Thursday, November 13, 2014

Coming home

Yishan Wong sent the board his resignation notice. We are 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.

Ellen Pao is stepping in as interim CEO and has already shown tremendous capability + poise over the last two years holding the #2 role at the company. In addition to running operations for the entire company, she was responsible for building our mobile team, acquiring Alien Blue, and her team already shipped our AMA app.

Dan McComas and his team are moving to San Francisco to unite with the rest of the reddit team after joining 3 years ago via the redditgifts acquisition. The platform is more vibrant than ever, with over 100,000 participants signed up for Secret Santa already (there’s still time to sign up!). Dan will be reddit’s SVP of Product.

I’m returning to be Executive Chairman. Allow me to re-introduce myself.

My name is Alexis Ohanian and when Steve Huffman and I launched reddit in June of 2005, it was a very humble beginning. Today it's a global platform for online communities to connect and share that far exceeds our initial expectations.

I left reddit in 2010 to volunteer for kiva.org in Armenia and have been in an advisory role to reddit ever since. When reddit became independent in 2011, I was asked to return, but turned it down because there were exciting non-profit projects I wanted to do, a book I wanted to write, and I loved advising early stage startups at Y Combinator.

Instead, 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.


discuss this post on reddit