Alexis Ohanian - Without their permission: how the 21st century will be made, not managed

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Copyright 2013 by Alexis Ohanian

Cover design by Oliver Munday

Cover copyright 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First ebook edition: October 2013

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ISBN 978-1-4555-2003-9

Dedicated to my mother and father, Anke and Chris Ohanian:

I wish you were here to read this, Mom.

May this book, my life, and my persistent smile all honor you.

Every company Ive helped start has a cute mascot I drew. Its sort of my thing. For this book, the breadpig (a pig with slices of bread for wings) will be the cute spokesmodel to my Bob Barker. Its the eponymous mascot for my social enterprise, Breadpig, which well get to in (no peeking!). Youll notice hes black and white, which makes this book a guide for navigating the Internet age successfully as well as a coloring book! What a deal!

In an August 20, 2011, op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, world-renowned venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world. possible even for a couple of twenty-one-year-olds like me and my reddit.com co-founder, Steve Huffman.

My story starts out rather ordinarily. Despite having been born in Brooklyn, I was raised in the textbook and did well enough at my public high school to get into the University of Virginia. It was on move-in day, when I met my roommate, Steve, that things started to get interesting.

By the time we graduated, Steve and I had taken twelve thousand dollars in seed funding from a then unheard-of investment firm called Y Combinator to start reddit.com. Less than a year later, I was organizing meetings with potential acquirers and, in less time than it took me to write my honors thesis, we sold our company to Cond Nast. Sixteen months after graduating from college, I was a millionaire. Since then, Ive founded a social enterprise, helped launch a travel search engine, started a nonprofit corporation, invested in more than sixty startups, advised hundreds more, spoken about tech entrepreneurship all over the world, and helped in the fight against two terrible legislative billsthe Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which threatened to undermine the free and open Internet that made my success (and the success of many others, some of whom youll read about here) possible.

But this isnt just my story. Ive had a lot of advantages and a lot of help along the way,world, for now) has brought with it the promise of a global stage on which ideas can come to fruition. For centuries, invention was limited to those who had access to the means of production and access to labor. Today, you can simply create and present your ideas online. Granted, if its that easy for you, its that easy for everyone. Having your content discovered, let alone appreciated, is not guaranteed. There continues to be innovation that will help new and interesting content come to the surface, but even as a work in progress, its better than the old world of gatekeepers. If there isnt a platform for something yet, chances are someone will build itsoon. The ruthless, fickle, and particular users of the World Wide Web have created the most competitive marketplace of ideas the world has ever seen; you either make something people want or people move on.

Global connectivity isnt just changing the way we do business; its changing the way we think of value. More than ever, we as individuals have the opportunity to put our ideas into practice without the implicit or material support of traditional communities, industries, and governments. Now any individualan undergrad at UVA, a comedian from Austin with cerebral palsy, a farmer in Missouri, or a public school teacher from the Bronxcan transform the way we all live. As value creation shifts from well-connected MBAs to the innovators themselves, so does wealth creation. Whatever you think of the worlds youngest billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook crew, theyre just the beginning. The Forbes list of richest peopleor its future equivalentis going to have far fewer businesspeople and far more creators on it. If this seems obvious to you, great: Ill be your Sacagawea-like guide as we meet scores of pioneers in their fields. If this sounds crazy and maybe even a bit shocking, even better!

So heres how its going to go: Ill spend the first part of this book describing my own experiences as a startup founder. Youll learn how I ended up getting involved in all this, how Steve Huffman and I took a failed application to Y Combinator and turned it into reddit, one of the fifty most popular websites in the world. Youll hear about the early days of a travel search engine that had no business being in business with entrenched incumbents, but we started it anyway because we were so damn frustrated.