Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed

by Alexis Ohanian

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Newsletters

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Dedicated to my mother and father, Anke and Chris Ohanian:

  I wish you were here to read this, Mom.

  May this book, my life, and my persistent smile all honor you.

  A Quick Introductory Note

  Every company I’ve helped start has a cute mascot I drew. It’s sort of my thing. For this book, the breadpig (a pig with slices of bread for wings) will be the cute spokesmodel to my Bob Barker. It’s the eponymous mascot for my social enterprise, Breadpig, which we’ll get to in chapter 7 (no peeking!). You’ll notice he’s black and white, which makes this book a guide for navigating the Internet age successfully as well as a coloring book! What a deal!

  The Real Introduction to My Book

  The World Isn’t Flat; the World Wide Web Is

  In an August 20, 2011, op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, world-renowned venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world.”1 I couldn’t have said it better myself. Andreessen sets the stage: “With lower startup costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.” Software developers worldwide are transforming every single industry on the planet thanks to the open Internet, which makes unprecedented “permissionless innovation”2 possible even for a couple of twenty-one-year-olds like me and my reddit.com co-founder, Steve Huffman.

  My story starts out rather ordinarily. Despite having been born in Brooklyn, I was raised in the “textbook” suburbs of Columbia, Maryland,3 and did well enough at my public high school to get into the University of Virginia. It was on move-in day, when I met my roommate, Steve, that things started to get interesting.

  By the time we graduated, Steve and I had taken twelve thousand dollars in seed funding from a then unheard-of investment firm called Y Combinator to start reddit.com. Less than a year later, I was organizing meetings with potential acquirers and, in less time than it took me to write my honors thesis, we sold our company to Condé Nast. Sixteen months after graduating from college, I was a millionaire. Since then, I’ve founded a social enterprise, helped launch a travel search engine, started a nonprofit corporation, invested in more than sixty startups, advised hundreds more, spoken about tech entrepreneurship all over the world, and helped in the fight against two terrible legislative bills—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which threatened to undermine the free and open Internet that made my success (and the success of many others, some of whom you’ll read about here) possible.

  But this isn’t just my story. I’ve had a lot of advantages and a lot of help along the way,4 but the beauty of the Internet is that you don’t need these advantages to change the world. The near ubiquity of the Internet (in the developed world, for now) has brought with it the promise of a global stage on which ideas can come to fruition. For centuries, invention was limited to those who had access to the means of production and access to labor. Today, you can simply create and present your ideas online. Granted, if it’s that easy for you, it’s that easy for everyone. Having your content discovered, let alone appreciated, is not guaranteed. There continues to be innovation that will help new and interesting content come to the surface, but even as a work in progress, it’s better than the old world of gatekeepers. If there isn’t a platform for something yet, chances are someone will build it—soon. The ruthless, fickle, and particular users of the World Wide Web have created the most competitive marketplace of ideas the world has ever seen; you either make something people want or people move on.

  Global connectivity isn’t just changing the way we do business; it’s changing the way we think of value. More than ever, we as individuals have the opportunity to put our ideas into practice without the implicit or material support of traditional communities, industries, and governments. Now any individual—an undergrad at UVA, a comedian from Austin with cerebral palsy, a farmer in Missouri, or a public school teacher from the Bronx—can transform the way we all live. As value creation shifts from well-connected MBAs to the innovators themselves, so does wealth creation. Whatever you think of the world’s youngest billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook crew, they’re just the beginning. The Forbes list of richest people—or its future equivalent—is going to have far fewer businesspeople and far more creators on it. If this seems obvious to you, great: I’ll be your Sacagawea-like guide as we meet scores of pioneers in their fields. If this sounds crazy and maybe even a bit shocking, even better!

  So here’s how it’s going to go: I’ll spend the first part of this book describing my own experiences as a startup founder. You’ll learn how I ended up getting involved in all this, how Steve Huffman and I took a failed application to Y Combinator and turned it into reddit, one of the fifty most popular websites in the world. You’ll hear about the early days of a travel search engine that had no business being in business with entrenched incumbents, but we started it anyway because we were so damn frustrated.

  Then in the second part of the book I’ll break it all down so you can do it, too—everything from taking that great idea you had last night over drinks to closing that first round of funding that’ll let you quit your job and turn that cocktail concoction into a real business.

  The third part of the book covers just about everything else one could aspire to do online. Whether you want to embrace the Internet for fun, profit, or the good of humankind (or all or any of the above), this book has you covered.

