Episode with Alexis Ohanian (Co-Founder of Reddit and 776 Fund)

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Build in Public podcast. I'm KP, your host, and today I am beyond thrilled. I have with me probably the biggest guest of the year, but Gary Vee was on the show too, so I'm gonna—

Bigger, bigger than Gary. Come on.

Clash of the titans. Alexis Ohanian, the man who needs no intro. Thank you for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. Happy to finally make this happen. I incorporated 776 on September 1st of last year. So 2020, uh, it's my daughter's birthday, coincidentally.

Oh,

and well, not so coincidentally, Caitlin, my partner, did that.

Of course.

So, you know, it's been just over a year and since founding my latest and last endeavor, this venture capital firm, and I've just been very, very, very, very, very focused and head down on building. That first year is so important in a business and so Whether it's been building the team or building the software like Cerebro, or just making good investments and helping those companies. I've just really, I've Heisman'd almost all press unless it was specifically to help launch a portfolio company. I just Heisman'd everything. And I'm finally coming out of my shell now, one year in, to start to talk a little bit about what we built. I also don't like talking about the things that I haven't done yet. I would much rather do them and then maybe reflect on the sort of the things learned from doing as opposed to just— Big sky talking, because talking doesn't do

it. What's been interesting about this journey, even though you say you've been kind of quiet, like kind of, you know, well, not really.

I've been not doing interviews quiet. I still tweet my face off.

Yes. And I think that's awesome. And then there's an arc that you make all of us, including me and a lot of your fans, a lot of your peers and friends, investors, you make them follow that arc because you're kind of showing under the hood, like, What kind of almost day-to-day decisions you're taking, what kind of pros and cons you weigh. Sometimes you talk about Cerebro, like the software you guys are building, which is very, again, very refreshing for a VC fund to have such a cutting-edge software product.

Yeah, this is right. It's a startup that just happens to deploy venture capital.

I love that.

And I'm inspired by this generation of founders, usually through Twitter, building in public, talking about their ups and their downs. You know, a founder like Josh over at Metafy, he posts every month his investor update publicly. And I think this trend continues to snowball throughout startups, and I hope it continues to snowball throughout venture capital because we're trying to do it that way, inspired by founders, because I think you just end up learning a lot more faster. You end up building a community a lot faster. Those are all things that just help you be more successful, and that's why we want to do it too.

I think also, given your reach, Right. It's unprecedented with Twitter, right? Like the countries, the rooms that you've never gone into, or you would never be able to travel to personally, you can reach that audience through Twitter, through content.

That's

why you do such a great job at this.

I, thanks. I have, I've got some for sure. But I also, I don't know, I probably should think more before I tweet. That's my secret is I don't think before I tweet, I just go, but I really, I want, I'm at a point in my life where I am only more motivated than ever, partially thanks to becoming a father. And I want to be— I realize actually even broadly, we at 776 want to be building this way because we are so impatient. We want to see change. We want to build the change. And then we want to do it in a way where we share the ups and the downs, the mistakes and the successes so that others can build faster too. And there is, I think, a silver lining to this horrific pandemic, which is it's motivated a lot of people to look at their lives in the last couple of years and just say, you know what? I got to do something else. I got to— there are big problems that need to get solved. There's this, you know, we've had— I've invested in more what I would call repeat founders in the last year than I have in the last 10 years. And founders who had started a startup specifically, so they'd started a company, they had gotten acquired or shut down, you know, acquihired, maybe for a modest outcome, or shut the company down and joined a big company. And then in the last year, basically looked around and said, this is the time for me to go build, and came back and said, okay, I'm ready. Like this, I need— I can't spend the next decade working at blah, I have to build this thing. And when that hits a founder, and then you certainly amidst all the existential dread of the last couple of years, you just, you want to hang on, you want to, you want to give them funding and help them build it because they are going to have a different kind of fire under them than founders of the past. And so I really do think this horrific last year and a half, 2 years has galvanized some really amazing builders. It's going to keep doing it, I think, for the next year or 2, especially as people decide, you know what, I have to do this, whatever this is, I have to build this in the world. I need to solve this problem. And it means doing this job is amazing because we get to invest in some really inspirational and motivating folks.

So let's get to the foundations. How would you define building in public? What does it mean to you?

In the simplest form, sharing as you go metrics, updates, things that you would normally only be sharing with insiders, with the entire internet. And Metafy is a perfect example in a lot of ways because it is just literally sharing the investor update that normally only I or other investors would see with everyone. And it's a good muscle to exercise because when you consider eventually, if your endgame is to be a public company, you have to do public reporting. You do it every quarter and it's, you know, there's a bunch of accountants and a bunch of other people and it's a lot more to compute. Right. But it's the same muscle. You're exercising that muscle a lot earlier now. And I think the reason it didn't happen sooner was because so many founders or CEOs, our motivation was more private because of, I think, just fear, insecurity, not wanting to show, you know, the trough of sorrow, 6 months of flat growth, right? And, you know, the quarter where you're worried about not making payroll, at least until after it happens. And then you do the retrospective and you're like, okay, here are the 2 years you didn't know about our startup when blah, blah, blah happened. And here are the charts and here's everything. And I think enough people found that more and more helpful that they thought, okay, let's just flip the script. If we, if we share in public from the start, from day one, and we build in public that way, it doesn't feel like we're sacrificing anything because that's just the culture of the org. And we're starting at zero. So like we're, we're starting at failure essentially, right? The company's dead. Right. And then it's, you have an idea, you, you know, raise some funding or you get some early revenue or some early customers or some combination of those things. And all of a sudden you're not dead. You're at least, you know, there's a glimmer of hope and there's a little money in the door or some traction or whatever. And by doing it from the very, very start, you are just setting a different standard and you're then getting people like your own customers, your own early adopters, of which there are far more now than there were 16 years ago when I was starting Reddit. Right. You get them believing in the business. You get them caring a lot more than they should about some random startup on the internet and it becomes a differentiator. And then when a couple of CEOs do it and have success, it inspires other CEOs to do it, which inspires more and more. And, you know, we're in the middle of that flywheel now of inspiration. And as Josh and Metafy continue to have more and more success, that alone is going to inspire more to want to do the same.

