Alexis Ohanian just isn’t a fan of pickleball.
He has ample motive 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 the whole lot from court docket house to sponsorship {dollars}.
However his particular criticism is extra revealing.
“Can the atomic unit—can its basic highlights—go viral?” Ohanian stated. “Till I see a pickleball spotlight go viral, I don’t suppose it’s an actual sport.”
The comment is a throwaway jab, the type of mild ribbing acquainted to any sports activities fan. However additionally it is laced with the logic of somebody who has an intuitive understanding of how tradition—and athletics—operate within the digital age.
Ohanian, who leads the 2024 class of ADWEEK’s Model Genius honorees, has constructed his complete profession on his means to grasp how communities behave on-line. He co-founded Reddit in 2005, then spent 15 years reworking 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 few hateful boards and fill his board seat with a Black government. He now has restricted express affect on the corporate and is as a substitute 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 in recent times, the so-called entrance web page of the web has flourished. As generative AI threatens to drown the net in commodity content material, the worth of Reddit and its logged-in, question-answering consumer base has risen in conjunction.
