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Watch Live: reddit’s Co-Founder Talks About The Launching And Selling Of A Business

Posted on May 25, 2009 - 6:35 PM PST

When: Tuesday, 5/26/09 @ 11 AM Pacific
Where: On Mixergy.com. Watch and interact from your desk.

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Photo by medigirol

About Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian co-founded reddit a news website where readers, not editors, determine what goes on the front page in 2005 and sold it to Wired the next year. You can find out about that and his other projects on http://alexisohanian.com or you can say “hi” to him on Twitter via @kn0thing.

About this interview

This is part of my series of interviews with entrepreneurs to illustrate the entrepreneurial process. My goals are to:

• Find out where an idea comes from.

• See how an idea evolves.

• See why companies need funding and how they use it.

Give your input

The best questions in my interviews come from readers like you. Submit your questions here in the comments, or by emailing me, or by asking Alexis during the live program. Suggested comments:

• Do you know something about Alexis or reddit that I may not know?

• What would you like to learn about how reddit was built?

• Do you have a question about entrepreneurship?

• There have been lots of interviews on the founding and building of reddit. What have they missed?

  • The market is crowded already for the social market what gave them the confidence to go ahead, and how did they promote it.

    How do you promote a forum or a social media site and get participation on a budget?
  • Geoff H
    Hey Andrew, when is this interview going up for all the people who missed it live?
  • Sorry about the delay. The audio didn't come out well so I'm spending a ton
    of time trying to fix it. I should have it up this week.
  • gloombergnews
    I would like to know if you think sites like reddit and digg are good investments if the only true money they can make is from advertising in an advertising market that is way down right now...and possibly forever
  • Great question. Wish I got this in time. I need to start posting sooner
    about upcoming interviews to give people like you time to send your
    questions.

    This was a really good comment.
  • I have a few questions:

    What role did Aaron Schwartz play in the early days of Reddit?

    Since they open sourced some of the code base has Reddit received the amount of improvements from the community they expected?

    http://blog.reddit.com/2008/06/reddit-goes-open...

    If they could start all over would they handle subreddits the same way?

    I ask because many of the popular categories like Business, Entertainment, Technology appear to be in control of the person who first registered the sub-reddit and some people report aggressive moderation by those individuals.

    Here are two reports of such activity:

    http://www.dirjournal.com/internet-journal/the-...

    http://www.brentcsutoras.com/2009/05/13/reddits...

    Incidentally Brent who wrote the post referenced above, was linked to by Reddit in the open source announcement post that I linked to above. I mention this because it seems the community has turned on him

    http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8k6...

    http://twitter.com/BrentCsutoras/statuses/18441...
  • magnus
    How did open-sourceing the reddit software affect reddit.com ?
  • Great question.
  • I'm dying to know his opinion on digg.com!

    Also, I'd love to hear what he would do different (Would he take outside funding? Would he still sell his baby to Wired?). How can reddit innovate from its many competitors? Is that the plan, at all?

    I hope I can catch that live.
  • Great questions.

    Alex, you just helped make my interview 10X better.
  • Thanks. That's just my way of giving back.
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