  There’s a unifying message here: the Internet is already doing awesome things, and it’s just in its infancy. No one knows what’s coming, but we’re certain that the status quo is due for some serious disruption and that it’s up to the innovators to push us forward. That’s where you come in.

  I say this not just as an observer but as an active participant. I’m a serial entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. I grew up online, and now the Internet is how I make my living—it went from being my babysitter to being my boss. It’s been good to me, and it’s good for everyone else, too (yes, incumbents, even you).

  That’s because the Internet helps people help themselves. It’s no surprise to me that the Internet freedom movement has been so successful here in the United States, given that this core message of entrepreneurship is so baked into the founding of our country. Now the platform is connecting us as never before, enabling and empowering innovation that simply wasn’t possible because the markets governed by supply and demand never met the need for it so efficiently.

  Read this book to find out how to chart your own course or to avoid becoming obsolete. I’ll share everything that’s worked and a few things that have failed spectacularly. Above all, I hope you’ll carry this blueprint, and the optimism inherent in it, with you long after you put this book down. It’s vital that we preserve a level playing field, not just to keep my book relevant but also for the sake of human progress, which is more
important. Nations are making decisions in the coming years about the Internet that will significantly affect the trajectory we’ll take politically, economically, and socially.

  I’m writing this book to inspire as much as to inform. The Internet has tremendous potential for anyone who works with it. I want to lionize the efforts of some of the innovators who’ve benefited from this new medium and inspire others to join them in creating something themselves. Generations X and Y were raised to believe that they could be and do anything they wanted. I never did become a professional football player, but when one takes a more rational approach to life goals, the online opportunities become boundless.

  There is still a significant digital divide, even in the United States, and certainly in the developing world, but I intend this book to spotlight what happens when a population has its most basic needs fulfilled and can use the Internet for remarkable things. All these are reasons to bridge this divide, whether in Yerevan or Brooklyn. Through connectivity, there is an opportunity of global proportions unlike anything the world has ever seen.

  I don’t care what Tom Friedman says.

  A Perfect Marketplace of Ideas

  The Internet is an open system: it works because you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to be creative and because every address is equally accessible, whether it’s the dot-com of the world’s largest multinational corporation, the dot-gov of the world’s most powerful country, or YourFirstWebsite.com. As former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “Once you’re on the Internet, you don’t need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society.”

  All links are created equal. They have to be. The reason we fight to preserve this openness is because the innovations of the future—whether in business, activism, the arts, politics, philanthropy, or cat photography—cannot come to fruition with anything less. An open Internet means a platform where what you know is more valuable than whom you know. The promise of such a platform (and the reason we must protect it) is that it allows awesome ideas to win because people like them, not because some gatekeeper said so.

  To quote Fred Wilson, a friend of mine and one of the most successful (and best-liked) tech venture capitalists in the country:

  The Internet is not controlled by anyone or anything. It is a highly distributed global network that has at its core the concepts of free speech and individual liberty. This ethos, which includes but is not limited to hacker culture, is in many ways at odds with big companies, institutions, and governments which seek to control, regulate, and “civilize” the Internet.5

  It’s threatening to incumbents, especially lazy ones with something to lose, but that’s all the more reason why the supporters of Internet freedom are so numerous.

  I’m motivated by all the awesome people whose ideas we’ve never benefited from because of where they were born or because of their race, sex, or other characteristics. All the bullshit that holds amazing people back doesn’t suddenly disappear online, but the open Internet does technologically level the playing field for everyone. When all links are created equal, your ideas can win simply because people like them. The future of innovation will be made, not managed. We cannot (and should not) control it. Our responsibility is to get everyone onto the playing field with the skills they need to succeed. We cannot afford to make the wrong decision and stifle Internet freedom—mostly for the sake of human progress but also because I don’t know what else I’d do with myself if I didn’t have this platform from which to share and develop my ideas.

  For incumbents who read this: you don’t have control, but that’s okay. In fact, you never did—the Internet just demonstrates it in real time. The Internet is a network without hierarchies. And that’s awesome. Here’s what that means.

  We the People, in Order to Form a More Perfect Network

  The Internet is a democratic network where all links are created equal. And when such networks get hierarchies forced upon them, they break. They start looking a lot more like the gatekeepers and bureaucracies that stifle great ideas and people in the physical world. That’s why we fight so hard to keep them the way they are—open—so that any idea that’s good enough can flourish without having to ask anyone’s permission.

