Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian on How a Business Is (and Isn’t) Like a Baby

Depending on how you’ve curated your Twitter feed, you know Alexis Ohanian as one of two things: a tech figurehead and investor revered as a co-founder of Reddit, or the husband of tennis G.O.A.T. Serena Williams. But since the arrival of his two-year-old daughter, Alexis Olympia, he’s increasingly blurring the lines between the two roles, thanks to a very vocal advocacy for quality paid family leave after his experience with a 16-week paternity leave. Part of that advocacy involves challenging the cultural and social biases we bring to a father’s role in childcare and domestic life. For Ohanian, that means asking dads the same question we always ask moms: How do you balance it all? So Ohanian went out, brought together a crew of powerhouse dads across sports, business, and entertainment (from Nicholas Thompson to Chris Bosh to The Kid Mero), and asked ‘em. Today, through his venture capital firm Initialized Capital, he’s releasing those conversations as a new podcast, Business Dad.

“I wanted to talk to as broad a range of business dads, all at the top of their game but doing a variety of things,” he says of the pod. “Guys I knew professionally, we had a whole other thing to talk about that I didn't know we thought about. It unlocked this entirely different thread of conversation whenever we'd get together.”

Ohanian’s hoping to expand our ideas of how the idea of “father” and “businessman” can—and could—bleed into one another. His first guest is Hasan Minhaj, comedian and host of Patriot Act, and if you listen, you’ll realize that Ohanian’s asking loftier life questions, too: about what constitutes a good life, and how his guests think about the responsibility of caring for—and developing—a real, live human. I caught up with Ohanian about the launch of the podcast, how parenting and start-ups overlap (and don’t), why fatherhood has changed his eye for investment, and what most worries him about his daughter growing up in the age of tech.

But first we talked about Game of Thrones.

One thing you mention on the podcast’s first episode is that you now understand Game of Thrones better, because you feel like if your house is secure, then everything else will secure itself. How did you come to that realization?
Well, what I meant is [becoming a dad] really crystallized why I do the work that I do. It's to provide for this legacy, for my family. It really helped me understand the lengths that people will go to defend the legacy that is their family. I'm not advocating for violence here. A lot of awful stuff went down in the name of family [in that show], but it made me be able to empathize a lot more.

I know that there are going to be trade offs that I'll have to make. The conversation with Hasan was so interesting because he's really popped off in the last couple of years now, at the same time he’s become a father. Having to weigh those responsibilities of dramatic career growth along with the responsibility of being a newfound dad—that's real. That's hard. He carves out time with his daughter every morning. That's something that his wife suggested super early and that he was receptive to—and is now grateful for—because he's got long nights, rewriting jokes for hours, especially doing a comedy show. He knows that morning window is sacred. He's built a wall around it. He's making that investment in fatherhood. That is a classic example of taking a short term “cost” for what is going to be a much bigger long-term investment on his productivity and his career.

There's been this myth, especially among men, that home and work are so separate. [But] we can do better work when we feel empowered knowing that our castle is in order, and that there's a bigger purpose to the work that we're doing.

Hasan also offers up the realization, too, that his dad didn't have the opportunity to make those choices. I think his line was, “My parents compromised so that I could live. What I'm doing is really living.”
There’s an interesting dynamic now that there’s a generation of children of immigrants who, because of their parents' sacrifice, have been able to architect a life that is much more on their terms than their parents could have ever imagined. They're not doing jobs they need to in order to pay the bills and survive. It creates a very interesting new challenge as parents, because you don't really have a framework for what it looks like to be a parent doing work that you love. If you grew up with parents who worked to live and made sacrifices, it's a new set of muscles that parents like Hasan will have to exercise and sort out.

What have you learned from being a dad, or from talking to other dads, that you’ve applied to business?
We've made three family[-focused] tech investments in probably the last eight or nine months. You now have twice as many people—now that dads are a lot more plugged in—thinking about and investing in the well-being of family, and using technology to do that.

That, to me, is a massive change. Historically, if you think of all the marketing dollars, if you think of all the products, it has been communicating to moms. And they're still a very valuable part of the market in terms of deciders on all that household spending. But you're seeing a big shift now. It's a good one, because it's a significant shift in the attitudes we have around parenting, and the antiquated idea that it's really only Mom who cares about this stuff.