I think one thing that's unique when I see founders like Josh share both not just the upside, but also the red, the flat part of the graphs and charts, is this healthy sense of detachment from the outcome and just believing in the process, right? Because that's, that's what it's signaling. Like, okay, we had a— we tried 4 things. in Q3. 3 worked, 1 didn't work, but wait until Q4. Here's what we're going to still try. And so that kind of vulnerability is so magnetic, right? And so how should investors see this? And I'm curious, as you know, your peers, investors, you know, people who are fund managers and people who are looking at founders who are on the fence of building in public and like, okay, should they encourage them? Should they, should they say, all right, don't share everything? Like, how— what's the conversation that you typically have with your peers?

You know, I mean, this is something I think I should be doing a lot more of, candidly. I think so many founders wrap— I mean, myself included, we wrap ourselves so tightly in the identity of our companies, and we're so married to that success and failure, and it's hard to separate it. And even as investors now, a lot of the coaching that we do with our founders is to help them deal with and sort of separate themselves from the successes or failures of their company every month, because they're inevitable, and we face them in our own way. And I candidly, I wish I could be a lot more public. Part of what holds a venture fund back is if you are technically fundraising, you can't be doing things that could be construed as solicitation. And, and so generally, so then the lawyer advice is just don't talk at all about anything. And I think, look, there's good— I think there's— I understand the reason why those rules exist, but the trend lines continue to move towards more transparency, more candor, and I think they're going to evolve. But for founders in particular, our mindset is how do we support you? We invest at the earliest possible stage, often when there's no team, like even no product, just an idea. And how do we then support those founders as much as possible? And part of it in the work that we do to help them, everything from introductions to workshops to just brainstorming sessions, to even setting aside real dollars. We have 2% of every investment we make in an early-stage company is set aside for the founders to use. And half of that is fronted by us, the firm, out of our fees. The other half comes from our LP base because they care about this too. And founders can use it for everything from their mental health to physical health to family needs. So that's, you know, that means a founder can come and say, hey, I want these dollars for an executive coach. It can mean they need these dollars for a surfboard, you know, because that's just what they need for their— to sort of reset. They could need it. They could take the money for a babysitter and date night with their partner. Great. That's awesome. The important part here is when you're starting a company, and I've been there enough times to know, you are already carrying so much weight of the success and failure of this business. And you're the most valuable asset in the company. You're— you, the individual, are the person we are investing in. You are the entire company, because there is no team, right? There's very little product. The market is still undefined. Like, and so any investment that we as investors can make in the success of the founders, like as human will lead to a greater outcome for us as investors because it will mean they'll be more likely to, you know, get the next round of funding and keep growing a successful business. Then any employees they bring onto their team are going to be more likely to be supported in the same way. So now all of a sudden we're scaling this one investment to drive returns, not just for our founders, but for every person the founder hires, because that starts— that sets the culture from day one, which now scales in really interesting ways. And it's going to look like table stakes in the future, I really believe, because— To do this job at scale, repeatably well, that is early-stage investing, you have to be differentiated from all the other ways to take money or to give money to a great founder. And so even my dog Adora agrees it's going to be— I hope it's going to get replicated by other firms and then we'll have to just try harder to come up with some other way to differentiate. But I think it's going to be pretty apparent over the next 5 years how important this is because we'll have founders who took advantage of the program in, you know, at pre-seed or seed that are then the founders of multi-billion-dollar companies and, you know, they're going to tweet one day, hey,

yeah,

they're going to— it mattered. This program, I used it for this. It affected the company. Here's how. And it doesn't take a lot for that meme to spread. And I know, you know, in the earliest days of Reddit, like during Y Combinator, as a first-time CEO right out of college, I had my then-girlfriend was in a pretty serious accident, fell out of a window while she was studying abroad. She was in a coma for 6 months. I spent a lot of time trying to go back and forth and spend time with her. My mother gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was a lot in those first months of building And if Y Combinator had something like this to say, look, you know, we know you're dealing with a lot. You're already carrying all this weight as a first-time CEO and a founder here. You know, here's $5,000 that you can use for travel or whatever, because especially as a first-time CEO, you know, we only had $12,000 in the bank. We raised, I think, another $60,000 at Demo Day. So we had $75,000, let's call it, in the bank, right? We didn't have much burn, but that's because we were cheap college kids. And I didn't want to spend an extra nickel on something. I wasn't paying for these. I wasn't getting a salary, like money for that. So obviously founders are much better capitalized now, 16 years later, but still a great CEO is always looking to extend runway, especially in those early years, as much as possible. And I don't want them sacrificing to the point where they're hurting, like really damaging themselves. And I would rather folks who can afford it, investors like us, help pick up the tab.

