# Yishan Wong on Reddit (u/yishan) Part of Founders and CEOs on Reddit, researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-07. Interactive version: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/founders-on-reddit/yishan-wong Yishan Wong: Former CEO of Reddit and founder of Terraformation. - Reddit account: [u/yishan](https://www.reddit.com/user/yishan/) (Personal account) - How we know it's theirs: ["New reddit CEO reporting for duty" on Reddit's official r/blog, posted from this account](https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/qnyy7/) - Where they post, in the records we retrieved: r/IAmA (8), r/blog (6), r/TheoryOfReddit (5), r/announcements (2), r/AskReddit (2), r/pics (1) - Known activity in the posts we found: 2012 to 2021 - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yishan_Wong ## Moments ### u/yishan in r/explainlikeimfive, Mar 22, 2014 · The why Replying to the post "ELI5: What does a CEO of a large company do in a "typical" week, and why is he (usually he) paid so much?". > I am not the CEO of a large company, I am the CEO of a rather small company, but maybe this answer will be helpful: > > There is no "typical" week, as my job is a non-specialized function. Thus, I typically spend my time working on X (see below), plus facilitate decisions on whatever critical issue has been escalated to my level. I say "facilitate" instead of "make" because sometimes I'm not the best person to *make* a decision, but instead I push people to sharpen their thinking, confront ambiguity, etc, in order to render a decision, especially on tough issues. > > X is defined as an always-varying combination of 1) things in my key areas of personal strength, 2) areas where, especially in a small company, we have not yet hired key people to lead that area but which still need to be done, and 3) areas where quality of execution is not sufficiently developed to achieve key strategic aims. > > In #2 and #3, potentially *none* of those areas may lie in my own areas of personal strength. As such, one other key activity for a CEO is to recruit the right people to the company who have the expertise to lead work in those areas better than he/she can. > > ---- > > Ever since taking this job, I've discovered several things that I think result in CEOs being paid a lot more than other corporate officers. It's been an interesting journey. > > **1) The CEO is responsible for *everything*.** In a regular job, there are always problems that come up that you don't necessarily need to be responsible for - it's your co-worker's area, or you can kick it up to your boss, it belongs to another department, etc. Even if you are an VP or other executive, a problem may come up that is just in some other exec's department (e.g. if you are VP of Marketing and a tech problem comes up, it's the VP of Eng's issue, and vice versa). If you are the CEO, there is no other such person. *Every* problem is your problem. Yes, you can delegate, but you are responsible for the person handling it correctly. 100% of problems at the company are your problem. This is true for no one else. > > **2) You are the public face of your company, no matter how much you don't care to be.** When you think about a company, good or bad, you think of the CEO as the ultimate authority on everything. You probably don't know the VP of Corporate Communications at Microsoft, or the CFO of Tesla, but I'll bet you know the CEO's names. The CEO becomes *personally synonymous* with the company, especially when someone has a complaint. > > **2a) In a failure, you *must* be willing to be the sacrificial lamb to the public.** This is something that comes with the job, and is not a job requirement for any other executive position. Sometimes other executives take a fall publicly when something goes wrong, but it is usually because of something egregious directly going wrong in their organization. On the other hand, there are multiple macroeconomic or external disaster scenarios which can affect a company negatively and if the CEO is nothing less than brilliant in overcoming them (not always possible), it's part of the CEO's job to resign or be fired, and usually shamed publicly. This is known and accepted as part of the job. If you've had any other job, this was probably not part of your job description. :) > > **3) The job doesn't end. In many jobs, the job can end when you go home or on vacation.** Even in other crisis-response-type positions (ER, police, fire, datacenter ops), you have on-shift rotations and downtime. Not so for a CEO. Whatever key strategic initiative, ongoing crisis of the moment, or existential threat to the company will always be on your mind, and you are always subject to having a high-priority issue escalated to you. This is related to #1, i.e. you are responsible for *everything,* in that if there is something that truly requires your attention, no one will say "Wait, he/she's off-duty, don't bother them." You are always on duty; your downtime is when you leave the job. > > **4) You actually have *less* power over your environment than you have in any other job.** This is a counter-intuitive thing that people often don't realize about positions of authority. The degree of control you feel you have over your life is a ratio between the size of the sphere of things you can directly control ("Sphere of Influence") compared to the size of the sphere of things whose effects you need to worry about ("Sphere of Concern"). When you have a front-line, entry-level job, you may feel that you have little power, but the *ratio* of power-to-concern is quite high: you can affect how you are doing your job, and things you can't control include your boss, certain things about your work environment, and customers you come into contact with. If you become a manager, you control the entire team (but not really - people may defy you if you are not convincing enough), but now you have to be concerned with things that happen in other teams, elsewhere in the company, and an even larger demographic of customers. As a CEO, you have authority over the entire company (though again not true control over every individual's free actions), but you need to be worried about all the users and customers, competitors, large-scale industry trends, macroeconomic forces, regulators and governments, the press, etc. Thus, being a CEO requires developing extreme mental equanimity in the face of feeling nearly totally