#3 Alexis Ohanian — Founder of Reddit

Alexis Ohanian  is an American internet entrepreneur, activist and investor based in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, best known for co-founding the social news website reddit. He also helped launch travel search website Hipmunk, and starting social enterprise Breadpig. Alexis Ohanian was born to an Armenian-American father and a German-born mother. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2005, Alexis Ohanian started reddit.com, with co-founder Steve Huffman. Reddit initially received funding from Y Combinator and was later acquired by Condé Nast Publications in 2006. Ohanian continues to work closely with reddit as a member of its Board of Directors.

Alexis Ohanian was only a month into his Y Combinator summer in which he and Huffman built Reddit when he received three disheartening phone calls. First, it was a call from his then girlfriend's mother, the girl who was studying abroad in Germany at the time, had fallen out of a five-story window and was in a coma. Next, it was a call from his mother about the death of his family dog which he loved a lot. And finally, it was a call from his father that his mother had been diagnosed with class IV Glioblastoma multiforme — terminal brain cancer.

"And you'd better believe that when you come home to a mother battling brain cancer and a father spending every waking hour taking care of her and running his own business, you don't complain, you don't cower, and you most certainly don't quit."

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