I'm back. Fully Initialized.

Today, I’m very excited to return to Initialized Capital as a full-time General Partner alongside my longtime friend and collaborator Garry Tan.

Here’s a little history first. Initialized launched in 2011. Before that, Garry and I were having success as angel investors and founders kept telling us we were providing more value than other much better funded investors.

Before long, we’d raised $7 million for our first Initialized fund, which made seed investments into startups like Instacart and Coinbase. We were on to something.

Since then, we have grown to manage more than $250 million, which is invested in companies that are now worth more than $20 billion (including six unicorns, startups that are worth over one billion dollars). We’ve recruited a remarkable team of partners, and built a ton of software to scale all of the traditionally high-touch, and less scalable parts of the venture business to better serve our founders.

We want to be the first check and we want to do the work — we aspire to be the kind of investors we wish we’d had when we were founders. And after more than three years of serving back at Reddit, my first “baby” is in a much better position and has a great team in place.

Now I’m back at Initialized with even bigger ambitions than when we started. As a new father of a five-month-old little girl, I want to make sure the world she inherits is as great as possible. This depends on the entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow building companies that truly matter.

We need your voice as we continue the fight for net neutrality

Original post.

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My fellow redditors,

When Steve and I created this site twelve years ago, our vision was simple but powerful. We wanted to create an open platform for communities and their members to find and discuss the content they found most interesting. And today, that principle is exactly what net neutrality is all about: preserving an open internet with consumer choice and unimpeded access to information.

Net neutrality ensures that the free market—not big cable—picks the winners and losers. This is a bipartisan issue, and we at Reddit will continue to fight for it. We’ve been here before, and this time we’re facing even worse odds.

But as we all know, you should never tell redditors the odds.

A level playing field

Net neutrality gives new ideas, online businesses, and up-and-coming sites—like Reddit was twelve years ago—the opportunity to find an audience and grow on a level playing field. Saving net neutrality is crucial for the future of entrepreneurship in the digital age.

We weren’t always in the top ten most-viewed sites in the U.S. When Steve and I started Reddit right out of college, we were just two kids with $12K in funding and some computers in Medford, MA. Our plan was to make something people wanted, because we knew if we accomplished that, we could win—even against massive incumbents.

But we wouldn’t have succeeded if users had to pay extra to visit our website, or if better-funded alternatives loaded faster. Our start-up got to live the American dream thanks to the open internet, and I want to be able to tell aspiring entrepreneurs with a straight face that they can build the next Reddit. If we lose net neutrality, I can’t tell them that.

We did it, Reddit, and we can do it again.

You all are capable of creating movements.

I’ve had a front-row seat to witness the power of Reddit communities to rally behind a common goal—starting when you all named a whale Mister Splashy Pants in 2007. It’s been heartening to watch your collective creativity and energy over the years; it’s easy to take all these amazing moments of community and conversation for granted, but the thing that makes them all possible is the open internet, which unites redditors as an issue above all.

Here’s a quick recap:

And all of this actually worked.

It’s not just about the U.S., because redditors in India have used the site to defend net neutrality and the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) visited r/Canada for a thoughtful (and 99% upvoted!) discussion with citizens.

Reddit is simply too large to ignore, and you all did all of this when we were just a fraction of the size we are today.

Time to get back to work

We’re proud to join major internet companies like Amazon, Etsy, Twitter, and Netflix (better late than never!) in today’s Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality, orchestrated by Fight for the Future. We’ve already been hosting AMAs on the subject with politicians (like Senator Schatz) and journalists (like Brian Fung from the Washington Post). Today we’re changing our logo and sharing a special message from Steve, our CEO, with every visitor to our front page to raise awareness and send people to BattleForTheNet.com. Most exciting, dozens of communities on Reddit (with millions of subscribers) across party lines and interest areas have joined the cause. If your community hasn’t joined in yet, now’s the time! (And you’ll be in good company: u/Here_Comes_The_King is on our side.)

