Alexis Ohanian Quotes

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.

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.

The first version of everything is janky,

If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.

Nothing will replace good journalism.

The reason people need advice on using social media is that they're a much more complex and nuanced way to communicate than a conversation or email.

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.

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.'

I like sarcasm. I like snark.

Find People Who Give a Damn; Hire Them; Repeat

What one realizes there is that we are not in control of the [reddit] community, in any way, shape or form. We have no power over it and so we've lost this total control.

The weird thing about reddit is that, for a community its size - now I'm no longer at reddit, but the public traffic numbers that they put out are, I think with the site about eight million unique visitors a month, or every 30 days, which is a fairly big site.

When sharing anything you've created with the world, you have to assume at the start that no one gives a damn about it. Well,

Entrepreneur is just French for 'has ideas, does them'.

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.

I often think of a quote from entrepreneur Jim Rohn: 'You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.' Surround yourself with people who are doing interesting things, who are thinking interesting thoughts, who challenge you to be better, and who come from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. That, combined with appropriate moments of 'me' time, provides the perfect breeding ground for great ideas. And whatever you do, don't get hung up on what competitors are doing. Be aware of what's going on in the industry, but don't let it dictate your own creative process.

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.

We don't even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way