Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian: "We are all still learning how to effectively use Web 3.0"
May 03, 2022
39-year-old co-founder talks emerging technology at
EMerge Americas conference in Miami
EMerge Americas conference in Miami
Like many who grew up with the Internet, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian got his start building websites on Geocities in the mid-1990s. As a teenager, he built a site as an homage to his favorite video game at the time: Quake 2. “I was very proud of it,” Ohanian recently told the eMerge Americas crowd in Miami. “I didn’t even know the counter on the bottom of the page was page views. I thought it was unique visitors.” What Ohanian, 39, didn’t know at the time was that what he was working on was a very early version of what Web 1.0 became.
Ohanian was at eMerge for a chat about where the Web appears to be heading, as the industry braces for Web 3.0, a concept that covers the emergence of high-tech, including AR- and VR-based immersiveness. Ohanian told his story as an illustration of where the tech world is in Web 3.0: still in the early stages where a Quake 2 website might seem like a great accomplishment but still with much more to come. “Seven, eight years later I’m sitting here designing upvotes and downvotes for Reddit,” said Ohanian, one of the most famous Internet entrepreneurs.
Ohanian was at eMerge for a chat about where the Web appears to be heading, as the industry braces for Web 3.0, a concept that covers the emergence of high-tech, including AR- and VR-based immersiveness. Ohanian told his story as an illustration of where the tech world is in Web 3.0: still in the early stages where a Quake 2 website might seem like a great accomplishment but still with much more to come. “Seven, eight years later I’m sitting here designing upvotes and downvotes for Reddit,” said Ohanian, one of the most famous Internet entrepreneurs.
“My younger self in Web 1.0 never could have even conceived of any of the stuff that was being built.” Ohanian said that right now, despite more attention being paid to Web 3.0, we are still in the Geocities phase. “We are all still learning what to tinker, what to build and so the builders right now have an amazing assortment of Lego bricks to build with,” he said. The team at 302 attended eMerge to learn from successful entrepreneurs. Here are some highlights and nuggets we pulsed from Alexis’ discussion.
- Technology is going to drive and be a part of every industry. The opportunity to create world-changing businesses happens everywhere.
- If you have the ability to deploy capital, do it early. We are not at a shortage of talented people who can build a good business.
- Crypto is going to be a very foundational part of finance moving forward. “I’m not exclusively a fan of crypto but it is one of the most exciting spaces to be investing in right now.”
- He looks for founders who have a strong conviction about a space with a very thoughtful and deep understanding of what they are building, why they’re building and who they are building for.
- In 2022, he says that people are looking to invest and, more than ever, looking into unconventional places.
- At Reddit, we allowed the community to organize and determine for themselves what’s right. It was not perfect but it allowed them to decide what they were.
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