I think, look, I'm very

lucky, right? I was middle class kid.

My mother worked night shifts as a pharmacy technician.

My father is a travel agent.

So, you know, I got the chance to sell Reddit for $10 million.

When I got the offer, it was probably like eight months in and the deal finally got done about eight months later.

You know, this was life changing money for me.

If AI makes content abundant, but proof of humanity scarce, does genuine community become the most valuable asset on the internet? Or can a platform still protect it at scale?

Just small

things.

Love that ambition.

I was thinking that.

Let's see why I invested.

Is that about passion? The wild thing is, as a technologist coming into sports, these teams, these leagues are remarkably devoid of it.

Despite having tremendous, tremendous success, this is an opportunity to have.

And in that storytelling, I think there's something beautiful that I don't think other sports can do.

How are you kind of concerned and excited at the same time about AI and trajectory, specifically with that sort of 10 year vision you've

got? I think I mean, even even now is, you know, social media has obviously buttered my bread for a couple of decades.

You know, the dead Internet theory is no longer a theory.

It's this idea that I think is very real, which is probably half of everything we consume online on social media is fake in some way.

It's botted, it's AI content, it's rigged, it's pay for play.

Like it's it's there is so much content now in our feeds.

You know, we made social media to rail against no offense, the institutions that would traditionally tell us like top down, here's what's news, here's what's important.

How can you put all that together to improve and increase fan engagement and change sport in that way?

How are you concerned and excited at the same time about AI and trajectory, specifically with that 10-year vision you've

got? I think I mean, even even now is, you know, social media has obviously buttered my bread for a couple of decades.

You know, the dead Internet theory is no longer a theory.

It's this idea that I think is very real, which is probably half of everything we consume online on social media is fake in some way.

It's bodied.

It's AI content.

It's rigged.

How can you put all that together to improve and increase fan engagement and change sport in that way?

six brand partners for the wta 18 for the atp not a single specific brand partner like female brand for that so we often hear brands want to show up for women's sport yeah does that actually convert and and if they're not converting what are you doing differently with athlos that has been able to get them to sign up to get a tiffany on to go and do some really cool stuff for

example so i it's funny on the one hand i should know a lot more about how the wta is structured i've had some conversations about this and look i if i'm i'm so you can fact check me on this later i think one of the challenges the wta has is the fact now i guess the atp has it too but let's play this out the wta doesn't own those grand slams and the grand slams operate each autonomously the reality is okay I don't doubt that those athletes are very much in demand.

It's clear that the athletes individually have been able to get those deals done.

My suspicion is the WTA doesn't have the assets that are able to get sold to those brands for those athletes because they have so much autonomy.

that like, you know, they get to decide what they're putting on their torso or what's in the, you know, the patch they put on their jersey or their outfit, you know, their box.

You know, now coaches are selling branding.

I mean, I have worn a few portfolio company hats, full disclosure, in the players box.

Yeah.

I read it on Reddit.

And, and it represents a significant chapter in my life.

Obviously, it, it has, you know, provided with me the wealth and the experience and all the things it let me do, all the things I do today, and I'm, I'm grateful for that.

But I really had no expectation it would become what it is, and I'm, I'm grateful I got the chance to come back when I did in 2014 as chairman to lead the turnaround.

But I think we're in such an interesting place now where 21 years later, social media is so widespread, the challenge now is so much of our content that we consume is fake.

And then you see this bot culture of, of comments and posts, and I think there's gonna be some next wave of social coming in the next few years that is, it is verifiably human without being creepy.

Like, you're not gonna be able to scan retinas, I think, to get people to want it, but it's gonna become increasingly clear that so much of what we see online that is supposed to be, like, of the people is, is fake, it's compromised.

[laughs]

Tell me about your experience of social media and how that's influenced how you present yourself.

Yeah.

I guess for many of us who have grown up tech native, we've grown up with a phone in our hands.

For the most part, we're seeing ourselves back all the time through a phone screen, and oftentimes we've got a filter on that, or we feel the need to put makeup on to feel like we're enough so that we can take those photos for social media.

