Add one more thing to the Snoop Dogg empire.
The Long Beach, California, native is among a handful of celebrities, including actor Jared Leto and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, to invest in the popular website Reddit.
Probably best known for its candid “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) Q&A’s where virtually nothing is off limits, the website set out to find some outside funding to expand its brand and raked in a whooping $50 million from various investors. Reddit shared its plans with the public via a blog post:
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 Reddit gifts marketplace, pay for our growing technical infrastructure, and all the many other things it takes to support a huge and growing global internet community.
Snoop has been a mainstay on the site frequently doing the AMA sessions where his love for marijuana is a frequent point of discussion.
“He’s like a Reddit superstar,” said Sam Altman, president of start up financier Y Combinator, which backed Reddit when it began in 2005. “The site loves him.” In fact when it came time to come up with a list of potential investors Snoop was one of the first people called upon. “Snoop was high on the list,” Altman confirmed. “We asked him to invest, and he said yes.”
When the deal went through and all became official, Altman posted to the AMA forum to share the news and sure enough Snoop, who goes by the username “Here_Comes_The_King” on site was among the first to comment.
“Whaddup Sam! They let the Dogg n the building,” he said. “Now do I get an official title??”
