Quotes by Alexis Ohanian

Waking up every morning with a company is a lot of pressure. But when you're aware of what other people are waking up with, it's a whole lot easier.

It's a fight to get anyone other than your mom to care about your startup.

Ramen in L.A. is much better than ramen in San Francisco. That's just a fact.

Until we actually get legislation that protects our rights online, we will continue to fight against stupid, lobbyist-bought legislation. We want bills that protect us, not ones that destroy us.

Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can't help being interested.

I've been learning how to soft-scramble eggs. And once you've had an amazing soft-scrambled egg, you cannot go back. It takes a little bit more work, but they're really great.

Most redditors are at least college educated. A number of them have post- or, rather, graduate degrees. A number of them are in the IT tech world.

If I can accomplish anything in the next however-many years, it is this: To help a generation realize, or to think of themselves, not just as consumers but also creators.

The biggest threat to the Internet is, frankly, always going to be complacency. I want to see more and more of us activated and people thinking of themselves as defenders of it.

I try not to have the computer in the bedroom. I used to sleep with it, though. I used to wake up spooning my laptop.

Love making jewelry? Awesome! Find blogs that inspire you, follow people on social media who have great taste, start an Etsy store, and borrow a friend's DSLR to take some beautiful photos of your craft. All of this costs $0.

I'd like to see the word 'entrepreneur' knocked off its pedestal. Being 'entrepreneurial' is something I look for not only in founders to invest in, but also employees to hire.

If you've never seen people taking the pledge of allegiance for the first time as U.S. Citizens, it will move you: a room full of people who can really appreciate what I was lucky enough to grow up with, simply by being born in Brooklyn.

Let's all strive to be more entrepreneurial, and I think we'll all be in a better place.

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.

I'm probably the worst Silicon Valley insider ever. I don't hang out with Silicon Valley people.

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.

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

Everything is derivative. Everything is a remix, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants -- a great phrase.

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.

Pitch tip: Speak confidently about your product, but be able to admit when you need more information, and get it to the people you're pitching quickly after the meeting.

The Internet is, as a communication platform and a learning platform, unparalleled because whether you want to learn something or share something, it's simply a few clicks away.

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

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.

Nothing will replace good journalism.

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.

Having ideas and doing them -- that's what entrepreneurship comes down to. That's something that makes you not just a great founder who I want to invest in, but also a great employee or someone I want to work with.

Do not be scared of the incumbents.

Net neutrality is one where we the people are definitely on the ropes.

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

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.

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

The people who are going to be succeeding are not going to be waiting around for anyone's permission.

I want to be in an industry where the upstarts can grow and displace the incumbents, because that's why there's so much innovation.

To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.

The Internet is too transformative for incumbents to not want to try to stifle or curb it -- incumbents in the sense of multinational corporations, governments, take your pick.

If you imagine Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you can get all those requirements checked off and have all those amazing things that we need to just live lives, but actually get to do the thing that you're really passionate about.

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.

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.

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.

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

So much of Reddit as a product was built on the shoulders of giants... We did some novel remixes of it but, at the end of the day, it was that: Grit and good luck.

What makes Reddit special is that people feel free to express themselves. Where we want to draw the line is where that feeling of being able to express oneself freely starts to infringe on someone feeling like they can express themselves.

Reddit is a network where someone with a million karma points has an equal shot as someone with 10 karma points to hit the #1 post or comment.

Reddit offers the opportunity for us as humans to connect on a much deeper, broader level because users have an alter ego and aren't tied to a social network of friends with whom they want to share how perfect their lives are.

The reason why I think Reddit is still around and some of our competitors are not is because we were really adamant about maintaining the integrity of the site.

Reddit has attracted a lefty, libertarian audience since the beginning.

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.

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.

I do genuinely believe that, when given and presented with all the information and all the actual facts, the vast majority of people will make the right choice.

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.

As long as people are using the Internet, people are going to do stupid stuff, and people are going to do bad stuff. And by the time that robots are sentient, they're going to enslave us anyway, so it won't matter.

Maybe libertarians especially like Reddit because it is a perfect marketplace of content. Every Redditor is created equal, whether you're the highest karma Redditor or a brand-new Redditor with 10 karma points. No submissions or votes are more equal than others.

It thrills me to write reference letters for enterprising founders who are looking to get visas to start their companies here, to create value and jobs for these United States.

Word of mouth now has a unprecedented influence because it spreads so far and so fast.

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.

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

On my father's side, I'm descended from immigrants, one of whom was a Syrian refugee from the Armenian genocide, and my mother was an immigrant from Germany whose visa had expired and, for a year and change, was undocumented here in the U.S.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

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.'

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

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.

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

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