Just days after news broke that Reddit CEO Yishan Wong had resigned from his position at the helm of the popular online community, the man himself took to the Internet to shed light on the whole ordeal. Answering a user-submitted question on Quora, a question-and-answer site curated by a community of users, Wong confirmed that he had in fact resigned due to a disagreement on the relocation of Reddit’s offices to San Francisco.
Wong further laments that the job as Chief Executive of Reddit had taken its toll on him and drained him both physically and mentally. This left him unable to cope with the stresses accompanying the relocation of Reddit’s global offices. He further clarified the office relocation issue by stating that sites within San Francisco proper threw up the issue of skyrocketing rent for employees, whereas options outside the city were vastly unpopular.
The shake-up at the top, however, resulted in a lot of old faces coming back to the firm. COO Ellen Pao takes over the vacated CEO slot in an interim capacity, with news buzzing of a longer term engagement in the works. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian made his Steve Jobs-esque return to the company that he brought to life nine years ago in a newly-minted executive chairman role.
This all comes at a tenuous time for the site, as doubts regarding revenues continue to circle like buzzards in the unforgiving start-up wilderness. In spite of a $500 million valuation and $50 million injection during its last round of investment, Reddit has accrued a fair deal of controversy in the past couple of quarters.
The site made headlines for all the wrong reasons when it hosted the much-talked about incident that resulted in hacked images from multiple celebrities’ phones being leaked onto the site this September. This was coupled with an ugly termination involving a previous employee and Wong himself that took place all over Twitter.
However, Reddit has shown that with the power of its community of aptly-named "Redditors," it can and will grow. With 174 million monthly active users and over 5 billion monthly page views to their credit, all eyes are on the self-titled “frontpage of the Internet” to keep on growing.