OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman might be able to make tens of millions after Reddit goes public, because of a collection of bets on the web dialogue board firm that return to 2014. Altman holds 9.2% of voting energy forward of Reddit’s preliminary public providing, in accordance with data in the corporate’s prospectus.
Altman, who’s now reportedly eager to lift trillions for chip improvement that might assist meet Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s synthetic intelligence computing demand, has invested in dozens of startups over time. That features Asana, which hit the New York Inventory Trade in 2020, and Instacart, which debuted on the Nasdaq in September. Earlier than OpenAI launched in 2015, Altman was president of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, giving him publicity to many small corporations.
In 2014 Altman led Reddit’s $50 million Collection B funding spherical, after utilizing the service day-after-day for 9 years, he wrote in a weblog publish.
“reddit is an instance of one thing that started off wanting like a foolish toy for losing time and has turn into one thing very fascinating,” he wrote. “It has been an essential group for me over time—I can discover like-minded those who I am unable to all the time discover in the true world.”
Within the first half of 2021, Reddit was elevating a Collection E spherical, 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 funding from earlier within the yr was up 45% in worth.
The shares of Reddit’s Class A and Class B inventory are unfold throughout 5 totally different entities, and they’re going to give Altman extra shares than even CEO Steve Huffman, in accordance with Thursday’s submitting. Reddit has not but informed buyers what number of Class A shares it plans to promote within the IPO.
Altman sat on Reddit’s board as just lately as 2021, in accordance with the submitting. Reddit mentioned in January 2022 that he had just lately stepped down.
“Sam was an unimaginable board member and offered invaluable help and counsel to Reddit and myself over time,” Huffman was quoted as saying on the time. “We’re deeply grateful for the impression he made on the corporate.”
Now Altman is making an attempt to extend adoption of OpenAI’s companies, together with the favored ChatGPT chatbot. Reddit mentioned in its submitting that it sees competitors from giant language fashions that may produce human-like textual content in response to a couple phrases of written enter. Among the many LLMs listed are Google’s Gemini, startup Anthropic and ChatGPT.
As a part of the IPO, Reddit will supply shares to a few of its customers and moderators, recognized colloquially as Redditors. For Altman, that is more likely to be a optimistic.
“It is all the time bothered me that customers create a lot of the worth of websites like reddit however do not personal any of it,” he wrote in his 2014 weblog publish.
He went on to say that buyers within the Collection B spherical would give 10% of shares to Reddit customers.
“I hope we improve group possession over time,” he wrote.
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