e Readers Reviews: The battle over credit for Reddit

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Image Credits: filo / Getty Images

Another week, another battle between well-known industry players (maybe these all tie to planetary events?). This time, Reddit co-founder and VC Alexis Ohanian was miffed that Initialized Capital — the firm he co-founded with Garry Tan — didn’t recognize him in celebrating its portfolio company’s IPO in a tweet. Wrote Ohanian in a retweet, “Wow, this is petty, @GarryTan @brettdg @jenhwolf — even for y’all.”

If it was an oversight — and there was debate over whether it was, given a misplaced comma — Tan tried to remedy this by tweeting his congratulations from his own account to both Ohanian and his co-founder, Steve Huffman, who is Reddit’s CEO. But the exchange laid bare the strained relationship between Ohanian and Tan, who both passed through Y Combinator before together co-founding Initialized — only to leave the firm separately later. Ohanian bailed first in 2020 to launch his current firm Seven Seven Six; Tan left in the summer of 2022 to become president and CEO of Y Combinator, though he still remains involved as a board partner.

Not everyone gets along forever, of course, and it seems likely that fame and power are complicating factors, along with the powerful platform now known as X. Indeed, Ohanian’s frustration with Tan was reminiscent of his 2020 falling-out with Huffman on what was then Twitter, when Ohanian tweeted out his plans to leave Reddit’s board amid the Black Lives Matter movement. Asked weeks later about the episode, Huffman suggested to the New York Times that quitting is easy compared with staying. (Tellingly, Huffman didn’t mention Ohanian at all in Reddit’s S-1.)

It’s hard to feel sorry for anyone in this saga. Huffman is poised to make many millions from Reddit. Ohanian and Tan have also done just fine for themselves. In the end, this is just a giant kerfuffle. But displays like these sometimes overshadow what’s really important — in this case, the surprisingly successful public offering of a nearly 20-year-old company that was long considered a toxic cesspool. — Connie Loizos

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