A New Team at Reddit

Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit.

The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease).  To be clear, though, we didn’t ask or suggest that he resign—he decided to when we didn’t approve the new office plan.

We wish him the best and we’re thankful for the work he’s done to grow reddit more than 5x.

I am delighted to announce the new team we have in place.  Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO.  Because of her combination of vision, execution, and leadership, I expect that she’ll do an incredible job.

Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator).  He will be responsible for marketing, communications, strategy, and community.

There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things.  Alexis probably knows the reddit community better than anyone else on the planet.  He had the original product vision for the company and I’m excited he’ll get to finish the job.  Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.

Dan McComas will become SVP Product.  Dan founded redditgifts, where in addition to building a great product he built a great culture, and has already been an integral part of the reddit team—I look forward to seeing him impact the company more broadly.

Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun, I am happy they are coming to a close and I am sure the new team will do a far better job and take reddit to great heights.  It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total.

Twitter Widget Iframe