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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 18, 2024.
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | getty images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stands to make millions after Reddit goes public, thanks to a series of bets he made on the online discussion board company dating back to 2014. Altman holds 9.2% of the voting power ahead of Reddit’s initial public offering. For information in the company’s prospectus.
Altman, which is now reportedly looking to raise trillions of rupees for chip development, could help accomplish that Microsoft-OpenAI has invested in dozens of startups over the past few years, supporting artificial intelligence computing demand. Contains Posturewhich affected the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, and instacart, which debuted on Nasdaq in September. Before OpenAI launched in 2015, Altman was president of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, which gave him exposure to many smaller companies.
In 2014, Altman led Reddit’s $50 million Series B funding round after using the service every day for nine years, he wrote in a blog post.
He wrote, “Reddit is an example of something that started out looking like a silly toy to waste time and has become very interesting.” “It’s been an important community for me over the years – I can find like-minded people that I don’t always find in the real world.”
In the first half of 2021, Reddit was raising a Series E round, and Altman invested $50 million.
Then, in the second half of the year, Altman sank another $10 million into Reddit as the company raised about $512 million in funding. By that time, Altman’s $50 million investment had increased 45% in value since the beginning of the year.
According to Thursday’s filing, the shares of Reddit’s Class A and Class B stock are spread among five different entities, and they will give Altman more shares than CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit has not yet told investors how many Class A shares it plans to sell in the IPO.
According to the filing, Altman most recently sat on Reddit’s board in 2021. Reddit said in January 2022 that he had recently stepped down.
Huffman was quoted at the time as saying, “Sam was an incredible board member and provided invaluable support and advice to Reddit and me over the years.” “We are very grateful for his impact on the company.”
Now Altman is trying to drive adoption of OpenAI’s services, including the popular ChatGPAT chatbot. Reddit said in its filing that it sees competition from larger language models that can generate human-like text in response to a few words of written input. Listed LLMs include Google’s Gemini, startup Anthropic and ChatGPT.
As part of the IPO, Reddit will offer shares to some of its users and moderators, colloquially known as Redditors. For Altman, this is likely to be a positive.
“It always bothers me that users create so much value out of sites like Reddit but own nothing of them,” he wrote in his 2014 blog post.
He further said that investors in the Series B round will give 10% shares to Reddit users.
“I hope that over time we will increase community ownership,” he wrote.
Watch: FirstMark’s Heitzman says Reddit is a litmus test of investors’ appetite for non-AI things
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