Following CEO Ellen Pao’s resignation from the company only days ago, Reddit chief engineer Bethanye Blount has quit after less than two months in the job.
As Re/Code reports, Blount cites a loss of confidence in the direction the company is taking as the reason behind her resignation.
“There are some very aggressive implied promises being made to the community, and they’re going to have to have some pretty big challenges in meeting those implied promises,” Blount says.
The whole debacle seems to have centred on the company’s efforts to transform the huge online community into a commercialised and profitable business, angering many users. Reddit has been in a near-constant state of turmoil after it fired popular employee Victoria Taylor, who handled Reddit’s high-profile celebrity AMAs.
With revenue slowing and profit margins beginning to shrink, Google is actively seeking efficiencies and decreasing its employee intake as it tries to take a stricter approach to costs.
Google is “slowing down as it grows up”, The Wall Street Journal reports. It seems that newly hired chief financial officer Ruth Porat, who joined the company in late May, is behind the effort to run the empire more efficiently.
Google hired less than 2000 people in the first quarter, the smallest increase since 2013.
Match Group buys PlentyOfFish for $575 million
Match Group, the subsidiary of Tinder and OkCupid owner IAC, has purchased PlentyOfFish, an online dating service popular mainly in Canada.
As TechCrunch reports, the deal is expected to close by the end of the year, and will give Match Group millions of new customers, who also happen to be in the target demographic for some of the self-improvement services that the company owns.
PlentyOfFish was created by Markus Frind in 2003 and has been entirely bootstrapped by him since. He still has complete ownership over the company, so no doubt he will be having a very, very good day.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 75.90, rising 0.42% overnight to 18,053.58. The Australian dollar is currently trading at US75 cents.
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Denham Sadler is a former editor of StartupSmart. He was previously a journalist at the publication and has worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, the Saturday Paper and the ABC. In his spare time he likes puns and jaffles.
