Alexis Ohanian Quotations

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.

It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time.

My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, 'You bastards.' I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call 'The Waffle House Epiphany': I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a dent in the universe.

The social-media landscape changes incredibly fast, so you have to be open-minded and nimble to keep up with it.

I want to stay hungry. I really believe my resources are best used to help projects that make the world suck less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Nothing will replace good journalism.

The first version of everything is janky,

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.

The surveillance state has run amok. Technology that's enabled us to send selfies 24/7 - not that valuable - has also enabled us to be spied upon us 24/7.

There was a clear lesson here — and that was that the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants.

Having that kind of endorsement and having Paul Graham's readership coming to your site and contributing to it and building the foundation of the community was just a really invaluable way to start Reddit.

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.

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

The great thing about the Internet is, it's the freest marketplace of ideas that there is.

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.

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.

Facebook makes me hate the people I know, and Reddit makes me love the people I don't.