How Alexis Ohanian plans to turn track stars into superstars

Track and field athletes captivate millions during the Olympics — but then vanish for four years.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is betting he can change that with Athlos, a women’s track and field spectacle that highlights both the power of the human body and Instagram.

“Track and field is one of the most watched sports of the Olympics … but it’s not really elevated outside of those Olympic Games,” Ohanian told me. “We want to put them on the biggest stage that we can in prime time.”

The first Athlos event was held in September 2024 at Icahn Stadium on Randall’s Island. Thirty-five of the world’s top women in track — including Marileidy Paulino and Gabby Thomas — competed, attracting three million viewers across streaming and broadcast platforms.

On Friday, the big event will return to Icahn, as well as stream on X, YouTube and Ion. Ohanian is hoping it will be even bigger than last year.

His ultimate goal is to turn a whole new generation of athletes into superstars with the same wealth and fame as his wife, Serena Williams. Track’s incredible feats of running and jumping have amazing potential to go viral on social media, he believes.

“In sport, our job is to capture attention,” he told me. “Track and field can tell an entire story within 45 seconds.”

The 42-year-old Ohanian started his venture capital firm Seven Seven Six — appropriately named for the year the ancient first Olympics were held in 776 BC — in 2020. A self-proclaimed “proud girl dad” to Alexis Olympia, 8, and Adira River, 2, he’s known for investing in opportunities he believes will have a positive impact.

After leaving Reddit in 2020 — 15 years after starting the now $38 billion social media behemoth — he became founding control owner of LA’s Angel City FC, which competes in the National Women’s Soccer League. He also recently bought a stake in the Chelsea Women’s FC. 

But he doesn’t conflate principles with charity.

“It’s all about the return,” he said. “It feels good to be right about the values I have.”

Women’s sports is a somewhat recent focus. He grew up in Brooklyn in a family that only cared about men’s football. “That was the sport I played. That was the sport I watched. My dad would change the channel [if women’s sports came on].”

He was drawn to invest in women’s athletics by data that suggests that female contenders in certain sports can have just as large of a following — if not larger — than their male counterparts.

“The dollars don’t lie … You’ll notice no one ever thinks of women’s tennis as like a charity,” Ohanian said. “Even to this day, more Americans watch the U.S. Open women’s final than the men’s … Everyone knows women’s tennis is as big a deal, as important, as valuable as men’s.”

Just as few anticipated women’s tennis exploding before Billie Jean King and the Williams Sisters, Ohanian believes track and field can follow the same trajectory — especially because the data is already there.

Top stars like Alica Schmidt and Sha’Carri Richardson have 5.5 million and 4 million respectively. By comparison, the world’s fastest man, Noah Lyles, has just 1.6 million followers.

“For me, as a social media guy, I didn’t care what the TV ratings of these sports were, because those were all lagging indicators of where people thought the value was,” he said. “I was looking on the free market of the internet, where Instagram, like it or not, is the biggest market for attention.”

Ultimately, he envisions that Athlos won’t just be an annual event but rather “a Formula One-style, team-based track and field” league that keeps athletes in the spotlight year-round.

But it’s far from Ohanian’s only project. He’s poured nine figures of his own money into Seven Seven Six, which now has over $1.1B in assets under management. It incubates at least one company per year while seeding dozens more, including Mr. Beast’s Feastables, Stoke Space, Riverside, Nucleus Genomics, Monumental Labs and RO. The latter is a health company for which Serena Williams is serving as a GLP-1 ambassador.

Earlier this year he was part of one of the many bids to buy TikTok.

While his group wasn’t the winning bidder, he’s still open to involvement.

“I still would love to play some kind of role in the new TikTok. I’m here if, you know, if y’all want me,” he said.

He’s thinking a lot about where social media is heading next — and it’s not what most people expect.

With AI-generated content flooding major platforms, Ohanian believes authentic conversation has already migrated somewhere else: group chats.

“My hunch is the next wave of social, it’s already here in group chats… People have moved conversations there because, you know, you know, the 50 other CEOs in your group chat are real humans,” he told me. “You actually care about the real humans you actually want to influence.”

The next iteration of social media, he predicts, will need to solve for trust and authenticity in ways current platforms can’t.

“It’s going to have proof of humanity, and it’s probably going to have some delightful user experience hook that makes people want to go there instead of what they’re doing now, which is whatever a WhatsApp group or Signal, you name the different thing. So that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for right now.”

Whether he’s right about group chats remains to be seen, but he loves proving people wrong with his success.

“Having half the internet say, ‘you’re an idiot’ … I save all those tweets. I literally save them,” he said. “Then, every time we have another revenue milestone or sellout crowd or a new valuation, I tag them and I post their tweet and I say, ‘Thank you so much. Thank you. I feast on your tears.’”

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