Ohanian’s advice to his class was something of a preview of his future: The now 42-year-old Reddit cofounder created a social network that once called itself “the front page of the internet,” and despite leaving Reddit, he’s never stopped being an entrepreneur. Over the past two decades, he has invested in, advised, and mentored a wide range of early-stage startups. 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 of the social network Digg, the duo has repurchased the platform for an official relaunch. Ohanian joined me on Uncanny Valley for the podcast's first Big Interview. Check your feeds for a new episode each week, featuring one-on-one conversations with a range of voices from WIRED's world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. KATIE DRUMMOND: We always start these conversations with a little bit of rapid fire. Are you ready? ALEXIS OHANIAN: Yes. I've had my coffee. OK, good. What's your most active text thread? With my wife and our nannies. That sounds right. Parent of two over there. ChatGPT or Claude? You know, I dabble between both. I'd say I use ChatGPT more, but I feel like Claude does a much better job writing and programming. ChatGPT was trained largely on tons and tons and tons of Reddit data, so I guess I should use it more. 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 Horton's, so I agree. Favorite pizza topping? Bold. First video game purchase? Oh my God. With my own money? It was probably this helicopter action sim called Comanche: Maximum Overkill. I'd just gotten this computer, this 486SX monster. I was so excited. Now you're really making me want to look and relive this game on YouTube. My first game was probably something like SimTower, and sometimes I get these cravings. I crave building those condos. New York or San Francisco? New York. I was born in Fort Greene. Come on. American football or soccer? I'm forever going to be a die-hard American football fan. That was the sport I played, the sport I loved. I've come to love the beautiful game, but I definitely was indoctrinated in the NFL. Favorite Reddit AMA? 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. And now everybody using ChatGPT can get really good vacuum-repair advice. Wimbledon or the US Open? US Open. I'm a New Yorker at heart, and I just love the crowd, that energy. And the US Open night-match energy—definitely inspired in a lot of ways. So I’ve got to give it its flowers. Final question: lake or ocean? I'm not really a water creature. I'm definitely an earth bender. I like being solidly on the ground. But I guess ocean's more fun. So you were born in Brooklyn, as you said, but you were raised in Maryland, right? In a suburb, one of the first planned communities in the United States. Wow. Deep cut. Mom was German, dad was Armenian. Talk to me a little bit about your childhood. How did that inform where you are today? So I was born in Brooklyn. We lived in Ridgewood, Queens, for a minute there— Ridgewood is hot right now. It was not in the ’80s, but I'll let my dad know. My mother was an au pair who overstayed her visa because she was in love with my dad. 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 was American-born but to Armenian parents, survivors of the genocide. This had a pretty big impact on me. My mother worked different jobs, but she was ultimately a pharmacy technician down in Maryland. She'd come over and she got a GED, but that was her highest level of education. And then my dad was a travel agent, which was a career in the ’80s. He started doing that in Baltimore, so we moved when I was 6 or 7. I had aunts and cousins and uncles up in the city, and I was very jealous of how cool living in New York would've been. But it ended up being a really good childhood. Good schools, and I could hang out with my buddies all day just biking around the burbs. I think because I was so bored, that's what got me into computers. The advantage of having a recent immigrant for a mom and watching her go through that whole process of trying to assimilate into the country and eventually become a citizen—I remember even helping her study for the test—gave me perspective on what it meant to really want to be here. West Germany at the time was a great place to live. It wasn't like she was fleeing anything. She just was really drawn to America and really, really loved my dad. And then on the flip side, my father's family obviously came here as survivors. My birthday is April 24th, which is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. So it's a very unique, let's say, day to be born as an Armenian. 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—the death march, the beheadings, things that were the reason why we ended up here. And basically saying: Listen, you have a tremendous responsibility to make the most out of what you have. That family that came over, there weren't that many kids from it. She really squarely said: Make the most out of this. 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. She saved up for me, and she was the reason why I didn't have to take on any student loans to go to college, University of Virginia. I'll never forget that conversation. It really imbued me with a desire to do as much as I can to earn it and try to pay it forward. 