You know, I think there's also a bit of a stigma around asking for help if you're a founder.

Yeah.

Right.

That's

because you're supposed to know all the answers. You're supposed to figure it out. You're supposed to be invincible, like stoic and all that. And I think, as you said, going forward, we will see founders being vulnerable and open and honest that, hey, man, this is a stressful job, right? Like, this is like, it's not as sexy as you saw in the movie, uh, Mark Zuckerberg's Social Network or something. It's there. The highs are super high and the lows are super low. Yeah. I do need some help. I think we're seeing a wave of founders open to executive coaching, just therapy, Just mental, like coaching and then, you know, apps like Calm and Headspace, right? I think it's time.

It's definitely gotten better and it's just, there's still a lot more to be done. And I even see this for ourselves, only one year in, we're already workshopping ways in the new year to make sure founders take more advantage of this, this program. Even we saw the same thing at Reddit. Caitlin, my partner at 776, had built a very similar program for folks at Reddit so they could tap into this. This helped us fight burnout. improve retention, et cetera. And like anything, you actually end up having to spend a lot more time than you realize just reminding people the program exists, coercing them to do it, even when they're not founders, even if they're just employees at a startup. So breaking the stigma is important. And then even beyond that, just making sure it's in front of folks and they know they can take advantage of it is a big deal. And I do think, I think you're absolutely right. The culture around this has changed so much in 16 years, and I think the momentum just continues to work in our favor.

So another theme that emerges from blending these 2 topics of being vulnerable, being honest and being transparent and also building in public and storytelling is this theme of consistency and being just telling a story over and over again. And I think one, I'm curious how you feel about this because a lot of your tweets are repetitive, Alexis. I'm sorry. I'm just kidding. Because when you say the right thing, people assume that the world will pause, stop, take notes, and then change habits. No one cares.

No one cares. It's the hardest thing to learn as a first-time founder.

What is it like to go on? I mean, I think unpack that because I think even your stage where you are as a fund manager, as a founder, or as a VC, whoever identity, you just have to keep repeating the right things over and over. But I think that's another thing about building in public where people think that it's just a one-time, like, all right, one thread, boom, it's over. No. Like,

no,

be prepared to do it 50 times a year.

It's very repetitive. And I think that's something I still have to remind myself of. So as a CEO for the first time, you learn pretty quickly that you have to repeat things. I forget, there's a rule, it's like a dozen times for it to stick. And most of us, or at least I'll say for me in particular, I just assume like, oh, I hear something. If I hear something once, I remember it the first time. Like, why can't people— why does it take people 12 times? The reality is it takes everyone, including me, everyone, it takes a good dozen times to repeat stuff. So as a CEO, especially as the team starts to grow, you feel there's this weird Groundhog Day feeling because you are repeating yourself multiple times throughout the day. Like you'll find yourself saying the same thing at all hands that you keep saying because you just need to say it that many times to get people to really remember and have it stick. And it doesn't matter how high Performing the team is still the same issue, and so that's the outcropping.

Yeah, imagine that that's

a controlled environment where you know there's only 300 people in this room, like,

and they're

paid, and they're paid to

listen to

you. Paid to listen, yes. And and as a leader, you you learn pretty quickly that like no, that actually doesn't matter, and you still have to beat yourself a ton. And so now, as you're saying, you take it out to the global zeitgeist, and yeah, I knock out a tweet, and I'm like man, that was a good tweet. I feel so good about that tweet. And you know, best case scenario, I mean, I like absolute best case scenario. I I was actually. Sneakily launching this webcam company. So that tweet had the 5 million impressions and that was a solid tweet, right? But there were still so many people, including I'm sure some of those 5 million impressions in quotes that have no recollection of this tweet, didn't even see the tweet. Like, no, like the reality is even the most viral tweets that purportedly have millions of people seeing them actually are ignored, forgotten, whatever you want to call it, never even seen in the first place. And so then take a typical tweet that just goes off Into the ether. And what's wild is even if every single one of those people saw it and processed it, you'd still be reaching just a fraction, which is why I've had to get in this habit of the same kind of repetition. And I do feel bad for the few people who have decided to get notified on every single tweet that I put out there. The bell icon for you? Yeah. If you've clicked the bell icon on me, I'm sorry because you're probably like, goddammit, dude, I know about Web3. I get why you're excited about the Nova Viable community. Please stop. But that's such a tiny Percentage. And it's just, it's a very humbling thing every time I have to remind myself how few people actually care what I have to say. And so I remind myself of that often.

So a lot of, a lot of early-stage founders come to me and then they're like, KP, I tweeted about my company, my startup, or I did the thread, or I had 4 viral tweets in a month. Nobody cares. I'm like, yeah, nobody will care. That's the point. You know, only your mom to earn it.

Only

your mom is going to care. It could take years to enter the zeitgeist and be relevant. And my other thing too, I think you know this very Well, like great products don't sell themselves. It's another popular meme, right? People think when I build, like, if I build this, they will come or something, some version of that. You know how many touchpoints it took for me to switch from Zoom to Riverside? I know the guys, like I told them.

