Alexis Ohanian
Co-founder of reddit
Discussion
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
Hi everyone, I'm Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder at Reddit, tech investor, bestselling author of 'Without Their Permission', and activist for the open Internet. After I graduated from UVA and realized my desire to play for the NFL miiiight not work out, I turned to working on making the Internet suck less. I'm super stoked about the things Reddit has accomplished since returning back to the company, including shipping our brand new official mobile apps, launching native image hosting, and building out an incredible team. In my spare time, I cheer relentlessly for the Washington Redskins, invest in some pretty cool startups, and FaceTime with my cat, Karma. Ask me anything!
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Philippe Beaudette
@pbeaudette · Director of Community, Reddit
Alexis, it's Philippe - your community manager from Reddit. I've got my whole team with me because it's time for our weekly meeting. But you know that we are never ones to be shy or miss an opportunity to have fun with the boss. Folks may not know of your tradition of giving prizes to staff....who write the best haiku to earn them. So my team has a challenge for you: they would like to hear your very best Haiku about your time here today, by the time we are done. Also, please don't fire us. :-)
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@pbeaudette
Haikus are lovely
'cuz almost anyone can
Free smart frying pan
🍳
Philippe Beaudette
@pbeaudette · Director of Community, Reddit
@alexisohanian .... that day when you troll your boss, who trolls you back, and better.
Philipp Meder
@phimema · Sales, Marketing @JapaCasa
@alexisohanian @pbeaudette I'm taking a creative writing class atm and this week we were supposed to write haikus. This might be one of the funniest ones I've heard so far!
Andrew Ettinger
@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)
Hey Alexis, thanks for joining! Been a super active Reddit user for ~8 years. Quick question: why has there never been a redesign? I figure there's a reason so would love to hear your take.
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@andrewett Don't you love my choice of Verdana??? I've been asked this question for over a decade and I'm happy to say we're already making great progress on mobile web (http://m.reddit.com) and native mobile apps, which are world class, fast, and beautiful -- more than half of our traffic is via mobile, so it made sense to start there. The team has done a remarkable job in a short period of time by modernizing Reddit, while still holding true to the principles of function over form.
Abhishek Chakraborty
@coffeeandjunk · UX Designer
Hey Alexis, what is your typical day like?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@coffeeandjunk I should get better at documenting this on snapchat (id: alexisohanian). It really depends on the day, but I'm usually doing some combination of meetings, emailing, and meetings. And travel. I'm on a plane a lot, but those hours are the times when I get some of the most work done because there's no distraction.
Sergio Flores
@byoigres · Software Developer
@alexisohanian @coffeeandjunk Are you currently reading some books?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@byoigres @coffeeandjunk Yes! Love books. Currently reading The Inner Game of Tennis. And most nights I get home, work on emails, and catch up on all that great TV I've been missing. (e.g., Walking Dead, Narcos, etc)
Sergio Flores
@byoigres · Software Developer
@alexisohanian @coffeeandjunk Nice! I love TV shows and I didn't know about "Without Their Permission", looks really interesting, probably this will be my next acquisition.
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@byoigres @coffeeandjunk For all you wonderful PHers... 😏😏😏😏
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o6hpne...
Sergio Flores
@byoigres · Software Developer
@alexisohanian @coffeeandjunk Oh my, I should probably start to read it. Thank you!
jeneta hot
@jenetahot
@alexisohanian @byoigres @coffeeandjunk this is awesome - thank you!
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@jenetahot @byoigres @coffeeandjunk Now you have no excuse not to read & review!
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
I recently read your initial YC application http://alexisohanian.com/our-y-c... - and you guys said you were rejected by YC with this and told you could join if you came up with a new idea... what is the story of coming up with that new idea (reddit) and pitching it back to YC to get accepted?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@BenTossell Thank you, Jessica, for demanding to the other partners that they let us into YC. She had second thoughts the next morning and YC decided they would accept us, but only if we changed our idea to something in a browser (not for mobile) that "solved our problem every morning." Here's the story in a much longer form.... (ganked from my book)
Somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, on an exceptionally long train ride back to Virginia, my cell phone rang. It was Paul Graham. He wanted us back, but only if we changed our idea to something else. So much for proving them wrong. We got off at the very next stop, but not before I got Paul to buy us a pair of tickets to fly back to Charlottesville that night so we could return to Boston for an hour to join him in brainstorming a better idea than mobile food ordering. The big problem with the concept was that not only did we have to persuade customers to use the product, but because this was a time before app stores, the only way to get our software on people’s phones was to make deals with mobile carriers first. That alone would’ve been an impressive feat for a brand-new company of two, but we’d also need to get restaurateurs—notoriously late adopters—on board as well. Yikes.
We got back to the Y Combinator office and met with Paul Graham alone, without his partners. He told us to forget mobile for a moment and consider building something for the browser. Long before most people realized the power of online software, he knew the Internet offered tremendous potential for an idea to spread as never before. When a customer only needs a browser and an Internet connection to access your product, unprecedented growth is possible. He asked us about frustrations we had using the Internet, which had just recently seen the launch of a college-only site called TheFacebook.com. Steve was an avid reader of Slashdot, a news website with editorial oversight and a robust community of commenters as well as a moderation system. I had too many tabs open every day—they showed me a range of news websites, but I had no way to filter signal from noise. At the time, a website called del.icio.us (pronounced “delicious”; ignore the dots) let people bookmark websites online, so if you hopped between computers, your reference material followed you. An interesting by-product of this was del.icio.us/popular, which aggregated the most popular bookmarked URLs at any given time. There was something here that del.icio.us wasn’t quite getting, but we saw the potential for something bigger, which would sort not the most popular links for bookmarking but the most popular links for sharing.
