"The fact is that those of us who can take ideas and make them into things, those are the ones who have the power, thanks to this great enabler called the Internet," Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the popular social media and entertainment site Reddit.com, told about 400 aspiring entrepreneurs at Case Western Reserve University on Monday to pursue their passions without being afraid to fail.
Ohanian stopped by Case's Thwing Center Ballroom as part of a 200-stop, 77-campus national book tour at the invitation of Benjamin Ratner, a second-year computer science major. After reading Ohanian's book, "Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed," Ratner asked the tour's promoters to consider adding Cleveland to the book tour.
Ohanian said the book's title comes from U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper's quote that "It's often easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission." He said he and Steve Huffman could have never have created Reddit, which now gets more traffic than the New York Times' website, without what he called this "permission-less invention."
"I want people to understand that they don't need to wait for permission to be awesome or great," he said.
"Life is full of setbacks and failures but that's OK," he said. "Because sucking is the first step to being good at something... If you remember nothing else, remember: 'Go forth and suck.'"
He told Case students about feeling "sooo cool" when he got his first dial-up Internet connection as a child and started creating his own community -- and following -- online. "What I had was an opportunity to create and my schoolwork seemed boring my comparison," he said. "Little irrelevant me could make something that millions of people around the world could see. It felt awesome."
"Pretty soon, I was helping nonprofits with their websites" for people who didn't know they were dealing with "a little kid in his parents' basement," he said.
Ohanian calls the Internet "the world's largest stage and largest library at the same time," and invited everyone in the audience to learn code and create something to solve a problem. But he sprinkled his remarks with stories of other people's success to underscore that people don't have to take the same path he did. "The more people who are out there doing great things, the better," he said.
He said ideas alone are worthless, because everyone has great ideas. "The fact is that those of us who can take ideas and make them into things, those are the ones who have the power, thanks to this great enabler called the Internet," he said.
When he and Huffman started their first jobs, "we had no idea what we were doing, no idea at all." But he said it's the same with everybody else. "That's what life is, just figuring stuff out. Don't let that stop you from putting stuff out in the world."
"The first version of everything is janky," he said, showing off the first versions of Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. But Reddit, which started out as "just two dudes in a room," last month had 110 million visitors and 5 billion page-views.
Ohanian launched Reddit in 2005 after graduating from the University of Virginia. He eventually sold it to Conde Nast Publications in 2006, and in 2012, the site became an independent organization based in San Francisco.
Reddit users can log on and look up whatever they're interested in and find like-minded people who want to talk about it, too. They can also create their own discussions, called subreddits, on everything from the Cleveland Browns to knitting in Australia, submit links and have discussions about them, which other users will vote up or down.
He said most Reddit users subscribe to about 50 topics, but he subscribes to about 250. "One of the things that we did right is that we didn't try to build a culture of personality around me and Steve," he said. Instead, Reddit is about its users and what they're interested in.
"Just like Twitter is a platform for individuals, Reddit is a platform for communities," he said.
Monday's event was sponsored by Blackstone LaunchPad, a campus program to mentor and promote entrepreneurship, Case's Career Center, the Weatherhead School of Management, and IDEA, an entrepreneur club.
From Case Western, Ohanian was headed to Ohio State University. He will return to Ohio for an appearance at Ohio University on Feb. 24.