I told you straight up, I'm doing this interview as long as you get on Riverside.

That's why I did it.

Okay.

So you see that, but it's not that I didn't know Riverside. I knew it. It's just that my lazy ass habits, Zoom was working.

I want you to have greatness. KP, right?

But then it just took Alexis to reply to one of my emails and say, KP, I'm doing this only if you do it over Slack or something. And I'm like, all right, finally. I took the 8 minutes to switch and I'm like, oh my God, this is the best. Now I'm a big advocate. Like everywhere I'm like, oh my God, they have this thing called Magic Editor, which is my favorite. We just shipped this.

It's dope,

right? I'm like, oh yeah. I'm like, so dope, so dope, right? But again, the same thing, like to enter the zeitgeist with something like Zoom is so freaking hard. You have to keep talking about this, keep talking Until like it oversaturates almost. You feel like, oh, okay, now I think maybe enough people know, right? So that's, it's a very long game, even when you have the product.

100% right. And that, that's the thing people, they do not appreciate and yet is so, so crucial. So freaking crucial.

So let's talk about a few other points I have for you. Of course, about Reddit. I would be remiss if I missed asking you Reddit journey questions. I'm sure you've answered this millions of times, but I'm going to throw a curveball. Like I'm going to say, What do you regret about not doing enough while you were at Reddit in the early days?

I mean, so this was from 2005 to 2010, and then I came back in 2014 and then left for good, I guess, last year, really. But the first go-around, I really— you have to remember the context. 2005, no one is starting a startup. It was just a very different landscape. Facebook was still in colleges. Twitter didn't exist. Nothing else in social media did not exist as a phrase.

Digg was the biggest competition.

This is 4 or 5 years before the iPhone. Yeah. So we built a desktop-based website to let people share links and had some nifty things we could do in Ajax to make— like, I designed these cute little up and down arrows and karma score and awards and all this stuff to incentivize people to get them to want to comment and post. And it would appear in real time, which was a pretty unique thing. And, you know, you didn't have to wait for the page to reload. So like, this was a weird— this was like, we're kind of playing with really brand new tools to do something kind of nifty that was just a remix of forums, which have been around for as long as the internet's been around. And that really, like, there's probably, look, there are lots of micro decisions I would have done differently. And like I said, as a first-time CEO, I just, there were so many things I didn't know and I didn't know that I didn't know. And even Y Combinator, this was their first batch. So Paul Graham had no idea what

he was doing. Actually, most people don't know this. You were part of the first ever

Y Combinator. Very first Y Combinator. Yeah. And, and so it was very, I mean, it was intimate. I think there were only 10 or 11 companies. We would meet at this little house that Paul owned in the suburbs of Cambridge, Massachusetts. We'd meet once a week on Tuesdays for dinner and there'd be a guest speaker, but the guest speaker was like one of Paul's friends. It wasn't like the founders of Airbnb. It was just like, here's Paul's friend. He's a lawyer. He'll answer your questions about corporate law. Like it was amateur hour. Like it, and by Paul and Jessica's own admission, they had no idea what they were doing, but they had the right instinct and they clearly got it very right. But there weren't, I didn't have folks I could talk to about, you know, the acquisition offer I'd gotten from Conde Nast. And all I knew was, hey, they want to buy this company for $10 million. This is for 16 months worth of work, more money than my family will make their entire working lives. And I felt like I'd be a jackass for not taking it. And, you know, at that point had only raised $72,000 and no salaries. No, I mean, this is so much of what motivated me to become an investor was realizing if I had someone who had some more experience, had some more savviness, who could sit me down and who I could just talk to candidly, at least what I would've told my younger self is like, dude, if it's working this well, take that acquisition offer and go raise money, and then you can hire people, and then you can actually pay yourself a salary. And then like, these are good things that are happening to you. It's still early. Like, there's no shame in just raising money and going on it further. And even something that— right, that is elementary advice. That's not even advice. No one would even need to give that advice in 2021 because it is so obvious. Because 16 years later, there's so much more awareness. Startups are, you know, it's ubiquitous. There's YouTube videos, there's all this stuff. There's so much more knowledge and so much less ignorance for that kind of thing. And so what I'm So in many ways, a lot of my bad decisions or less good decisions were rooted in an ignorance that I can't regret because it was a product of the time. Certainly plenty of things I could have done differently, but no regrets about it. And it was really the second time around coming back to Reddit in 2014 to help lead the turnaround as executive chairman. And, you know, ultimately that's how I met and hired Caitlin and Lizzie, who came in and joined me to start 776. Going through it with them, being in the trenches of that turnaround was very formative. I feel like that's where I actually learned how to lead, how to manage, how to deal with the ups and downs of hiring and firing and all of that. And, and actually scale a business from nearly zero revenue to, let's just say, a lot more. And, you know, multi-billion dollar valuations and really get to see people on the team who were just excellent. And then really understanding the value of building teams geared towards excellence, building and aligning folks around a vision and around relentless execution and the stuff that just really makes companies a amazing because you can get a lot of high-performing people together to achieve something in a pretty short order of time. That is remarkable. It's exhilarating. It's— and I feel like I have the best job now because I get to help founders and CEOs much smarter than me, much better than me do these things. And I get 60% of the upside of satisfaction, but only like 1% of the downside. Because when the days are bad, like I feel bad because I'm a reasonably empathetic person, but I don't actually— like I hate the way Yeah. As a founder, as a CEO, like you sleep over it, it weighs on you, this existential dread. And even when things are going well, because you just don't know what could happen next quarter. And that's a very interesting thing that when people ask, do you prefer, do you ever want to go back to being a founder or CEO of a startup? And I'm like, absolutely not. And one of the reasons why is founding a venture capital firm, you actually know exactly the existential dread part is gone. A big part of it, which is, you know, because of how these funds work, you know how much you have in fees at the start of every year, right? Because it's a fixed amount that is a percentage of the total fund size. So you know exactly how many dollars you're gonna have on January 1st. And your goal is to basically get as close to zero as possible by the end of the year for salaries, for all the other stuff that makes the business run. Then you know, January 1st of the next year, how much money is in the door. So as long as you can budget properly for 4 quarters, you're never like you— there's, there's no existential dread of, oh, there's no like, well, what if we don't hit our numbers? What if we make this trade-off and it doesn't, you know, we want to accelerate growth, but it doesn't pay off. Like, that doesn't exist anymore. Because as long as you can handle some basic budgeting, you know, things are gonna be fine. Everyone's getting paid every month, you're good. And it's such a subtle but huge, huge distinction that I can't unsee it. I can't go back. This is why I want to do it for the rest of my life. And then it also just makes me appreciate all the folks who actually have to sleep with that every single night, because I remember it, but I don't— it's— I'm not living it.

