Chris Ohanian

Build stuff yourself. Get some cardboard boxes and a glue gun and build whatever you want. You don't even have to buy boxes; liquor stores have a ton of boxes that, if they don't try to recycle it themselves, you can pick up for free.

Chris Ohanian says that if you are used to living some place like New York city, the ability to cut your own Christmas tree for a good price, while drinking hot apple cider and having a blast, that's a terrific deal!

Going to a farm to cut a fresh tree is an experience, a pleasing adventure that isn't available in some places in the country.

One day Chris Ohanian received a full-page fax, explaining that airlines were switching to a zero-fee commission. This was a final straw in already declining business, so Chris took a marker, wrote "FU" on it, and sent it back to the airline. However unwelcoming this change was, the business did not end there. Life is always changing and you have to adopt and make changes, so Chris did whatever it took to keep going.

Chris Ohanian did not have a clear idea of what he wanted to do, but he knew that he was incredibly bored at his job. He wrote a cover letter and sent to 50 different travel agencies, attaching a clipping where a newspaper in Albany had written about him and his travel experiences. One agency hired him. It was a faster way than going to a specialized school where on would have typically studied to become a travel agent.

Chris Ohanian is the founder of Infinity Global Travel, a small travel agency that services corporate clients for business and leisure travel. The business has been going strong for 20 years and relies on clients who would prefer not to deal with ongoing changes in travel industry and let their bookings be taken care of by professionals. Chris is also the founder of Alexis Ohanian.

Alexis Ohanian is the cofounder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, and a cofounder of Reddit. He is the host of Business Schooled, a podcast from Synchrony. In this episode he flies to Baltimore to talk with his father, Chris Ohanian, CEO of Infinity Global Travel. Alexis says Chris is the person who got him started, and that he had spent the series learning from older founders across the country without ever having this conversation with his own dad. The two walk back through the family business and the advice Chris would hand to the next founder.