The FCC is deciding this issue the way big cable and ISPs want it to, so it’s on us as citizens to tell them—and our representatives in the Senate and House—how important the open internet is to our economy, our society, and especially for when we’re bored at work.

I invite everyone who cares about this across the internet to come talk about it with us on Reddit. Join the conversation, upvote stories about net neutrality’s importance to keep them top of mind, make a high-quality GIF or two, and, most importantly, contact the FCC to let them know why you care about protecting the open internet.

This is how we win: when every elected official realizes how vital net neutrality is to all of their constituents.

--Alexis

Comment on this post with why net neutrality is important to you! We’re visiting D.C. next month, so if you're an American, add your representatives' names to your comment, we’ll do our best to share your stories with them on Capitol Hill!


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Hey, we've got Snoop on our side.

Initializing...

Our tech community in SF turned out big-time on a very rainy night this weekend to celebrating the third fund of Initialized Capital. They're the reason we get to do this, for that we're grateful.

Lots of people, but I only got a few photos...


So many amazing people in one place. Thank you, SF tech community & initialized fam, for coming out tonight.


We had an event in SF on Saturday for our tech community that makes it all possible. It was our first. It won't be our last. Wanna get into tech but don't know how? Listen to Breaking Into Startups podcast by Ruben Harris -- seen here between two VCs.

Lessons Learned: Three Must-Dos for Entrepreneurial Success

This post is sponsored by Chase Ink®

I’m proud that Reddit is the seventh largest website in the U.S. with millions of users worldwide. But it wasn’t always that way.

When we started, my co-founder Steve Huffman and I faced some enormous hurdles on the meandering pathway from the initial idea to an up-and-running business. 

We made it, but it could have been easier if we knew then what we know now.

Whether you are just launching a new business or are a serial entrepreneur, there are best practices for making the journey a bit easier.

Here are three actions that I believe are must-dos to ensure your company survives and thrives.

1. Embrace your culture. There’s a reason why people want to work for your company, and the paycheck isn’t usually #1. Culture is the glue that holds your team together, that drives people to do their best work. 

But if you grow too fast, you can lose control of that culture. For instance, Reddit has strived to never double our headcount in a single year (I know, I know, a nice problem to have). The point is … stay true to what guides your company. Believe me, it’s what draws customers – and employees – to your brand. 

2. Spend smarter. In the early days of a startup, or when the company hits a growth spurt, it’s easy to lose control of expenses. For me, travel expenses have always been a struggle to control. Because our company is global, I’m always on the move. And that can quickly overwhelm the budget. 

Look for ways to save while spending. You may have seen one way I recommend doing it, in this video. I’ve been a Chase customer for a while, and the new Chase Ink Business Preferred Card helps business owners get something back for their spend on certain purchases important to entrepreneurs. Earn 3x points on travel, internet, cable and phone and in other select business categories.  Points you can redeem down the road, for things like … more travel. Ahh, the circle of life. 

3. Protect your biggest asset … you! At the ripe old age of 33, I’ve finally started to take better care of myself. Not so much in the early days at Reddit. I worked all the time, and I loved it. But there is a cost to bear, both physically and mentally. 

Now, I spend more time exercising and being careful about what I’m eating – and I feel more productive and effective when working. I wish I’d started taking care of myself a lot sooner. Don’t make that mistake. 

At the end of the day, we’re in business to make money. That’s a tough proposition even in good times, but it’s even more difficult if you’re not in control of your business culture, your expenses or your health. 

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Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, and other small business owners are finding creative ways to use the rewards points earned on their business credit cards to invest in their business. Learn more about the new Chase Ink Business PreferredSM Card and its flexible and rich rewards.

My Open Letter to the Reddit Community

Below is a copy of the post I wrote for Reddit yesterday. It was an intended to be an open letter, to encourage other American redditors to share their own or their family's immigration stories. Within 9 hours, this post had a record score of over 90,000 points and over 25,000 comments. Many of these stories were far more eloquent and moving than my own. Please read them here.

After two weeks abroad, I was looking forward to returning to the U.S. this weekend, but as I got off the plane at LAX on Sunday, I wasn't sure what country I was coming back to.

