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The site was not changing, but it kept growing. "We saw something in Reddit in the half decade we were gone. In tech it almost guarantees it will kill you," he said. In any industry, lack of innovation will hurt you. Ohanian saw Reddit's potential: "In spite of us being gone for half a decade, the company had not really changed," Ohanian told CNBC in 2016. Co-founder Huffman returned as CEO in 2015. In 2014, after Reddit CEO Yishan Wong resigned, it gave Ohanian the opportunity to return as executive chairman and lead the company he sold prematurely. Ohanian did not immediately respond to further request for comment.)Īfter Reddit sold to Conde Nast, Ohanian, then 23 years old, stayed on for three years. Molly Gannon Conway, a manager of communications at The Washington Post, tells CNBC Make It, "We have no record of this," when presented with Ohanian's tweet. "They did diligence on a potential acquisition of Reddit but didn't want to compete with Conde Nast's offer, so they passed," Ohanian tweeted. Ohanian also said that he had pitched Reddit to the leadership of WPNI, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, which was then the online publishing subsidiary of The Washington Post Company that operated news and information sites, including, Slate, and Budget Travel Online.
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"I wish I'd had an investor tell me there were other options (like raising a Series A!) and there would be a path to much greater things given how fast the audience was growing at a time when our engineers had basically stopped working on the product," Ohanian said. Looking back, Ohanian knows now that he needed guidance. Ohanian's father, Chris Ohanian, is a small business owner (he is the founder and owner of Infinity Global Travel in Taneytown, Maryland, which he started in 1998), and his mother, Anke Ohanian, was a pharmacy technician. "I thought I was getting away with something because for 16 worth of work, I was getting more money than my parents had made their entire working lives," says Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit after he graduated college in 2005 with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz. On Monday, Reddit announced it had raised more than $250 million in a new round of funding that valued the company at $6 billion.īut when Ohanian made the deal, $10 million was more money than he had ever seen. "The deal was months in the making and I wish I'd had more advisors around the table giving me more perspective on the sale."įor one thing, Ohanian confirmed the amount for which publishing company Conde Nast paid for Reddit in 2006: $10 million. "Halloween is always a surreal holiday for me, because on Halloween 2006, we sold Reddit to Conde Nast," Ohanian tweeted the day after Halloween.
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