Reddit names new CEO, Yishan Wong
With an engineering and startup background, the news aggregator's new boss says he's looking to complete its independent spin-off successfully.
Along with the news that Reddit was spinning out into an independent company last September, the community-curated site also said it was searching for a new CEO.
That new CEO started the job today. Yishan Wong comes to Reddit with an engineering and management background; his last position was Director of Engineering for Facebook.
In a blog post, Wong writes that he was shocked to learn he got the position because even though he had worked at startups and managed large teams of engineers, he didn't have previous CEO experience.
"At first, I didn't really quite believe I was a serious candidate," he wrote. "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."
Reddit has been in the process of spinning out from the company that acquired it, Conde Nast, since last fall. But rather than going solely independent, it now functions under Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast.
Wong wrote that with joining Reddit as CEO, he will been working with Advance Publications to complete the spin-off, which includes establishing a new board and revamping the capital structure to allow Reddit to manage its own finances and operations.
"I'm not looking to step in and make 'big, bold changes,'" Wong wrote. "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."
Reddit was getting 21 million page views a month when it was acquired in 2006. As of December 2011, the Web site reported it served 2.07 billion page views per month with nearly 35 million unique visitors.