🎙 110 - The Internet Reset | Alexis Ohanian

when i got krypto pilled was the wedge informed me was seeing this community behavior that reminded me of early days of reddit except now with so much more potential and so much more upside because it's not singular it's it's not centralized it is truly global welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity this is ryan sean adams i'm here with david hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless great episode for you guys today the internet

reset can we just pull out the power cord and restart this whole thing that's the idea we get into this discussion with alexis ohanian who has been recently crypto pilled a few things to take away from this episode number one hear his story how did alexis actually get crypto pill the founder of reddit co-founder of reddit he fell down the rabbit hole what does that look like number two how he'd actually rebuild reddit if it was on web3 what does that look like and number three his investor cheat codes where the next opportunities

in crypto be on the lookout for some of those that are mentioned as well david what were your thoughts in this conversation with alexis yeah i very clearly remembered the moment i got into reddit and understood like started to understand what was really going on there and the thing that captivated me about that platform was just the emergent behaviors that the platform enabled the communities and it was one of those it was just one of these things where all these weird quirky internet culture things all seem

to be born out of reddit so like the rage comics some of the early memes and like memes and reddit i discovered these things around the same time and it's really all about emergent behaviors and so we take this conversation to alexis about what he sees in the early days of reddit and the parallels that he's seeing now in web3 and that was a very important story for him and how he was able to wrap his mind around web3 it was using a lot of these early concepts these early principles that reddit really leaned into that are now like on

steroids in the world of web 3 in the world of online internet crypto enabled communities and so we unpack all these parallels and connect them to the internet at large and how we're going we're kind of uh this internet culture was definitely existent in web 1 kind of lost in web 2 but is now as you said getting reset and reborn in web 3 which is what alexis apparently makes him optimistic about the future of where this whole internet experiment is going it's a super cool

conversation in in reddit i think is one of the most organic um internet native social media platforms uh certainly today it's where i kind of got my start learning about crypto as well and i think probably many the bankless audience did too uh so fantastic conversation really fascinating i think there's some insights here you can carry with you into uh the investing world as well about what's coming next in web 3 and what's coming next in crypto alexis has been on our bankless podcast wish list

for quite some time so we are super excited to get right into the conversation with alexis ohanian but first we want to tell you about these awesome tools that will help you go bankless living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys and that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet and brand new to the ledger lineup of hardware wallets is the ledger nano s plus a huge upgrade to the world's most popular hardware wallet with more memory and a larger screen the nano s plus makes it easy to navigate and verify your transactions and the paired ledger live desktop app gives you

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cases if you're a developer who wants to build on the polygon ecosystem go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation and if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy you can bridge over your eth or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on polygon bankless nation we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest alexis ohanian he's a technology entrepreneur now a vc now an investor he's focused on the world i'm making the world a better place as vc firm 776 he's an early investor in lots of

products that we know and love coinbase axe infinity open c in the web 3 space even the software we're actually using to record this it's called riverside if you invest in that too you may also know him as one of the co-founders of reddit and he's really an expert in the internet i i think specifically internet communities uh so he's got a lot to teach us today alexis welcome to bankless how you doing man well thank you for having me ryan i just happy to be here okay i enjoyed chatting with you and david before the show began

i'm happy i'm happy we hit record so we can save all this gold for your listeners do you know what you always look like you are having fun with the internet like whatever you do it always looks like you're having fun and everything you do also feels like mostly true very human like it feels just very authentically human do you is that a through line is that something you you've uh striven for is that just part of your nature uh i think it's the latter i think it's a part of my nature you gotta look i guess you gotta dig up the old content from like 0.5 and oh six you know

grinding it out founding reddit to see if i still have the same vibes but i think so i don't know i've the advice i find myself giving ceos uh more often than not is to be to think of communication on the internet just as you would communication offline and and you know this this really comes up in community building because people for 16 years especially in the last couple years been asking like how do you build community blah blah blah and and a lot of it comes back to the same way you would do it offline if you were inviting people over to your house

