Christopher Slowe (he/him)
Senior Technical Fellow, Reddit
Chris Slowe was Reddit's first employee. He joined Steve Huffman in 2005 out of Y Combinator's first batch and spent the early years building the systems that kept Reddit alive: ranking algorithms, anti-spam infrastructure, and the engineering habits of a team with no margin for error. He served as Reddit's CTO from 2017 through the company's 2024 IPO and until early 2026, scaling the engineering organization through hypergrowth to one of the internet's largest community platforms.
Before software, Chris was an experimental physicist (he holds a PhD from Harvard) which mostly means he learned to reason carefully about complex systems with messy feedback loops. Useful training for platforms, AI, security, and organizations.
He now advises startups and speaks about AI strategy, community building, technical leadership, and what it actually takes to compete when the odds aren't in your favor.