Today brings a bit of a shakeup at the top of reddit corporate HQ, as CEO Yishan Wong has resigned his position.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced the news in a blog post, saying that the company is “grateful for his contributions over the last few years, including growing reddit from 35M to 174M, and we have a team in place to ensure that reddit’s best years are still ahead of it.”
According to Sam Altman, who’s spent the past eight days as interim reddit CEO, Wong left over an internal dispute of an office.
“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,” he writes.
Ellen Pao will be the interim CEO. As number two in command Pao has been responsible for running reddit’s operations for some time now. He most recent move was the acquisition of Alien Blue – the popular iOS reddit app.
The blog post is titled “Coming Home”, and that’s what Ohanian himself is announcing. Ohanian left reddit four years ago and spent that time involved in activism. In 2012, he led a bus tour across the country campaigning for an open internet. With the battle for Net Neutrality heating up, Ohanian has decided to come back to where he started it all.
Ohanian was always a board member, but now he’s returning to an active role.
“I joined the board and have done everything I can to not be a helicopter parent, but rather support reddit and all the amazing people who make it work as best I can. But reddit is and will always be my baby (yes, reddit has two dads, and that’s awesome).
“Now at a little over nine years old, with thousands of communities, reddit is at an amazing inflection point and I’m thrilled to return to help it achieve all that it can. We’ve got a lot of work to do: mobile, user experience, and community tools are on the top of our list, but as always, we can’t do it without you,” has says.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
