Alexis Ohanian (pictured above with Ingram Micro SVP of global marketing Jennifer Anaya) co-founded Reddit in 2005 with his University of Virginia roommate Steve Huffman and later Aaron Swartz. Ohanian spoke to this year’s attendees of the recent Ingram Micro ONE conference about his entrepreneurial mindset, and how it has contributed to his success. His philosophies on life and business apply to most entrepreneurial ventures, but especially to those in the technology industry. Here are four tips he advises MSP business owners to follow to grow their own companies and advance their leadership skills.
Don’t Expect It To Be The Easy Way Out
Entrepreneurship will never be the easiest way to make a paycheck—so don’t expect it to be. “There are better ways to make money,” Ohanian said. “If you just want to make a living for yourself or your family, don’t be an entrepreneur. It’s one of the harder ways to [make a living], from a return on investment and return on time standpoint.”
But that doesn’t mean Ohanian discourages people from starting their own businesses. “If you really feel the need to [be an entrepreneur], if you feel this unquenchable need to build, then I think you should listen to it,” he said. “And certainly, if you can, avoid doing something that is just to satisfy what your parents want or what you think society wants you to do. Because especially now, in this age of AI, the opportunity for entrepreneurs, for people to self-teach, is so much money. All this change and disruption means that young people have more opportunity to really reinvent industries, to self-start in challenges they want to fix. It’s an amazing time.”
Audit The Company You Keep
Community is essential, even in endeavors like entrepreneurship that can seem isolating. But it isn’t enough to have people around you—you have to have the right people around. That means keeping company with people who challenge you, teach you, and push you to grow.
This aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset is even more important for younger entrepreneurs, or those in the beginning stages of starting a business.
Ohanian referenced a commencement speech he gave a few years prior: “One of my challenges to them was to be ruthless about who they’re spending time with in these years after graduation. I’m not saying be a jerk, but do an audit of the people around you. Make sure the people you’re spending time with are bringing out [your best traits] or have characteristics that you admire. They don’t have to all be startup founders, but they all need to be people who you admire. Your 20s is exceptionally high leverage for that—you don’t have experience or much in the way of resources, so one of the best things you can do is surround yourself with other people who are going to make you better, faster. All of those moments are going to help you grow your business, grow your network, and grow your learning.”
While older business owners have more resources to leverage than their community, there is still value to being selective with the company you keep. Surrounding yourself with more knowledgeable peers, rather than a bunch of ‘yes men’ pushes you to continue improving, innovating, and growing. This is a large component of why it is so critical for MSPs to join peer groups with other MSPs in the same ‘stage of life’ as themselves.
Get Used To Failure—And Learn From It
“Any entrepreneur will tell you, there are failures every week. There are setbacks all the time,” Ohanian says. “There were definitely some pretty epic ones that I’ve tried to turn into learning opportunities.”
Ohanian’s most constructive failure happened in 2009, when he was working at Reddit as a project manager, after selling the company to Common Asked. Ohanian recognized the launch of the iPhone as a huge opportunity—he wanted to create an app so users could access Reddit on mobile devices, not just their desktops. Unfortunately, Ohanian recounted, “Because I was a terrible manager leader, I was ineffective in getting my team to want to build it. There was this belief that everyone loves Reddit on desktop, and mobile could be a fad.”
He then hired a freelance team to create the app, which Ohanian said was the wrong approach, since he couldn’t sell it internally. He launched the app and users loved it, but when Ohanian left Reddit a few months later, the app floundered because the internal team left behind had no interest in it. Five years later, Reddit was in distress and the board asked Ohanian to return as executive chairman.
“In 2014, it was obvious that mobile was not a fad. That was one of the things that had frustrated me over those five years. Twitter had grown tremendously bigger than us, and we still didn’t have a Reddit app,” Ohanian said.
In the end, it took a meet cute with Serena Williams—Ohanian’s now wife—and an awkward moment where she couldn’t find Reddit in the App Store, to get the Reddit app pushed out. “But here it was five years later,” said Ohanian, “and those were five years where if I had done a better job selling it internally to the team and getting buy-in, Reddit would have already had a mobile app. Reddit would have likely had a much bigger presence than Twitter. I just go back to my total, utter failure as a leader and my impulsiveness. I think I have grown a good amount since then, but that definitely set us back five or six years.”
Don’t Say “Can’t”
As a father of two, “Don’t say ‘can’t’” is a governing rule in both Ohanian’s home and business—and his daughter, Olympia, occasionally calls him on it. “We don’t say ‘can’t’ in our house,” Ohanian said. “We can say other words that more accurately describe the situation, but I don’t want to have that mindset. It’s a way of life; it’s a way of framing.” Ohanian says that when his daughter says “can’t”, it’s rarely a natural limitation, such as a law of physics. Instead, it’s in the context of not being able to do a role or a particular thing. “That’s the moment I strike,” Ohanian said. “I want her to reframe it. She can do the work—do it and get better and improve—or she can decide not to.”
Ohanian then addressed the MSPs in attendance directly with the same message: “Accept you can. Stop saying you can’t, when you actually don’t want to. Then, it’s a question of: Do you want to? Do you have enough agency to decide how you can put in the work?”
For more coverage from Ingram Micro ONE, read about the marketplace’s perspective on AI and advice for MSPs here.
Photo credit to Ingram Micro.
