Is Reddit Investor Spinning CEO’s Departure Over New Office Location?

Reddit CEO for 2-1/2 years Yishan Wong has resigned and there seems to be no shortage of drama to entertain the media over it either. Investor & Y Combinator head Sam Altman is claiming that Wong has left the company over a dispute relating to where the new Reddit office would be located. Yes, you red the correctly. Altman said on Hacker News:

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, etc.–all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).

This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we’ll make the best of it.

“The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease).  To be clear, though, we didn’t ask or suggest that he resign—he decided to when we didn’t approve the new office plan,” Altman wrote.

Wong on the other hand wrote:

“The job as CEO of Reddit is incredibly stressful and draining.  After two and a half years, I’m basically completely worn out, and it was having significantly detrimental effects on my personal life,” Wong wrote.

“If anything, I probably pushed myself way too far – 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, i.e. how stressful is too stressful, 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

Reddit just recently raised 50 million in funding and certainly with that kind of cash lying around you certainly want to build a new office. With Wong leaving Altman had to take the reins for 8 whole days until second-in-command, Ellen Pao took over temporarily.

UPDATE: Mobility Digest has just learned that the real reason for Wong’s departure was an apparent dislike for Rap music which caused friction between Snoop Dogg, another investor of Reddit! (This cannot be confirmed at this time and could very well be an attempt to generate more drama by this website).  Happy Friday everyone!