Alexis Ohanian at UMass Amherst

I took my boys to see Alexis Ohanian at UMass recently. They both read Reddit and were persuadable to go. He gave a good presentation: in equal parts funny, insightful, and inspiring. He also interviewed a UMass alumnus, Steve King, who has worked at a lot of internet startups. There was a lot I would agree with, but I was also left with a number of questions.

Are generation times decreasing? There's already a generation gap between Alexis and the students in the audience. Alexis talked about geocities websites and other early internet technologies that most of the people in the audience probably had never heard of. The world has already moved on.

How remixable really are newer mobile technologies? Reddit was created in a time when it was possible to inspect the protocols different layers of technology more easily than it is now. I worry that as the internet gets more complicated -- and subject to greater corporate control -- it raises barriers that previous entrepreneurs didn't face.

What role does luck play? The entrepreneurs talk of how you need to fail to succeed and you only need one to succeed and that's all well and good as a rationale for why you need to try. But what if none of your ideas succeed? In the end, it reminded me quite a bit of the advertising for the lottery: "You can't win if you don't play!" Like the demotivator says, "Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots."