The first thing Alexis did when he returned to Reddit’s San Francisco office as executive chairman in November 2014 was introduce himself to the team. He thanked them all, including new interim CEO Ellen Pao, for their work at Reddit.

Alexis, now 31, had been away from Reddit longer than he and Steve had worked on it full-time. He had traveled around the world, invested and mentored startups, published a memoir and become a prominent figure in the fight to keep the Internet open in the face of threats from the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and recent proposals to end net neutrality.

Yet, he had never fully detached himself from Reddit. He wrote often about Reddit on his blog and in his book, talked about his involvement with the company in interview after interview and joined Reddit’s board in September 2011, when it became an independent business. Some close to Alexis say he benefitted from the continued association with Reddit as much as Reddit’s leadership benefitted from its association with him. They legitimized one another, enhanced each other’s brands. The decision to return full-time was significant for both.

“I got a lot of stuff out of my system,” he says of his time away. So when board members began reaching out to him after Yishan abruptly resigned, he felt the time was right. “After talking it over with my dad and girlfriend, it was time for me to come back.”

Reddit insiders cheered his return. As one employee put it, Alexis has the moral authority that only a founder has, which he can use to endorse and push through new features and standards on Reddit. That said, some we spoke with wondered whether even Alexis had the ability to push Reddit to be more innovative. The company and the community are much bigger and more unwieldy now than when he left.

The vision Alexis has since laid out for Reddit focuses on figuring out mobile — ironic, considering Alexis and Steve originally wanted to build a mobile app a decade ago, but were told not to — and improving discovery for new and existing users. Reddit is expected to put some of that $50 million it raised to hire more mobile developers and community managers to build better tools for users. The funding also gives Reddit a deeper war chest to make strategic acquisitions like Alien Blue, a third party app it acquired in October.

“We need to do a better job with things like mod tools and discovery to make the lives of these varied community moderations a lot better,” he said in an email. “It’s a failure of UX that so many people don’t even understand how reddit works.”

Kristina Lerman, the USC professor, echoes that point. For all its influence, Reddit is still a niche service. “Reddit’s weakness is demographic,” she says. “There is the perception that it doesn’t reflect the mainstream. That it’s very specialized.”

One thing Alexis did not touch on in his initial announcement, nor in his comments after, was monetization. Industry observers we spoke with expect Reddit to introduce more services like its gift exchange and its recently launched crowdfunding platform, which could bring in more revenue. Just how much Reddit can rev up its advertising efforts, however, remains to be seen. Ad execs note the challenges of Reddit’s limited targeting tools, basic ad formats and tough user base.

"The Reddit audience has probably the most honed bullshit detector of any website,” says Ben Winkler, chief digital officer at OMD. “And Reddit has no interest in moderating comments. So not only will your inauthentic advertising get savaged, but that savagery will stay there for all to see."

What Reddit needs to do, according to execs we spoke with, is double down on mobile ads, improve its target efforts and think beyond ads, perhaps providing marketers with a paid insights platform that would help them identify stories and topics that are about to go viral on the web.