Alexis Ohanian Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Entrepreneur is just French for 'has ideas, does them'.

Having ideas and doing them - that's what entrepreneurship comes down to. That's something that makes you not just a great founder who I want to invest in, but also a great employee or someone I want to work with.

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.

We don't even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way

The first version of everything is janky.

You know that Estonia, based largely on how successful Skype was, built by Estonian developers, that was a tenth of the entire country's GDP when eBay bought it. That was like a decade ago, it was f****** Estonia, they were behind the Iron Curtain two decades earlier. They're now pushing for K-12 education in computer science in public schools. They've gotten the message. They know how much value that can bring.

Every founder has to delude themselves into thinking, "Yes, it's going to be big. It's going to take over the world."

Not everyone is going to end up being a founder of a company, but the skill of being entrepreneurial, having ideas and going through with them - that skill is so important. Everyone should be imbued with it. Because once you have that, once your brain has been wired for that, all these problems, obstacles, all these things start looking like things you can hack.

Hundreds of these companies I've seen since the beginning stages - including Dropbox and Airbnb - one of them has actually been crushed by an incumbent. The Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks, they might be someone to acquire you, which is not necessarily a bad position to be in.

The social-media landscape changes incredibly fast, so you have to be open-minded and nimble to keep up with it.

Let's do 150 stops. Let's go to 75 universities, and let's spread this gospel of Internet entrepreneurship everywhere we go.

You can throw - and we've seen plenty of these kinds of companies - millions of dollars in advertising for a website or a service, and in the end if it's not useful no one's going to use it.

I don't have a crystal ball, but if you can ever put yourself in a situation where you are indispensable - where you aren't part of what looks like a fad, but you actually are a company, a brand that people trust and go to - at this point, you could put some of the mainstays of tech on anything, right?

If I were a snarky Reddit user though, I would say, hypothetically, that that would just be like reading Reddit's Front Page a day later. But I'm not going to go there.

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.

The people who are going to be succeeding are not going to be waiting around for anyone's permission.

Obviously solving the education problem is big and complex, and there's already so many failings, but coding is the new fluency. This is the most valuable skill of this century. If you want to be a founder of a company, and not even just a tech company, but like a founder of a company, because I'm telling you software is going to play a role.

The stage of investing that I do is seed stage, so it's really early. Here's a pair of founders who maybe have a prototype. They have a little bit of traction, maybe one employee, tops. At that stage, you really, really can only evaluate a company based on those founders and what they've been able to build. It's very, very team driven.

I guess if you include contractors that are six or seven people working on reddit, but when we got acquired there were basically three and then in the years since, we've added three more developer hires full time, and a community manger. But the site is still remarkably small.

What one realizes there is that we are not in control of the [reddit] community, in any way, shape or form. We have no power over it and so we've lost this total control.

If you look now, more than ever new entrants, new upstarts, are able to grow so much faster than they could before.

There is a much bigger issue with student loan rates, the cost of tuition; those are some huge problems that need to be resolved.

I actually haven't even found a curriculum in America that is really preparing people for this 21st century world.

If I'm at the University of Georgia and I can't inspire this room full of students, OK, fine. I'm not going to take it personally. Maybe a little bit, but I'll be all right.

The goal shouldn't be to be the next Silicon Valley (there'll always only be one of those) - it's to be your own startup community.

It's a lot easier to convince uninformed people than it is to convince politicians.

Let's say you're all worried about student-loan debt and you need to have steady income. That doesn't have to be your everything.

I think the one advantage to a failed - recovering, but a pretty broken - economy, and a lot of broken promises, is that we've pulled the veils from our eyes way earlier than most people do, and realize "Hey, you know what, maybe I should try do this thing that I really care about, and why not spend the time now during my best years to get into knitting, or coding, or swamp boat sailing." And there's this resource called the Internet that's going to provide you with a stage and a library for all of those things.

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.

I like sarcasm. I like snark.

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.

The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.

Because it's so empowering, I want people to think about being entrepreneurial regardless. They don't have to start companies, but that's what makes them great employees, that's what makes them great citizens.

Raise $500 for a thing you care about because you actually get the experience of taking an idea and actually doing it. There are fewer and fewer excuses not to.

The first step, and the thing that everyone has to do right on the Internet is make something people want.

No, everyone has great ideas, but what makes a difference, especially online, or just in life, is actually doing it; getting that first version out there.

I try to help founders as much as I can, but so many of us we won't even take meetings with people who still just have an idea, because everyone has an idea.

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

The Internet is such a tough marketplace because everyone is a click away from going back to a cat photo, or going back to whatever else they were doing. You have to win them over, and do it quickly, and do it by making something people actually want.

Everything is derivative. Everything is a remix, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants - a great phrase.

If you imagine Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you can get all those requirements checked off and have all those amazing things that we need to just live lives, but actually get to do the thing that you're really passionate about.

I want to be in an industry where the upstarts can grow and displace the incumbents, because that's why there's so much innovation.