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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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Alexis Ohanian
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: April 24
Entrepreneur
Internet Entrepreneur
Investor
Venture Capitalist
Brooklyn
New York
Kn0thing
Alexis Kerry Ohanian
Grow
Grows
Much
Upstart
Displace
Incumbents
Innovation
Industry

More quotes by Alexis Ohanian

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The first version of everything is janky.
Alexis Ohanian
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It's a lot easier to convince uninformed people than it is to convince politicians.
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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I actually haven't even found a curriculum in America that is really preparing people for this 21st century world.
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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There was a clear lesson here — and that was that the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants.
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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Entrepreneur is just French for 'has ideas, does them'.
Alexis Ohanian
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Facebook makes me hate the people I know, and Reddit makes me love the people I don't.
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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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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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
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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 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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Nothing will replace good journalism.
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
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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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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.
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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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