Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian took to X, formerly Twitter, to thank Snoop Dogg for being one of the platform’s earliest investors during its spin-out and turnaround.
Reddit, a social media platform and online community, ranks among the top 20 most visited sites worldwide and went public in March 2024.
American internet entrepreneur and investor Ohanian is best known as the platform’s former executive chairman and co-founder, along with Steff Huffman and Aaron Swartz. He is also the husband of tennis legend and venture capitalist Serena Williams.
Huffman and Ohanian began building Reddit for fun while roomates before American startup funder Y Combinator gave them $12,000.
They then merged with Infogami and started working with Swartz, who rewrote Reddit’s codebase using the program he had designed for Infogami.
Six years after Reddit’s inception, it became a major player in the social media sphere, boasting 35 million visitors and 2.8 billion page views, Ohanian wrote in Fast Company.
Snoop Dogg’s Reddit Investment
In 2014, when Reddit was valued at a reported $500 million, it attracted the support of Snoop Dogg, who participated in a $50 million seed round led by Sam Altman.
Ohanian, who resigned from the company in 2018 and later left its board by 2020, took to X to thank Snoop Dogg for his involvement.
“Beautiful day in LA. I appreciate this city so much,” wrote Ohanian. “Got to catch up with a lot of friends. 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 for get your Day Ones.”
At the time, Snoop was sought out due to his status and his popularity on the site’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ discussion forums.
“He’s like a Reddit superstar. The site loves him… We asked him to invest, and he said yes,” said Altman in 2014 to The New York Times.
Snoop was also high on Reddit’s wish list of investors who wanted to join the company.
” 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 in a 2017 interview for ‘GGN News.’
