Reddit just can’t seem to catch a break. In another the blow to the company, Bethanye Blount, Reddit’s chief engineer hired two months ago confirmed on Monday July 13th that she would be leaving the company, citing she had “lost confidence in the new direction of the company and did not think she could deliver on promises being made to the community". This announcement comes of in the wake of Ellen Pao's resignation as interim CEO and Steve Huffman taking over as returning CEO.

Reddit’s over night success was probably not something that roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian never imagined would happen so quickly when they founded the company in 2005. On an average 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start a business fail within the first 18 months. But Reddit succeeded – so what went wrong?

Professor Edward Ness, University of Virginia, in his courses on managing small enterprises and the challenges of business growth teaches “..you need to respect the power of growth and you need to grow smartly..approach growth with planning and thinking”. Lack of a solid infrastructure for a growing business can be a company’s worst nightmare; and that appears to be the case at Reddit where the people with the most power, authority and responsible for the site’s success are the moderators. Moderators who volunteer their time, who creates and maintains the sites contents and who are not legally bound to the company. The moderators showed their power on the July 4th week-end by shutting down the most influential subreddits in protest over the unexpected dismissal of Victoria Taylor, the go to gal in the IAmA “I am… ask me anything" subreddit.

“Entrepreneurs who succeed spend time with personal development. I have never once met an angel or venture capital investor who doesn’t investigate the character of a founder and his/her team before whipping out their checkbook. It still amazes me how many business owners who actually have good ideas with the ability to execute them — crash and burn because of their own dysfunction.” ~Eric T. Wagner, Contributor Forbes. Is Reddit on it's way to "crashing and burning?" Let's hope not. It's social-media sharing site has give a voice to people in over 175 countries.

Now that Bethanye Blount is leaving, returning CEO Steve Huffman will have his work cut out sorting out this mess. Re/Code contacted Huffman for comments on this latest development:

Re/Code: "Does Reddit have a gender discrimination problem that you need to address?"

Huffman: "No. Bethanye’s departure had nothing to do with gender, and I was looking forward to working with her. The company is growing, and we have the opportunity to improve in many areas — including the number of women in leadership positions. I am confident in our ability to recruit women at the executive level, as we have made a point to do so at Hipmunk, where more than half of the executives are women."

Re/Code: "What makes you and the rest of Reddit’s leadership confident in Reddit’s ability to accomplish the goals that have been stated publicly?"

Huffman: "I returned because of my confidence in the company to accomplish said goals and I’ve committed publicly to two things: Creating a new Content Policy, which we are hard at work on, and improving tools for moderation, which are also in progress. I don’t foresee any difficulty in accomplishing either of these things in the near future."

Re/Code: "Do you have an interim replacement for Blount?"

Huffman: "We have George Pang, who was managing the team for almost a year prior to Bethanye, but we’ll be starting a new search ASAP."

Bethanye tweeted her plans for the future to her followers on Twitter.

Blount was once the Engineering Director at Linden Lab (makers of Second Life) where her teams were responsible for all customer-facing products. After Linden Lab, she served as Vice President of Software Engineering for EMI Group. In 2010, she co-founded MailRank, where the team developed a new approach to email productivity. MailRank was acquired by Facebook in 2011 and she continued working for Facebook until June of this year when she left to join Reddit.

What does the future hold for Reddit? Only time will tell as more of the company’s troubles surfaces.