Hip-hop star Snoop Dogg, a fan-favorite on Reddit, is among a new group of high profile investors raising a new $50 million round of financing for the link-sharing and discussion site.
"We asked him to invest, and he said yes," Sam Altman, the deal's lead broker,
told The New York Times.
Snoop Dogg is the stage name of Calvin Broadus, Jr.
Broadus was joined in the financing round by actor Jared Leto – an occasional angel investor – as well as venture capital titans Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, and Josh Kushner, among others.
Ahead of the deal, Altman, the president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator – which counts Reddit among its graduates – asked the Reddit community who they'd like to see among its investors. "Snoop was high on the list," he said.
"He’s like a Reddit superstar," he explained, noting the rapper's popularity on Reddit's "Ask Me Anything" community interview forum. "The site loves him."
Broadus, whose career has spanned more than two decades, is a frequent and savvy user of social media, and also dabbled in the tech sector last year when he released his own smartphone app, Snoopify. The app allows users to add stickers of marijuana blunts, gaudy jewelry, food, scantily clad women, and other paraphernalia to their own photos.
Altman explained that in addition to including celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Leto, the deal also stipulates that all the investors allocate 10 percent of the equity they are buying to Reddit's users, who he said had "already invested their time to create value."
"These community sites – the community has always generated the value and rarely gotten it for themselves," Altman
told Re/code.
The mechanism by which the equity will be distributed back to users remains under discussion, but many have backed the creation of a unique digital currency to do so.
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