  This is new territory. Before the social media revolution connected billions, this was only hypothetical. Ideas traveled across the Internet, but there was neither the number of users that there are today nor the applications necessary to speed discovery and sharing. Thanks to the emergence of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and reddit, we’re now seeing social media play out every day, affecting every business in every industry. And if it’s not apparent right now for your industry, it will be soon.

  A few years ago, most would have scoffed at the idea that a couple of Rhode Island School of Design graduates in an apartment with laptops would have more rooms available for rent than the Hilton corporation6 (not a Hilton or even the biggest single Hilton hotel—the entire Hilton Hotels empire). But that’s exactly what happened. The guys at Airbnb.com (air bed-and-breakfast; see what they did there?) found a brilliant, simple way to connect people who have space, from spare bedrooms to entire homes, with people looking to rent, like vacationers and business travelers, in an online marketplace. These days, their company is valued in the billions and highly profitable. I had the privilege of watching them pitch their idea at Y Combinator Demo Day, if not the foresight to invest in them when I had the chance. Airbnb is a perfect example of a company that technologically could’ve existed before social media connected the web—websites like CouchSurfing.org and even craigslist had been facilitating this for quite some time—but thrived when it did because social media had created a critical mass of people who were comfortable turning online relationships into real-world business transactions.

  Five years ago, I doubt you would’ve found many international hotel companies who were worried about startups disrupting their industry. They owned all those expensive, big, solid buildings, after all! It would take ludicrous amounts of money to build a hotel empire in a few years, but that’s exactly what Airbnb did—except they did it with pixels rather than bricks. It turned out that a vast empire of hotel rooms was in our homes the whole time.

  Airbnb is just one example of disruption enabled by an open Internet, but there are countless others happening as we speak. No one can predict just how these industries will be disrupted—only that it’s a matter of when, not if. That’s the nature of innovation. We make things that never existed before. In an industry without the biases and inertia of “how things should be done,” you’ll have a tremendous advantage over incumbents—some of whom won’t adapt fast enough, even when they realize they must. That’s the free market, online and in hyperdrive—industries disrupted in less than twelve parsecs.7

  It’s Not as Simple as It Looks

  So you’re convinced these “interwebs” aren’t just a fad. Fabulous!

  One hitch—none of this future is guaranteed.

  In fact, if history is any indication, someone is going to screw it all up. Invariably, whenever a major leap in the American information industry occurs, it first flourishes with openness and innovation but ultimately is swallowed up or consolidated. Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, describes the brewing war over the Internet that echoes past battles long lost over telephone, radio, and film. Basically, his book is a downer, but a very important one, that pairs well with my book and a nice Malbec.

  We’ve got something going for us this time, though, and it’s not just my youthful optimism. The information platform we, the people, wield is far, far more powerful than any of its predecessors. The United States (and, to an extent, the world) witnessed it firsthand on January 18, 2012, when the Internet went on strike—thousands of websites went dark as thousands of people went to the streets in protest and millions of Americans did something no expert predicted: they won an unprecedented victory against entrenched powers and tens of millions in lobbying dollars. The people wh
o fought against SOPA and PIPA did it in the name of Internet freedom, and it’s fitting we succeeded thanks to the platform we fought to protect.

  Over the years, whether I’m speaking to Fortune 500 executives or college students, whether I’m talking about the future of nonprofits or entrepreneurship, I’ve found myself coming back to the same themes. I can’t talk about the power of the Internet enough, so I figured I’d take this message to more people than I can fit in a room using the printed word. Why a book? Not many people have the attention span to read something this long online. That, and because books smell so good. This book begins with my own story, which couldn’t have been written without HTML.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The American Dream Lived Online

  “Yes, I’d like to upgrade my dad’s season tickets. Oh, front row, fifty-yard line, please—the best you have.”

  Me, approximately three minutes after we sold reddit

  Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, but on October 31, 2006, all the hard work Steve Huffman and I had put into starting reddit (with lots of help from our first hire and good friend, Dr. Christopher Slowe) had quite literally paid off. The first thing I did after the money showed up in my checking account was to call the Washington Redskins ticket office and upgrade my dad’s tickets to something a bit better than the nosebleed seats we had. I then made a sizable donation to my mom’s favorite charity and got back to handling all the inbound press. It was a blur of a day, but once it ended, I was able to take stock of just how far we’d come in only sixteen months.

  When Steve and I looked at each other, there were no cheers of joy, just a shared sigh of relief. We’d pulled off something statistically improbable—just barely—and we knew it. And after everything we’d been through… wow. Grateful, we went and shared a pizza at Mike’s, the same place where we’d been ordering pies since we moved to Somerville, Massachusetts. There, we caught our breath after an entire day of interviews.