Alexis Ohanian
speaker
292 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Jun
Alexis Ohanian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was not about, well, what is going to happen if all of a sudden there is an election that could decide, that there's an election whose fate could be decided based on whether or not a post goes up or not. Like it would be, laughable to have that conversation in a boardroom 10 years earlier because it's like hey we might die next month the company may not be here next month but
Credit to this generation of founders. Every one of them knows going into it, hey, technology is shaping far more than it. It's not just these are the most powerful companies in the world or in our economy, but there are repercussions to it. And I think by and large, we want the good stuff to win.
Did you ever get a chance to- I was not invited to those meetings if they were happening. Admittedly, Reddit was this very solidly tier two company, right? Like we, you know, selling the company 16 months in was ludicrous, but it was life-changing money. It was just $10 million for-
16 months worth of work i thought i was getting away with something this is nuts and then part of khan and asked you know the trajectory just sort of changed from when you're an independent startup and so reddit was really solidly a second tier social media platform for over a decade and then it wasn't until you know so 2014 i come back and then probably by the late teens once it's like oh here it's a billion dollar company again the business is back let's
You know, there's a path to an IPO one day. And so if those meetings were happening, Reddit was not invited. But rightly so. I wouldn't have been mad. I get it. We didn't have our shit together. But there's probably... I don't know. I've gotten to know... Jack a little bit. I don't really know Zuck.
A few of the other folks around these other platforms, but like there isn't, I don't know, there's not a group chat.
There's not an active group chat.
Oh, yeah. It's my first, one of my first and earliest memories. So I was... probably like six, five or six years old. And so if you can't tell from the last name, I'm Armenian. And my great aunt Vera pulled me aside. So my birthday is April 24th, which is the, it's the Armenian genocide remembrance day. So it's a conflicted day for me. But this particular birthday is
I learned that it was the genocide remembrance day. How did I learn? I remember my aunt Vera pulling me aside and basically sitting me down and walking me through our family's story of survival in detail, talking about the costs, the toll it took, the things that her parents endured and what they saw and all of that, and basically how we got to America.
And probably not a conversation you should be having with a six or seven-year-old, but our meetings, we keep it real. She basically finishes up this conversation saying, listen, it's not a coincidence your birthday is April 24th. You are the product of all of their sacrifice, of all of their hard work, of everything that they endured.
You have a tremendous responsibility now to make the most out of this life that you have. When I was born in New York, here in the States, like couldn't have asked for a better outcome, right? Generations later. But what they endured is something that you will have to carry for the rest of your life. Happy birthday. And so, yeah, no, that has never left me. And she was an amazing woman.
She was a public school teacher in Brooklyn, didn't have any kids herself. She was my grandfather's sister. She's my great aunt, Vera. She didn't have any kids herself, but she saved up as much money as she could. She's the reason I could go to college. I went to University of Virginia without taking on any debt. Uh, she paid for that all.
Um, and so amazing woman, she framed that for me at a very, very young age. And so I am very fortunate. I had an amazing loving mom. I have an amazing loving dad. I had the ultimate cheat code, uh, having that foundation, you know, grown up as a white dude here in the States at a time when technology was starting to rip. My parents put some money together to let me get a computer.
All that stuff lined up. And then it was imbued with this responsibility that I probably will never escape. For better or for worse, it's always going to weigh on me. I'm never going to feel like I've done enough. And I'm not mad about it. I'm grateful for it. Because I think that...
brokenness has has made me who I am and it helps me do the things I do but it instilled something in me that I just feel a tremendous responsibility for and and so I I don't know I think I've probably spent you know I'm 41 now I've spent three decades trying to earn that and And I still haven't. And I will probably spend three more decades trying to earn that. And I still won't.
And it'll be a part of me that's always feeling, not that it's not good enough, but that I have not done enough. And, and, and I know this is a story shared by plenty of folks who are descendants from survivors of genocide and whatnot, but, oh man, it just, it always hits. And it's like, I feel, and it's this juxtaposition, right? Cause I go through my life largely stress and anxiety free, right?
And I'm aware of that and I'm grateful for that. And then there's moments where I sit with it and I'm just like, I can still hear, I can still see Aunt Vera telling me this. And I'm like, keep going, do better. You have a responsibility, do more. Needless to say, I'm being very...
i'm very careful with explaining like i want our i want olympia and adira of course to be proud as armenians they're only a quarter but they're still armenian they got the last name too i want them to be aware of this stuff and be proud of their family and obviously their mom is going to have some some big big stories for them too but um i'm also trying to be mindful of the fact that like maybe i'll wait until after you know they're a little older to really go into the details of it but uh you know it's these things shape us man and i like i said i i am
I mean, she could have just got me a normal birthday gift. But I'm still grateful for it.
She's not. She got to see me graduate from college, which was awesome. She was there in Charlottesville for that. And yeah, no, it's wild. I've never... I don't know. I think...
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