Theme that you touched on is, I think, why I personally I believe great founders, or even just founders, make for better investors because that empathy is unbelievable. It's unmatched.

For sure. And the next best thing, if not a founder, is at least a builder or an operator or someone who's had experience creating something. You could have created an online community, you could have created a web app, you could have created a white paper. But the folks who are going to be most valued on the cap tables of the future, the not too distant future, are the builders or the creators or the ones who actually have practical experience actually doing the things, not just deploying capital. Whereas traditionally the investor class, all of this venture capital, all of finance, right? These are folks who have spent their entire working lives usually just learning about how to move money or analyze. And that could not be more undervalued in startups. Now there's, so there's a couple of fintech startups like, okay, you can make the case, but by and large it is, it is so undervalued. And what is so overvalued is real practical experience and operating ability. And that's, that's the thing that founders are gravitating towards. And I don't blame them.

Right. So Web3, what would Alexis do if you were in this era as this— I mean, as in, like, I'm not talking as if you were, like, from the time travel, but I mean, like, the 23-year-old Alexis just discovered Web3, wants to start something like Reddit. What's the playbook?

That's a good question. I'd probably ship some MVP that lets you connect via wallet. And I mean, the forum, like, at the end of the day, the underlying technology— I mean, Reddit is— we open sourced it years ago. Like, the sauce is around the community. And what's so powerful about Web3 is that you finally align community incentives properly because you can reward people who are early and right about participating in the right communities early. And 2005, Alexis, I had to create upvotes and downvotes and karma scores and these daily awards just to kind of gamify the experience. Again, 2005, this was a fairly novel concept. Okay. Trust me, before Foursquare and Gowalla and all that, like this was a way to get people to care about internet points that were utterly meaningless. outside of Reddit, but gave a status that if you believed people would care about the community, you would believe they would care about their status within the community. And that was my bet. And it worked.

Which translates really well to Web3 now.

Dude, I mean, it's the fact that it worked in spite of it not having real value means to me, and I look, not the smartest guy in the room, but if it worked when it was pointless, when there was no real value to the points, then when there is real value and you can pay your rent with the points, so to speak, it's going to work even better, right? Like, that's— that line of thinking is pretty straightforward. In many ways, Reddit was ahead of its time. We used the best tools we could. I mean, even, dude, I still remember hacking together the first storefront, which was— it was actually the first co-founder fight that I had with Spez, which was I really wanted to sell merch and I thought this would be a good revenue stream. And I think I thought our users would want it. And anyway, he was very opposed, but I overrode. And so I ordered like 400 of these shirts, had them sent to the house, to our little apartment, and then I put this storefront up and hacked it together because there was no Stripe and there was no Shopify. So I hacked together some HTML and some PayPal. Again, 2005, I made this janky checkout, took some photos, posted it up, sold out in a day. And I went to the post office the next day with 2 garbage bags over my back like Santa with these mailers that I had personally hand-stuffed and signed the cards and mailed out these t-shirts. And in that moment, I saw, okay, in 2005, 400 random people on the internet cared enough about this little alien that I drew while I was bored in marketing class to give us money in exchange for wearing it on their torso. And that's a huge, huge gift from

a

testament. Huge. Yeah. And the fact that it had worked that early on was so encouraging and so motivating. So then, you know, when I see profile pics, right, what is wearing something on our torso digitally is basically what? It's our profile picture, right? Right. Sort of, I know, eventually, okay, metaverse, blah, blah, blah. But for all intents and purposes, the ubiquitous metaverse right now lives in profile pictures. Eventually, you know, this, I won't get into all that. But at the end of the day, we're seeing the same signals that we saw back then, except the tools are so much more valuable. Because if you bought one of those shirts, I still have one of them somewhere in storage. Maybe you could make a few bucks off of it on eBay as like a collectible, but you could be certain that if those were NFTs, that today those would be incredibly valuable.