or bringing folks over to you know a convention hall like you you think about community building online the same way you do offline you bring good people together you give them opportunities to to you know have great experiences you're you know that's sort of like the the ideal party host is someone who's not there talking about themselves but helping connect good people and starting good conversations in good times and that's that's so much of it and i think i've been fortunate because creating reddit was probably was was not just a great outcome for me

professionally but it also set the stage for getting the reps in for all the things that are most valuable now in web 3 16 years later and uh and it's it's just about that authenticity and i guess that's i don't know that's my vibe is that what brought you into web3 is that what brought you into crypto it's like we talked to so many people on bank list and they all have a story of how they came into crypto and crypto has all of this surface area right some people are uh you know it's appealing the finance side of it the economic side of

it the like uh sovereign money side of it the individual expression side what brought you into crypto what was your hook so there's what brought me into crypto and then there's what crypto pilled me which are two different questions for the first i 2011 2012 i was a partner y combinator and i meet this this bright young man who had just left airbnb a great job at airbnb i think it had just become a billion dollar company it was a clear winner in silicon valley and he had been doing uh

fraud uh detection and prevention there his name was brian armstrong and he entered that batch of yc and he said you know what i think bitcoin is going to be a big deal and right now it's a pain in the ass to buy and sell and i want to make it really easy i want to make it so simple for anyone to buy some bitcoin to participate in this and candidly the only reason i did that seed investment was because the r slash bitcoin community on reddit at the time

was so engaged and and as an investor i'll tell you my cheat code and i've been a pretty public it's not that secret but i visit the nascent reddit communities if there are them if they exist for the things i'm investing in because that's a great barometer you can't really fake community on reddit if it's there it's there if it's not like it requires such a herculean effort to make work that you're not gonna fake that one easily and i don't know i just saw something there that was pretty wild

it was really emphatic i had been to enough at this point i still think i've been to more reddit meetups than any person on the planet like literally all over the world and at more and more reddit meetups i was hearing from more and more readers i mean think of the folks who came out to a reddit meetup in like 2011 2012 2013 these are die-hard users when i'd go to some meetups yeah i'd go to like riga in latvia or i went to a reddit meetup in in halifax uh up there in canada nova scotia like i mean not just la new york sf but like everywhere

and i went to one in bangalore india so okay one of the interesting through lines was like for these really hardcore redditors i started hearing more and more about bitcoin and about crypto and about these ideas of decentralization and i thought okay well the our slash bitcoin community is super hyped about this if you can get that many redditors that excited about a new technology you're probably there's probably something worth paying attention to but the government will definitely shut it down so i'm not going to get my hopes up too high but still that and those

were the pretenses through which i i got excited about doing this investment and it was years that went by as i started to see more and more talented people you know wanted to go all in on it and i thought okay this is interesting you know i still don't think it's going to like survive because if it works this will this is this is going to assail so many institutions right it will upend so many parts of our lives and and reimagine them and uh and there's no way that that's gonna actually work because it just candidly

just seems so far-fetched um and uh and then when i got crypto pilled properly was at the start of kovid because i started looking around and seeing you know and at this point right coinbase is on its way to ipo i had been making a number of investments over the years around the space and been lucky to be a part of some early pre-pre-sales and i i'd done well but the whole time i'm just like kind of holding my breath because i'm like this is too good to be true like when when you're a kid reading about major

historical events and and technological shifts uh there at least when i was a kid doing those things i just never could have imagined myself being a part of it let alone live like living during that time let alone being party to it just seemed pretty pretty far-fetched and so with every passing year i'm like holy [ __ ] this thing is actually like it's it keeps growing it's growing there's there's more and more talented bright driven people building on it which is a great sun and and then i started seeing things you

know as we're all locked inside we're all feeling all kinds of you know existential dread anxiety about the world you started seeing people looking for ways to commune digitally and all of a sudden twitter where i was already spending a ton of my time started having more and more conversations around all things krypton nfts were certainly one one popular one but more broadly just more and more people talking about building creating together and i started to see things that reminded me of early reddit

