Called “The Mayor of Internet” by Forbes magazine, Serena Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian has taken to Twitter again, and this time it’s a shout-out to the haters. Alexis posted a video where he sat down with hosts from “The F**king Metaverse Product”. He spoke about how he was insulted by a Yahoo executive in 2005, and most importantly, how that insult fueled him to break Yahoo with Reddit. Alexis Ohanian is always active on his social media. Fans love it and so do budding entrepreneurs. This time he sat down to talk about haters.
Ohanian isn’t a quitter.
In 2005, Ohanian was invited to a meeting by Yahoo. What he thought would be a collaboration proposal, an “M&A type discussion”, ended in ten minutes.
What was the conversation between Alexis and The Yahoo Executive?
The Yahoo executive asks, “So how much traffic do you have?”Ohanian answered honestly, “I don’t know, about ten thousand…daily actives.” At this, the Yahoo exec said, “You’re a rounding error compared to Yahoo.”
Ohanian talks about how he felt completely out of place at Yahoo after that.
The Yahoo executive said, “What are you doing here?” And Ohanian was at a loss, “Is this what Yahoo does?”
What did Ohanian do after the Yahoo meeting?
After he got back to Boston, he printed out “You are a rounding error” next to his desk so that he had a daily reminder of how much work was left. He read and printed out all these discouraging blog posts that said Reddit is never going to work. And in 2017, “Reddit surpassed Yahoo in traffic.”
Ohanian’s counsel to all the founders.
“If you’re creating something, it’s always a vulnerable thing…you’re actually better off having haters. Better to be doing something that has somehow made people so irrationally mad at you than to build something that no one cares about.”