Yeah. Oh my God. I mean, I think I'm very curious to see what, like, which founder from where will create the next Reddit. Of course, will look and feel different.

I've been saying I mean, there's, you see these pop up. There have been, look, there have been different versions in the past. The, you know, there was one called Steemit that years ago just had really messed up incentives because they, what they got wrong was they thought they should incentivize people to post content so you would get rewarded for the upvotes. That just incentivizes the worst behavior because it's this sort of, it devolves into really lazy posting to get upvotes.

Yeah. Just not,

which

not interesting enough stuff.

It's not about community at that point. It's about, let me just post something lots of people are going to like so I can make some money. So they misaligned the

incentives. It has to align to the karma points though, somehow. I think what you had going with the karma points is so apt. And because now if you think about it, right, like karma points are not just about spamming the forum, you know, right? You have to earn them and somebody has to give you the gold. Like, it's so cool, like the core mechanics.

Well, I'll tell you, it was almost all by accident. And, you know, I was inspired by so many different games that I played did growing up, like even the leaderboards, right? That's just classic old school arcade leaderboards.

Yeah.

The awards in your trophy case are based off of GoldenEye because at the end of GoldenEye Deathmatch on the N64, you know, it's 4 people playing usually, only one could win. So the other 3 would get these little awards that would be like most cowardly. And, and it was a way to create a conversation piece even for the worst players who would never ever win anything. They still got to talk about like, oh, that's BS. Or, or the, you know, like whatever. Like, and I realized, okay, that's, that's a fun dynamic. Once karma scores got pretty high, and it didn't take that long, you know, after a few months, people are getting tens of thousands or 100,000 karma points. Someone shows up and sees that the leaders have 100,000, they're like demoralized from the start because they just think, I'm never gonna catch up.

Never gonna be that guy. Yeah. Okay.

So then we started to create, you know, I realized, okay, let me create these daily awards. And some of them have actually become like the most famous one is the end year badge. And like that, people to this day introduce themselves to me not as their government name, not as their Reddit username, but I'm a 12-year Redditor because it means something to that community and that little icon has tremendous value. And again, those are all NFTs. Like we'd be in a very, very different setup. And so I think I lucked into a lot of the right design decisions. I think today someone building it, the most recent one I saw is just called GM. Someone building it today is able to learn all the lessons, all the things that we got right, all the things we got wrong and build something that I think can do just some really interesting stuff. It's to me, we were standing on the shoulders of giants in 2005. Today, someone building in 2021 is standing on the shoulders of giants that are standing on the shoulders of other giants. And I think to get to an MVP with a minimum viable community is going to be so much faster. Like,

yeah,

2005, I had to convince people, like most people who I pitched Reddit to were in disbelief that the average person would spend a majority of their day posting on the internet. Again, in 2005, the typical response I heard was there is no way I or anyone is going to spend most of their day posting on the internet or reading stuff from other random people on the internet. That was, that was the mindset in 2005 of most everyone I pitched Reddit to. Obviously today it'd be hard to imagine anyone not spending the vast majority of their day creating or consuming content online by other strangers, from other strangers, all that. But now everyone understands this. The technology is ubiquitous. The cultural tendencies are already there. And yes, you know, crypto awareness is not yet mainstream. You still got to figure out how to set up a wallet. You still have to sync and sort of get onboarded, but that's going to get solved. That's a UI/UX problem in the next year or two that's going to get solved.

Yeah, I think it's about a year or two away from super mass adoption. I want to jump topics to the business dad.

Sure. One business dad.

Oh my God, you've been a great example, and I mean this sincerely. You've been a great, great example, a Now to be someone I look up to for years, of course, but especially since 2021, April, when my son was born. And it really hit me what you were trying to say all these years. And I really had to figure out a way to still be ambitious and do all the things I want to do from a career perspective. I wanted to start a podcast, wanted to be an operator at On Deck and all that stuff. It comes with all these responsibilities, but also being insanely present and empathetic towards the needs of this infant, you know, who is very needy, as you know.

It gets better. It gets better.

I want to— I really want to unpack this with you, Alexis, because again, not a lot of people are talking about this. And I think this podcast hopefully can be an avenue where, you know, you share why being this #businessdad means something to you, why you consistently— again, one of those things where you talk about consistently, why.

