Filling out his application form for university, Alexis Ohanian reached the housing section and made a decision that would change his life. Faced with a choice of "old dorms" or new, he ticked the box for the former, for no better reason than "it just sounded cooler".
As he wrote in his 2013 book Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed: "I can't help wondering how much different life would have been if I hadn't made that seemingly insignificant decision."
At the time, Ohanian’s ambition was to become a doctor, but on the day he moved into halls at the University of Virginia he met fellow freshman Steve Huffman and medicine went out the window. The two video-game-playing nerds quickly became friends and the choice of dorms would prove to be “one of the best, albeit most random, things that ever happened to me”.
By the time they graduated in 2005, Ohanian and Huffman had attracted US$12,000 (Dh44,062) in seed funding from start-up investment company Y Combinator to launch reddit.com, a social media site that would be billed as “The front page of the internet”. Registered users could post links to news and other items from around the internet, on which the entire community could then pass judgment, “upvoting” or “downvoting” items to create a democratically edited front page.
Within a year Ohanian and Huffman were meeting with potential buyers and “in less time than it took me to write my honours thesis”, they had sold the fledgling company to Condé Nast for a little over £20 million (Dh90m) – too early, and for too little, commented analysts. Nevertheless, just 16 months after graduating, 23-year-old Ohanian was a millionaire, living the dot.com dream.
Now 33, the man who describes himself as “a serial entrepreneur, investor and adviser” will be in Abu Dhabi next week as one of the inspirational speakers at the first Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis for Future Generations. Anyone hoping to retire in their 20s could do worse than hang on to his every word.
Yet perhaps the most inspirational thing about Ohanian’s story is how rooted it is in the now-threatened American tradition of welcoming immigrants and refugees.
Born in Brooklyn in 1983, Ohanian was raised by his parents in the leafy suburbs of Columbia, Maryland. His German-born mother, Anke, came to the United States at the age of 23 to work as an au pair. When she met and fell in love with Ohanian’s father, travel agent Chris, she outstayed her visa welcome and, until they married, remained in the US for a year as an illegal alien.
That was something her son revealed during a moving speech in November at a technology conference in Brooklyn, in which he speculated about how things might have turned out under a Trump regime. “I’m very grateful for the fact that she didn’t get deported,” he said. “I feel I shouldn’t have to bring that up, but these days it bears repeating.”
Ohanian’s immigrant roots go much deeper than one generation. In an open letter to the Reddit community, posted at the end of January in the wake of president Trump’s executive order banning visitors from six Muslim countries, he wrote movingly of being “the son of an undocumented immigrant from Germany and the great-grandson of refugees [on his father’s side] who fled the Armenian Genocide”.
As a young boy his great grandfather had watched as his parents were killed by Turkish soldiers. He survived and found sanctuary, initially in Syria and then in America, which changed everything for him and his descendants. President Trump’s order, Ohanian wrote, was “not only potentially unconstitutional, but deeply un-American. We are a nation of immigrants.”
The journey of the Ohanians from refugee to millionaire status in three generations is the American dream writ large and he is acutely aware of how lucky he is. "Being a straight, middle-class male born in the USA is life with cheat codes," he once wrote, and he credits his parents for everything. They bought him his first PC at the age of 10 and he was hooked. Teaching himself HTML, the standard language for creating internet pages, his first website was a fan page for the first-person-shooter video game Quake II and soon he was building sites for small non-profit organisations.
Stuck behind his computer through much of his adolescence, he grew overweight and his life “easily could have gone the other way – self-loathing and depression”, he told the conference in Brooklyn. Luckily, “I cared too much about video games and computers to realise how not-cool I was”.
He finally got a grip at high school, giving up fizzy drinks and junk food to lose 26 kilograms in one year, but he stuck with the video games at university, where he met fellow gamer Huffman. In between blasting aliens, they worked on the idea for a link-sharing website that would finally evolve into Reddit.
Just after graduating, they got the $12,000 cheque from Y Combinator, “which felt life-changing”, and was. They started work in a small rented apartment in Medford, Massachusetts, and the site went live after a month. At first, Ohanian later cheerfully admitted: “We were faking all of our early users.” No faking is necessary today. According to internet analytics company Alexa, with more than 230 million unique visitors every month Reddit is the seventh most-visited site in the US and number 21 in the world.
Somewhat self-aggrandisingly, Reddit says it “bridges communities and individuals with ideas, the latest digital trends, and breaking news” and that, under its voting system, “the most interesting, funniest, impactful, or simply amazing stories rise to the top”. But so too does an awful lot of hate, abuse, false news and general craziness generated by the “wisdom of crowds”.
In 2009, four years after selling to Condé Nast, Ohanian and Huffman left the company to co-found travel booking website Hipmunk. Four years later Ohanian returned to Reddit as executive chairman of the company. In the meantime he wrote his bestselling book – a manifesto and how-to guide for wannabe tech entrepreneurs – and became engaged in political activism, earning the nickname “Mayor of the Internet” after wading into the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two legislative bills that, he said, “threatened to undermine the free and open internet that made my success possible”.
The other thing it made possible was Ohanian’s conversion from overweight HTML geek who failed to get on to his high-school football team to successful man about town, a transformation that appeared complete in December when his engagement to US tennis superstar Serena Williams was announced – where else? – on the 23-times Grand Slam winner’s Reddit account.
It is this “rare intersection of tech-geek celebrity culture and actual celebrity culture”, as Slate put it – perhaps even more so than Ohanian’s overnight elevation to millionaire status – that has given hope to introspected programming nerds everywhere. After all, with a net worth of $150m to his paltry $5m, Williams is clearly not after Ohanian’s money.
weekend@thenational.ae
