Alexis Ohanian, reddit's co-founder, has returned as an advisor | Hacker News Reader

Alexis Ohanian, reddit's co-founder, has returned as an advisor

blog.reddit.com

67 pointsthecoffman20 comments

So, what I find more interesting in this is that Reddit did bring in a "new" general manager.

What worries me is that it's not actually someone new. Neither is Alexis, for that matter.

From the outside looking in it would appear that while Reddit has been great at building a community, ramping up page views and engagement ... they suck at making money. (And this has limited their ability to hire and has spread the existing team very thinly.) From from what I can tell, they've always sucked at making money. So by promoting their community manager and bringing back the original CEO as an advisor, it would seem that this would enhance the parts that they're already really good at, but will they be willing to stir things up enough to bump up the revenues (even if it pisses the community off some)? In an armchair-quarterbacking sort of way, I'd hoped they'd bring in someone that was more of an outsider.

Like Jay Adelson?

They've been doing fine for money since they brought in reddit gold. The problem with hiring new staff had to do less with their revenue and more with Conde Nast's print-centric internal structure. That's why reddit gold worked out so well for them: they counted as "paid subscribers", which meant that reddit could get more money allocated for staff. Before, they had rarely had a problem getting servers or other infrastructure, but get approved to hire people to run them was difficult.

Good for him. Alexis is a genuinely nice guy. When I launched The Startup Foundry, Alexis emailed me two days after I launched (when I still didnt have much traction) and offered his support. I've had the privilege to interview him in a couple different occasions since then and he's always been incredibly kind.

He's a real standup guy.

This is awesome. From the things I've seen Alexis do, he seems like a genuinely cool person, and it really makes me happy seeing people like him succeed at things (advisor to Conde Nast seems like a pretty serious position).

Congrats, man.

Thank you! It's not nearly as awesome for reddit as Erik becoming GM or Max joining the team, but I'm happy to have the chance to give input into the future of reddit.

Chromakode is a JavaScript badass. If you have a chance to listen to his talk on generating dynamic audio in HTML5, you definitely should attend.

Down-to-earth cool guy. Reddit owes a lot of what it is to him. I can't see how the community won't benefit from this. Congrats Alexis.

Thanks, but I hope no one catches on to all these shill accounts of mine ;)

Winking at a shill account is pretty meta. Your shill calling you on it is even more meta.

Whoa.

Time to update the Alexis Tracker 3000:

    - YC ambassador to the East
    - hip hipmunk
    - returning to reddit as advisor/doodler
      - (moving back to SF full-time?  part-time?)
    - advising conde nast
    - publishing books/magnets/sauce/posters/shirts for charity
    - talking talks

How much did I miss? I know more about your life than my own.

You missed kn0thing :)

I'm not moving, Erik (hueypriest) Martin is.

Everything else in your tracker is right on :)

I'm bummed this is such a story, though, because the real story is Erik's promotion (congrats, dude!) and Max (chromakode) joining the team. He's been a longtime code contributor (socialite) and active redditor for even longer (he also donates time to help breadpig, building stuff like WTFCNN.com for me).

I was simply asked by Conde to formally advise them from time to time about reddit & their general web strategy (and possibly consult on future mascots for new web properties). The chance to have some input on my baby was hard to pass up, but this is not even a part-time gig -- managing and growing the hipmunk brand & community is my fulltime commitment.

What exactly will Erik's new duties as GM entail? How does it differ from what he and Jeremy already do?

Hoping for the best, but based on some of my own experience, these things rarely work. You can't go home again.

I can't stress enough that I'm just a formal advisor now. I was already informally doing it whenever someone asked me to. The exciting story here is Erik moving out west to GM and Max joining (and bringing those UX skills).

Sweet! This can only be a good thing. Alexis is awesome (as evidenced by him talking to us for 30 min at 1am for our YC pre-interview.)

Thanks, but that's a perfectly normal thing to do at 1am.

I wonder how that happened. Sounds very Jobsian... Very cool, glad to hear it.

Alexis is truly awesome. I'm sure he will be a huge help for CondeNast

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