Why am I so annoying about this? It's because I finally, becoming a dad, I finally understood. I finally understood what I was going to care about for the rest of my life. And it's a humbling thing when you've been spending your entire life— like, I've, I've was, I was a pretty ambitious kid too. And so like, I would, I mean, I'd be hanging out with my guys. These are still my closest friends to this day. I'll be playing Age of Empires with them tonight on Discord. Like, we would be hanging out and I would, I don't know, we'd all be taking— I'd be waiting to take turns to play, I don't know, TIE Fighter. And while I'd be waiting, I would just be thinking about something that I wanted to be working on or something that was going on in my Quake 2 clan or my Request Guild, or like I was always thinking about or scheming something, not always business related, but like creation or building or doing, or back then it was just like websites. But I always had that mindset and I spent all of my adult life, spent like 15 years of my adult life trying really hard to build a great career, doing what I loved and being as successful as possible at it. And then you become a dad and realize with Within an instant, that all doesn't matter in the same way. And I still care just as much. I am, like I said, I think I'm actually more ambitious now than I was before becoming a father, but I have something else competing for that ambition, which is what makes me more ambitious because I know that I have this other force in my life that I really care deeply about, which is my family and specifically my child. And when that transformation happens, and I think once I started, basically I got into a club that I didn't know there existed because I started talking to friends of mine who were already dads who were, you know, wildly successful in their own industries, entertainment, sports, business, tech, whatever, didn't matter. And once I unlocked, once I showed them my dad card, it unlocked this side of our conversations that went to a very different place because it's all of a sudden all these people who I admired and respected for the work that they did and the greatness they had and achieved in other industries, all of a sudden started talking about how much this, this part of their lives Meant to them too. And it wasn't something they would've shared with me before, 'cause it's kind of obnoxious to talk about it with people who are not also dads, 'cause it's like, okay, asshole, I get it. You love your kid, whatever. But once you get into the club, and then once you realize there are lots of other just very ambitious people who also have a similar kind of drive to what they aspire to be as dads and struggle with it and all the other stuff, it unlocks something else that is really exciting. And it's something that historically Historically, we've buried as a, as a culture. You know, if you think of mass media, it's usually the Homer Simpson dad. It's usually the Married... with Children dad. It's, it's the either like totally checked out dad or the like Don Draper, like my career is everything. And I really do not care at all what happens with the kids. Right. And it was those paradigms, which, yeah, for sure, there's truth in that. But the thing that I found time and time again is the advice I hear from, from guys who are older than me, especially when they're granddads, wildly successful, doesn't matter what industry, whether again, politics, business, sport, does not matter. They continue to reflect upon and impress upon me how important this time is to build a foundational relationship with a child who— someone— this goes viral every year. When you see the amount of time you end up spending with your kids, and you realize the amount of hours, like, I gotta— we gotta pull this chart up for the show notes. You see the amount of time you get to spend, and then you actually get to see the amount of time you spend with your parents as well. And you start to understand them a little better.

Yeah.

Because you have actually a really narrow window, window, you know, the first 3, 4 years of your kid's life, you're going to see them all the time because they're not going to school yet. And then as soon as they start going to school, you're spending less hours with them in the day. And actually you're kind of relieved, spoiler, because you don't have to spend all this time with them. But before long they're 18 and all of a sudden the time spent with them basically plummets. And then for the rest of their lives and the rest of your lives, you're seeing them, what, a couple times a year? Holidays. The holidays. And as sort of traditional society here in the States plays out, you have such a tiny window when you look over the course of your life, if you reframe the amount of hours that you get to spend with your son over what will hopefully be a long and prosperous life, this window is actually tiny. It's tiny. And the thing that you find, no matter how much wealth you amass, you still can't buy more time. I mean, okay, you could argue maybe there's some life extension stuff, but that is the scarce resource everyone cares about most. And if you— so if you know time is finite and no amount of money can change that, no amount of success can change it, no amount of fame can change that, okay. And then you know that you have this thing that you care deeply about that is your actual legacy. see, you know, that is the thing that's carrying on your hopes, your dreams, your ambitions, you know, generations worth of those hopes and dreams and ambitions. And you know that the window you have to impress upon them and spend time with them is that small. Like, yeah, you want to maximize it. And yeah, it's gonna suck because you're gonna have to make trade-offs. And I feel like— Trade-off. It's a pendulum that swings, man. There are times when I feel like I'm doing a great job as a dad and a husband. There are times when I feel like I'm doing a terrible job as a dad and a husband. There are times I feel like I'm doing a great job as a founder and a CEO. There's times when I feel like I'm doing a terrible job. It's endless. It's an endless pendulum where you just try to keep an equilibrium as best you can. And sometimes it goes out of whack and it swings back and that's life. But there are so few dads talking about this. Yes. And at the same time, you have an unfair burden placed on women here in society that said, okay, every one of them is going to get asked, you know, how do you balance it, career and family and blah, blah, blah. And you, you know, everyone's going to make their own choice of where they want that pendulum to live. But the more that we can unlock dads, Normalizing this and talking about this, the better, because it's not just better for us because we're going to learn cheat codes faster. Just like, just like, right? Going to make the same mistakes that I made 16 years ago just because there's more awareness. There will be too among dads. And then the byproduct of that means we now relieve some of the burden on the women in our society to carry that rather unfairly. And it's, it's, it, I am so excited to see this get unlocked at a greater scale. 'Cause like, I hear from dads all the time who say similar things as you did, which is like, yeah, you know, I saw it. I wasn't really that into it. So I didn't bother listening. And then I had a kid and I was like, oh, let's, let's hear what Hasan Minhaj has to say. Let's, let's hear what these conversations are like. And I think that it's exciting to me because that's the kind of content that I want to create. That's the kind of content I want to be known for. That's, that's the stuff that I think people need to hear and want to hear and talk about. Hopefully it helps.

I'm so glad you shared this because the last segment, this last 15 or 10 minutes of this segment, hopefully will resonate so widely with so many of founder dads, VC dads, operator dads. And because I think what's not talked about enough, as you said, is that is how normal it is to feel like you're doing an inadequate job either way.

Yeah.

