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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
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.
Alexis Ohanian
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
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.
Alexis Ohanian
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
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
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
The problem is these politicians have very, very big interests in being re-elected, and the money that gets them there is provided by people who don't necessarily have the interest of the public in mind.
Alexis Ohanian
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.
Alexis Ohanian
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
Net neutrality is one where we the people are definitely on the ropes.
Alexis Ohanian
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
The first step, and the thing that everyone has to do right on the Internet is make something people want.
Alexis Ohanian
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.
Alexis Ohanian
The first version of everything is janky.
Alexis Ohanian
It's a lot easier to convince uninformed people than it is to convince politicians.
Alexis Ohanian
We all have great ideas. No one ever says, I've got this terrible idea.
Alexis Ohanian
If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.
Alexis Ohanian
I can't begrudge anyone who opts to get a job instead of creating one for themselves.
Alexis Ohanian
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
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