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. And again, this is a white woman in America. But clocking that as a young kid and being so incensed by it, I think, drove me in a lot of ways as well. It probably helped create a little bit of empathy, because I figured, OK, if it's like this for her, then what is it like for so many other people who don't look like her? That's an origin story right there. Where did Reddit come in? So I'd walked out of the LSAT. I had studied for it. I was getting ready for it. And then 20 minutes into it, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just gonna invent a career and be an entrepreneur. I had a roommate [ed: Steve Huffman, now Reddit's CEO] who was an engineer who was much better than me. I could program, but I was not a great programmer. I basically spent the next six months convincing him to join my company. Initially we were going to let people skip lines by ordering food from their cell phone. It was ahead of its time. 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 a Startup,” and it was conveniently during our senior-year spring break. 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. You were very clear that land is preferred. We went up to Boston. Paul gave his talk, and then I approached him and I pitched him on the idea. I think he was shocked we came all the way up from Virginia. He agreed to meet us that night. He loved the idea, and I was really proud of that. Like a week later, he announces Y Combinator. It was called the Summer Founders Program back then, but you could get $6,000 per founder in funding and they would get, I think, 7 percent ownership. He encouraged us to apply, and we did. And then we went up for the in-person interview. I felt like I gave the pitch of my life. We were out drinking, already celebrating the inevitable acceptance—he already said he liked the idea—and then he called me up and he said, “We're passing.” The good news is we were already drinking, so we could just continue that. The next morning, hung over, on the train 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.” I played it cool. I was like: “We'll call you back. We gotta talk about it.” But I was already trying to find the conductor, get off at the next stop, and head back to Boston to meet with him. And in this meeting we got our check for $12,000 and for 7 percent of the company. But you know what, I'm not even mad about it. The suggestion Paul had was to build something people use every day. Don't build something in a phone. Build something for a browser. He pointed out this website called Delicious, which at the time was letting people bookmark websites but also see what everyone else bookmarked. There was this “Popular” page where you could see what was the most interesting stuff being saved. That was all reference material. But it did show that you could benefit from the wisdom of the crowds. So we adapted the idea, taking inspiration from places like Slashdot and their karma system. I created these little upvote and downvote arrows to push good content up and bad content down. I doodled a version of comments that would also be upvoted or downvoted based on how much people liked them. 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. Not just interesting content getting posted—links or whatnot—but actual great conversation. So it all started with a Waffle House, and the rest is history. Reddit launched in 2005. You sold it not long afterward for $10 million—full disclosure: to Condé Nast, WIRED’s parent company. In looking back now as someone who works with founders all the time, do you think that success gave you a false sense of the entrepreneurial journey, of what it meant to scale a startup, what it meant to be an entrepreneur at that time? In 2005, 2006, it was not the startup economy. All the things we take for granted now were not a thing yet. I still distinctly remember the headline of Zuck turning down that billion-dollar offer [from Yahoo] as being so preposterous. I just thought, my God, if I could have gotten that much money for a few years’ worth of work, I would've taken it in a heartbeat. If anything, I was very naive. You have to consider $10 million of value creation in 16 months. When we first got the offer, I'm thinking: It's been not even a year. This is more money than my parents will earn their entire working lives. A certain amount of it is just my own naivete and also my circumstances. If I had wealthy parents and I knew that, yeah, there's a billion-dollar offer from Yahoo today—and this is no shade to Zuck, he's a generational entrepreneur—nine times out of 10, I take that offer and I'm excited about that offer to exit. You’ve 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, fresh outta 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. This was an aggressive stage-four glioblastoma. They gave her a few years. To hear that and continue to have just unflappable support from her—I mean, literally her first words to me when I saw her at the hospital were “I'm sorry,” because she felt so guilty that her son would be “distracted,” in her words, while he's building his company. She was an exceptional woman. I wanted nothing more than to be able to say, yeah, you were right, you were so right. From