Reddit was purchased back in 2006 by Condé Nast, a large media company. After five years Reddit came out as its own independent company again. Since the company has emerged on its own, it was lacking a CEO, giving Wong the opportunity to step up to the plate.
Wong announced news of his new position at Reddit in a blog post saying he was surprised when asked about taking the position as he does not have any CEO experience. Wong, however, says that the social content sharing site does not need a traditional CEO anyway.
"I came to understand that reddit wasn’t looking for a conventional CEO candidate, because reddit is not a conventional company," he wrote.
The CEO says that Reddit has created a new board and can now manage its financial dealings independently.
"Companies that use technology to do truly great things are rare, and my hope is for reddit to become one of those," Wong wrote. "We’ve established a new board including, among others, reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, 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."
The CEO says that he does not have any plans to make significant changes and his primary focus is to learn as much as he can about reddit and how its functions over the next few months.
"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."
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