And I think when we're constantly bombarded with influence from a screen, people's idyllic lifestyles, people dressing, looking perfectly, that we begin to internalize, and we begin to internalize that to mean something about us, and that is that we are less than if we're not looking perfect ourselves.

So this is something that I've certainly experienced through my lifetime as a social media user.

And then when I started to research this for my book, Real, as well, I realized that this was a really common issue for so many women around the world.

How hard was it for you to have the photo taken? Tell us about the process.

But in theory, it could have been run by Sotheby's or something if everyone agreed to that.

As long as there is a critical mass of people who believe in it, that is the only database that matters.

And so, yes, you can right-click save to as many different databases as you want.

But as long as enough people believe that there's one that truly matters, then it's the one that's going to win.

But you don't have to believe every sale price or ever want to buy an NFT or even not hate that other people are spending their money this way to see that NFTs are part of the much larger context of art itself.

In the next five or ten years, we will see a new generation of artists who are creating exclusively with digital in mind.

But this is a new medium.

The new canvas is this technology, and it's massive.

Yep.

Like, like we're now seeing a moment where the smartest folks in venture capital are realizing this is not just a trophy asset.

And what, what we've been privileged to see now for three, four, five, six years is under the hood of these organizations, guys, these, the best sports teams in the world, the best sports leagues in the world are run like a tech company in, like, the mid-aughts.

They are devoid of modern technology.

They're, they're-

Wha- like very interesting-

Dude, what was your strategy? When you're the biggest LP in the VC firm- [laughs] ...

you get to kinda do- Okay ... what you wanna do.

I'm at the

season of my life where I don't need to, you know, catch up with the latest show necessarily or play my favorite video game.

It's either whatever my girls are into at the moment or whatever I'm building on the business side.

And so that helps streamline it.

And then also, look, crossover.

You know, one of my favorite traditions now has been enjoying the weekends, making pancakes and then, you know, putting on the Chelsea women And it's a very unique thing.

As an American sports fan, you are used to sports happening usually in the later afternoons or the evenings.

What made you think, as a businessman and as a tech guy, this is something I want to be part of and why?

Oh, wow.

And so I'm obviously a big believer in this.

And then once I got under the hood, you know, you look at something...

I, I just got the LA franchise for League One volleyball, um, women's volleyball league, uh, professional league here in the US.

And, and, uh, and, and at the same time, I'm learning from the Onit crew, um, just how well the Nebraska women's volleyball cards sell relative to the Nebraska men's football.

And I'm sitting here like, "Wait, what?" And, and, and with all the time I'm spending now in volleyball, you can see the fanaticism.

You can see the fandom.

Mm.

this the way you need to think, or is it a little bit of a fa- fantasy?

I...

Oh, it's so, it, uh...

These numbers are big.

The, the projections, the ambitions are big.

I do think, though, when we think about what we are capable of as a species, um, space has been something that has mystified us, excited us for a very long time, especially in modern history and modern technology.

This was a frontier we really believed for a long time, and I did growing up, it was only a place for governments to build and innovate.

Is something broken that those are the statistics we're faced with right now?

... what's broken with the current one?

Well, look, the, the first thing I noticed was actually back in 2019 with the Women's World Cup, where similar to what I saw with athletics and, uh, the Olympics, the whole world paid attention to these footballers every four years, and especially United States.

Uh, most Americans consider football or soccer a women's sport because the American women have been so dominant, the American men, mm, less so.

Uh, and it just didn't make sense to me that these amazing athletes would get all this attention and then sort of go, go silent for another few years in between when they had millions of followers on social media.

In, in my world, spending 15, 16 years building and turning around Reddit, the free market of attention is the internet, social media, and, and at the end of the day, you might not think these athletes are worth the investment, and certainly a lot of the status quo didn't.

Hmm

... through, you know, the troubles of an industry that was not yet ready for her to ascend in the way that she did and, and all the things she had to deal with along the way.

You know, so much of women's sports has been mired, I think, both in, uh, people with good intentions who, who I think have held it back because they looked at it as a charity, and they thought, "Oh, well, of course we'll do this.

Um, what insight did that experience give you about the experiences of women?

