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Do not be scared of the incumbents.

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
Incumbents
Scared

More quotes by 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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Net neutrality is one where we the people are definitely on the ropes.
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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If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.
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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Every founder has to delude themselves into thinking, Yes, it's going to be big. It's going to take over the world.
Alexis Ohanian
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There is a much bigger issue with student loan rates, the cost of tuition those are some huge problems that need to be resolved.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
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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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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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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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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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
Alexis Ohanian
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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.
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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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.
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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Everything is derivative. Everything is a remix, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants - a great phrase.
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