Alexis Kerry Ohanian (born April 24, 1983) is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and executive chairman of the social news website Reddit along with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz. He also co-founded the early-stage venture capital firm Initialized Capital, helped launch the travel search website Hipmunk, and started the social enterprise Breadpig. He was also a partner at Y Combinator. In 2012, Andy Greenberg of Forbes magazine dubbed him "Mayor of the Internet."
Alexis was born on 24th April 1983 in Brooklyn, New York. His earliest lessons of web design and management were learnt from Quake 2 Clan and Everquest guild.
Alexis went to Howard High School in Ellicott City, Maryland, where he gave the student address for his graduating class in 2001.
He enrolled in the University of Virginia and that was where he befriended Steve Huffman who would later be his partner in founding ‘Reddit’. Alexis majored in history and German and had plans to become a lawyer. The future however had other plans. Alexis Ohanian and Steve visited Cambridge to attend a lecture from Paul Graham on ‘How to Start a Startup’. Afterwards they went out with him for drinks where they pitched some ideas to him. Their first plan was to build a system that would allow people to order food from their cell phones but this was not accepted by Graham. Their other idea was reddit.com.
After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2005 with degrees in commerce and history, Ohanian and friend Steve Huffman pitched the idea MyMobileMenu to Y Combinator. The company passed on the idea but encouraged the duo to come up with another idea it could potentially fund. They later came up with reddit.com with the goal of it becoming the "front page of the Internet."
Reddit is a social news website where the readers are able to control the front page by voting for the stories they want on it. The website has more than 35 million visitors and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites. In 2006 the website was sold to Conde Nast. However Alexis continued to offer his advice to them till 2010 when he left for Armenia where he spent three months and worked as a Kiva Fellow and volunteered for Kiva.org. He is the member of Reddit’s board till today. After his return, he focused his attention on a new project which he called Breadpig. Also called ‘Newman’s Own for Nerds’, ‘Breadpig’ features several eminent web comics and geeky innovations such as LOLmagnetz, Awesome sauce and xkcd & Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The profits attained from this site are given away as donations.