You still can’t ask Ellen Pao anything. But Reddit announced Thursday that the former venture capitalist will now be working with the social networking site, home of the popular Ask Me Anything chats.
Ms. Pao shocked Silicon Valley when she filed a discrimination suit last spring against her employer at the time, the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The suit was much debated but brought up widespread accusations that the Valley, for all its 21st-century tech, had medieval attitudes toward women. Ms. Pao has maintained her silence about the suit
Yishan Wong, Reddit’s chief executive, said on the company’s blog that Ms. Pao had been “a formal and informal adviser to reddit for more than a year, and recently decided to finally join us full time. She’ll be working on helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community.â€
Ms. Pao herself went on to add: “I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on ‘Star Wars,’ computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I’ve worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to 11 countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies.â€
She said her favorite Reddit categories were Ask Me Anything and pareidolia, which is pictures of things that look like things they are not (trees that seem to have faces, etc). That is a perfect choice, because a court will eventually decide whether her suit is what it says it is or is something else entirely.
