Alexis Ohanian’s Next Big Bet: Women’s Sports

Alexis Ohanian will not be a fan of pickleball.

He has ample purpose to not be, after all. The 41-year-old co-founder of Reddit and the enterprise agency Seven Seven Six is married to Serena Williams, one of many biggest tennis gamers of all time. In recent times, the 2 sports activities have more and more discovered themselves at odds with each other, competing over every little thing from courtroom area to sponsorship {dollars}.

However his particular criticism is extra revealing. 

“Can the atomic unit—can its elementary highlights—go viral?” Ohanian mentioned. “Till I see a pickleball spotlight go viral, I don’t assume it’s an actual sport.”

The comment is a throwaway jab, the sort of light ribbing acquainted to any sports activities fan. However it’s also laced with the logic of somebody who has an intuitive understanding of how tradition—and athletics—perform within the digital age.

Ohanian, who leads the 2024 class of ADWEEK’s Model Genius honorees, has constructed his whole profession on his capacity to know how communities behave on-line. He co-founded Reddit in 2005, then spent 15 years remodeling the platform into one of many web’s most important web sites. 

He left the platform in 2020 in an act of protest, compelling its board of administrators to shutter quite a lot of hateful boards and fill his board seat with a Black government. He now has restricted specific affect on the corporate and is as an alternative targeted on his enterprise portfolio, which has invested in startups starting from MrBeast’s snack model Feastables to the reusable rocket agency Stoke Area.

However lately, the so-called entrance web page of the web has flourished. As generative AI threatens to drown the online in commodity content material, the worth of Reddit and its logged-in, question-answering person base has risen in conjunction.