What happens when the founder of Reddit and Serena Williams meet in a restaurant
in Rome? Sparks fly and the future of the internet is changed for good!
As the Brooklyn-born son of German immigrants, Alexis Ohanian has a strong appreciation for
where he came from and where he is now. He told the Financial Times,
"I have a bit of a crush on the Statue of Liberty ... I look at that every day
and keep in perspective — coming from a family of immigrants — everything
they went through to give me the good fortune I've had."
His family background has given Ohanian a unique perspective and
compels him to speak out when he sees injustice. In an open
letter posted by the Armenian National Committee of America, Ohanian said,
"I am the son of an undocumented immigrant from Germany and the
great-grandson of refugees who fled the Armenian Genocide."
Ohanian further explained that his entire family history was shaped by
immigration and new opportunity. It's because of that past that he
does his best to help immigrants who are seeking visas. He wrote,
"If you've never seen people taking the pledge of allegiance for the first time as U.S. Citizens,
it will move you: A room full of people who can really appreciate what I was lucky enough to grow
up with, simply by being born in Brooklyn. It thrills me to write reference letters for
enterprising founders who are looking to get visas to start their companies here,
to create value and jobs for these United States."
You may imagine that someone so successful later in life was a star student,
but according to Alexis Ohanian, that was not the case. During most of his school years,
living in Maryland where his family had moved, he didn't have any real interest in his school
subjects. Ohanian told Inc. that he always felt ambivalent about school and formal education.
To him, school was just taking away from time to do what he cared about. And what
he really loved was spending time online chatting with strangers and playing video
games. Despite his lack of interest in schooling, Alexis Ohanian did his best to follow an academic
path and become a lawyer. It wasn't until he was prepping for the LSAT that he realized that
wasn't what he wanted for his future. He told Inc. that during his junior year of college,
he was in an LSAT prep course when he couldn't take it anymore. He recalled
flipping the test over, walking out, and going to a Waffle House. Ohanian said,
"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."
That epiphany started him down the path toward becoming an entrepreneur. But he
didn't have the idea for Reddit right away. He and his former college roommate
Steve Huffman's first startup attempt was called "MyMobileMenu," a mobile food ordering venture.
Although that dream didn't pan out, it got them started making connections,
including Paul Graham, who eventually helped them get started on Reddit.
Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, said they liked Huffman and Ohanian,
but not their idea. Huffman and Ohanian spent the next three weeks developing
what became Reddit. Ohanian described the simple concept to Inc., saying,
"It was just web links and text submitted by users, with Interesting or Uninteresting buttons."
Everything was going well, but about a month into creating Reddit, Ohanian
received shocking news. His then-girlfriend had fallen from a fifth-floor balcony and was
in a coma. Fortunately, she got out of the hospital a few months later,
but not long after that, Ohanian got a call from his dad saying that his mother had brain
cancer. Though shocking and tragic, the news did give him some perspective. Ohanian said,
"Waking up every morning with a company is a lot of pressure. But
when you're aware of what other people are waking up with, it's a whole lot easier."
Just 16 months after launching Reddit, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman sold the site for
around $10 million, according to CNBC. Ohanian was only 23 at the time. The quick acquisition
of Reddit was a huge and exciting surprise to Ohanian. Although he was open about the
big impact the sale had on his life, he kept the exact price to himself, telling Inc.,
"You can Google it, and you'll find it was between $10 million and $20 million."
After he got the money, the first person he wanted to call was his mother. She was sick with
cancer at the time and has since passed. Ohanian described his feeling in telling her the news,
"To be able to call her the morning after the money was in the bank ... meant the world to me."
Alexis Ohanian and Serena Williams' relationship seems like a real-life romcom, starting with
their surprise meeting in 2015. The two of them were staying in the same hotel in Rome,
where Williams was playing in the Italian Open later that day. Williams and Ohanian retold
their meeting to Vanity Fair, admitting that at first, Williams saw her future husband as
nothing more than an irritation. She was ordering breakfast with members of her team, and they were
expecting more people who were going to sit at a nearby table. When Ohanian took the table,
Williams' group started telling him there was a rat, hoping to scare him off. When Ohanian
told them he was from Brooklyn and rats didn't scare him, Williams invited him to sit with them.
