After coming into the general public markets in March, Reddit inventory is up 15% from launch, whereas year-over-year income and adjusted earnings are up 20% and 23%, respectively. A September 2023 replace to the Google algorithm gave Reddit heightened visibility in search outcomes, almost tripling its visitors in simply over a yr. And in February, the corporate struck a $60 million content material licensing settlement with Google.
Ohanian was not on the helm as these occasions unfolded, and he’s fast to credit score present management for the latest success. However after many years of underperformance, the narrative round Reddit has these days undergone a profound shift. Reasonably than trailing behind, it seems as an alternative that the platform merely wanted the remainder of the web to catch up.
It was this similar sense of prescience that led Ohanian to embark upon his newest, and arguably most formidable enterprise: constructing out the universe of girls’s sports activities. Like Reddit, the world of feminine athletics has, till lately, been outlined by underappreciation, each by way of its cultural affect and industrial potential.
Ohanian, nonetheless, considers this oversight his benefit. Free from the hidebound traditions that govern males’s sports activities, ladies’s athletics have the chance to rethink each factor of sport and optimize it for the digital age.
Nothing embodies the audacity of this idea greater than Athlos, a first-of-its-kind observe competitors created by Ohanian that goals to reimagine the oldest sport on this planet—partially by putting ladies athletes at its middle. Like Reddit, the enterprise is of venture on the long run, a thesis whose returns—in the event that they materialize in any respect—could possibly be many years within the making.
“In sports activities, so many choices are decided by previous precedent, doing issues the best way they’ve all the time been finished,” Ohanian mentioned. “On this planet of tech startups, if you happen to assume that manner, you fail. With Athlos, we’re questioning each factor and constructing one of the best model of the product doable.”
Rising the infrastructure
Curiosity in ladies’s sports activities has risen dramatically previously few years. Deloitte forecast that the trade will generate greater than $1 billion in income in 2024, a 300% improve from its 2021 valuation—however Ohanian was early to the chance.
In 2019, after seeing Reign FC, the Seattle outpost of the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League, promote for simply $3.5 million, Ohanian realized how undervalued NWSL franchises have been. Reign’s star athlete, world sensation Megan Rapinoe, was most likely value $3 million simply on her personal, he figured.
The subsequent yr, Ohanian turned a founding investor within the Los Angeles NWSL workforce Angel Metropolis FC on the belief that it might mature in worth. This July, the funding paid off: Disney chief government Bob Iger and his spouse Willow Bay, a dean on the College of Southern California, acquired a controlling stake within the workforce, valuing it at $250 million.
