With the unexpected news that tennis icon Serena Williams is pregnant with her first
child, the question on everyone's lips became: who is her baby daddy and husband-to-be?
As it turns out, he's pretty famous on the Internet, not to mention super rich.
Here's everything we know about tech entrepreneur and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
Nice guys finish first
Whether it's in an interview, on social media, or on Reddit, Alexis Ohanian comes across
as a genuinely nice guy.
As Serena Williams told People, "He's incredibly — a really nice person.
I think he definitely treats everyone the same, which is really cool to see.
Really, really nice to see."
Serena's big sister Venus certainly agrees.
She told USA Today, "[He is a] super nice guy.
You never know how the things are going to end.
In this case, it's not gonna end.
So it's great."
The Waffle House Epiphany
Ohanian grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, and spent most of his spare time on the Internet,
playing games, doing web design, and chatting online.
As he told Inc Magazine in 2012, "In school, I was just a kid.
Online, I had authority."
He met future Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman on move-in day at the University of Virginia
in 2001.
They were complete opposites; Huffman was an engineering major, while Ohanian majored
in history and also studied commerce.
But they hit it off immediately, finding shared interest in gaming and computing.
Ohanian changed the trajectory of his life in his junior year, when he was studying to
take the LSAT to be an immigration lawyer.
He told Inc, "I flipped over my test and thought, You bastards.
I walked out and went to Waffle House.
That's where I had what I call The Waffle House Epiphany.
I didn't want to be a lawyer.
I wanted to make a dent in the universe."
And, thus, his viral future — and lifelong love of Waffle House — became clear.
Another college internet prodigy
After Ohanian pulled the plug on becoming a lawyer, he and Huffman decided to develop
a way to order meals online.
They reached out to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, a startup incubator, to see if he would be
interested in their MyMobileMenu idea.
Graham passed on the pitch, but the next day, he reached out to the hopeful duo and suggested
they brainstorm on another idea.
When they came up with the idea of a site to share links, Graham called it "the front
page of the Internet."
That is what became Reddit, which launched in 2005, shortly after Ohanian and Huffman
graduated from the University of Virginia.
It took just three weeks to build Reddit.
Ohanian said, "It was just Web links and text submitted by users with Interesting or Uninteresting
buttons that you could click on underneath."
Later, they added the ability to comment, and Steve Huffman would later describe their
partnership by claiming, "I made Reddit, and Alexis made Reddit cool."
Personal strife
Although Ohanian's professional life was skyrocketing around the time of Reddit's launch, his personal
life was falling apart at the seams.
According to The New York Times, Ohanian's girlfriend at the time had attempted suicide
by jumping out of a window in Germany.
Then his mother experienced a seizure the day they put down their family dog, which
led the family to discover that Ohanian's mother had terminal brain cancer.
In a personal blog entry, Ohanian wrote, "My mother was diagnosed with a class IV Glioblastoma
multiforme.
Such an ugly name.
I remember the first time I googled it, hoping I could search my way to a cure.
But it basically meant terminal brain cancer.
She was 51 when she was diagnosed.
I flew down to Maryland first thing the next morning.
And you know the first thing she told me?
'I'm sorry.
Sorry because I know how much you've already been through.'"
Just 16 months after Reddit started, Conde Nast bought Reddit for between $10 and $20
million.
Part of the reason Ohanian put the site on the market was his mother's declining health.
She died less than two years after the sale, but he's credited her brave perseverance through
the illness with encouraging him "to wake up every morning and kick some ass."
Starting anew
Ohanian stayed at Reddit for three years after the sale to Conde Nast.
But afterward, he and Huffman came up with the idea for a travel search engine called
Hipmunk.
The goal, in Ohanian's words, was to "take the agony out of online travel search."
He and Huffman also co-founded Breadpig, which combines product sales with charitable donations,
and he's an investor of the organization Das Kapital Capital, which provides money and
advice to startup businesses.
It doesn't stop there, either: he started Initialized Cap, a venture capital company,
and has also been heavily involved in measures to protect Internet privacy, something he
wrote about in his 2013 book Without Their Permission.
But despite all the extracurricular activity, he still wasn't done with Reddit just yet.
Circling back to the startup
Over the years, both Ohanian and Huffman regretted selling the company too soon.
They later returned to help run the site a decade after selling it, in part to help deal
with controversial content and in-fighting.
The site set up "rules of the road" to help keep comments more civil.
That wasn't the only reason.
As Ohanian told Fast Company, "There was a strong sense that it was not living up to
its full potential, and we felt like Reddit was never going to live up to its full potential
unless we boomeranged."
Incidentally, Serena Williams helped influence the changes made to Reddit when Ohanian returned.
He told AdAge, "She was not a Redditor when we first met and I'll never forget one of
the first things she asked me was why is there no app.
And I was like, 'Touché.'
So that's something she showed me."
Or as his future bride might put it, game, set, match.
Finding love with a legend
Ohanian and Williams first met at a lunch in 2015.
Sharp-eyed Redditors spotted him on TV at Wimbledon in 2015 before the world knew that
they were dating.
In a Reddit post confirming her engagement in 2017, Williams wrote, "I came home a little
late.
Someone had a bag packed for me.
And a carriage awaited.
Destination: Rome, To escort me to my very own 'charming,' back to where our stars first
collided.
And now it was full circle: at the same table we first met by chance.
This time, he made it not by chance, but by choice: down on one knee, he said four words.
And [I said yes]."
Who knew she was such a poet?
Speaking of the little-known artistic skills of this growing family…
Drawing an icon
Reddit's mascot, a space alien named Snoo, was a doodle Ohanian did while bored in a
college class, and it came quite in handy when he decided Reddit needed a mascot from
the future to show that the site was a success.
In addition to his creation of Snoo, Ohanian also drew the logos for some of his other
brands and, perhaps most famously, he sketched the drawing of him and Williams that accompanied
their engagement and pregnancy announcements.
Clearly, their child is going to be inheriting all kinds of talent from these two.
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