Strategic Immigration Reform: Alexis Ohanian, co-founder, Reddit. Alexis Ohanian: How I Got Washington to Listen to Start-ups. Every couple weeks, someone asks Alexis Ohanian when he's going to run for office. Recently, the idea has crept into Facebook posts and into comments on Reddit, the site he co-founded in 2005. It's not unheard of for an entrepreneur to blaze a trail to Capitol Hill...but a 29-year-old start-up founder who loves video games and football, and who lacks government experience? He's come a long way since November 2011. At that time, a consortium of technology companies including Google and Facebook were seeding efforts to oppose proposed legislation aimed at strengthening copyright online. The bills aimed to prevent copyright violations, but would have done so at the server level, which Web companies feared would censor the spread of information on the Internet--and punish a broad range of websites.
Now long laid to rest in the graveyard of failed bills, the proposals were known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and its Senate companion, the Protect IP Act, or PIPA. How I Did It: Alexis Ohanian, Reddit. In 2005, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit, one of the first start-ups launched from the Y Combinator program. A year later, the social-news site was acquired by Condé Nast—and Ohanian was a 23-year-old multimillionaire. Others might have kicked back, but not Ohanian: Over the past five years, he has launched a social enterprise (Breadpig), helped found a travel-search site (Hipmunk), and founded an investment firm (Das Kapital Capital) that has stakes in 25 start-ups.
Meantime, he has also proved a savvy political activist, taking the lead in organizing opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the recent controversial efforts by Congress to regulate content on the Internet. He told his story to Christine Lagorio. I went to high school in Ellicott City, Maryland, and I felt pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. I was terrified that no one played video games in college. My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian Speaks At The Next Web Conference.
Entrepreneur and angel investor Alexis Ohanian, probably best known as one of the co-founders of reddit and evangelist of HipMunk, took the stage at The Next Web Conference this morning to profess his love for the Internet. We kind of already suspected that Ohanian was a fan of the Internet, but he shared an interesting view on where he thinks the Web is going, and how close it came recently to getting censored by elected U.S. government officials.
These are my notes from his talk (slightly paraphrased here and there): When reddit was started, we just graduated from college. Social media wasn’t a term yet, Facebook was only available for college students, and Delicious hadn’t yet been ruined by Yahoo. Nowadays, we can use social media to see what people are having for breakfast all over the world. This notion of a meritocracy, however, doesn’t really exist in the real world, but it does on the Internet. January 18, 2012, was a watershed moment for the Internet. U.S. I’m optimistic. How Reddit's Alexis Ohanian Became The Mayor Of The Internet. Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and Web advocate. And last week, President Obama stopped by Reddit for a surprise question-and-answer session, saying he would “fight hard to make sure the Internet remains the open forum for everybody.”
“Republicans want to keep the open Internet safe from big government. Democrats want to keep it safe from big corporations. I say we agree to agree and move ahead,” Ohanian said in an interview. “It was so successful because we literally had the Tea Party next to the MoveOn.org guys at these meetings. Ohanian’s inroads in Washington is a homecoming of sorts for the Columbia, Md., native. His introduction to high-stakes Beltway politics came this year when he and other executives from Silicon Valley stopped a pair of bills that would have held Web sites accountable if they host pirated content.
These groups complained that Web companies were enabling pirated content, stealing billions of dollars from artists, authors and movie producers. Ohanian’s views are more uncompromising. Alexis Ohanian on How Gen-Y Entrepreneurs Can Succeed. What Reddit and Hipmunk's Alexis Ohanian Gets About How The Internet Really Works.