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A new team at Reddit

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: A new team at Reddit

#311

Post by x0x0 »

codezero wrote: post #178
gojomo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally such a resignation is about being-overruled (board no-confidence), rather than just the particulars of one decision. With ~sama's revelation that Wong preferred a Daly City HQ, the battle-lines could have been: Pro-Daly-City: "more space, cheaper, less-cool, longer-runway, more employees who've self-selected for willingness to do Reddit muckwork vs. glamorous SoMa networking, outsider perspective" Pro-SF: "…

It would be interesting if startups would get together and do some real analysis on location. My company is in SoMa, and recruiting is not super easy, I'm confident if someone really wanted to work at Heap, they'd work in Daly City or Sunnyvale. Location has never been a great selling point. Maybe there is a certain kind of candidate for whom not being in the city is a dealbreaker, but I'd like to see numbers. That's…

I live in the peninsula and you would have to be my dream job to get me to drive to soma regularly.

I do it once a week and, starting driving at 7:05 AM from San Mateo, it takes until 8am or just before to get into soma. Leaving at 8-9 would take longer.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#312

Post by [deleted] »

prostoalex wrote: post #240
mcfunley wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a thoroughly classless move on his part. The reddit or HN community might eat that kind of thing up, but it's recruiting poison. Anyone contemplating taking a job at reddit would have to think twice about working for someone who would permanently and capriciously destroy the SEO of a former employee like that.

How would you handle somebody who, after being let go, would use a public forum to besmirch the previous employer? E.g., here he calls the company management "two-faced" https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r... Companies have to act and usually act quickly, handling a public issue privately, no matter how successfully, would leave a lingering impression of "Yahoo hires just about anyone with a…

[deleted]

Re: A new team at Reddit

#313

Post by x0x0 »

scelerat wrote: post #183
toomuchtodo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit of moving to Daly City vs SF proper? I'm not from the bay area, so I'm not familiar with why this would be a problem.

Daly City is south and west of San Francisco. It's served by BART (the regional rail system that spans the SF bay area and runs between SFO, Oakland (and its airport), Richmond, Pittsburg (north east bay), Dublin/Pleasanton, and Fremont) and Interstate highway 280, which runs N-S between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. DC is a 25 minute BART ride for me from Oakland. I could totally envision commuting there for wor…

That's great for people from Oakland.

If you live in sf, you most likely don't live near bart. So now you have to take muni to a bart station; I'd be astonished if such a commute was much less than 1 hour. Each way.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#314

Post by jacquesm »

x0x0 wrote: post #308
jacquesm wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a nice bike commute. Especially with the weather there.

you haven't met the drivers out here. They're bad, there mostly aren't physically separate bike lanes, and you often don't even get a ticket for killing a bicyclist. It's not worth it. edit: Also -- sample size of 13 -- 70+% of the people I know who bike commute daily have been hospitalized. I also know someone who did 6 months in a nursing home after some bitch ran a red light, hit him, and cracked his pelvis; he wo…

That's a good point. I'm too NL centric here, old ladies here would have no problem with a bike trip on that distance but not having bike lanes changes the picture quite a bit, especially if the drivers do not exercise care.

My mom routinely does 100 km trips and she's in her seventies.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#315

Post by dhruval »

quaunaut wrote: post #301
hiou wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO > Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator) > There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Ellen Pao leading reddit in the long term. Also from today's re…

Alexis wants Pao as the permanent CEO, but the next few months are a testing ground for her. Edit: Source: http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-int...

Given her background, I think it will be Pao as a very operations focused CEO and Alexis as a fairly involved Executive Chairman focused on guiding culture and general direction.

It could work out very well for Reddit.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#316

Post by alexis »

asaramis wrote: post #228
sama wrote: post #85

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…

Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit? I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringi…

Ellen has the operation prowess, analytical mind, and a ton of other skills that have been the reason she's been so successful at reddit so far. Remember: reddit is not a media company, it is a platform for communities -- thousands of them -- to share and we have a team in place that is going to turn this into a network of a billion people, worldwide.

reddit has doubled in traffic literally every year since Steve & I launched it. Granted, it was smaller in 2010 when we left, but I've been an advisor since (and gotten up to a few other things since - like helping Steve launch hipmunk and investing/advising in a 100 or so startups) but the core reddit product is for better/worse still the same as it was when we left.

I'm excited to work with Ellen, Dan, and the entire reddit team to develop reddit with the vision Steve & I had in creating it, but with the benefit of 10 years of experience & learning from it.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#317

Post by jacquesm »

redthrowaway wrote: post #295
cma wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: "he had the original product vision for the company" I thought Alexis et. al. originally started a company doing something else at the beginning of their application and acceptance to YCombinator, and Paul Graham had the idea for reddit and convinced them to do it instead of their original plan. When Aaron Swartz was fired (edit: used to read quit) and the other founders of reddit tried to remove his founder stat…

Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea, but liked them, so he suggested the "front page of the Internet" idea.[1] And Swartz was fired, not quit. He went to Germany then didn't show up for a couple weeks when he got back. [2] [1] http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/reddit-co-founder-speaks-power-open-i... [2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/200…

> Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea,

http://www.just-eat.com/

Re: A new team at Reddit

#318

Post by bhouston »

MysticFear wrote: post #106
sama wrote: post #85

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…

Were there other decisions by Yishan that you pushed back on? How many? Possible he felt that he did not have enough influence as CEO, not enough confidence from the board and couldn't run the company as he desired.

Yishan was likely fired or strongly recommended to resign. And we are all being polite about it for Yishan's sake and to maintain positive community around reddit. We will forget about this probably by tomorrow.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#319

Post by jeffasinger »

calimac wrote: post #115
minimaxir wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

October 1: Yishan wants all employees to move to San Francisco. Early November: "jk, we're moving to Daly City." Even though Daly City is a BART away, the fact that this decision happened in 1 month is absurd.

Moving an office like this scenario and timeline can and in most cases, does cause tectonic shift in the company's dynamic. There's a ripple effect through far reaching aspects of the employees lives that effect there work. On another note- Office location can be the most personal aspect of business to an exec processing the decision. A territorial undercurrent is in play.

At my old company, as the lease at our slightly too small and horribly boring office park was set to renew, moving was floated.

Everyone in the office was immediately for it. However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs, and everyone else assumed that meant into the city, centrally located, with cheaper rents.

We ended up staying in the office park that no one really liked.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#320

Post by DannyBee »

freshhawk wrote: post #310
DannyBee wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a really interesting definition of cold. Apparently it is "you might have to wear a jacket".

The standard California definition.

I saw someone wearing earmuffs in 55 degree weather in downtown mountain view.
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