🔥 Fireside Chat: Alexis Ohanian (on life, career, Reddit)
Without Their Permission: The Story of Reddit and a Blueprint for How to Change the World
In January 2018, I had a great time chatting with Alexis Ohanian at Amazon Seattle HQ for a Fishbowl. We talked about life, career, his super-cute daughter, remembering to be human, and his best-selling book Without Their Permission: The Story of Reddit and a Blueprint for How to Change the World.
Watch our chat below, followed by applicable lessons, photos, and a bonus!
Meet Alexis Ohanian.
Guest: Alexis Ohanian (Cofounder of Seven Seven Six, Initialized Capital, Reddit).
Fun Fact: Alexis chose Verdana as the font for Reddit and r/AnimalsBeingJerks is one of his favorite subreddits.
Applicable Lessons.
Lesson #1: Believe in great founders. Ideas change, market climates change, but resourceful founders do not change.
Lesson #2: Be relentlessly resourceful and have a bias for action to get things done. If you wait for someone else’s approval or are afraid of taking risks and failing, then opportunities will pass you by. To kickstart the Reddit community in the early days, Alexis recalled the team creating fake users to hack the system, and it resulted in him getting to know every single user on a deep level.
“We want to encourage everyone to act like an owner, we want to encourage people to have this responsibility and maintain resourcefulness and scrappiness.”
Paul Graham (Cofounder of Y Combinator) said "You must be relentlessly resourceful as a startup." In the early days, Alexis said their big idea to gain traction was "Our big idea was to fake users...for the first few months of Reddit, it was just me and Steve (cofounder), and two of my good friends, they were the only ones who actually used the site other than us, and so we just had to fake users with different usernames, this was 2005, there was no social media, no Product Hunt, no way to get users to try it out...the principle to take away is to spend time using the product especially if it's a community-based product and create the culture yourself first that you want to see. Be willing to roll up your sleeves as an owner and do the work. Nostalgically, that was some of my favorite work to do because that was the closest I have ever been and will ever be to our users. There was a point where I actually knew everyone on Reddit. It was only a few months, but I knew everyone."
Lesson #3: Remember to be human and build mechanisms to really connect with and understand the needs and recommendations of your customers and community, especially your top customers/early adopters (e.g. local meetups with Reddit moderators). Communities will be one of the most important features of a company. Do not sleep on communities!
“Remember to be human [company value] is one that comes up in product decisions, community decisions, and frankly around the company.”
“I went to 82 universities over the span of 5 really long months and just spread the gospel because college students have this really unique time in their lives where they hopefully don’t have too much responsibilities and can actually make things and find future cofounders and I wanted to indoctrinate as many as possible with this idea of entrepreneurship.”
Alexis drew the first Snoo (Reddit's mascot) during his senior year in college (University of Virginia), even before the idea of the company. Fun fact, Alexis used Illustrator and the touchpad on his laptop to draw Snoo. Alexis jokes "I'm not saying the only measure of your mascot's success is how many people have tattoos of it...but I have seen a dozen Reddit alien tattoos in my life."
Lesson #4: Seek the companies/ecosystems that are innovating on top of major platform shifts like cryptocurrency and blockchain. For example, during the California Gold Rush (1848-1855), companies that supplied the tools and services for the 300K prospectors did well (e.g. Levi’s Strauss & Co. was founded in 1853).
Lesson #5: Keep an eye on startups that look like “rounding errors” (referring to financials), because they are the ones most likely to disrupt you by doing something completely opposite to you.
Early days, Alexis had a Wall of Negative Reinforcement that reminded him of a meeting where Yahoo invited him and Steve Huffman (cofounder) and remarked "You guys are a rounding error compared to Yahoo" when discussing Reddit's traffic numbers (tens of thousands at the time). Alexis said that motivation helped during tough times.
Fishbowl Photos.
[Update] Lessons into Action.
[Bonus]
Many curious minds reached out asking about the questions I prepared.
In the spirit of transparency and to get better (send me recommendations), see below.
2017 was quite an uneventful year for you…Reddit raised $200M in new venture funding at a $1.8B valuation, you got married, and you had your first child, a beautiful baby daughter named Alexis Olympia Ohanian, Jr. How on Earth are you going to top it this year?
For audience members who have yet to read the book, how would you describe it?
In chapter two, you describe the journey when you went to Boston for the first round of Y Combinator funding, got rejected, get a call back from Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham to come back but only if you changed your startup idea. Take us through that last moment when you and Steve went back to Y Combinator and came up with the idea for Reddit with Paul, what did you do, how did you feel, what sparked the idea to create Reddit?
You quote Paul Graham saying that you must be “relentlessly resourceful” as a startup, what is a recent example of your team at Reddit showcasing this relentless resourcefulness?
A recurring piece in the book is your recommendation to keep a list of “agonizing experiences” as they are opportunities for innovation — what is currently on your list?
You write that larger companies cannot have absolute focus on solving a specific problem better than anyone else nor can they inspire work ethic as passionately as a startup can, as Reddit grows, what are you and Steve doing to maintain that relentless focus and work ethic?
Looking back now, would you make any changes to the book?
Tell us about some exciting projects you are working on at Reddit now.
What is your favorite failure at Reddit and what did you learn?
At Amazon, we have 14 leadership principles such as “customer obsession” “bias for action” and “earn trust” — what would you say are Reddit’s leadership principles?
One of the most popular and enduring things about Reddit is the mascot, Snoo, and Snoo is famous for taking on many variations, what is your favorite Snoo or Snoo story?
Final question before we dive to audience Q&A, when can we expect your next book?
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“Fly High, Burn Bright, Be Curious.”