Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit and author of Without Their Permission, held a live AMA at Capital Factory.

• How did Reddit start out? 
  • Things we have to remind people is that Reddit is that it started out by two guys who just got out of college who didn’t know what they were doing.
  • If anyone acts like they know what they are doing, they are probably lying.
  • Please, what you see at Reddit now is 8 years of decisions, bad decisions, and process.
• How do you leverage an accelerator to raise money? 
  • Demo day brings people who are wealthy and are excited to invest in some great ideas, management teams.
  • Lot of work in getting funded is building hype.
  • Optimize the value when you working on closing with a potential investor.
  • Prioritize a list of investors that are best fit for you and your situation.
  • Just go down that list and work on building momentum.
• Advice for starting up a company? 
  • Writing code or getting users to the point where it is a relentless pursuit.
  • It’s everything to the culture, to the work attitude.
  • During office hours, you want to not just get your questions answered, but be able to generate more guided questions.
  • The best thing to learn is to know which advice from smart investors or founders to ignore.
  • Until you learn the how to generate revenue, you have to be ego-less about the business.
  • Great founders are those that able to care to work on activities that don’t scale early on. They are willing to do little things that need to be done.
  • Anyone who is willing to be your first 1,000 customers are amazing. Find ways to delight them because I am never one of those people and I think they are amazing creatures.
• Are you happy about the Reddit alien as a brand? What impact did it have over this many years? 
  • Branding comes second, the product comes first.
  • The best encounter we see where we see that there are humans behind this cold desktops and mobile devices.
  • A great brand will not save a mediocre company. See Pets.com sock puppet.
  • You can give a great service and then a good breand.
  • I’ve seen a half-dozen Reddit alien tattoos.
• What’s your decision to not to make a mobile app? 
  • We built a good mobile app, not a great mobile app.
  • The focus hopefully is going to be on an API and letting developers build those mobile views.
  • Alien Blue is a better user experience since it exposes sub edits better.
  • I don’t think we will ever pull a Twitter in how we treat developers, but at this point we want to support the API and developers.
  • Unless you’re on someone’s home screen you are pretty much irrelevant and you have to do something amazing to be on someone’s homescreen.
• What did you start Reddit in the early times to get traction? 
  • We just submitted links ourselves under different usernames since we wanted to let new users know how the system works.
  • We emailed our friends asking them to submit links.
  • A month later we added comments and people thought that would doom site.
  • A leaderboard feature was a great idea as it allowed people with just the top 5 users of the day was a key driver to get people on.
  • This movitated people to generate links, content.
  • We would know there was a problem with the leaderboard cause we got a lot of email from users letting us know.
• How did you create the culture? 
  • The best thing we did was never put advertising above the user experience.
  • The day Digg put an ad for Egg McMuffin on half of their home page, we knew we were winning.
  • We would go above and beyond the users for weird stuff.
  • The memes of rMexico are animals and I have no idea what they mean.
  • We had to be the best party hosts we could, otherwise why would someone create rMexico?
• What was your defining the moment when you realized you had traction? 
  • Reddit has doubled every year, there was never a moment we had traction.
  • If I had to say, it was a month in and the site was working.
  • We would show up in the morning and people had posted new items.
  • With Hipmunk, it’s mostly UX. We aren’t showing you results no human would want to take.
  • Hotels is where the money is because the margins are so high.
  • For every Instagram there are a hundreds or thousands of similar products that we will never hear from because they will never get enough traction.
• How did you start our financially and raise capital? 
  • We got US$12k from ycombinator.
  • Then we raised US$70k from our seed round and we were thrilled. (It was 2005 after all.)
  • User experience matters when you expect people to create content.
  • We are making a push to Reddit gold.
  • We are using the same model to advertise online that we use to advertise in papers a 100 years ago. Why is that?
  • We’ve seen that subscription model can work, but we don’t want to load users down with ads.
• As an investor, how does someone get you to invest in their money? 
  • If you go to someone that is investor, and ask for money you will get advice.
  • If you go to an investor and ask for advice, you will get money.
• How did you get involved in this book? 
  • I gave a talk about a whale at TED and publishers wanted me to write a book about that, but felt it wasn’t the right fit.
  • The book is about how important the Internet is to everyone, not just job creators or web builders.
  • The resources are so much better now cause for people who are starting out now who want or would want to start a business.
  • Currently supporting the book on a 100+ city bus tour of college towns.
  • If you never see college students react to a t‑shirt cannon, you would think we are shooting money.
• How did you get involved with HipMunk? 
  • If you got an itch or complaint and no one seems to be solving it, that’s a great place to build a startup around.
  • HipMunk was started because the founder was frustrated with Kayak and how it would list duplicate flights or flights no human would want to take.
  • Alex invested as the GUI was grafted onto the site and he could see how everything came together.
  • If the majority of Americans that take one trip, we need to be in their heads. That’s what fare alerts.
  • Twitter, Facebook, Groupon have made it okay to email the hell out of people.
  • We want to make content that helps people. That’s why we have city guides and actually give tips to people via social media on their trips.