Alexis Ohanian: Reddit was created for people to speak freely and auth...

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.

Alexis Ohanian

reddit pages reading

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.

Alexis Ohanian

foundation community way

If you look now, more than ever new entrants, new upstarts, are able to grow so much faster than they could before.

Alexis Ohanian

upstart able looks

No, everyone has great ideas, but what makes a difference, especially online, or just in life, is actually doing it; getting that first version out there.

Alexis Ohanian

making-a-difference differences ideas

We all have great ideas. No one ever says, "I've got this terrible idea."

Alexis Ohanian

great-idea terrible ideas

If I'm at the University of Georgia and I can't inspire this room full of students, OK, fine. I'm not going to take it personally. Maybe a little bit, but I'll be all right.

Alexis Ohanian

georgia littles inspire

Hundreds of these companies I've seen since the beginning stages - including Dropbox and Airbnb - one of them has actually been crushed by an incumbent. The Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks, they might be someone to acquire you, which is not necessarily a bad position to be in.

Alexis Ohanian

google stage might

It's a lot easier to convince uninformed people than it is to convince politicians.

Alexis Ohanian

easier politician people

The goal shouldn't be to be the next Silicon Valley (there'll always only be one of those) - it's to be your own startup community.

Alexis Ohanian

valleys community goal

I think the one advantage to a failed - recovering, but a pretty broken - economy, and a lot of broken promises, is that we've pulled the veils from our eyes way earlier than most people do, and realize "Hey, you know what, maybe I should try do this thing that I really care about, and why not spend the time now during my best years to get into knitting, or coding, or swamp boat sailing." And there's this resource called the Internet that's going to provide you with a stage and a library for all of those things.

Alexis Ohanian

knitting eye thinking

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.

Alexis Ohanian

eight unique thinking

Let's say you're all worried about student-loan debt and you need to have steady income. That doesn't have to be your everything.

Alexis Ohanian

debt income needs

I think everyone should learn how to code.

Alexis Ohanian

code should thinking

Because it's so empowering, I want people to think about being entrepreneurial regardless. They don't have to start companies, but that's what makes them great employees, that's what makes them great citizens.

Alexis Ohanian

empowering people thinking

There is a much bigger issue with student loan rates, the cost of tuition; those are some huge problems that need to be resolved.

Alexis Ohanian

issues cost needs

Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.

Alexis Ohanian

exercise people ideas

The first step, and the thing that everyone has to do right on the Internet is make something people want.

Alexis Ohanian

want people firsts

Raise $500 for a thing you care about because you actually get the experience of taking an idea and actually doing it. There are fewer and fewer excuses not to.

Alexis Ohanian

excuse care ideas

I actually haven't even found a curriculum in America that is really preparing people for this 21st century world.

Alexis Ohanian

america people world

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.

Alexis Ohanian

excited lucky firsts

Reddit was created for people to speak freely and authentically and also for us to protect and value privacy. We're sort of the anti-Facebook in that regard.