“Clearly none of you are sports fans. Well, you might be sports fans, but you have terrible priorities for being here.”

Poking fun at Washington University students for choosing his speaking engagement over both the World Series and Monday Night Football, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian was nevertheless impressed to see a turnout of about 150 people when he stopped by campus earlier this week.

The presentation was part of a nationwide bus tour to promote his book “Without Their Permission,” released in early October, and to encourage students to take chances and pursue their own goals.

Ohanian urged students to take action based on their ideas and learn from initial failures by sharing his personal experience of getting rejected from the first round of Y Combinator, a technology accelerator that provides seed money and advice to startups for three months in return for an equity stake.

Ohanian believed his idea, called My Mobile Menu, would innovate ordering food by allowing users to order food via text message so it would be ready when they arrive at the restaurant. Y Combinator dismissed his idea as “not terrible.”

On the train ride home from the Boston headquarters of Y Combinator, Ohanian received a call telling him he was allowed to join Y Combinator only if he could “build the front page of the Internet,” a project that became Reddit.

“I had no f—— clue what I was doing, and I’d argue I still have no clue what I’m doing,” Ohanian said. “If you are doing anything remarkably new, you are going to be uncomfortable.”

Ohanian also recounted a difficult meeting he had with a Yahoo! executive when Reddit was just beginning to develop a user base.

“[The executive] said, ‘You guys are a rounding error compared to Yahoo! What are you guys doing here?’” Ohanian said.

Ohanian printed the Yahoo! executive’s quotation and taped it to his wall so that he could look at it daily to inspire him.

“Every morning, I would eat it for breakfast, like waffles,” Ohanian said.

To show that Ohanian’s experiences starting Reddit, a message board-style social networking website that promotes user-generated content and priorities, were not unique to him, the event progressed to a mock fireside chat with a former University student who also experienced initial failures.

During the fireside chat portion of the speech, Spencer Hewett described how the launch event for this college startup BazaarBoy, an online marketplace for college students, did not attract the crowd he expected.

“We had this huge launch party at Cicero’s; we had a lot of flyers,” Hewett said. “We get to the launch party and no one was there. It was just me and the co-founders and a couple of friends.”

Hewett later dropped out of the University to start a different tech startup with funding from the Thiel Fellowship, a program run by entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, that pays students age 19 or younger a $100,000 grant to drop out of college and pursue a startup for two years. Hewett’s resulting business, Skip, aims to streamline the retail payment process and is expected to launch later this year in a few stores.

Junior Jay Lee, the organizer of the event, responded to a request from Ohanian in the University “subreddit,” or online community on reddit.com, to begin planning the logistics for Ohanian’s campus visit.

“It just popped up on my newsfeed. One of my friends was saying Alexis [Ohanian] was interested in coming to campus, and we just kind of started arranging things,” Lee said.

Lee co-programmed the event with computer science honorary Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the Washington University Technology Entrepreneurs and Social Programming Board.

Many students found the event uplifting and somewhat inspiring, including junior Aaron Pang.

“It was a ‘seize the day’ type of event. He touched on very important issues,” Pang said. “I’m really stressed out right now, so it’s nice to hear something positive.”

Some students were surprised that Ohanian didn’t discuss the politics of the Internet, including 2011’s proposed online regulation legislation Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, which were the subject of his previous bus tour.

“I thought he was going to talk about the political stuff, but he motivated me to try to be an entrepreneur,” junior Arian Jadbabaie said.

Other students felt that Ohanian’s humor—mostly Internet culture references and memes—was pandering to a predictable audience of reddit.com fans.

“Some of the stuff was kind of cringe-y, but I think he was trying to appeal to the people who would come to a Reddit event,” junior Robbie Helfman said.

Ohanian closed out his speech and fireside chat by launching T-shirts out of a cannon and allowing attendees to meet and speak with him one-on-one. Attendees who caught the T-shirts were invited on his tour bus, which was going to an after-party at Blueberry Hill on the Delmar Loop.

Ohanian prepared his speaking engagement with the strong computer science base at the University in mind but said technological entrepreneurship could appeal to students with different educational backgrounds.

“Even a [pre-medical school] student group that’s really excited about some kind of public health issue or medicine in the world could look to watsi.org,” Ohanian said. “They’re setting a new standard for nonprofits. They’re doing a fairly common thing, letting people fund medical pursuits, but with full transparency and accountability.”