Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, the possible return of Toys R Us and how Amazon just burrowed itself a bit deeper inside your house.

But first, Reddit. So not too long ago, Reddit was best known as the social media site you didn't tell your friends or family that you visited.

For every thread and community on something like climate change or biomedical engineering, there was one about so-called creep shots or men taking and posting photos of unsuspecting women.

Advertisers, not surprisingly, stayed pretty far away.

But today's Reddit is much,

much different and much more important. First, the company banned many of its scummier topics.

It also revamped its business strategy and last year generated over $100 million by selling

ads to a whole host of Who's Who in the Fortune 500. And in a pretty major

validation of the overhaul, Reddit yesterday announced that it's raised $300 million in new

venture capital funding, led by Chinese internet giant Tencent at a whopping valuation of $3 billion.

But why this matters isn't really the money. It's that Reddit is increasingly where tomorrow's

mainstream conversations begin. If you wanted to learn about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies years

before the newspaper articles and magazine covers, Reddit was your spot. Or maybe more

importantly, as we head into 2020, Reddit was where Donald Trump was first taken seriously

as a presidential candidate,

or at least where you could first see that there was major energy around him.

This site has the same reach as Twitter, but with a different organizational structure and more

focus on community than on celebrity.

And Reddit should only grow larger with this new $300 million in the bank.

In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper with

Alexis O'Hanian, Reddit's co-founder and current managing partner of VC firm

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