Alexis Ohanian
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian addresses a protest in front of the building housing the New York offices of U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Kristen Gilliband, Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012. January 18 is a date that will live in ignorance, as Wikipedia started a 24-hour blackout of its English-language articles, joining other sites in a protest of pending U.S. legislation aimed at shutting down sites that share pirated movies and other content. Reddit.com shut down its social news service for 12 hours. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of the self-described "front page of the internet," Reddit, will speak at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst this weekend. He will discuss online entrepreneurship, and his new book, "Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed."
In a video uploaded to YouTube, Ohanian spoke to the UMass community. "It seems I'm going to be attending your beautiful, concrete campus in the very near future on my 'Without Their Permission' book tour."
Ohanian's life path is one that often appeals to college students. During his senior year studying history at the University of Virginia, Ohanian attended a lecture by venture capitalist Paul Graham on "How To Start a Start-up," according to a profile by Financial Times. Soon after, 22-year-old Ohanian and friend Steve Huffman convinced Graham's firm Y Combinator to provide the pair with funds to start Reddit.
Now, less than nine years after it was started, 55 million people across the world visit the site every month. Active users, known as Redditors, submit links or ask questions. The site is broken into "subreddits" narrowed down by location, such as Massachusetts, or topics including humor. A popular category known as Ask Me Anything has allowed Redditors to ask musicians, CEOs and even the President of the United States frank questions.
Through this online community, Ohanian organized his 100-stop college book tour to promote his new book that was released in October.
While the tour is inspired by his book, Ohanian told the Financial Times he has no plans to simply read from his book. “People can get the audio book if they want to hear that. I’m going to sit down with an alum from that university who’s done something cool online. Whether it’s a company, a successful Kickstarter campaign, who knows? Hopefully, my story can be inspirational.”
For the Amherst event, Ohanian will sit down with UMass alumnus Steve King, one of the first 15 Facebook employees. According to his CrunchBase profile, while at Facebook "he directed Media Sales in several key verticals and was responsible for landing landmark relationships such as Panasonic and Microsoft that paved the way to unprecedented revenue and market share growth."
Of the discussion, Ohanian said he's going to bring the class he wishes he could have attending in college; on internet entrepreneurship. "What I'm most interested in doing is making sure everyone of you knows what kind of power there is online for you to take your ideas to the world."
He added, "You don't have to be a startup founder; you can be a philanthropist, a comedian, a singer. This internet thing is not a fad. It's sticking around and it's changing the world and I want to make sure you all have the blueprint."
The discussion will be held Sunday, Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. in the Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall on the UMass Amherst campus. The event is free, though organizers request attendees register here.
Wrapping up his video attendance pitch, Ohanian speaks to UMass students, asks attendees to bring friends along. "I want this to be better attended than one of your football games."
Disclosure: Reddit and MassLive are owned by Advance Publications, though Reddit operates as a standalone business.