OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman might be ready to make tens of millions after Reddit goes public, due to a series of bets on the net discussion board company that return to 2014. Altman holds 9.2% of voting power ahead of Reddit’s initial public offering, in keeping with information in the corporate’s prospectus.
Altman, who’s now reportedly keen to boost trillions for chip development that might help meet Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s artificial intelligence computing demand, has invested in dozens of startups through the years. That features Asana, which hit the Recent York Stock Exchange in 2020, and Instacart, which debuted on the Nasdaq in September. Before OpenAI launched in 2015, Altman was president of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, giving him exposure to many small corporations.
In 2014 Altman led Reddit’s $50 million Series B funding round, after using the service day-after-day for nine years, he wrote in a blog post.
“reddit is an example of something that started off looking like a silly toy for wasting time and has turn into something very interesting,” he wrote. “It has been a crucial community for me through the years—I can find like-minded those that I can not all the time find in the actual world.”
In the primary half of 2021, Reddit was raising a Series E round, and Altman invested $50 million.
Then, within the second half of the yr, Altman sunk one other $10 million into Reddit, as the corporate raised some $512 million in funding. By that time, Altman’s $50 million investment from earlier within the yr was up 45% in value.
The shares of Reddit’s Class A and Class B stock are spread across five different entities, and they’ll give Altman more shares than even CEO Steve Huffman, in keeping with Thursday’s filing. Reddit has not yet told investors what number of Class A shares it plans to sell within the IPO.
Altman sat on Reddit’s board as recently as 2021, in keeping with the filing. Reddit said in January 2022 that he had recently stepped down.
“Sam was an incredible board member and provided invaluable support and counsel to Reddit and myself through the years,” Huffman was quoted as saying on the time. “We’re deeply grateful for the impact he made on the corporate.”
Now Altman is attempting to increase adoption of OpenAI’s services, including the favored ChatGPT chatbot. Reddit said in its filing that it sees competition from large language models that may produce human-like text in response to a couple of words of written input. Among the many LLMs listed are Google’s Gemini, startup Anthropic and ChatGPT.
As a part of the IPO, Reddit will offer shares to a few of its users and moderators, known colloquially as Redditors. For Altman, that is more likely to be a positive.
“It is often bothered me that users create a lot of the worth of web sites like reddit but don’t own any of it,” he wrote in his 2014 blog post.
He went on to say that investors within the Series B round would give 10% of shares to Reddit users.
“I hope we increase community ownership over time,” he wrote.
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