“We were trying to get him to move and get out of there,” she said. “He kind of refuses and he looks at us. And he’s like, ‘Is there really a rat here?'” So she switched tactics: “‘No, we just don’t want you sitting there. We’re going to use that table.'”
Reader, a meet-cute this was not.
But something about Ohanian won Williams over, perhaps his proclamation that in his native Brooklyn, he saw rats all the time. Williams then invited him to join them, which is when Ohanian got his first inkling that she was actually that Serena Williams, unmistakable tennis legend.
But, as he admitted to Vanity Fair, he had “never watched a match on television or in real life. It was literally the sport—even if ESPN was announcing tennis updates, I would just zone out. . . . I really had no respect for tennis.”
Which, was okay, because when Ohanian said he was at the tech conference to speak, an in-demand personality thanks to the creation of Reddit, Williams claimed to totally be familiar with the networking site, having perused it just that morning.
