I've been a redditor since 2005 (yishan) and over the years, I've read blog posts about the ups and downs of the reddit team, the complaints about the limiting effects of being a wholly-owned subsidiary of a much larger company. I sympathized with others (both inside and outside of reddit) who felt that reddit would be able to do better as an independent company. So, like many of you, I was quite happy last September to hear the news that reddit was being spun out into an independent entity.
That announcement included the fact that reddit was looking for a CEO. I'd be lying if I said that it didn't immediately cross my mind to imagine what it would be like to do that job. I'd left my previous company (Facebook) over a year ago and been doing random startup consulting ever since. But my last position was only as a Director of Engineering and I didn't have any straight-up CEO experience, despite having managed large teams of engineers and working on numerous business and startup issues. So imagine my surprise when two days later, I was contacted asking if I was interested in talking about the position.
At first, I didn't really quite believe I was a serious candidate. It didn't seem real, and I knew that I didn't match the profile of what you might consider (or so I thought) a CEO candidate. I don't have the polish and the poise and the schmoozing, and I don't play golf. Instead, I'm an engineer and a leader of engineers and I play Starcraft (poorly). But as I continued the conversations, I came to understand that reddit wasn't looking for a conventional CEO candidate, because reddit is not a conventional company.
I've spent the past decade of my career learning skills important to startups. I began as an engineer, and later moved on to managing teams. Even later, I learned about leading even larger teams, growing organizations, and about key business issues relating to startups, finance, open source, internationalization, and corporate development. I learned these things just because they were interesting, and because I felt by doing so I could be helpful to the people I worked with. But it was only when I got the call to consider joining reddit that I finally felt that perhaps this was what it had all been for: to help reddit spread its alien-wings and become a fully independent business, doing right by its community and people around the world.Companies that use technology to do truly great things are rare, and my hope is for reddit to become one of those. As part of my joining, we've been working with Advance Publications to complete reddit's spin-off. We've established a new board including, among others, reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing), and a revamped capital structure that will allow reddit to manage its own finances and operations, including the ability to provide competitive equity compensation to its employees, which we haven't been able to do in the past. I am inspired by the words of an engineer who once described Google as a place where "engineers can go all the way to the top, a place where the IT and HR policies are written with engineers in mind."
This structure is so that reddit can move quickly and flexibly, have full control over its resources, and grow to meet the demands of its mission. I'm not looking to step in and make "big, bold changes" - I think reddit is great, and the team has a lot of good features already in the pipeline to improve functionality for users and mods, help with subreddit discovery, improve the API, and help bring reddit to more people - so the primary goal for my first few months is to listen and try to learn as much as I can about the details of the product and the community. I think the best way to get acquainted and learn what's important to everyone is to have an ongoing conversation. I'll answer as many questions as I can in the comments here, and in a week or two I'll do another more "official" IAMA.
I'm here for reddit because I love it. I hope you'll join me in making it even better.
