Founder of Reddit and the Internet’s Own Cheerleader
By MICHAEL SCHULMAN
The New York Times
November 22, 2013
Alexis Ohanian bounded through the offices of Maker’s Row, a start-up
in Brooklyn that pairs small businesses with manufacturers. At
6-foot-5, dressed in a gingham shirt and jeans, Mr. Ohanian was, in
more ways than one, the big man on campus.
Trailed by a four-man camera crew from the Verge, an online tech
channel, Mr. Ohanian hovered over a cubicle and interrogated an
employee, Rafael Gonzaque.
`Do you have friends who are not in the start-up game who love their
jobs as much as you do?’ he asked.
`No,’ Mr. Gonzaque said, before adding, `Maybe fashion.’
It was a perfect response for Mr. Ohanian, the smiling 30-year-old
evangelist of the New York tech scene, and a relentless cheerleader of
the utopian promise of the Internet.
Having been a co-founder of Reddit, the behemoth social news site, at
22 with his roommate from the University of Virginia, he cashed out 16
months later, when the company was sold to Condé Nast for an
undisclosed sum. He went on to join Hipmunk, a travel site, and was a
co-founder of Breadpig, which raises funds for novelty items (he calls
it `Newman’s Own for nerds’).
When he’s not concocting start-ups, he spends his days as an angel
investor to feel-good sites like Upworthy, serves as an adviser to
young techies and is an unflappable champion of the Internet’s ability
to make the world more awesome.
That, essentially, is the subject of his new book, `Without Their
Permission,’ for which he is currently on a tour of 77 colleges to
spread his gospel of enlightened entrepreneurship.
It won’t be his first foray on the public stage. During the antipiracy
fight of 2012, when Congress considered a pair of bills that critics
said would censor speech and stifle innovation, Mr. Ohanian gave a
barn-burning (if cheery) speech at a protest in Manhattan, bearing
sympathy cards `to hand deliver to our senators here in New York,
mourning the death of the Internet.’
Mr. Ohanian’s telegenic advocacy set off chatter that he might run for
office, with Forbes magazine dubbing him `The Mayor of the Internet.’
(Bro in Chief is more apt.) It’s easy to see how he could pivot into
campaigning.
`He’s a classic politician,’ said Steve Huffman, his partner in
founding Reddit.
Like a good politician, Mr. Ohanian is happy to add to the
speculation. `If I were to run, I’d run for representative, and I’d do
it explicitly with the requirement that it’s only one term,’ he said.
But for now, he is more interested in spreading good vibes in the tech
world, particularly its East Coast wing. On a recent Wednesday, he
arrived at his brunch spot near his Brooklyn Heights apartment,
accompanied by his girlfriend of two years, Sabriya Stukes, a
Ph.D. student in microbiology. They met in college, Ms. Stukes said,
when she wandered into his dorm while he was playing video games.
`I asked him where my friend was,’ Ms. Stukes said. `He said, `I don’t
know,’ and then went back to playing video games.’
Mr. Ohanian, wearing a Nooka watch and (another) gingham shirt, said
he moved to Brooklyn Heights because his father, who runs a small
travel agency in Maryland, once dreamed of moving there. Repeating an
oft-told tale, Mr. Ohanian said that the first thing he did after
selling Reddit was to upgrade his father’s season tickets to Redskins
games.
`The thing that I don’t usually tell,’ he went on, `is that after that
I called my mom and told her, `What do you want?’ Because this was a
person who never wanted anything.’ His voice caught in his
throat. `And she said she wanted nothing.’
At the time, his mother was battling terminal brain cancer, having
received a diagnosis in 2005, shortly after Reddit started. It had
already been a tough year. A few months earlier, Mr. Ohanian’s
girlfriend at the time attempted suicide by leaping out of a window in
Germany. (She was in a coma for a while but recovered.) In September,
his family dog was put down, and that same day his mother had a
seizure, which led to the diagnosis.
`It all happened in a span of a few months,’ Mr. Ohanian said, still
sounding shellshocked.
His mother’s failing health was part of the reason he accepted Condé
Nast’s offer=3B she died less than two years after the sale. Mr.
Ohanian left Reddit, though he remains on its board, and spent months
volunteering for a microfinance group in Armenia, where his father’s
family is from.
Mr. Ohanian had another brush with tragedy this year when Aaron
Swartz, a 26-year-old programmer who had briefly worked with him and
Mr. Huffman at Reddit, hanged himself in Brooklyn. The partnership
had been uneasy.
`It was very clear after a month or so of him working with us that he
wasn’t terribly interested in working on Reddit,’ Mr. Ohanian said.
Mr. Swartz’s mood swings alarmed his collaborators. In 2007,
Mr. Swartz wrote a blog post imagining his own death, titled `A Moment
Before Dying.’ Upon reading it, Mr. Ohanian called the police, who
broke into Mr. Swartz’s apartment. Mr. Swartz laughed the whole thing
off.
`I was very sensitive to the warning signs,’ Mr. Ohanian recalled,
alluding to the ex-girlfriend who had attempted suicide. Soon after,
Mr. Swartz was forced out of Reddit, and he fell out of touch with his
former colleagues. Mr. Ohanian heard about his death from a mutual
friend. `It just makes me sad,’ he said. `There’s no satisfactory
explanation for it.’
What the two had in common was their zeal for the transformative
potential of the Internet, though Mr. Ohanian’s version is decidedly
sunnier. In his book, he extols the idea that `all links are created
equal’ – that any college student with Wi-Fi can, in tech parlance,
`disrupt’ an entrenched industry. The uprising against the antipiracy
bills, he explained breathlessly, shows how online networking can
accelerate social movements.
It was Reddit users, after all, who started the idea of an Internet
blackout, which spread to Wikipedia and other sites on the day of the
protests.
`It’s not the technology that does it,’ he said. `People are always
the ones who are making it work. But now you’re giving them a
platform.’
But what about the darker side of information sharing? In the
aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing this year, Reddit users
falsely accused a missing Brown University student, raising questions
about the value of crowd sourcing. Mr. Ohanian insisted that people,
not platforms, are to blame.
`When I get a prank call, I don’t blame AT&T,’ he said. `I blame the
person who prank called me.’
The incident did not dim his belief in technology. `As long as people
are using the Internet, people are going to do stupid stuff and people
are going to do bad stuff,’ he said. `And by the time that robots are
sentient, they’re going to enslave us anyway, so it won’t matter.’
Spoken like an optimist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/The-Founder-of-Reddit-Alexis-Ohanian-is-The-Internets-Own-Cheerleader.html