In "King Richard," the 2021 drama depicting the budding tennis careers of the Williams sisters, Will Smith's character Richard Williams turns down so many huge opportunities for his daughter Venus that it makes your jaw drop. That worked out pretty well for her and her sister, Serena, in the end.
If only social-media platform Reddit -- co-founded by Serena Williams's now husband, Alexis Ohanian -- had that kind of nerve and timing. Redditors took the market by storm last year, fueling a retail frenzy in meme stocks such as GameStop that turned investing fundamentals on their head, briefly making the WallStreetBets forum the center of the financial universe. Founded in 2005 in a dorm room, much like Facebook had been a year earlier, Reddit today is one of the most visited websites in the world with more than 50 million daily active unique users as of January.
But, financially at least, that is where the similarities end. In an era of tech hubris, Reddit is a rare case of underreach and founders who didn't know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
The company was sold in 2006 to media company Condé Nast for a mere $10 million. As of last August, it was privately valued at $10 billion. In late 2020, Mr. Ohanian tweeted that, at the time of the sale, he thought he was "getting away with something" after what amounted to just 16 months of work and more than his parents had made in their entire lives. He wrote that, back then, there were a lot of things he "desperately" needed to learn such as management, team building and leadership. A better sense of timing would have been handy, too.
Co-founder Steve Huffman, who now serves as chief executive officer, presumably has the management part down, and it looked as if he had learned to strike while the financial iron is hot. Reddit doubled its value in a private transaction just days after GameStop mania, also launching its first-ever Super Bowl ad. But the plans to raise capital were made before the episode.
Less auspicious was Reddit's waiting to file confidentially to go public until late last year, just as tech-stock valuations began to turn. An expected offering in the first quarter led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley never happened. Sentiment has since gone sharply downhill for the ad-based social-media business.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down 23% this year. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Fidelity Investments had slashed Reddit's valuation in April, marking down its stake by more than a third from the preceding month. And since then, Snap Inc., parent of ads-based social-media platform Snapchat, lowered its guidance, citing an unfavorable macroeconomic environment that has deteriorated "further and faster" than it had anticipated. That declaration led to a single-day drop in Snap's stock of 43%, dragging the entire social-media sector down with it.
When Reddit's WallStreetBets became a place that critics said helped separate fools from their money, including having "diamond hands" -- holding on during a speculative frenzy -- it earned Mr. Huffman an audience with Congress. He testified that investing advice on the forum was "probably among the best" because it has to be embraced by a crowd. Next time, he probably should just embrace whatever WallStreetBanks tell him.
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