On March 3, Frank McCourt announced that Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, has joined “The People’s Bid for TikTok.”
The group, which is led by Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty, is a consortium of tech leaders and investors. Their website states that they want to “purchase TikTok and migrate the platform to new infrastructure that allows people to control their own data.”
Given Project Liberty’s mission to establish a new, decentralized internet model centered on data privacy, it’s easy to see why they’d have a vested interest in the ongoing discussions about TikTok’s user data.
Who is Alexis Ohanian?
Reuters reports that Ohanian is joining “The People’s Bid for TikTok” as a strategic advisor on all things social media. But what exactly is on the venture capitalist’s resume? Along with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz, he founded Reddit in 2005.
As Reuters points out, Ohanian sold Reddit to Conde Nast the following year, but simply couldn’t stay away. Eight years later, he returned as executive chair of the company: shaping Reddit, for better or worse, into the site it is today.
As well as this, Reuters report that Ohanian has invested in some pretty influential tech companies, including Patreon and Instacart.
“Where he [Ohanian] can help mostly is validating but also socializing what we’re doing,” McCourt told Reuters.
“On the one hand, this is a project which has very sophisticated technology at the core, and so you’re dealing with a very specific audience when it comes to demonstrating the validity of that technology and in how it works, and why it’s necessary.”
Despite submitting an official bid to buy the app in early January, McCourt says ByteDance has only “lightly” engaged with them so far. There’s still time for them to do so, but given we are over halfway through the 75-day extension granted by Trump, this would need to happen fast.
If TikTok doesn’t make a deal, whether that be with McCourt or any other interested parties, it will likely shut down on April 5.
