Alexis Ohanian used to track down and personally congratulate Redditors who made the top post on the site each day

• Alexis Ohanian said he used to email whoever wrote the top post on Reddit in the company's early days.
• In a Twitter thread, the investor said he would congratulate them with a digital "golden Snoo."

If your Reddit post hit the top spot on the website in its early days, chances are you'd get a personal email from co-founder Alexis Ohanian himself.

The now-venture capitalist opened up about the practice on Twitter Wednesday.

"I'd congratulate them on 'hitting number one on Reddit' and send them a PNG file of a 'golden Snoo,'" Ohanian tweeted, referring to a gold-colored version of the company's alien logo.

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The co-founder said the process to find each author or creator was labor intensive but worth it, given the positive feedback he's gotten from recipients over the years.

The anecdote was part of a thread in which Ohanian explained the benefits of thinking outside the box as a young CEO and engaging with the people that are actually using the product.

"Something founders UNDERvalue is their title as CEO/Founder at an early stage startup — it means something when a customer/user gets an email from you and sees "CEO" in the signature (even if they've never heard of your startup). How often does that happen? (Never,)" Ohanian tweeted.

He also noted that CEOs doing something like that doesn't scale, but can improve the product and engages with a growing community. It's something he still looks for in founders today.

Ohanian co-founded Reddit in 2005 alongside Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz and sold the company to Conde Nast just a year later for $10 million. It was valued at $10 billion in August 2021.

Ohanian co-founded the VC firm Initialized Capital in 2011, where he was a managing partner until 2020. Just a few months later, he founded Seven Seven Six, a Florida-based VC firm focused on early-stage and growth startups.