President Trump’s recent executive order is not only potentially unconstitutional, but deeply un-American. We are a nation of immigrants, after all. In the tech world, we often talk about a startup’s “unfair advantage” that allows it to beat competitors. Welcoming immigrants and refugees has been our country's unfair advantage, and coming from an immigrant family has been mine as an entrepreneur.

As many of you know, I am the son of an undocumented immigrant from Germany and the great grandson of refugees who fled the Armenian Genocide.

A little over a century ago, a Turkish soldier decided my great grandfather was too young to kill after cutting down his parents in front of him; instead of turning the sword on the boy, the soldier sent him to an orphanage. Many Armenians, including my great grandmother, found sanctuary in Aleppo, Syria—before the two reconnected and found their way to Ellis Island. Thankfully they weren't retained, rather they found this message:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

My great grandfather didn’t speak much English, but he worked hard, and was able to get a job at Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company in Binghamton, NY. That was his family's golden door. And though he and my great grandmother had four children, all born in the U.S., immigration continued to reshape their family, generation after generation. The one son they had—my grandfather (here’s his AMA)—volunteered to serve in the Second World War and married a French-Armenian immigrant. And my mother, a native of Hamburg, Germany, decided to leave her friends, family, and education behind after falling in love with my father, who was born in San Francisco.

She got a student visa, came to the U.S. and then worked as an au pair, uprooting her entire life for love in a foreign land. She overstayed her visa. She should have left, but she didn't. After she and my father married, she received a green card, which she kept for over a decade until she became a citizen. I grew up speaking German, but she insisted I focus on my English in order to be successful. She eventually got her citizenship and I’ll never forget her swearing in ceremony.

If you’ve never seen people taking the pledge of allegiance for the first time as U.S. Citizens, it will move you: a room full of people who can really appreciate what I was lucky enough to grow up with, simply by being born in Brooklyn. It thrills me to write reference letters for enterprising founders who are looking to get visas to start their companies here, to create value and jobs for these United States.

My forebears were brave refugees who found a home in this country. I’ve always been proud to live in a country that said yes to these shell-shocked immigrants from a strange land, that created a path for a woman who wanted only to work hard and start a family here.

Without them, there’s no me, and there’s no Reddit. We are Americans. Let’s not forget that we’ve thrived as a nation because we’ve been a beacon for the courageous—the tired, the poor, the tempest-tossed.

Right now, Lady Liberty’s lamp is dimming, which is why it's more important than ever that we speak out and show up to support all those for whom it shines—past, present, and future. I ask you to do this however you see fit, whether it's calling your representative (this works, it's how we defeated SOPA + PIPA), marching in protest, donating to the ACLU, or voting, of course, and not just for Presidential elections.

Our platform, like our country, thrives the more people and communities we have within it. Reddit, Inc. will continue to welcome all citizens of the world to our digital community and our office.

And for all of you American redditors who are immigrants, children of immigrants, or children’s children of immigrants, we invite you to share your family’s story in the comments.

March For Science, started on Reddit, coming to a US city near you soon!

All it takes is one comment on Reddit to set the wheels in motion for a massive event. Thank u/beaverteeth92 on Reddit.


Via Washington Post:

The next big march on Washington could flood the Mall with scientists.

It's an idea spawned on Reddit, where several scientists — concerned about the new president's policies on climate change and other issues, and hyped from the success of the Women's March on Washington — were discussing the best way to respond to what they feared would be an administration hostile to science.

Then someone wrote, “There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington.”

"100%,” someone replied. Dozens of others agreed.

One participant in the exchange, University of Texas Health Science Center postdoctoral fellow Jonathan Berman, took the conversation to heart. In short order, the march had a Facebook page (whose membership swelled from 200 people on Tuesday night to more than 300,000 by Wednesday evening), a Twitter handle, a website, two co-chairs, Berman and science writer and public health researcher Caroline Weinberg, and a Google formthrough which interested researchers could sign up to help