Reddit CEO Explains Reasons For His Resignation

Wong confessed on Q&A site, Quora, a few hours after news broke that he had resigned as CEO of Reddit on Thursday. "I'm basically completely worn out, and it was having significantly detrimental effects on my personal life," he said.

"As a first-time CEO, all I knew was that such jobs are supposed to be stressful, so I never really had a good baseline... until multiple outside people and coaches I was working with remarked to me that I looked incredibly worn down for months on end and it wasn't supposed to be this hard," he added.

The official line from Reddit was that Wong had resigned a little more than a week ago after disagreeing with the board about new office space. The reason seemed so unbelievable that Reddit insiders quickly had to reiterate that yes, it really, truly was about office space.

"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," Sam Altman, the lead investor in Reddit's latest funding round, wrote in a post on Hacker News.

Wong confirmed that the office plans were an issue — there was a debate about whether to relocate to San Francisco or Daly City, about 10 miles away — but his post suggests that this was just the straw that broke the weary camel's back.

"If the job had been a energizing one rather than one that had been so draining, this probably wouldn't have been an issue I resigned over," he wrote on Quora. "But it was, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't relieved to have the burden off my shoulders.

It's notable that Wong opted to explain himself on Quora rather than on Reddit. He hasn't posted to the latter in more than two weeks.

Wong took over as CEO of Reddit in 2012 and helped grow the social news site to nearly 175 million users. Yet his tenure was plagued in recent months by criticism of how Reddit and Wong particularly handled pictures leaked from a nude celebrity photo hack.

Ellen Pao, Reddit's head of strategic partnerships and a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, has been appointed interim CEO. Alexis Ohanian, the company's cofounder, is returning to the company as executive chairman in a move that some might see as a confidence building measure for the team and the Reddit community.

Reddit raised a $50 million round of funding from a notable group of investors less than two months ago after having barely taken any funding in its nearly decade-long history. Shortly after, Reddit's general manager and longtime employee Erik Martin stepped down from the company.

The full Quora explanation from Wong HERE.

Culled from Mashable