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 site 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 current success. However after a long time of underperformance, the narrative round Reddit has these days undergone a profound shift. Moderately than trailing behind, it seems as a substitute that the platform merely wanted the remainder of the web to catch up.
It was this identical sense of prescience that led Ohanian to embark upon his newest, and arguably most formidable enterprise: constructing out the universe of ladies’s sports activities. Like Reddit, the world of feminine athletics has, till just lately, been outlined by underappreciation, each when it comes to its cultural influence and business potential.
Ohanian, nevertheless, considers this oversight his benefit. Free from the hidebound traditions that govern males’s sports activities, girls’s athletics have the chance to rethink each aspect 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 the planet—partly by putting girls athletes at its heart. Like Reddit, the enterprise is a raffle on the long run, a thesis whose returns—in the event that they materialize in any respect—may very well be a long time within the making.
“In sports activities, so many selections are decided by previous precedent, doing issues the best way they’ve all the time been performed,” Ohanian stated. “On the earth of tech startups, in the event you suppose that approach, you fail. With Athlos, we’re questioning each aspect and constructing the very best model of the product potential.”
Rising the infrastructure
Curiosity in girls’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, international sensation Megan Rapinoe, was in all probability value $3 million simply on her personal, he figured.
The following yr, Ohanian grew to become a founding investor within the Los Angeles NWSL group Angel Metropolis FC on the idea that it could 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 group, valuing it at $250 million.
