Alexis Ohanian’s resumé reads a bit differently from that of most 30-year-olds.

He was a dishwasher at Pizza Hut. He was a parking booth attendant.

And then, fresh out of university, he co-founded a website which made him a millionaire at age 23.

“I’m the first to admit that an amount of serendipity goes into that,” said Ohanian, reflecting on his success.

Ohanian started social news site reddit.com with his University of Virginia roommate Steve Huffman in 2005. Sixteen months later, the pair sold the site to media giant Condé Naste for a reported $20 million.

But Ohanian doesn’t chalk his success up to pure luck.

“Another significant part of it is the kind of work that goes into dealing with the setbacks, dealing with the failures — the kind of tenacity, the sort of relentlessness, that really, I feel, makes up a lot of what makes a company successful or not,” Ohanian said.

The Internet entrepreneur imparted his wisdom to a packed auditorium at the University of Toronto Monday night. The event marked the start of the second leg of a North American tour promoting Ohanian’s new book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed.

Part-autobiography, part-pep-talk, the book charts reddit’s rise from a dorm-room idea to the self-proclaimed front page of the Internet.

Readers on the social news site vote on the articles, photos and videos they like, creating aggregate lists of the most popular content on the web. In the last month alone, more than 100 million people visited reddit from around the world, viewing more than five billion pages on the site.

Celebrities and politicians, including U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, have hosted crowd-sourced interviews on the site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” section, answering questions posed by the community.

Ohanian pointed to charity drives conducted on reddit and crowd-funding campaigns on websites like Kickstarter as examples of how the Internet empowers individuals to reach a massive audience.

“You don’t need anyone’s permission to start doing this stuff,” Ohanian said Monday night to the roughly 300-strong crowd.

His advice to the fledgling entrepreneurs in the audience was wide and varied.

Learn to write computer code, Ohanian said, calling it “the most valuable skill of the century.”

“Ideas are totally worthless,” he said, stressing instead that execution is everything.

Don’t be afraid to fail, Ohanian said, and don’t feel like you have to know everything. He said when they started reddit, he had no idea what he was doing — and said he still doesn’t. If someone tells you they have it all figured out, Ohanian said, “they’re either lying or delusional.”

Since selling reddit, Ohanian has been involved with a number of other Internet companies, including travel planner Hipmunk and self-publishing enterprise Breadpig.

As he signed books after his talk at U of T, Ohanian said he was inundated with pitches from students.

“They are telling me about the companies, not just that they want to start, but that they’ve already started,” he said.

Joseph Orozco, executive director of U of T’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery, a program devoted to encouraging campus start-ups, said Ohanian was an example for students to aspire to.

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“Entrepreneurship is not about the genius. Entrepreneurship is about taking a decision and taking the risks now, when you’re young,” he said.

Orozco said the Hatchery was dedicated to providing engineering students with the tools and support to launch their own companies.

“We’re also redefining entrepreneurship,” Orozco said. “It’s that individual that can acknowledge limited resources — and also uncertainty — and work in any organization.”