that moment forward, I've never had anyone come to me with a business problem that was even remotely jarring. It makes me feel grateful, because I know this has helped me in so many ways as I've grown as a businessman. Your mom died in 2008 and you shared a video recently of the two of you. You used Midjourney to generate that short clip from a photo of you two hugging. My mom died in 2004, and I have very few photos of her. I don't have any video, I don't have any voice recordings. So when I watched that video that you created, it was very resonant for me. The idea of being able to do the same had this tremendous emotional pull—so appealing and so warming and slightly dangerous. When you shared that clip, there was a lot of debate. It was covered by the news. I'm curious how you think about how AI should be or should not be used, particularly in contexts where we're talking about emotional bonds, emotional dependency, the anthropomorphization of AI. Yeah, that was a wild one. I did not expect it to get that kind of reach and pickup. I also did not expect the vitriol. Like you, we didn't have a camcorder growing up. I have a decent number of photos of me and my mom, but I don't have any video of us together. Going on, God, 20 years since she died, there have been so many moments in my life—getting married, having children, all this stuff—that I wish she was there for. I do miss her, tremendously. At no point, though, have I wanted to create some kind of AI facsimile of her. Maybe it was a Black Mirror episode—avoiding grief by keeping alive this person through AI. I personally do not want that. I personally would not recommend folks do that. I've had a tremendous amount of time to process that grief, and it still makes me sad. Seeing that video warmed me, not because I thought this was really my mom, but because it gave life to an image. I felt almost this sense of déjà vu. That reminded me of a hug she gave me as a kid. It 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. I'm looking for bugs and missing frames and different stuff, and it’s pretty darn good. 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. But we have deteriorating VHS tapes in our homes, and there are likely going to be videos that you can stitch back together using AI. I wholeheartedly encourage you to do that. The bigger 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 OK and what's not. A small group of people like myself and you are living the bleeding edge of it—trying all the new things, finding ways to improve our own workflows and our life—and a whole lot of other people, probably far more people, are some version of not interested or even “anti” outright. I would always encourage us to have more informed folks in that conversation than fewer. You’re a cofounder of Angel City, Los Angeles’ women's football club, and earlier this year you bought an 8 percent stake in the Chelsea women's football club. And just to be clear, if you're American, when we say football, we're talking about soccer. Why that sport specifically? Why Chelsea now? Why this zone for you? After I resigned in protest from the board of Reddit in 2020 [following the murder of George Floyd], one of the first things I ended up doing was becoming the founding control owner of Angel City. I had this tweetstorm about how undervalued women's professional sports was. It went viral because a lot of people told me, “No one cares about women's sports, you're an idiot,” as people are wont to do online. But I laid it out pretty concretely, and it was pretty obvious to me. I simply said, I'm going to either buy a team or start a team, and with everything I do, I want to create billions of dollars of enterprise value. This isn't some charity. Soccer in America was the most obvious thing, even back then. It was incredible to see just how listless the board of governors was at the NWSL in 2020. I'm sitting here like, guys—and they were all guys, all old ages—the sport of soccer in America is a women's sport already, right? It is already conceived of as a women's sport, in part because the American women are so, so, so incredibly good, and the American men are so bad, and we love excellence in this country. I can market excellence. Here's a sport where the women are undeniably excellent, have been excellent, and then every four years a lot of people are paying attention to them during the World Cup, and a lot of brands are spending money on them during the World Cup, and bars are full of people watching them during the Women's World Cup. What the hell is going on in between every four years? And it turns out: nothing . Because there was no investment, there was no ambition. It was listless. I think that's a kind way of saying it. So I rolled up to the board of governors and just said, listen, if y'all are not looking to invest, that's fine, that's your life choice—but please sell your team. Please move on. Chelsea was a similar moment. The big opportunity in the WSL was unfortunately not to own a team but to buy a minority stake. Once that became the game plan, I just looked for who had the biggest trophy case, and that was Chelsea. You speak to any top-tier women's footballer or fan of women's football, and they all say this is a special club with a very special