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A new team at Reddit

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: A new team at Reddit

#341

Post by rdl »

x0x0 wrote: post #313
scelerat wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on where in SF, transit (SamTrans) could actually be faster than Muni to SoMA. It really depends on where.

Mission does have BART, and that's a high-density-of-hipsters area.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#343

Post by theelfismike »

shostack wrote: post #280
ryanmerket wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The culture at reddit is one of openness. We're also a super small team (about 30 in SF), so any kind of issues/arguments are easily recognized. Through the relocation announcement, the ex-employee issue on reddit, handling of the #celebgate, all employees and the board were supportive of Yishan for the most part. If there was any animosity, it certainly wasn't enough to call for his resignation. What Sam is saying i…

"This was the sole reason for Yishan's resignation, as I know it." Thanks for the response. I think the above quote is the salient point here though. Everything you said may be accurate, but without actually hearing Yishan's side, I don't think it is realistic to expect everyone to take this at face value, despite Sam and Reddit's reputations. Even if Yishan were to make a statement, I think there would still be skep…

Said statement: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CE...

Re: A new team at Reddit

#344

Post by mathattack »

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…

This seems like a big governance challenge. This is a big challenge for boards and CEOs. CEOs like to have full authority, and be held accountable. Boards like to be able to ask questions. In the end, the board's only true recourse is to fire the CEO.

Here it sounds like the CEO wanted a freer hand, and left when the event signaled a change in governance. (You can't take $50mm and not expect questions)

Re: A new team at Reddit

#345

Post by dkfmn »

hiou wrote: post #71

2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminatin…

Rare for an investor to put money into a company with the expectation of replacing the CEO. The speculation you propose is extra unjustified given that there was no change in control with this investment.

I know it's popular for HN to take the side of a persecuted CEO but in this case there's no evidence, or even pattern matching, to support this perspective.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#346

Post by nostrademons »

strlen wrote: post #218
anon808 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daly City is 9.7 miles from the reddit office, for all practical purposes it sounds like Yishan wanted to just move offices in the same city; the Daly City part doesn't seem like it's important. Or am I missing something?

I think the conflict is more cultural than people realize: an office in Daly City is tremendously easier to reach and if you're coming from South Bay -- essentially you exit the freeway and park. On the other hand, getting to a point in SF from the freeway and parking usually takes at least 30 minutes (in addition to the 30+50 minute drive from the starting point in the South Bay or Peninsula). SOMA area is reachable…

> Intuitively it makes sense: I can't imagine starting a Foursquare in San Jose (there isn't a critical mass of people -- not all of them geeks -- cloistered around any given landmark to gain sufficient traction).

It's not uncommon for a startup's initial userbase to be geographically far removed from the company's headquarters. Facebook's was in the Ivy & NESCAC colleges in New England even after the company moved to Palo Alto. AirBnB's was in NYC. Twitter, I've heard, took off in Austin after SxSW. Orkut got Brazil despite originating in Mountain View. WhatsApp first took off in the Ukraine and then India, also despite being based in Mountain View.

I don't know why this is - intuitively, I'd expect it to be where the founders are, because that's who they can directly talk to. But the data doesn't seem to bear that out. Maybe it's because of random chance - if you model a successful startup as a cluster of users who happen to have an unfulfilled need and an entrepreneur who happens to stumble upon the solution to that unfulfilled need, then it makes sense that many initial userbases will be geographically separated from the company simply because there are more people far away from you than people close to you.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#347

Post by codezero »

x0x0 wrote: post #311
codezero wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't drive. I caltrain. Train at least gives some alone time to get work done, the main issue is it restricts your schedule if you want to take fast trains. I train from Sunnyvale every day.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#348

Post by nostrademons »

jacquesm wrote: post #317
redthrowaway wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This seems to be a perenially popular bad startup idea. Sergey Brin's previous idea, before teaming up with Larry to found Google, was a startup to let people order pizza via fax machine.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#349

Post by nostrademons »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #333
waterlesscloud wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yishan went way, way too far in that case. Much further than was needed or appropriate. He always seemed prone to saying things that were of questionable judgment. I have no idea how he was at running the company, but I suspect Reddit will be better off having someone else speak for it at least.

I've been thinking it over, and I think you're right. If this sort of public response were the norm, the nature of the internet means that any CEO of any company would hold quite a lot of power over the entire future of every employee. Right now you can do poorly at a programming job without it affecting your entire future. That's important because people have down periods in their lives. It happens. If you get fired…

Yishan was in a really tough spot with that comment. It sounded like morale among existing employees was being significantly negatively affected by this ex-coworker going around spreading shit about the company. A CEO needs to consider how his actions will be viewed by everyone involved in the company; it's quite possible that neglecting to act would've caused enough of a productivity & morale hit that he judged calling the employee out to be the right call, even knowing what it would potentially do to his & the employee's reputation.

That said, your comment is precisely why people generally avoid bad-mouthing former employees, and why smart employees avoid bad-mouthing their former employers. Worst case, it blackballs a person or organization forever. Best case, it just makes everybody look bad. Better to keep your mouth shut and let other people draw their own conclusions.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#350

Post by baddox »

legohead wrote: post #241
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco attracts startups and talent because it's a cool, fun, sexy place to live. Bright young talent demands those sorts of conditions. Daly City is a suburban hellhole. If “cities” like Daly were desirable places to live, Provo, Utah and Tacoma, WA would be IT meccas. The traffic in that region guarantees an ungodly commute by car for anyone who wanted to stay in SF and drive to Daly for work (1 hour commute…

SF cool, fun, sexy? Have you ever been there? I found it dirty, scary, and smelly.

Yeah, that sounds like a better description of my 3.5 years here. Of course, don't tell any of the SF-lovers exactly where you live, because they'll just blame your experience on you not living at exactly the right block. Live in Soma? Oh, that place has no night life. Live in the Mission? Oh, you're too close to the BART station. Live in the avenues? Too far away from the city center. And so on.
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