The OSU Entrepreneurship Club and the Austin Entrepreneurship Program hosted Reddit.com co-founder Alexis Ohanian Thursday evening, who spoke to a standing room-only crowd at LaSells Stewart Center.
In a funny and inspiring talk riddled with internet-meme references, Ohanian told the story of Reddit while encouraging students to use the tools and resources available to them to create and innovate.
Ohanian and Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit – a social news and entertainment site where users submit content for others to either up-vote or down-vote – after a failed attempt to create a mobile food-ordering site. Ohanian has since started two other successful websites, Breadpig and Hipmunk.
Ohanian admits that the duo didn’t always know what they were doing when they started, but he encouraged the audience to embrace that feeling.
“Get comfortable not knowing what you are doing,” Ohanian advised the room full of entrepreneur hopefuls.
Author of “Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed,” Ohanian stopped at Oregon State as part of his tour to promote his book and enlighten the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Although Ohanian isn’t sure what the future holds, he wants the internet to be a powerful tool for people with great ideas.
“The internet is a new frontier –you are Lewis & Clark, and I’m Sacajawea.”
Ohanian closed with a “fireside chat” with recent College of Business alum Ryan Connolly. Connolly, a marketing and entrepreneurship graduate, co-founded Tally, a mobile app developed for users to gain opinions on fashion choices, with the help of the Advantage Accelerator.
