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Founder of Reddit and the Internet's Own Cheerleader

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  • Founder of Reddit and the Internet's Own Cheerleader

    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


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