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Former Facebook Engineering Director Is New Reddit CEO

By TechTaffy Desk

[By Sudarshana Banerjee]

Facebook’s former director of engineering Yishan Wong has joined Reddit as CEO. Mr. Yong left Facebook over a year ago, and he has been consulting startups ever since. Mr. Wong has been a redditor since 2005 (yishan).

Yishan Wong (CEO, Reddit): 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.

Reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast). Reddit, a division of Condé Nast, started on the road to becoming a separate company in September last year, and the company had been looking for a new CEO since.

As part of Mr. Wong’s joining, the company has been working with Advance Publications to complete Reddit’s spin-off. A new board, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) among others, 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 is in place.

“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,” says Mr. Wong.

[Image courtesy: Reddit]

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