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The first version of everything is janky.

Alexis Ohanian

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Alexis Ohanian
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: April 24
Entrepreneur
Internet Entrepreneur
Investor
Venture Capitalist
Brooklyn
New York
Kn0thing
Alexis Kerry Ohanian
First
Version
Versions
Firsts
Everything

More quotes by Alexis Ohanian

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If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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It turns out the Internet is this amazing resource for everyone who has access to it.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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I think we are a better and a more efficient society when people actually get to do the things that they really are passionate about, and really are amazing at, because it's going to mean better stuff for us, too.
Alexis Ohanian
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If I didn't believe in rooting for founders and investing in founders, I'd be a bit of a hypocrite.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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There was a clear lesson here — and that was that the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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If you look now, more than ever new entrants, new upstarts, are able to grow so much faster than they could before.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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The great thing about the Internet is, it's the freest marketplace of ideas that there is.
Alexis Ohanian