physical person pushing the screen? It would make sense that you could short circuit that and do it a lot easier from your phone. But it's pre-smartphone, so you'd have to text it in. Long story short, we were building towards this idea, and I had started getting restaurants all over Charlottesville to sign up. But we saw that Paul Graham was giving a talk at Harvard called How to Start Your Startup, and it was conveniently during our senior year spring break.

10:46And because, I don't know, I didn't have anything better to do, the idea of going to Cancun for a week wasn't really my jam. Even though I told you I was an ocean person earlier, it's just too much. Well, you were very clear that land is your preferred. And we went up to Boston and then I approached him and I pitched him on the idea and told him we'd come all the way up from Virginia. I think he was shocked. We came all the way up from Virginia and agreed to meet us that night. Pitched him on my mobile menu or for short. And he loved the idea. I was really proud of that name. It's good. No, it's good.

11:16He loved the idea. And, you know, he kind of left it with like, hey, I think you guys should do this. This sounds great. And like a week later, he announces Y Combinator. It was called the Summer Founders Program back then. But it was this idea. You could get$6 ,000 per founder in funding. And they would get, I think, 7 % ownership. And he encouraged us to apply. And we did. And then we go up for the in-person interview. I felt like I gave the pitch of my life. And we were out drinking already celebrating the inevitable acceptance. Because like he already said, he liked the idea. And then he called me up.

11:46And he said, we're passing. and the good news is we're already drinking so we can just continue that there you go and then the next morning hung over on the way back to virginia he called and he said listen we still don't like your idea but we like you guys so if you're willing to change your idea we'll fund you and i played it cool i was like we'll call you back we got to talk about it but we were i was already like trying to find the conductor get off the next stop this was on a train back and then head back to Boston to meet with him. And in this meeting, we got our check for 12 grand and for 7 % of the company, but you know what?

12:24I'm not even mad about it. And the suggestion Paul had was, you know, build something you use every day. Don't build something in a phone, build something for a browser. And he had pointed out this website called delicious, which at the time was letting people bookmark websites, but also see what everyone else bookmarked. And the benefit of that was this popular page where you could see what was the most interesting stuff being saved. And that was all reference material, but it did show this interesting idea that you could benefit from the wisdom of the crowds to sort of see and aggregate what people thought was interesting.

12:54And so we adapted the idea, taking inspiration from places like Slashdot and their Karma system. And then I created these little upvotes and downvote arrows to, the idea was it would be pushing good content up and bad content down, but that was the original idea. And then doodled a version of comments that would be also upvoted up or down or downvoted based on how much people like them. And that I think was one of the real clinchers. And, you know, it created a different way for people to take this classic internet technology forums and make them much more dynamic, have an identity that they could carry from community to community within Reddit and really allow the most interesting discussion to happen.

13:36Not just interesting content get posted, links or whatnot, but actual great conversation. So that's it. I'll start it with a Waffle House and the rest is history. And Reddit has obviously had a tremendous journey since then. It has. And Reddit launched in 2005. You sold it not long afterwards, full disclosure to Condé Nast, Wired's parent company, et cetera. In looking back now, as someone who works with founders all the time, right, you're sort of very well-versed in that entire world. Do you think that success or semblance of success, right? You sold the company for$10 million. Did that give you like a false sense of the entrepreneurial journey of sort of what it meant to scale a startup, what it meant to be an entrepreneur at that time?

14:22Uh, I think relative to the time, you got to remember in 2005, 2006, the startup economy, all the things we take for granted now were not a thing yet. Yeah. And I still distinctly remember Zuck. I remember the headline of Zuck turning down that billion dollar offer as being so preposterous. Right. I just thought, my God, like if I could have gotten that much money for a few years worth of work, like I would have taken it in a heartbeat. But I think, so I think if anything, I was very naive. I also, So I think you also have to consider$10 million of value creation in 16 months. Oh, it's crazy. Yeah.

15:08We first got the offer. It was right on my birthday. So like April, shout out to Karosh who called me up and was like, hey, we'd like to buy you guys. So, you know, at that point I'm thinking like it's been a year, not even a year because we launched in June. It's been not even a year. this is more money than my parents will earn their entire working lives. And I, again, I think certain amount of it is just my own naivete and also my circumstances where, yeah, like, I guess if I had wealthy parents and I knew that, yeah, there's a billion dollar offer from Yahoo today, and this is no, no shade to Zuck is a generational entrepreneur.

15:46But I do think, I think nine times out of 10, I take that offer and I'm excited about that offer to exit for one, you know, again, 16 months worth of work. And two, you got to realize too, like a month into Reddit, my then girlfriend falls into a coma, my dog dies, and then my mom is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. And so as a first time CEO, 20 years old, 21 years old, whatever, fresh out of college, you're feeling invulnerable, feeling really good about building this business. And then all of these things happen. And in particular, when my mom was diagnosed, it really framed mortality for me in a new way.

16:31This was an aggressive stage four glioblastoma. So they gave her a few years, two, three years. And, you know, to hear that and, and then again, continue to have the just unflappable support from her. I mean, literally her first words to me when I saw her at the hospital where I'm sorry, because she felt so guilty that her, you know, her son would be distracted in her words by all this going on while he's, you know, starting his company, building his company. So she, she's an exceptional woman. And, uh, and so I wanted nothing more than to be able to say like, yeah, you were right. You were so right.