powerless - and still being able to make effective decisions using the limited resources you *can* control. > > ---- > > These are the things I've noticed that separate the job from other high-level executive jobs. Certainly there are other factors (mentioned in other comments here), like being good at building relationships with key outside parties, having a lot of industry contacts, and being great at decision-making, but those are true of many executive-level positions. Thus, I believe that the salary differential arises largely from the fact that: > > * the CEO role involves a qualitatively higher level of life stress and personal risk-tolerance, > * subsequently far fewer people are willing to take on such a role, and > * the pool of such people intersected with people who are actually good at doing the job is therefore incredibly small, > * intersected further on a per-industry basis (Alan Mulally from Ford could not have been a CEO for Microsoft). > > This leads to an acute supply-and-demand problem, i.e. the "I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this shit" issue, wherein plenty of otherwise talented executives who would be CEO candidates are happy to just stick with not taking that extra step - keep in mind that anyone with the combination of characteristics necessary to be a successful CEO has *lots* of options - so you end up with a highly illiquid market of candidates, and thus boards and compensation committees have to come up with really unique compensation packages to induce those people to take the job. > > **TL;DR:** excessive CEO pay is the result of the combination of the job having extreme unique requirements *and* its effects on supply-and-demand. > > ---- > > FAQ: > > Q: How much do you get paid? > > A: Not enough to deal with this shit. But that keeps our burn rate down, at least. Full thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/210to8/eli5_what_does_a_ceo_of_a_large_company_do_in_a/cg8pycf/ · 3,119 points as of Nov 7, 2026 ### u/yishan in r/TheoryOfReddit, Dec 15, 2012 · The why Replying to a redditor: > I wish I had won that last lottery. I'd buy reddit and keep it going as is. But I don't want ads, just because with ad-supported media the user becomes the product and not the customer. How many reddit golds would it take to support the site. At $7 million a year, about 234k… > Hi. I am the CEO and I also sit on the board. I will make that promise right now: we will not sell reddit. > > I'm a long-time user, and I saw what happened to digg. I'm also someone who worked for a startup that was sold to a big company, and experienced how awful that was, both for life at the small company and what happened to the product (PayPal). > > Further, reddit was already *extremely lucky* to have been bought once in its lifetime by a large company that somehow, miraculously, didn't fuck it up. That is exceedingly rare in the corporate world. Now reddit has been spun off because Advance feels that by transitioning from whole owner to partial investor, it can allow an independent reddit to grow into something really great in the long-term, and they just want to own a chunk of that. So, having been lucky once, I'm not about to try my luck, our luck, the community's luck - again with another acquisition. So this is make or break - reddit has to find a way to be profitable and stand on its own. If we do, reddit will never need to sell, and it will be driven by the needs of its users. > > That said, we don't want people to buy reddit gold out of guilt. It's really nice that people did (I did, when it was launched) but we want to make gold better and better by adding features over time so that people will want to buy it out of self-interest. Guilt isn't a business model. > > **Point of interest:** we recently did launch a small persistent ad for reddit gold on the front page. It only shows up if you don't have reddit gold - log out and see. Look on the right sidebar, underneath the 300x250. It's supposed to be small and classy - we call it the goldvertisement. *After* you buy gold, if you don't disable ads, the ad turns into a little daily affirmation, and say something like "Who's awesome? / You're awesome" or "reddit is made of people / people like you." > > Not only that, but we are *also* doing the contest thing: it's a little hard to tell that it's going on, but /u/powerlanguage is running biweekly contests in /r/lounge. There's [one going on right now](http://www.reddit.com/r/lounge/comments/14h1iy/gold_peddler_competition/) to come up with more humorous messages to display in the goldvertisement box. It's lounge-specific, rather than reddit-wide as you seem to suggest, because intended to be another "feature" of gold, just another little bit of droll fun. > > Anyhow, thought you might like to know that. :) Full thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/14unl6/reddit_is_a_corporate_investment_and_we_are_the/c7gwhzp/ · 1,934 points as of Nov 7, 2026 ### u/yishan in r/IAmA, Apr 20, 2012 · Funny Replying to a redditor: > what's your favorite subreddit? > /r/yishansucks > > Although I am disappointed. There has been a severe drop in good content being submitted to that subreddit over the past few weeks. Full thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sk1ut/iam_yishan_wong_the_reddit_ceo/c4emqyq/ · 1,336 points as of Nov 7, 2026 ### u/yishan in r/IAmA, Jan 21, 2014 · Funny Replying to the post "IamArnold. AMA 2.0.". > Hi Arnold. Thanks for coming back. > > I just want to mention that [we have an opening for a full-time position on our community team](http://us.reddit.com/r/forhire/comments/1vsc55/hiring_reddit_is_hiring_fulltime_position/). > > We offer competitive salary and benefits, and one of our perks includes up to $500 reimbursable per year for gym memberships to encourage a healthy lifestyle. Under certain circumstances, you would also be authorized to wield the [banhammer](http://www.neatorama.com/2014/01/20/Reddits-Official-Banhammers/), although we have been especially impressed with [your ability to resolve conflicts with well-chosen words](http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/1i2w2z/best_damn_cardio_humanly_possible_in_15_minutes/cb0ky70). > > We feel you would make a great addition to the team, and encourage you to apply for the position. Full thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vshw2/iamarnold_ama_20/cevdrtv/ · 3,504 points as of Nov 7, 2026