history. There's the soccer piece of it, and then there's Athlos, right? That's a women-only track and field tournament. There's Gloria— Wow. That's an old one. That's to help female soccer players from remote areas get recruited. How do you think about your return on investment, whether it's financial or whether it's societal? Billions of dollars in enterprise value created. I stress that because I think even well-intentioned people in women's sports have historically not helped advance it as much as they should, because they did not frame it first and foremost as about business. Being an entrepreneur, being an early investor, you get to be right, but then you also get the financial upside of being right. Once you make the business case, especially in the United States of America, and you can see expansion—teams selling for hundreds of millions of dollars, teams generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue a year onward to one day, hundreds of millions a year—at that point, in America, the scoreboard has now spoken. At that point, if you still cry on Twitter about women's sports, you're just sexist. Maybe racist too. The free market has spoken so fucking loud that you're wrong. I get to take my daughters to games. Seeing a sellout crowd of 22,000 people screaming for a bunch of women footballers here in America, that's just normal. I love the fact that more and more people stop me for Angel City or Chelsea or Athlos and not Reddit. I will say, I took my daughter to a New York Liberty game at Barclay Center a few weeks ago, and it was an amazing feeling to have a 7-year-old with her best friend sitting there watching these incredible women, this sold-out crowd, packed stadium. Now I want to talk to you a bit about Seven Seven Six and the tech industry. You've been described as a very hands-on investor. What can a founder expect when they get into business with you? I want a performance culture. Venture is, historically, much more of a lean-back type of gig. And ironically, even though every VC invests in technology that's disrupting antiquated industries, venture is remarkably devoid of technology. I want to be as hands-on as a founder wants me. But most importantly, I want to build the tech infrastructure so that founders can extract the most out of me and the entire team 24/7. The first product we built was an intro tool. After seeding a few dozen billion-dollar companies, I went back to all those CEOs and said, Hey, what were the things that I did that were most valuable? And then I made them into a list of what was most productizable, and intros was the first one. Even five years ago, at 2 in the morning, a founder could say, I really want to talk to the CMO of company X, and they could search our contacts, find the person they're looking for, click a button, and start drafting the message for them on my behalf. Then they hit Send, it goes to me. I can edit it and hit Approve. We've got about 90,000 contacts now. We've built our own Cameo tool, so founders will use this to help close candidates or help close sales. I recently did a video for Bob Kraft, because the founders were looking to close the Patriots for their product. It comes in like a Cameo prompt. We obviously don't charge them. In the age of AI, you might think, well, gosh, you could have an Alexis avatar do that while you sleep. But part of the bet here was, the jankier the video, the more it looks like Alexis actually took 30 seconds out of his day to record this video for me while he is walking through the lobby of a hotel, the better. The more valuable in a world where video gets increasingly saccharine and perfect. It's on-demand. Founders get the support when they need it. I'm not trying to run the company for them. What are you looking for right now in an AI startup? There are many, many out there. You want to bet on the winners. The math hasn't gotten that different. For early-stage investing, we're often the first check the founder has ever gotten. Maybe there's not even a product yet, we're investing so early. The bet is still largely on the founder. And I can give you an example. Doji has built really the ultimate AI fashion avatar app. So you can take six selfies and then a couple of full-body photos, and it generates a beautiful avatar of you. That you can then seamlessly put clothes on. It preloads with a bunch of great fashion brands you can browse through, but you could be on Old Navy and drop in a URL to a shirt and it'll put it on you. This is a seven-month-old company. It's still early days, but this is the application layer of AI that I think is going to be a lot of fun in the next year or two. If it works right, Doji becomes the place people shop not just for luxury items but for all their clothing. And that becomes a really valuable piece of real estate. There's so much that goes into the ultimate user experience at that foundational level. You’ve really got to be obsessed with it. When Kevin Rose pitched me on resurrecting Digg, the “why now?” was: At the application layer, we can reimagine how AI will improve the user experience first and foremost of moderators. These are the volunteers who really make all these community platforms work, and the tools they're using are so bad. Using AI, we can