Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Ohanianis an Armenian-American internet entrepreneur, activist and investor based in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, best known for co-founding the social news website Reddit, helping launch the travel search website Hipmunk, and starting the social enterprise Breadpig. He is a partner at Y Combinator, and is also the executive chairman of Reddit. Ohanian is in a relationship with Serena Williams...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth24 April 1983
CountryUnited States of America
My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, 'You bastards.' I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call 'The Waffle House Epiphany': I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a dent in the universe.
The reason people need advice on using social media is that they're a much more complex and nuanced way to communicate than a conversation or email.
Facebook makes me hate the people I know, and Reddit makes me love the people I don't.
I often think of a quote from entrepreneur Jim Rohn: 'You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.' Surround yourself with people who are doing interesting things, who are thinking interesting thoughts, who challenge you to be better, and who come from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. That, combined with appropriate moments of 'me' time, provides the perfect breeding ground for great ideas. And whatever you do, don't get hung up on what competitors are doing. Be aware of what's going on in the industry, but don't let it dictate your own creative process.
It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time.
We were very, very lucky being in the first round of Y Combinator because that alone generated a lot of interest. A lot of readers of Paul Graham were just excited to see what was going to come up. And we were the first ones to launch.
If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.
The great thing about the Internet is, it's the freest marketplace of ideas that there is.
Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.
Having that kind of endorsement and having Paul Graham's readership coming to your site and contributing to it and building the foundation of the community was just a really invaluable way to start Reddit.
I hate phone calls so I believe in a telephone armistice. To me, the idea of calling someone unprompted is basically saying, 'Hey, stop whatever you're doing and talk to me right now.
There was a clear lesson here — and that was that the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants.
The surveillance state has run amok. Technology that's enabled us to send selfies 24/7 - not that valuable - has also enabled us to be spied upon us 24/7.
The weird thing about reddit is that, for a community its size - now I'm no longer at reddit, but the public traffic numbers that they put out are, I think with the site about eight million unique visitors a month, or every 30 days, which is a fairly big site.