What are some examples of the ways parents use tech?
So your doctor will tell you to download some kind of app—or use a notebook, I guess, if you're a Luddite—to track all of your baby's nursing, poops, all of these things. It's like: Do you want to be a good parent? If yes, then track everything that goes in and out of your baby for the first 12 months. It’s one of the best tests for: How is your baby doing? Is your baby healthy?

So you go on the app store and you view this bevy of terrible apps. And then a woman, Esther, that we found, she was so frustrated. She started a beautiful, modern, free baby app. And her premise was very simple. It was like, “I use Instagram to share photos of my baby. That's a world-class software to do something that, frankly, is not that important. And yet when it comes to something that's really important, that every new parent needs, this good app does not exist. How is that possible?” And so she built it: Nara Baby Tracker.

You can have multiple parties all using the software to track and keep tabs on the health and wellbeing of your child. It’s empowered dads. They’re grateful because they now have this real-time window into the wellbeing of their kid. It's a thing that they can ask questions about when they're at the doctor. It's a thing that they feel plugged into simply because software has made it beautiful and easy and transparent. It's such a subtle shift, but an empowering one.

You've written and talked about the importance of dads, taking time away from work and how that's paid dividends for you. What are some of the lessons you took from that time?
I didn't grow up with any little kids around me. So the first time I held my baby was the first time I really held a kid. And it was terrifying. I am big fella, and this was a little itty bitty baby in my hand, and it's such a humbling feeling. You know you can't fuck this up. Those first few months were world-changing because they gave me confidence that I could handle it, that I could figure it out, that I'm not going to break her.

She's two in a few months. There's always some new thing. Your baby evolves like a Pokemon. But I feel a sense of calm because I know we'll figure it out, and it really stems from that time when I got handed this itty bitty baby and was entrusted to take care of it and not screw up. I couldn't imagine not having had that time. And there are far too many dads who don't get the chance.

This sounds like a flippant question, but I mean it genuinely: are there similarities between nurturing a child and nurturing a new company?
I was guilty of describing my startups in those terms: it's your “baby,” it's your “kid.” It is very different. But being an entrepreneur prepared me for the 24/7 awareness. You never really shut off as an entrepreneur. The business is always on in your head, and that part very much exists in the mind of a new parent—or at least it does for me. It’s ever-present: Oh right, this is a responsibility that I'm going to have for the rest of my life.

As much as I love being an entrepreneur, it's still just different. You can declare bankruptcy on your company and start all over again. But you really shouldn't do that with your kid.

What’s something about tech that makes you optimistic for Olympia’s future? And what makes you a little worried?
I certainly will teach her programming as early as she'll let me and I'll hope to expose her to as much technology as she cares to be. But I would encourage every parent to do that. Everyone should have the opportunity to be exposed to it. The thing that gets me optimistic is I do believe that we can solve a lot of hard problems. I do believe that we can improve the world in material ways with technology.

The part that's more trying is I don't think we're asking the right questions yet, as a society, about the role technology is playing. I think we're five years behind the questions we should be asking. And I don't feel like we're fully aware of the effects automation will have in the coming decade on the economy. We don't fully appreciate the role of automation and the trade-offs between privacy and security. We can already see what that looks like in China. We're going to see very clearly what that looks like in the next 10 years as that expands and improves.

We still aren't having any conversations deciding where we want it to go or how we want it to shape society. The technology will continue to improve and will continue to evolve. We should start having the conversations sooner rather than later because technology will not wait.

How optimistic are you that we can close that five-year gap and start asking the right questions?
I think it depends on who’s President in 2020. It depends on the media, who plays a role guiding this conversation these days. It also depends on the extent to which social media guides this conversation. If we can come up with a really clever Tik Tok meme for discussing the automation revolution that's coming, maybe there's a way to get it into the consciousness.

The most immediate ask I would have is to see it be a part of the 2020 election. That whoever's getting the Democratic nomination—presumably, Trump’s getting the Republican nomination—will have to answer in debates for where we should go, and where we should draw the lines around security versus privacy. That would be a win, because then we can get Americans thinking about it, talking about it, better informing themselves about it. And then for us as a society, [we can] decide what we're okay with and what we're not.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Originally Appeared on GQ