now bring both transparency and simplicity to their lives and to their communities' lives so that these community managers can actually spend more of their time doing community-building instead of just janitorial work. That's your P zero, right? Solve for these power users. They're providing so much value to these platforms. How do you really delight them? And then beyond that, in this new age of AI, I am a big dead-internet theory believer. I would say a majority of social media today is fake. Not in the Instagram-fake way. I mean literally fake, like it is either AI-generated text that humans are pasting in or it's outright bot behavior. The opportunity we have with Digg is to reassess what it looks like to verify humanity in a way that's not creepy. I'm thinking specifically of orbs scanning your retina— Who could be responsible for that? Sam's playing 5D chess out here. He seems to be. The idea of, hey, let me give you my driver's license or my credit card, or any kind of verifying information, is unpleasant at best. We want to figure out how we build something better in this AI age that feels good and also still honors users wanting their pseudonymity. When you go to Digg.com, there’s a tagline: “The front page of the internet, now with superpowers.” What should we expect? I am really trying to underpromise and overdeliver here. That one is the big one. The way that one is phrased is very pointedly for moderators, to say: You deserve first-class tools. AI can actually help give you superpowers to be able to manage your communities better. I've been very outspoken about the problems with communities centered around violence and racism and hate. I don't want those to exist on the new Digg. I feel very strongly there'll never be a watch-people-die Digg. And that's great. Low bar, but that's where I'm coming from. In real life, you can think of these community platforms as an infinite Javits Center. Someone owns the Javits Center, and they rent out the space to various cons and different things. In an infinite one, you can always have multiple concurrent conventions going on. I was so opposed to these virulent racist communities because you're legitimizing them by having this convention hall of hate right next to a convention hall of Pokémon. What you're basically telling everyone is: You can go over there and talk about Jigglypuff, and go over here and spew your racist, hateful crap. And it normalizes the latter. There are plenty of places on the internet to go find that stuff. Just not at our Javits Center, so to speak. The other thing that real life does really nicely, if we keep pushing this analogy, is if you show up in the Pokémon Con and you start spewing really crazy stuff, you get a response from the people around you. At minimum, it's like, bro, that's fucking weird. We don't wanna see that. We can actually do near-real-time reading of a comment. Let's say you are showing up in the Pokémon community, and this Pokémon community has guidelines that the community has all agreed on. We've empowered users to say there's content that I just don't want to see. I come into this community for good vibes. The feedback you can then give to the person who's about to hit Submit is, Hey, just so you know, 10 percent of the community is actually going to see this post because of how inflammatory is. You can still post it, but just so you know. That helps you create this feedback loop that happens all the time in real life. We actually think that's a feature of civil society. And so if we can bring some part of that online, it improves user experience for everybody. We like to end with a little game. It's called Control-Alt-Delete. What piece of tech would you love to control? What would you alt, so alter or change? And what would you vanquish from the earth never to be seen or heard from again? This is a little silly. Can I control Apple to finally help their software? Apple Intelligence, all this stuff's just been so bad. You go help them out. Poor Siri. Siri, just limping along there. What would you alter? My buddy at Altimeter had this really good vision of getting every kid shares in the stock market when they’re born, like an index fund almost. And he's executed on a pretty good vision of it. I would alter all of their cap tables. So somehow every single American citizen could have a stake in that success, like basically own shares in it. There are Anthropic and OpenAI SPVs, these special purpose vehicles—basically people pulling shares together and then getting dollars to fund those shares—that are like six or seven layers deep. It’s an SPV wrapped in an SPV wrapped in an SPV. The only people who are getting access to that are connected people. And because these companies are all taking longer to go public, there's a ton of value that no one in the public markets has access to. What are you deleting? What are we vanquishing today? Extremism. I think we should purge extremism. But again, I'm talking magic-genie stuff. I’m not saying I want to create a government that rounds up anyone deemed an extremist. This is purely hypothetical. Just wait until it gets taken out of context. As long as I piss off everyone equally. Uncanny Valley Live: Get tickets to our first live show in San Francisco on September 9.