and that's when i got fully crypto pilled because i realized like okay we've reached a point of no return this from a like a regulation standpoint and we'll see with this executive order that's coming out but you know we we've essentially reached a point where i mean you know country ukraine was taking donations over bitcoin and ethereum like we've reached a point now where it's a part of the culture there's enough people who are bought in literally and figuratively to it and and and

it's here to stay and so now you start thinking okay what can we do with this and and over the last few years i just started seeing so much of this really interesting energy that just like i said reminded me the early days of reddit except now people who were early and right could benefit from the upside and and i mean that both financially but also sort of spiritually right we are i don't even back when we were just collecting like seashells on the beach our species really likes

private property and we we like this idea and look the ability to have private property also incidentally makes it even more interesting to then have shared property because that shared property is only special if you have a concept of of personal and private property but at its core like there is something special about that and seeing that switch flip among so many people who now found a new gateway into why this should matter because now they could reimagine how gaming could be

different and they started seeing versions that obviously an investor and actually like you said so rare another one and seeing seeing this resonate as a kid who grew up playing tons of video games and spent tons and tons of money that i'll never get back um and yet also a kid who you know bought a ton of trading cards and magic cards even spell fire which was like the d knockoff of magic the gathering you know i we took for granted the fact that we owned all of our in-game assets because you know you bought the card and then you got to keep them and if you wanted to give them to your kid's sister you could sell them you

could do whatever you want with them they were yours and the metaphor seems so obvious to me it's obviously still pretty contentious in some communities but i think in hindsight well again just feel very very very clear and and so as i sat here watching all of these people get so excited creating together and hoping together and and that i guess it was the that communing of people tied into a sense of ownership and a potential for for creating something bigger i mean even looking at you know failures like

constitution dao you still see the same kind of energy that just reminded me of 15 years ago on reddit as people pooled money together to help for a fundraiser just to do some good work right but now you have something that's not limited to one platform it is truly global it is it is boundaryless and man i mean we're in the earliest days of it so anyway that's when i got cryptopilled was the wedge informing was seeing this community behavior that reminded me of early days of reddit except now with so much more potential and so much more upside because it's not singular it's it's not

centralized it is truly global and that's definitely where i want to go down the rabbit hole of just to get this conversation started off which is just the the the parallels because there's so many parallels between reddit and web3 as you've alluded to and i think a lot of the parallels between these two things are also very foundational to the internet itself uh there's a lot of things about reddit that captivated my attention when i first got into it that also captivated my attention about web three and i i kind of want to unpack these things with you because i think

it'll uh give listeners premonitions of things to come in in the rest of this decade the things that captivated my attention about reddit when i first logged on was that like it gave the user so much control and it gave the community so much control so like a subreddit was basically like uh a blank slate of a dao of sorts it had it was just up to the community to etch in the the story of what the subreddit was and everyone on reddit would start with like a blank account and it kind of feels

like it felt like when you made your reddit account like it's like you spun up your your brand new ethereum address for the first time these felt like the same things uh and like learning how to read it and learning what reddit was was something that you had to experience for yourself there was no onboarding you had to just go do it and then the same thing of web3 like you can't really just like listen to bank lists and understand web three you have to go and actually experience it for yourself and like this is also true for like kind of the the web the web 1.0 days like you

couldn't just go read about it you had to go experience it it was all community driven and i'm and i'm now like now that we have this web three data point and this reddit data point and this web one data point it kind of all seems that there's some amount of just like uh individual first community first user self sovereignty emergent behavior platforms that the internet is trying to produce and i'm wondering what you what how you see this uh using your history and experience at reddit how you see

this all unfolding in the world of web 3 and beyond i think we inadvertently got a lot of things right in a process that really was was rooted in an experience growing up on forums i mean i ran a php bb forum in college you know open source software ran this was called eyeswide.org had maybe 600 700 community members active and and we just talked about politics we talked about philosophy it was just i just loved doing it in college and my

friends at the time thought i was pretty weird for doing it but it was it just felt good to be a community manager and i just really enjoyed the conversations there and i felt like it was satisfying this was right after 9 11 it was satisfying a part of me that wasn't getting fed uh with with traditional media and you know you know starting reddit right after that really in a lot of ways right this is just repackaging message boards and forums that have been around since the

