January 14, 2014
Alexis Ohanian has no idea what he’s doing.
That was the message the Reddit co-founder delivered to a packed lecture hall on Monday evening—when he founded the link-sharing and news-aggregating website with his college dorm-mate, they had no idea what they were doing, and neither does anyone else. People who try to tell you they’ve got it all figured out and you don’t are lying or deluded, said Ohanian. “We are all perpetually in a state of figuring stuff out,” he said.
They were scared. They were hearing negative feedback from all angles. They were up against better-equipped, better-funded and better-located competition. But the competition “will not beat you, you will just beat yourself. Pay no attention,” Ohanian told the crowd, a mix of students, professors and guests from outside the university who had come to hear Ohanian as part of the Entrepreneurship Hatchery’s Speaker Series.
“To me, an entrepreneur is any one of us who has ideas and does them,” said Ohanian. “You all don’t need anyone’s permission to start doing this stuff.”
University of Toronto was the second talk on Ohanian’s cross-continental tour to promote his new book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will be Made, Not Managed.
Ohanian’s half-hour talk was followed by a virtual fireside chat with Skule alumnus Yuri Sagalov (EngSci 0T8+PEY), founder of AeroFS, a secure file-syncing and sharing system meant to operate behind institutional firewalls.
Ohanian asked Sagalov whether he had any advice for current students considering walking the entrepreneurial path. “Just build something,” said Sagalov. “Build something that you’re passionate about, build something you want to work on.”
“One of the best pieces of advice I could give is to get involved in college,” said Sagalov. “The friendships I formed here I carry with me.”
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca