Yishan Wong (Chinese: 黃易山; pinyin: Huáng Yìshān) is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014.[2][3][4][5] With Niniane Wang he is also co-founder of the Mountain View coworking space Sunfire Offices,[6] and was an advisor at Quora. Wong was briefly a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine.[7]
Career
PayPal and Facebook
Wong worked as a senior engineering manager at PayPal from 2001 to 2005. He is a member of PayPal's early group of employees known collectively as the PayPal Mafia. In 2005, he joined Facebook as a director of engineering on projects including crowd translation.[8] Before leaving Facebook in 2010, he became an active Reddit user and posted often.[9]
Reddit CEO
After three months of talks with Reddit in late 2011, Wong was offered the position of CEO, an offer which he claims friends met with "uproarious laughter".[10]
In 2012, when asked about various controversial Reddit communities, Wong said that the site should offer a platform for objectionable content: "We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it."[11] In 2013, he hired Ellen Pao as the Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships and later recommended her as CEO.[12]
In 2014, Reddit board member and YC president Sam Altman announced that Wong was leaving the company, after being unable to garner support for a proposal to move the Reddit office from San Francisco to Daly City.[13] Reportedly, Wong "stopped showing up at the office" when the board of directors ignored his proposal.[14] Wong, who thought newer employees would prefer to work in a less expensive area, stated that before the disagreement he had considered leaving due to an abundance of stress.[15]
Terraformation
In 2020, Wong founded Terraformation to combat global warming through reforestation.[16]