Though they exchanged numbers, it wasn't obvious that they'd become
the power couple they are now. Williams even thought he was more interested in
one of her friends. But a few months later, she invited him to watch her
compete in Paris. Ohanian wasn't sure if the invitation was genuine, but he decided to go.
"And I figured, worst case scenario, if she blows me off for the weekend,
I have a great story of how I just got blown off for a weekend in Paris."
Fortunately, Williams exceeded his expectations, and the two of them explored Paris for hours
before her tournament. From that point on, their relationship and connection only grew.
While Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian are now proud and happy parents to their daughter,
Olympia, they weren't planning to get pregnant when it happened in
2017. Williams told Vanity Fair that she was shocked when the pregnancy
test was positive. She recalled her heart dropping and thinking,
"Oh my God, this can't — I've got to play a tournament. How am I going to play the
Australian Open? I had planned on winning Wimbledon this year."
When Ohanian came to meet her in Australia,
she handed him a bag with six positive pregnancy tests, and he was just as shocked by the news.
"It was really surreal."
Despite the initial surprise, Ohanian now sees himself as lucky, telling PageSix,
"It's been life-changing, and it's something that I never knew I wanted
it badly until I had it ... And then it just changed everything."
Though he's happy to be thought of first and foremost as Serena Williams' husband
and Olympia's father, Alexis Ohanian still follows his passions — including
his business career. Speaking on the Imposters podcast, Ohanian said he
sees being a businessman and a father as two big pillars of his identity. He explained,
"I spent most of my life, most of my adult life, really focusing on just the career part,
the first part, and then four years ago [I] became a dad. Things shifted.
And that is the lens through which I look at basically every decision."
Ohanian doesn't see his business aspirations as something that conflicts with parenting,
because he thinks it's valuable for his daughter to see him working. He said,
"I want to be doing my absolute best work for however long I can so
that my daughter can see me doing it, doing it in a way that I'm proud of,
that's she's proud of. I want her to see me put in work in something I really
care about and being passionate about something and caring about something."
In 2022, Serena Williams announced her retirement from tennis. After proving herself as the greatest
player time and time again, she still loves the sport but is walking away for her family. In a
piece she wrote for Vogue, Williams explained that she and Ohanian want to have another baby, saying,
"I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family ... If I were a guy,
I wouldn't be writing this because I'd be out there playing and winning while
my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family."
Though it was a difficult choice, it felt like the right time. After Williams shared
her plans to stop competing, Ohanian took to Instagram to share his support. He wrote,
"I've seen over the last seven years how much y'all love my
wife ... Plenty of folks have told me 'how Reddit changed their life,' but
the scale & impact of 'how Serena changed my life' stories absolutely dwarfs it."
In 2020, Alexis Ohanian announced he was resigning from Reddit's board.
Following his resignation, he requested that the board replace him with a Black candidate,
and also pledged future gains on his Reddit stock to initiatives to support
the Black community. Speaking to CBS This Morning about his resignation, he said,
"I didn't arrive at this easily. It was absolutely a hard decision."
However, thinking about his daughter ultimately pushed him to step down. Ohanian added,
"I realized I needed to look at myself ... and see what I could do to help contribute
some real positive change so that I could look my daughter in the eye when she's a
little bit older and she asks me what I did to help make this country and this
world a little bit better for her and for a whole lot of people who look like her."
Alexis Ohanian admitted he might not have made that decision if he wasn't
married to Serena Wiliams. By seeing her life and experiences up close,
he became more aware of the double standard they faced. Ohanian also
explained that their relationship opened his eyes to blind spots he's had, saying,
"To have that front row seat, not just to her greatness,
but everything she has to endure ... that made the education come really quickly."