You know, I remember y- y- preparing for that as any expecting, uh, father would.

I, I went into it just expecting, like, this was gonna be fairly straightforward.

Um, you know, we have access to some of the best care you could imagine, you know, in the United States, which, which is a very complex issue in our country, unfortunately.

But, uh, but what it opened my eyes to was the fact that, yeah, there was, you know, she was in the midst of basically diagnosing herself.

Uh, she knew her body incredibly well, both as an athlete but also just as a human.

And, and, you know, I, the best I could do was amplify her concerns and basically tell nurses and doctors, like, "Hey, really, it's time.

Mm

How did you think about all of those issues? And it's obviously broader than just a Reddit issue.

The Internet, frankly, that I spent my childhood growing up on always had its weird, dark, awful places.

But the community platforms that existed that by and large defined the Internet in those nineties and early aughts, the number of people online, especially online a lot, was far, far, far, far fewer.

It was a smaller sampling of the world.

And I think all of us, and I'd say all of my peers in the social media world, all those other founders and CEOs, we had rose-tinted glasses on because, yes, we all were white dudes.

That's worth stating.

We just didn't encounter much awful content in general.

How does that fit into your view of the world?

Tell us about that evolution.

Yeah.

So March of 2019, my tweet goes viral.

And I basically noticed that a team in the NWSL, the American Women's Soccer League, had just sold for like three and a half million dollars.

And this was the year of the Women's World Cup.

This was not a sport that I followed, but I knew who Megan Rapinoe was, knew who Alex Morgan was, I knew who the stars of the sport were.

So they'd already transcended the sport.

But if you look at the Reddit that you sort of left behind, right, and the Reddit that's a public company, what are your thoughts on things like the licensing agreements with the large language models? What do you think about the community that you are so key to building, having their data? now being sold to try and train the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI.

I mean, talk us through a little bit of how you view these investment opportunities, especially with, you know, new properties, startup leagues, kind of what stood out to you and convinced you that you wanted to be in this in a big way? Look,

I love the blank canvas.

Probably before my tweet five years ago, more people knew about me as the guy who made Reddit.

And I've spent the last five years spending a lot of time building in emerging sports.

But it started from a tweet about how undervalued women's sports was, in particular soccer.

And the opportunity there, starting Angel City, in hindsight, I actually wish I had just bought the NWSL.

Yeah.

Alexis, as a team owner, what were your barometers for success in year one? You guys have the best record in the regular season, and not to rub it in, I know you came up a little short there at the end, but as a business, as a team operator, what were you looking at as the most important criteria that you're doing a good job in year one of this league?

... was buy the league." Yeah.

Honestly, five years ago, 10, $15 million probably to buy the NWSL.

It was in dire straits.

It was the third league of its kind in the US, the first two had shuttered.

Like, it was in a bad situation.

So I got a second chance because the Olympics were coming up and I looked and I said, "Okay, what are the most popular sports here that, again, have a legacy of American excellence, especially among the women, and that disappear in between?" Track and field, lo and behold.

Legacy of American excellence, especially the women, and a, a fantastic product, really engaging, really engrossing, top viewers, and then it disappears.

... taking apart radio and boom, here we go.

Oh interesting

Because I think they're just a little slow on this sort of stuff these these bigger cultural shifts and and so I'm happy to correct them but uh but yeah i got plenty of tweets i saved them all you know things like go woke go broke you're an idiot you know no one cares about women's sports and and and i do think especially given you got to remember i resigned in protest from the red i want to talk about that in the summer of 2020 And I did so very intentionally to push for change.

And, you know, this has been well reported on that I couldn't get in the boardroom, whether it was around subreddits like watch people die or some of these really, really racist, hateful communities.

Saying all these things, I said, and look, like, I'm out.

I'm going to spend the rest of my life building in a way that will be wildly successful and also align with my values.

And.

you know, I haven't had any luck convincing this board.

What do you think about the community that you are so key to building, having their data now being sold to try and train the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI?

The parallels between the two, Alexis, what have been the qualities, if you will, that are transferable from the tech world into that sporting realm?