early days of the internet but creating it in a sort of singular network with a slightly better interface slightly uh i still i got a few things right with the upvotes and down votes and comments sorting but some of the other things a little little too spartan um but designing all that was really just an a sort of remix of web one and and then you know the whole innovation of quote-unquote web 2 and look i know people can roll their eyes at the branding of web3 this is sort of a necessary evil um we're going to just at

the same time i swear in 2005 uh 2005 starting reddit everyone was rolling their eyes the same way around web 2 and they were just like oh this is just some fun javascript that lets you load things on the page in real time like why are we calling this a movement and user generate content whatever yes it's all just branding but it's it's i think it's an important shorthand because it is identifying a major transition now and this isn't my quote but the the idea that you know web 2 was read and write and now we've moved to web 3 which is read and write and own is really meaningful

because we we inadvertently got some things right and i remember even designing the karma system was just look name taken from slashdot uh the upvotes minus downvotes equals karmascore was the laziest implementation i could come up with simply because it worked to encourage good content and discourage bad content and you know it turned out it was very motivating for people because they liked seeing their name on a leaderboard and i borrowed all kinds of elements from

video games for things like awards and 10-year club badges and all these other things which now people identify with they'll introduce themselves not with their government name or their reddit username they'll just say i'm a five-year reddit or a 10-year editor 12-15 year editor right but those are just pings that live on our server but now all of a sudden if you talk about pings that live on a chain you now have real receipts right and and my very naive take on this is if it worked without ownership it will work really well with ownership

because there is value in having those receipts and and so i really believe in you know speaking broadly around web too so this side you know social media as as we know it as i know you all are younger than me so you all grew up with is probably gonna look like a weird transition it it i think in the grand scheme of the internet is actually gonna look like a blip because i don't see one i don't see it it

becomes an intelligence test once you provide ownership as to why you would ever want to participate in a scheme uh where you don't actually own the things that you produce the user experiences today are still so janky and i actually don't i mean yeah like we still could have done a better job i i take full responsibility could have done a better job onboarding new users to reddit for sure i think it would have helped us grow a lot faster i think don't don't take don't have the lesson be make a terrible new user onboarding

experience make the lesson from this in spite of a terrible new user onboarding experience there was something here that people still wanted to dive into into because the content and the community was so good and so strong but even if we had had a better new user onboarding experience you still would have needed one still would have needed to like take time to actually understand the community before diving in and why because these online communities are the same as offline communities you move to a new town if all of a sudden i don't know where you all are in the world but

all of a sudden you move uh uh the next day to to bangalore shout out the redditors who i met at that meet up you you you show up the first day and want to make some friends you don't just barge into the first i don't know meet up you can find a first restaurant you can find it just start saying hi to people and start pitching whatever you're into right that's just not we as a human as a species we're going to spend a little bit of time understanding a new community we're going to spend a little time observing and watching and listening to start to learn etiquette and culture and all these

other things that we can have a good experience online community should work the exact same way and that's the part that is on the one hand it creates friction but on the other hand that friction creates the culture and the community and the reason why there are in-jokes and there are out jokes and so that's always a tension that we as a species have to figure out and navigate but it's what defines communities and what's wild now is we know it worked social media proved it worked at scale with billions of people all across the

world in spite of the fact that the the the ownership equation wasn't there the user experience was was all things considered actually pretty bad right because at the end of the day the way that you kept the lights on was by harvesting people's private information for advertising or some other version of that which was not really rewarding the content creators or the community builders at the end of the day so i don't know i think it's going to be a blip and i know i just monologued at you but hopefully that's a few lessons that

are valuable for the builders of today well we are definitely here to hear your monologues and so the next monologue i want to hear is uh unpacking the topic of just like emergence uh when you don't ascribe too much uh top-down uh design structures as i think as i claim that like twitter and facebook and instagram have done in their designs telling the users well this is the way that this this app is structured reddit and a lot of the web one days and i think what we're seeing a lot in the web three days is like just like a basic

