Reddit’s IPO Filing Is Missing Something: Cofounder Alexis Ohanian

Reddit cofounders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian spent about eight straight years living together, initially as college room mates, playing World of Warcraft late into the night and later working together on the foundations of the discussion forums service now frequented by nearly 270 million people. But that history was missing from Reddit’s sales pitch to investors published Thursday announcing its plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange: Reddit’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t mention Ohanian at all.

Huffman, who has been Reddit’s CEO since 2015, and Ohanian, who after stepping back from helping run the business had sat on its board for years, split in 2020 over how to handle some of the hateful content on Reddit. They’ve spoken little since. The lack of nod to Ohanian in the new document could reflect both that schism and Huffman’s attempt to cast a company that’s been around for 19 years in a new light.

Disputes among startup cofounders are common and not every investor pitch recounts the minutiae of a company’s history. But the gregarious Ohanian had been the public face of Reddit during its formative years and to early users was a kind of spiritual leader who shaped the community’s culture while Huffman worked on the code. Some users still closely associate Reddit with Ohanian and long for his involvement. But Huffman has held the reins in more recent history and has led work on developing potential paths to consistent profits that he and Ohanian never could envision in the early days.

The new sales pitch filed with the SEC, known as a Form S-1, allows Reddit to debut on the stock market with the ticker symbol RDDT as soon as next month.

Reddit and Ohanian didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. In a post on X Thursday, Ohanian, who now runs venture capital firm SevenSevenSix wrote, “Pretty wild seeing $RDDT going public after all these years. Founders, keep going.”

In the S-1, Huffman offers a brief look at Reddit’s beginnings, without naming his cofounder. “I think of August 13, 2005 as the day Reddit really came to life,” Huffman says. “We had been online for a couple of months, but until then there had never been enough posts from users on any day to fill the front page. That morning, to my surprise, I opened Reddit to discover the home page was overflowing with posts from real users for the first time.”

The filing also lists the number of Reddit shares owned by executives or people who individually own more than a 5 percent stake in the company. Ohanian isn’t listed because he and Huffman sold Reddit to Condé Nast (WIRED’s parent company) for about $10 million in 2006, a little over a year after founding it, relinquishing their ownership. They both left the company altogether in 2009.

Since returning to become CEO, Huffman has accumulated shares totaling 3.3 percent of Reddit, according to the S-1. ​​Ohanian said in a separate X post on Thursday he said he still has some shares from when he was executive chair of Reddit about a decade ago.