When Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman sold Reddit to Condé Nast in 2006, the 23-year-old co-founders became multi-millionaires overnight. The exact sale price was never disclosed but the site, which they sold within two years of launching it, reportedly went for between $10 million and $20 million.
It was “more money for me than my entire family — my mother and father — had made in their entire lives," Ohanian, who washed dishes at Pizza Hut as a teen, told Guy Raz during a live podcast taping of NPR’s “How I Built This.”
His first subsequent purchase was a memorable one: Front row season tickets at FedEx Field, home to the NFL team he has been supporting since age five: the Washington Redskins.
“The very first thing I did was I called up the ticket office,” Ohanian told CNBC Make It on Tuesday at the launch of 1850 Brand Coffee's Bold Pioneer contest for aspiring entrepreneurs. “My dad had two nosebleeds for a number of years and I upgraded his seats to four seats at the front row around the 50-yard line.”
“I had the ticket office call him up so they could kind of punk him,” Ohanian tells Make It. The salespeople told his dad there was a problem with his seats before explaining that his son had just upgraded him to the row directly behind the field.
Ohanian's family kept the season tickets for 11 years before giving them up last year. “I used to go back for every home game and now my life’s changed a little bit,” he says. In addition to focusing on the venture capital firm he co-founded in 2011, he recently had a daughter with his wife, Serena Williams.
As for Reddit, which he rejoined in 2014 as executive chairman, it is now the third most popular website in the U.S. and valued at $1.8 billion.
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Don't miss: Alexis Ohanian washed dishes at Pizza Hut before co-founding Reddit, now valued at $1.8 billion