here's a fundamental primitive platform for your community to exist now go create you go do something and like this natural the creativity that that a lot of these platforms besow upon their users gives them a lot of room to have their own emerging behaviors and what is really immersion behavior other than like the culture that we all agree on that we decide that we have value how do you see this like role of emergent behaviors in online communities like how do you see this trajectory

moving forward beyond platforms like reddit and into the world of web3 so so we are in the earliest days of this year right and we're going to see emergent behaviors come up and and they're going to define a lot of what we love and enjoy the wild dynamic here is i actually think at some point you know on the adoption crown the tech adoption curve you get to that fat part in the middle and the average user there actually doesn't want to tinker doesn't want to create does not want a blank canvas the person

there and and their necessary component right to become mainstream you by definition have to grab those folks in the middle maybe you don't want to become mature but if you want an idea to truly become rancher you need a lot of people who actually are never going to care about that stuff and and as a product designer and as an investor now i think a ton about user experience because the user experience for those earliest adopters is different from the user experience of the mainstream and that's it's an interesting intention because yes by its nature everything on chain is very like good

luck sovereign individual wish you all the best figure out for yourself and look i consider myself a pretty early adopter i i still however i want to be coddled in certain parts of my like crypto and web3 experience because i just like there are things i want to invest my time in and then there are other things that i don't there are things i want to invest my anxiety in and then there are other things i don't and and so every user is going to fall somewhere on that sort of tech adoption

curve across different technologies and different needs all that said the emergent behavior period that we're in right now is fascinating because i'll give you a specific example right some of the most famous things about reddit did not come from us it it came from our users so for instance even the co the notion of self posts so the idea so originally reddit started we just let people link out that was it and we had a not very good seo strategy which meant that our comments pages were

just sequentially numbered so when you posted a new link it would just it would be appended with you know 3465 and then if you posted one would be 3466 and one of our users realized this and guessed what the link would be when they hit publish and made a self-referring post which created the first self post we thought that was clever okay let's just productize that and so we did and then it wasn't long thereafter that one of them showed up and said hey i'm gonna you know i'm a dental hygienist ask me anything i forget what the

original one was and it was this interesting meme and and people loved asking questions of some random person who wasn't a celebrity just had an interesting life or maybe not even that interesting ostensibly but you get to ask some fun questions and actually becomes really interesting and and you know amas are now ingrained in internet culture i don't even know how many people actually even know those came from reddit we have a show called uh ama ask me anything and it's all from reddit right that's where it really loves ama well i'm well i'm glad see and i'm glad that it has flourished it is totally invented by some random person

on the internet some pseudonymous person will never know and and it's probably one of the most famous things that reddit has done right and so that gives us a lens into like how you can benefit from emergency behavior even when you have a top-down centralized company like we did which is just you know still still shipping the things we want to ship but doing so that's pretty well informed and reactive to interesting stuff we see happen and and that is the very nature of everything that is getting built right

now and the the problem at the end of the day any centralized organization still has to make i mean it's a gift and a curse they still have to make hard decisions about what to focus on and what not to because if you focus on the right thing like i don't think spacex can happen in a truly decentralized fashion maybe someone wants to get out there and get it started prove me wrong but i i really believe right something that complex something that

uh you know the average person actually can't contribute to helping spacex in a lot of ways like you actually need rocket scientists to do a lot of that work kind of thing there are some projects where you really need centralization and you can still take lessons from this world fine but like i don't know i we'll see if we'll see if the rocket down proves me wrong but the there are plenty of things though where a a properly incentivized and connected decentralized community will outperform any centralized group a

million times out of a million and content creation is a really great example of that right as evidence you can look at i mean even tic toc which is still one of those web 2 manifestations crushing quibby didn't matter how many dollars you had how many a-listers you had you're never going to compete with millions of teenagers with smartphones able to produce content endlessly that is on trend that is inventing trends that's you know what people want okay but this i i'm excited to see now because we get the web one energy of hey holy