We hadn’t figured out functionality, but we knew the old model for news aggregation, when it was printed on a dead tree, wasn’t suited for the Internet age. In fact, the vision was best crystallized by Paul Graham in that very meeting: “That’s it! You should build the front page of the web.”
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
@alexisohanian getting the book...
Vitor
@vit05 · tapan.ga
@alexisohanian late for the party, but would have loved to hear your thoughts about AR. And what do you think about Audio Apps, we have space for something new?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@bentossell Thanks, Ben! There's an e-book version floating around in these comments...
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@vit05 There's a lot of hype in AR right now and I'm pretty skeptical of most of it. I believe in it long-term, but short-term the only 2 companies doing hardware around this space that I could get behind are Thalmic https://www.thalmic.com/whatsnext and Meta https://www.metavision.com/
What are audio apps, exactly? Spotify?
Vitor
@vit05 · tapan.ga
@alexisohanian Thanks for answer. =)
metavision looks cool, but to big for use on streets.
Spotify is for produced music. I mean any kind of audio. I see a lot of podcasts apps (terrible name) or apps to talk directly to friends. But I do not see many social apps that are fun to use for spontaneous audios. I do not know if anyone wants something like this, if there are killer apps that are not popular yet, or if there is an opportunity there.
Pierre-Marie Galite
@tsunaze · entrepreneur, mobile developer/advisor
Hey, do you intend to do 'Small Empires' again? It was really cool!
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@tsunaze I LOVED creating Small Empires. Had an amazing team - Stephen, Jordan, Billy, Christian, and more all made that happen for a couple great seasons. Some of my favorite episodes would have to be Atlanta with PartPic or NY with OKCUPID. That said, while I'd love to continue it, I just don't have the time right now. We looked into 'open sourcing' it for a minute...
Thomas Stöcklein
@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com
What are you favorite subreddits?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@tomstocklein Right now... r/Redskins, r/NFL, r/sneakers, r/AskHistorians, r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/futurology... and @CDixon just turned me on to https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootrop...
Abhishek Chakraborty
@coffeeandjunk · UX Designer
How did you get the initial users of Reddit? Did they like it from the very beginning, or did you guys have to tweak the product?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@coffeeandjunk In 2005, there was no social media to speak of, so no effective way to get an audience from 0 other than pitching better known bloggers to write about you. I emailed a few hundred people who had been members of a message board (PHPBB!) that I ran in college, which converted into a couple of Reddit users and pinged all our friends from college (two converted - thanks, Connor + Morgan!).
Because we weren't going to attract anyone to stick around with an empty Reddit frontpage (nothing sadder than an empty Reddit community) Steve and I submitted links for the first month or so under different usernames. This helped new users understand that Reddit wasn't some kind of stripped down blog Steve and I ran, but a new kind of community platform.
Our first surge of traffic that didn’t come from browbeaten friends was thanks to an essay Paul Graham wrote and gave us a great bump. People actually were using the site and a couple months in, Steve and I no longer needed to fake submissions, which was a pretty awesome feeling. It seemed like it just might work after all.
Abhishek Chakraborty
@coffeeandjunk · UX Designer
Can you give a few tips on building a community?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@coffeeandjunk I wrote an ebook about this a while ago and I'm not sure how useful it is today, but here's a copy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jl704t...
Let me know if it's worth the quick read.
As for some quick tips.... I think the biggest one is knowing what you're about and being true to it. Steve and I were the first community managers at Reddit because we only had one community then (front page) and we handled spam, etc. We set the tone for the community with the things we posted and upvoted and were active 'party hosts' there. In many ways that was a reflection of us, if we'd have behaved differently, the community would have looked different (just like offline community organizing).
Now when it comes to building a community OF communities, that's a different conversation.
We realized quickly that we needed to be a platform for communities if one day we wanted to have a billion users, we'd need to support tens (hundreds?) of thousands of disparate diverse communities on one platform, which meant letting people spin up their own communities (subreddits) and lead them like we did back in the day. We still have work to do, but the team has made meaningful improvements to mod tools, decimated spam (literally down 90%), and developed strong processes & built out our community support staff.
Abhishek Chakraborty
@coffeeandjunk · UX Designer
@alexisohanian Hey thanks a lot for the book :)
Chirag Charlie Bansal
@chirag_bansal · CEO Sweat Proof Dress Shirts
How did the idea of Reddit come about?
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Alexis Ohanian
@alexisohanian · Co-founder, Reddit & Initialized Capital
@chirag_bansal Answered this up here. https://www.producthunt.com/live...
TL;DR We got rejected for another idea (skipping lines by ordering via your mobile phone) and they invited us back to Y Combinator as long as we changed our idea to anything that we could build in a browser (not mobile) and we built Reddit based on a conversation with Paul that encouraged us to solve our problem every morning of finding out what was new and interesting in the world.