Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian: ‘Hustle porn’ a dangerous tech trend

Reddit founder Alexis
Ohanian.
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Images

• Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian wants you to know that
  “hustle porn” — the fetishization of extremely long working
  hours — is bad.
• Ohanian let his own mental health go when he built
  Reddit. He suffered from depression, he says, but worked
  instead of getting well.
• “This is one of the most toxic, dangerous things in
  tech right now,” he told Web Summit on Tuesday.

LISBON — “Hustle porn!” exclaims Alex Ohanian, his voice booming
through the 20,000 capacity Altice Arena in Lisbon. “Is this a
thing in the European tech community? Or is this a US thing?”

The Reddit founder is standing on stage at Web Summit, the annual
tech conference in Lisbon, and the audience is baffled.

“This is one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right
now,” he says. “This idea that unless you are suffering, grinding
working every hour of every day, you’re not working hard enough.”

“It’s such bullshit, such utter bullshit.”

Ohanian is referring to the
fetishization of extremely long work hours, typically by
entrepreneurs or tech workers, who give up nights and weekends to
code their software or build their businesses.

Read more: How Reddit cofounder

Alexis Ohanian and tennis
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Ohanian hates it. It was a recurring theme in his speech to Web
Summit on Tuesday, titled “What I wish a VC had told me.” The
backstory, of course, is that Ohanian was given $12,000 at a Y
Combinator event in 2005, told “good luck,” and went on to launch
Reddit.

Now — in addition to being executive chairman at Reddit — he is a
general partner at Initialized Capital, his own VC firm. And he
has advice to give about not working ludicrous hours that
sacrifice your physical or mental health.

“It has deleterious effects not just on your business but on your
wellbeing,” he says. Ohanian is passionate about this in large
part because he suffered from depression while building Reddit
after his mother died.

“As entrepreneurs, we are all so busy ‘crushing it’ that physical
health, let alone mental health, is an afterthought for most
founders. It took me years to realize that the way I was feeling—
when working on Reddit was the only therapy I had — was
depression,”
he wrote earlier this year.

Ohanian has other advice to give, of course. But it was a theme
that ran through his speech. Take care of yourself, because work
is not a substitute for health: “Please do not succumb to hustle
porn.”