How Reddit’s Jen Wong balances users and investors—and navigated a $748 million IPO

Reddit was founded nearly two decades ago, but it wasn’t until 2024 that the social media company finally went public. COO Jen Wong was behind the wheel when it happened at last on March 20. 



Growing up on Long Island, Wong’s childhood could be characterized by some of her most prized possessions: a record player, an Atari, and a collection of People magazines. Wong says that her fascination with music, video games, and pop culture ultimately drove her to join Reddit in 2018. 



As COO, Wong oversees the platform’s business growth including Reddit’s advertising and data-licensing efforts. In 2019, the company’s ad revenue surpassed $100 million for the first time. Now, roughly five years into Wong’s tenure, Reddit brings in more than $222 million in ad revenue. Last year, Wong’s work centered on building Reddit’s data-licensing business and preparing the business to keep up with advancements in AI. This year, she says, has been all about the company’s IPO. 



Despite the company’s “windy” path, Wong argues that Reddit’s IPO has “legitimized” the company to its investors, users, and employees. The IPO “revealed to investors we have a great business,” she says. “It’s really shown off how special our platform is, and it’s really validated our employees who have worked at this company for a long time and really believed in Reddit’s mission.”



Reddit’s public offering captured attention not just because of its long-awaited timing, but because of the company’s decision to set aside close to 2 million shares (about 8% ) for 75,000 of Reddit’s most loyal users and moderators.



“We were very thoughtful about the IPO. One of the reasons to become a public company was to hopefully have our users and moderators be able to be shareholders,” explains Wong. “They are very important stakeholders in our platform, and for them to have the opportunity to be a shareholder I think is very meaningful.”



Still, many moderators balked at the chance to become shareholders, and some were vocally critical of the company’s IPO, fearing that Reddit would change too much in order to finally achieve profitability. Many others simply doubted how successful the stock would be. 



But so far, the IPO has generally been considered a success. The stock closed its first day 48% above initial offer prices, valuing the social media platform at more than $9 billion . 



According to the company’s first public earnings report , Reddit’s revenue spiked 48% from $163.7 in Q1 of 2023 to $243 million in Q1 of 2024, beating Wall Street expectations. And the site’s daily active users have grown 37% from last year to 82.7 million.



Not long after going public, Reddit announced a new content deal with OpenAI—boosting the stock once more. While Wong did not directly comment on Reddit’s partnership with OpenAI, she says that “in the world of AI, where there is going to be more summarized content and there is going to be more synthetic data, original human ideas just increase in value. And that’s what Reddit is.”



Wong argues that while the easily consumable video- and image-based social media platforms have dominated the social media sector for years, Reddit’s primarily text-based functions and hyper-specific communities make the company’s data uniquely valuable to AI companies who wish to train their large language models on authentic conversations. 



And when it comes to the concerns of skeptical moderators, balancing what makes Redditors love Reddit and profitability has long been Wong’s charge. In this case, she argues that what makes Reddit unique is good for business. 



“We want to run a good business, and good businesses are self-sustaining, which means that they’re profitable,” says Wong. But simultaneously, she stresses that the company plans to continue to prioritize data privacy and the anonymous nature of Reddit’s platform. 



“A lot of bad businesses on consumer platforms on the internet were built on demographic profiles. They were built on your personally identifiable information (PII), your gender, your age, and in some cases, built on your browsing history,” she says. “That’s a very different approach than what we have. Reddit is anonymous—that’s important. It allows people to reveal interests they wouldn’t otherwise. It’s about what you really care about, not what you want your friends to think you care about.”



Looking forward, Wong and her team are doubling-down on Reddit’s contextual and interest-based advertising business as well as the company’s newly launched Reddit Pro features, which enable businesses to grow their own accounts and track when and how users mention their brand.



More broadly, Reddit must now compete against the small number of public social media companies, such as the domineering Meta. For this reason, ensuring that investors, users, and employers are all appeased is both a moral and business imperative for Wong and her team. 



“We are extremely energized by the privilege of becoming a public company,” says Wong. “And so, the onus is on us to continue delivering all the things that we said we would do.”