Alexis Ohanian is an entrepreneur and investor based out of Brooklyn, NY, and best known as the co-founder of reddit, a platform for online communities to share links and have discussions. Sixteen months after he graduated college, reddit was acquired by Condé Nast. Alexis continued to manage product and business at reddit until leaving in 2010 to volunteer in Armenia for Kiva.org. Today he sits on the board of Reddit, Inc., which averages 100 million unique visitors a month and is one of the 50 biggest US websites.
After working as a Kiva Fellow for three months, Alexis returned to the US to focus on a social enterprise he'd started called Breadpig. Described as a "sidekick-for-hire," Breadpig publishes books featuring some of the most popular webcomics in the world. It also provides services for people who want to make something nice, or take a risk on something crazy. The non-sustainable profits are donated to worthy causes (over $200,000 so far!). At that same time, Alexis also accepted a position as Y Combinator's Ambassador to the East.
In August 2010, just weeks before the launch, Alexis joined the team at Hipmunk, Steve Huffman's second Y Combinator startup. Alexis helped create the Hipmunk brand identity and managed their marketing and PR. After a year, Alexis moved on to an advisory role and accepted an offer from Grand Central Publishing for his first book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made not Managed, which was as a national bestseller.
In early November 2011, Alexis joined the fight against SOPA and PIPA, becoming one of the public faces for the movement, which ultimately thwarted both bills in a display of citizen power never seen before by lawmakers. He continues to fight for internet freedom working on projects like the Declaration of Internet Freedom, Internet Defense League, and the Internet 2012 Campaign Bus Tour, which toured the heartland of America with Erik Martin to campaign for the open internet and produced a documentary about the adventure, Silicon Prairie. He also sat on the NYC Mayor's Council on Tech and Innovation under the Bloomberg Administration.
In 2013, he launched a show on The Verge called Small Empires about NY tech startups -- the founders who create and the people who use these digital platforms. Alexis is an active investor with over eighty tech startups now in his portfolio. He designed the logos and brands for reddit, Breadpig, and hipmunk, and he has proven the model for making something people love online & offline, building brands that are both community-driven (reddit) and not (hipmunk). He uses these experiences to mentor and advise the young startups in his portfolio and recent YC graduates. Today he's a part-partner at Y Combinator and is back at reddit as Executive Chair.
Alexis has spoken at TED (a talk viewed over a million times), been rendered in CGI on NMA.TV, was named to the Forbes "30 Under 30" in Technology two years in a row (and then turned 30), and included in Inc. Magazine's "30 under 30" for his work at hipmunk. He's a regular contributor on Bloomberg TV and is especially proud of unlocking his bucket-list achievement - appearing on The Colbert Report.
Alexis has spoken at universities including MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, UPenn, NYU, Columbia, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Virginia to name a few, has lectured at conferences like TED, the Clinton Global Initiative, SXSW and ROFLCON, has spoken to companies such as Google, BBDO, and Betaworks, and has been hired for talks at Johnson & Johnson, Hyatt, Kraft, and Palantir. He even keynoted an entrepreneurship summit in Cairo organized by the U.S. State Department just months after the Egyptian Revolution.
Alexis has appeared in countless publications in print and online: New York Times, WSJ, Washington Post, The Economist,WIRED, NY Post, Gawker, TechCrunch, Mashable, Paper Magazine, Nylon guys, Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc. He's also appeared in television programs on networks including CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CNBC, Al-jazeera English, NPR, and G4.
Alexis loves hummus, the Washington Redskins, the Brooklyn Nets, his cat, and his girlfriend. His mother always told him he was special.
Alexis Ohanian opened up the Øredev conference with a fantastic keynote. The talk had the main topic on embracing the users of any system produced. He showed eye-opening examples of our changing word and how anyone making products needs to follow, adhere and advance. Since then he has developed his international reputation even further spreading his wise words globally. As a conference organizer I was very pleased to cooperate with Alexis with his prestigeless manners, and commitment and adoption to his audience.