Ideas are worthless.
Unless you put them into action, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, told the packed Walter Rotunda on Monday night.
Ohanian, along with Imgur founder and former Ohio University student Alan Schaaf came to Athens to stress entrepreneurship’s necessity in modern society.
Reddit is a networking site — it calls itself “the front page of the Internet.” The website can be organized in specific topics to narrow a search.
“I got to create something that millions of people can see in an instant,” Ohanian said.
Schaaf became frustrated with the way picture-sharing websites required users to upgrade to a premium service for continuous use.
Imgur was designed to make image hosting easy, accessible and more functional, Schaff said.
Imgur — which was created in an OU dorm when Schaaf was a junior in 2009 — is now the largest image-hosting website on the planet, with 112 million unique visitors and more than 5.4 billion unique page views, Ohanian said.
That means 112 million people have looked at 5.4 billion items on Imgur.
Which, Schaaf mentioned, is outpacing Reddit.
The “welcoming” environment Athens offers its students and community members helps foster creativity, Schaaf said.
“The main thing you really got to be good at is Googling,” Schaaf said. “Really, we use the same tools that you have. You just got to have the need to create. We have exactly as many hours as Beyonce has in a day.”
@bret_jamerson
bj844311@ohiou.edu