17:03But I also feel like To have all that stuff happen, from that moment forward, I've never had anyone come to me with a business problem that was even remotely jarring. And it's just, it's something, it makes me feel grateful because it means I know this has helped me in so many ways as I've grown as a businessman because it gave me that experience.

17:32your mom died in in 2008 and you shared a video recently of the two of you together yes you use mid-journey to to generate that that short clip from a photo of you two hugging and i won't get i will try not to get too emotional but um my mom died in 2004 and i know i mean i'm i'm sorry for both of us thank you and i have very few photos of her i don't have any video i don't have any voice recordings. I have very few assets, as I would say in 2025, of my mother. So seeing that video, when I watched that video that you created, it was very resonant for me. And the idea of being able to do the same had this tremendous emotional pull for me that felt so appealing and sort of so like warming and like slightly dangerous, like slightly scary.

18:22and when you did that when you shared that clip there was a lot of debate about that decision i mean it was covered by the news like there was coverage of of you sharing that that clip of of you and your mom and i'm curious about how you have thought about that debate and how you think about there is so much debate right now about ai and how it should be or should not be used particularly sort of in contexts where we're talking about emotion where we're talking about emotional bonds, emotional dependency, sort of the anthropomorphization of AI. I mean, there's a lot there and we don't have to sort of get into all of it, but I'm curious about that and just sort of how you're thinking about that.

19:04Yeah, that was a wild one. I did not expect it to get that kind of reach and pickup. And I also, I did not expect the vitriol. Yeah. But so like you, right, I didn't, I wouldn't have a camcorder growing up. I don't have, I have a decent number photos actually of me and my mom, but I don't have any video of us together. And, you know, going on, God, 20 years since she died, like there have been so many moments in my life, getting married, obviously having children, all this stuff that I obviously wish she was there for. I do miss her tremendously. And, and, and at no point though, have I wanted to create some kind of AI facsimile of her.

19:44Right. There was definitely a very like black mirror ask, and maybe it was a Black Mirror episode too, avoiding grief by keeping alive this person through AI. I personally do not want that. I personally would not recommend folks do that. I feel like I've had a tremendous amount of time to process that grief. And I still, look, it still makes me sad. Seeing videos like that warmed me, not because I thought this was really my mom, but because it gave life to an image that just resonates. And by being able to bring that static image to life and feel like almost have this sense of deja vu of like, God, this is, I feel like that reminded me of a hug she gave me as a kid.

20:35It triggered something that made me feel good. I enjoyed rewatching it also as a technologist where I'm just like, wow, this tech is getting really good. Like I'm looking for clipping. I'm looking for, you know, bugs and missing frames and different stuff. And it's actually gotten, you know, pretty darn good. And I do think like all technology, these are tools. These are tools that are going to get abused. There are some people who for sure are going to find ways to use this technology to, in a way, reanimate deceased loved ones. And I would strongly encourage them not to. Yeah. But if you want to bring life to some old photos or the example I use this, we have deteriorating VHS tapes in all of our homes.

21:17And there are likely going to be videos that you're going to be able to stitch back together because of missing seconds or deteriorated film or what have you using AI. I wholeheartedly encourage you to do that. There's, I think for the, certainly for the preservation of memories and then sure for the, it's not really a creation of a new one, but for the animation of still photos, I you know, I personally found it to be endearing at a nice moment. And I don't know, I think the bigger challenge we have right now is we're at a time where this technology is rapidly advancing, where there is a small group of people like myself and you who are living at like the bleeding edge of it, who are trying all the new things, who are finding ways to improve our own workflows and our life.

22:16And I mean, even the way I teach my kids has evolved thanks to this technology. And then there's a whole lot of other people, probably far more people who are some version of not interested or even like anti outright. And the challenge here is I don't think this technology stops. I don't think this progress stops. And we need more people leaning in if we want to have educated voices talking about as a society, what's okay and what's not. Cause like on some societal level, we will decide through laws, at least in the United States, or even the sort of soft power of, that's not socially acceptable versus doing it.

23:02We're going to figure out where that is. And we just, I would always encourage us to have more informed folks in that conversation than fewer. And so it was just, it was surreal seeing something that affected so many people. And I just wished, maybe this is asking too much from the internet. I wished for a higher level of discourse from the folks who felt a certain kind of way. Yes. But, you know, I guess that's just me being naive.

23:35The economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift. And all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work. I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily 10-minute podcast where a team of award-winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.

24:11Let me ask you about what you're doing now because there are a few things to cover. So sports for one, I want to make sure to talk about. So to start off, you are a co-founder of Angel City, Los Angeles Women's Football Club. And earlier this year, you bought an 8 % stake in the Chelsea Women's Football Club. And just to be clear, if you're listening to this and you're American, when we say football, we're talking about soccer. You guys know the whole deal. Why that sport specifically? Why Chelsea now? Why this zone for you? Well, you know, after I resigned in protest from the board of Reddit in 2020, one of the first things I ended up doing was, yeah, becoming the founding control owner of Angel City.

24:52And I had had this tweet storm, went viral back then for how undervalued women's professional sports was. And it went viral because a lot of people told me, no one cares about women's sports, you're an idiot, as people want to do online. But I laid it out pretty concretely, and it was pretty obvious to me. And I simply said, look, I'm going to either buy a team or start a team and with everything I do, I want to create billions of dollars enterprise values. This isn't like some charity. I want to build a tremendous business and soccer in America was the most obvious thing even back then. I mean, it was incredible to see just how listless the board of governors was the NWSL in 2020.