Serena Williams’ tech entrepreneur husband Alexis Ohanian spent his Cinco De Mayo holiday with one of his wife’s hometown heroes who served as an early investor in his Reddit platform.
Ohanian was outside on Sunday, May 5, celebrating “a beautiful day” in Los Angeles with one of the city’s most prominent figures. In a photo shared on Twitter, the Reddit co-founder praised Snoop Dogg’s early support of his billion-dollar company.
“Beautiful day in LA. I appreciate this city so much. Got to catch up with a lot of friends,” Ohanian wrote.
“Some of you may
know @SnoopDogg was one of our earliest investors at @reddit during our spin-out & turnaround. Very few people wanted to invest in us back then. Snoop did. And ya never forget your Day Ones.”
Launched in 2005, Reddit serves as an online community where people from all over the world can connect and communicate on any topic. Ohanian co-founded the company alongside Steve Huffman while both were studying at the University of Virginia. The company started to take off after merging with Infogami’s Aaron Swartz, who rewrote coding for Reddit.
Just one year after its
launch, Ohanian and Huffman sold Reddit to Conde Nast for around $10-$20 million. As it continued to grow in users and valuation, the investments came swarming in. By 2014 when Reddit was valued at a reported $500 million, Snoop Dogg joined a group of investors in a $50 million financing round for the link-sharing and discussion site.It was the organizer of the investment group who sought Snoop out due to his celebrity status and how popular he already was on the site’s “Ask Me Anything” discussion forums. Snoop was also high on Reddit’s wish list of investors they wanted to join the company.
“He’s like a Reddit superstar,” Sam Altman, Open AI CEO and co-founder, said of Snoop Dogg. “The site loves him. Snoop was high on the list. We asked him to invest, and he said yes.”
The “Gin and Juice” rapper doesn’t really talk about his early investment in Reddit but did previously share how he got his foot in the door.
“I worked my way in. You understand me? I didn’t mean to tell everybody, but I’m a part of Reddit too,” Snoop Dogg said to Ohanian on GGN News in 2017.
Reddit is currently valued at $10.68 billion, with a share price of $67.67. It’s a drastic jump from the $5 billion it was valued at in 2021.
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