By Maxim Tamarov, News Staff 

Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, the procrastinator’s Internet haven, addressed an audience of about 500 people at Blackman Auditorium.

“A lot of people know me as the guy who has cute mascots for his startups,” he began.

Ohanian came to Northeastern as part of his book tour, promoting his new novel “Without their Permission” about the innovations of the 21st century. He is a cofounder of Hipmunk and Breadpig, as well as outspoken activist for Internet freedom.

The talk, which was hosted by the Entrepreneur Club, addressed various qualms that young entrepreneurs face when starting off, such as getting their ideas out there and dealing with setbacks.

At the University of Virginia, Ohanian said that a professor told him that there are plenty of students at all universities with start-up plans and that the Internet has allowed them to blossom. He backed up this claim by asking the audience to raise their hands if they were working on an idea for a start-up and arbitrarily selected a student to come up and share their project.

Julie White, a senior chemical engineering major at Northeastern, ventured onstage and explained the critical thinking and collaboration skills web page project that she and her brothers are working on.

“My brothers are busy coding right now,” she said.

Many students are able to spread such amazing ideas due to the web.

“Ideas are worthless — as the cliche goes — execution is everything,” he said.. Success is dependent on chance, he added, but serendipity only happens if you’re willing to put your hand up.

Ohanian related a story about his childhood and how he was able to succeed by utilizing all of the opportunities that he was presented with.

“I was lucky enough to get an Internet connection and computer,” he said.

Although he didn’t enjoy his school work, Ohanian would go home and make websites on his meagre platform.

“I had a GeoCities page,” he recalled. “Never forget your first!”

The opportunities available to this generation far surpassed his own, Ohanian said. “They merely adopted the Internet,” he said of the incumbents of the Internet while doing an impression of Bane, the Batman villain. “We were born in it, molded by it.”

Over the past few years, projects have been springing up that no one could have imagined before the web.

“Many of us are finding ways to basically invent careers,” he said. He advised the audience to do the same.

Ohanian’s first start-up idea was with Reddit cofounder, Steve Huffman. The program allowed customers to order food from their phone.

“We applied. We got rejected. We got drunk,” Ohanian remembered. “In the morning they called us back and said, ‘We don’t like your idea — we like you guys.’”

This eventually led Huffman and Ohanian to improvise the idea for Reddit, a website on which articles and pictures are shared under specific labels called sub-Reddits. Ohanian’s Reddit logo, a cute alien, had been drawn before the program was even designed. He would go on to draw a pig for Breadpig and a chipmunk for Hipmunk.

“We had no [expletive] idea what we were doing,” Ohanian admitted. “I still don’t. We all start off not knowing and are perpetually not knowing.”

He urged students to not be discouraged by confusion, since being lost is a natural stage of entrepreneurship.

“It was janky,” Ohanian admitted as he pointed to the pilot version of Reddit. “But the first version of everything is janky.”

The final half-hour was reserved for interviewing Mike Norman, a Northeastern alumnus who founded wefunder. Norman shared the story of his startup, a website that allows the public to invest in other startups. An example he mentioned was Terafugia, a company that makes flying cars.

Ohanian’s most resonating story was that of his rejection from Yahoo! The company invited him and Huffman to speak about Reddit, but quickly dismissed their web traffic as too miniscule.

“You are a rounding error,” they said to Ohanian. He made himself a plaque of that quote to remind himself who he was proving wrong.

“Life is going to be full of failure and that’s okay,” he reminded the attendees. “Sucking is the first step at being good at something.”