Folks often ask, you know, we were early and right in women's football starting Angel City.

We did it again with Tigers Team Golf League, TGL, bought the first team in that league, and that's been a great success.

And folks often ask, and again with the success of Athlos, they're like, okay, you've done it now three times in three very different sports.

What's the thread? How? And I actually think creating Reddit was the best way best possible education for building in the world of sports because of something you talked about in the intro which is community and you know in building reddit my job was thinking through how do i build a product and build a community that and a product that reinforces that community that makes strangers on the internet feel kinship around things ranging from sports teams, living in a city, r slash Abu Dhabi, r slash Angel City FC, or stapling bread to trees, r slash, I think it's stapled bread to trees.

That's a real community.

There are hundreds of thousands of people, don't ask, who take photos of bread that they've stapled to a tree.

What's the ultimate goal with this, Alexis? Ultimately, and I'll ask this bluntly, is it to sell it?

(laughs)

Well, I mean, come on.

It's, it was a...

It was one of those dangerous...

It's one of those dangerous first investments in a sector, because then, you know, you end up thinking you're, you're a genius at it.

But, uh...

But Andy Lapson and the team are doing a hell of a job.

Yeah, it's so small.

Right.

'Cause just like you're, if you're Ferrari, you wanna make sure you're holding up that trophy at the end of the season.

And so it'll mean, let's say we added a couple other sports, maybe even throw in, uh, a thrower.

Um, you start now seeing a broader team composition and, and, and these brands are incentivized now to build out that roster and to support those athletes in marketing as well as in, you know, physios and sport, all this other stuff.

And, and I think really level up the way we think about, uh, what these brands can do.

And now you better believe, just like I, I...

if I watch, I don't know, watch Mercedes win a Formula 1 race, it incentivizes me to wanna buy a Mercedes sedan.

Yep.

Yeah.

... and Ms. Oerstein.

Like they, they did a really good job grounding them in that.

And, and it's funny 'cause like even to this day it's never been about, uh, the celebrity part.

It, it's like the funniest thing people don't realize is, you know, some of the best days that I know she has and we have, are some of the most boring suburban parent dates, right? It's, it's taking our daughter to ballet.

It's, it's a lot of things frankly that a l- I think a lot of folks probably take for granted, because they imagine, "Oh, well, jeez, I'd wanna be on the carpet.

I'd wanna be holding up the US Open trophy.

Yep.

Right.

'Cause just like if you're, if you're Ferrari, you wanna make sure you're holding up that trophy at the end of the season.

And so it'll mean, let's say we added a couple other sports, maybe even throw in, uh, a thrower.

Um, you start now seeing a broader team composition, and, and um, these brands are incentivized now to build out that roster and to support those athletes in marketing as well as in, you know, physios and sport, all this other stuff.

And, and I think really level up the way we think about, uh, what these brands can do.

And now you better believe, just like I, I...

If I watch, I don't know, uh, watch Mercedes win a Formula One race, it incentivizes me to wanna buy a Mercedes sedan.

Yep.

To encapsulate this portion of the conversation, what exactly, if there's anything, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, specific, more so than anything else, that you're hoping this will accomplish, what would that be?

You know, I wanna put a spotlight on these athletes and I wanna let people know, especially in the run-up to LA28, uh, we're obviously hosting an Olympics here in the United States, this is going to be the premier team-based track and field league.

And so if you love following, you know, Ferrari and Mercedes and their Formula Ones, you're gonna love following Athlos because we are going to have the place where the very best, to do it, are, are gonna sprint through some of the biggest cities in the world.

So I, I can't wait and I'm grateful, obviously, ESPN+ is gonna be where you can find it, uh, so i- we're expecting many more.

We had three million tune in last year, I, I'm expecting many more this year.

... to use, you know, yet another avenue to show to what greatness is all about and how you could be the greatest that you can be? What would be the ultimate incentive for her in that regard?

Gosh.

I mean, I can't answer that as well as she can, but my, my guess would be, you know, when you've operated at that level for that long, you have come to expect, for better or for worse, you've come to expect delivering, uh, at, at such an exceptional level with such pressure, with some, such stress.