Starting a business is hard at the best of times. But in 2005, when he was just launching Reddit at barely 22 years old, Alexis Ohanian experienced a series of traumatic events that would shape his approach to work and life forever.
His girlfriend at the time had fallen out of a fifth-floor window in a foreign country. After months of being in a coma, surgeries and rehab, she eventually recovered, and Alexis was due for another shock.
When his family dog died that same year, it was tough for him but devastating for his mother. Little did he know that 6 hours of grief later she would be hospitalized – diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She died in 2008.
When Alexis emailed our CEO Boris asking if he could tell this story on stage for the first time ever, we of course obliged. Alexis had copied and pasted TNW NYC‘s tagline into his email: “Discover the true stories behind the make or break moments of the world’s most successful individuals and companies”. The conference struck him as the perfect fit for him to tell his story.
What gave Alexis the strength to persevere and create one of the world’s most loved websites in the face of what was undoubtedly the hardest time of his life?
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Find out at TNW NYC
On November 16th at TNW NYC, Alexis Ohanian will tell his incredible story – a first for a tech conference, and a talk that should not be missed.
He and Steve Huffman, his former roommate and fellow Reddit founder, will both be appearing on stage separately, speaking about very different times in one of the internet’s most famous companies.
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