Either side. And there are days where you will feel inevitably that, man, I just had to prioritize this all hands. over that ice cream eating or whatever, and you just have to live with it. And that's okay because no one's going to get it right all the time. So I'm super glad you opened up. Also, another thing, just another thing I think culturally, we're talking about the archetypes like the Don Draper type or Homer's dad type. Culturally, the young kids, the toddler life or infant life or toddler life or even whatever, the early kid life is really not in the spotlight for some of the celebrities. Only until Until recently, right? Like, if you see Steph Curry change the narrative, change the conversation around it, right? Like, I don't remember Michael Jordan bringing kids to the podium,

or,

you know what I mean? Because you just be a man, like, don't bring a kid in front of—

like, it wasn't

a part of it. But you— and now part of the zeitgeist, and you see Steph just like walking with the trophy and with his girls in his hand, you know, or Cannon, you know, Cannon Curry.

But that's a great example.

I think about that, right? I think it changes like the fact that you really didn't realize that, oh, Even the greatest shooter of all time is a human at home, humble at home. He's a wholesome person. And I think that's the world that I want to be part of, rather than saying greatness at any cost.

Because look, it is the— I think the greatness at any cost view probably leads to a fair amount of dysfunction and problems. I'm just speculating here, but I like making cases for the positive reason. And so I think what you hit on there is really interesting because— so yeah, you had this mindset That probably was really bad for kids and families. But more interestingly, I think the new model is actually really, really good for them. And it ends up being really good for those parents too. And that's a reason to celebrate it and be excited by it because look, no doubt, all of these things, greatness requires sacrifice. And that is whether you want to be great as a dad and do that full-time, or you want to be great as an NBA player and a dad, or you want to be great as an NBA player who doesn't have any kids, right? It's that spectrum. You get to choose your own adventure.

Yes.

But whatever you're choosing, you know that if you want to be great at it, you have to make sacrifices. And you have to figure out that balance and those trade-offs. Because even if you just want to be absolutely great at any one of those things, let alone those blended things, there are going to be costs regardless.

Right. And

I love seeing this normalization of fatherhood because part of what I hope it does too is also like increase the bar for how much we expect out of Dads, like, yeah, celebrated. I get celebrated for doing very, very basic stuff. I have made news just taking Olympia for a walk, like going to get groceries with her because I had her strapped to my chest and it was like, oh, look at that. Take this kid. Yeah. And so like, there's clearly a double standard there because a woman does the same thing for her kid and it's just like, yep, she's doing her job. And, and, and so Steph bringing that out, you know, exposing the sort of normalcy of just being a dad in a press conference. Like it's heartwarming. It's touching. It's very different from how it was traditionally, culturally. And it's also just normalizing in, I think, a really powerful way. Like, I'll even tell— one thing I'll tell folks who ask, like, what can I do within my organization to help normalize this kind of behavior? If I've got, let's say, male leaders, CEOs in the org or whatever, who, you know, maybe don't quite get it. And I'm really fond even of just using that idle banter time before the Zoom meeting starts, before everyone's on, just to, like, if you have a male leader in the org who has kids just to ask, how are your kids doing? What's the latest? What's their favorite toy? What are they into right now? You know, it depends on the age, obviously. And chances are the guy's going to have a really like excited thing to talk about. Like he's going to actually care. Yeah. And he's going to say, oh, well, so-and-so, she's just, she just made junior varsity on her soccer team or so-and-so, you know, he's really into zebras now or whatever. Like just normalizing that conversation of just pointless, aimless sort of banter that creates opportunities for men in power to talk about their kids. It's like version of Steph Curry bringing his kids to the press conference. It is reminding people, everyone in the room, that even the most senior, the most alpha male in the room actually cares about this and actually thinks about it and has an opinion on it. And all those little things start chipping away at the culture and showing that no, actually this is not— they're not mutually exclusive at all.

Absolutely. I mean, it's definitely a much better conversation starter than talking weather, right?

Especially now We're all inside anyway. We're not bothered by the weather.

Right, exactly. Anyway, trends. You want to talk about a couple other trends you're excited about?

I mean, I think we're just getting started. Minimum viable community is a big deal. I'll be— I'm expecting you to tell me when you find the Reddit of Web3.

Ah, I think I'm literally like, this is the most fertile time the next 18 months for a bunch of Web3 companies that will benefit, stand on the shoulders of Web2 giants. So there will be a new Spotify, there will be a new Shopify, there will be a new no-code. Look, I run the no-code program at On Deck and somebody asked me the other day, what are you excited about? And I'm like, I can't wait to see the world's first Squarespace, something that you can edit NFT contracts for. I'm sure there are mini projects. Yeah. But think about it. If Chris Dixon says, I don't know if you've heard the podcast with Chris Dixon and Naval where he's talking about NFTs are like the new webpages, they're are, whatever you make them out to be, then it's evolution. It's natural to assume that there will be an editor that will let an average Joe or tech-savvy person to go edit the contract, manipulate the contract, kind of like Squarespace or WordPress for NFT contracts and in the no-code way. And I don't know of anything as of today. Maybe there are.

All right. Send me those pitches.

I will. I will. I'm a tiny angel investor too, right? Anyway, this is awesome. I just want to say thank you so much, Alexis.

Wait, it's already been an hour? Wow, it's already been an hour? Dude,

we have blown through an hour.

No way.

And it is—

look at us. Look at us. You made me late for my next meeting, but it was so fun talking to you that it was so worth it.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

Thank you for— I got to get going.

Thank you so much. Have a great one. See ya. Bye.