Reddit said on Tuesday that it has closed a new $50 million round of outside funding led by Y Combinator President Sam Altman with participation from Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin and Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen.
Other investors mentioned further down in the announcement include Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Calvin Broadus Jr. (Get it, Snoop Dogg!), and CEO Yishan Wong.
The company discusses its plans for the money on its blog:
reddit has had a long and complex history, starting as one of the first Y Combinator companies, then as a division of Conde Nast, and three years ago spun out as an independent entity. During all of this time we have operated with a shoestring budget. This made us become efficient; it also meant that we were only able to work on essential features and were always understaffed. Even with the last year’s hiring (we’re 60+ strong now), we’ve found that there are still a lot more features you’ve been asking for that we haven’t always been able to get to as fast as we’d like.
Thus, we’re planning to use this money to hire more staff for product development, expand our community management team, build out better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third party developers to expand our mobile offerings (try our new AMA app), improve our self-serve ad product, build out redditgifts marketplace, pay for our growing technical infrastructure, and all the many other things it takes to support a huge and growing global internet community.
Interestingly, reddit says it has come up with a new way for its investors to give 10% of their shares back to the community.
In a reddit post (via TechCrunch), Wong says they’re thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it backed by those shares of the company, and then distributing it to the community.
Image via reddit