SWIMMING WITH THE SHARKS

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian was a brash avatar of Web 2.0. Today, he's funding everything from one-time rival Digg to women's sports. Has he mellowed—or is he more competitive than ever?

- by SAM BLUM photography by THEA TRAFF

BIG FISH This fall, Alexis Ohanian made his TV debut as an investor on Shark Tank.

Alexis Ohanian will not stop calling himself the Reddit guy. The 42-year-old technologist and entrepreneur is sitting on the Sony Studios set of Shark Tank for the first time, occupying the coveted seat of an investor, or “Shark” in the program’s parlance.

Wearing a black suit and white button-down with a pair of Nike Dunks, Ohanian’s brawny 6-foot-5 frame is commanding. He’s sitting among the most prominent business personalities on television, including Lori “Queen of QVC” Greiner and Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O'Leary. And yet, Ohanian is tempering his feedback to the show’s contestants with the kind of self-effacing charm you might not expect from a guy who helped unleash one of the more chaotic hubs of the modern internet.

Ohanian later tells me that Shark Tank’s producers asked him to refer to himself as the Reddit guy in an effort to acquaint the average viewer with his work as one of the social media giant’s co-founders. After all, Ohanian doesn’t inspire the same recognition and fanfare as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg—the kind of industry titans who might be more familiar to middle-American families tuning into ABC on a Wednesday night.

Not that it matters. Ohanian takes his turn as a guest Shark with the kind of tenacity that suggests he is in the right place. Over the course of the afternoon, he invests in an airline for dogs and a women’s jujitsu brand, to name a few deals. He does so in a way befitting his evolution from internet geek to venture capital pro. Certain pitches have “mimetic energy,” he explains. He also calls himself “chronically online,” revealing that he is inescapably Millennial.

When considering where Ohanian stands in his generation of entrepreneurs, a few comparisons come to mind. There are definitely glimmers of Mark Cuban, the former