TechTaffy

tech:

taffy

Former Facebook Engineering Director Is New Reddit CEO

By TechTaffy Desk

[By Sudarshana Banerjee]

Facebook’s former director of engineering Yishan Wong has joined Reddit as CEO. Mr. Yong left Facebook over a year ago, and he has been consulting startups ever since. Mr. Wong has been a redditor since 2005 (yishan).

Yishan Wong (CEO, Reddit): I’m not looking to step in and make “big, bold changes” – I think reddit is great, and the team has a lot of good features already in the pipeline to improve functionality for users and mods, help with subreddit discovery, improve the API, and help bring reddit to more people – so the primary goal for my first few months is to listen and try to learn as much as I can about the details of the product and the community.

Reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast). Reddit, a division of Condé Nast, started on the road to becoming a separate company in September last year, and the company had been looking for a new CEO since.

As part of Mr. Wong’s joining, the company has been working with Advance Publications to complete Reddit’s spin-off. A new board, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) among others, and a revamped capital structure that will allow Reddit to manage its own finances and operations, including the ability to provide competitive equity compensation to its employees is in place.

“I am inspired by the words of an engineer who once described Google as a place where “engineers can go all the way to the top, a place where the IT and HR policies are written with engineers in mind,” says Mr. Wong.

[Image courtesy: Reddit]

Just in

Series A

Tembo raises $14M

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Tembo, a Postgres managed service provider, has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.
Around the web

Raspberry Pi is now a public company — TC

Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate, writes Romain Dillet. 
Fundings

AlphaSense raises $650M

AlphaSense, a market intelligence and search platform, has raised $650 million in funding, co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners.
Around the web

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B to take on OpenAI — VentureBeat

Confirming reports from April, the series B investment comes from the participation of multiple known venture capital firms and investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, writes Shubham Sharma. 
IT

Capgemini partners with DARPA to explore quantum computing for carbon capture

Capgemini Government Solutions has launched a new initiative with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate quantum computing's potential in carbon capture.