A career as a manifesto for the power of community

When Roxy Young (MBA ’00) entered the marketing profession in 2000, it was still in “kind of a Don Draper era” with captivating billboards and beautiful photography splashing across glossy magazine pages. “Social media wasn’t even a thing when I started my career and search engines were just emerging,” she reflected. “Fast forward 25 years and search is old.”

As a marketing leader at several trailblazing companies, Young has witnessed firsthand how the internet has reshaped communication and commerce. Now, having just concluded an eight-year tenure at Reddit, where she became CMO in 2020, she is taking her “war wounds and wisdom” to mentor others as they adjust to an industry that isn’t gentle for those slow to adapt.

Roxy Young

“The one thing that marketers should know is that the channels are going to continue to evolve and new ones will emerge. But the core of what you’re doing — trying to understand why your product or service is going to provide real benefits to someone — that never changes,” she said.

In the mid-90s, Young could not have imagined that she would become an expert on marketing in the internet age, as that age was still on the horizon for the vast majority of people. In fact, she had not even imagined she would work in business, let alone marketing. Her goal was to pursue genetic engineering. When more than one professor at Texas A&M University recognized her knack for business as an undergraduate, she switched over to finance.

Young opted to pursue an MBA in order to round out her financial knowledge and better understand organizational behavior, business transformation and, of course, marketing. “I was looking for programs that were smaller-sized so I could know everyone and build deeper relationships with faculty,” she explained.

Given its prestigious reputation and Young’s Catholicism, the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business fit the bill perfectly. She expected the program would allow her to level up professionally and she also hoped to forge relationships that would carry into the future. It turned out, the program altered nearly everything in her life.

“It shaped my life significantly because I met my husband on the very first day of orientation,” she laughed. “I met some of my best friends and colleagues and my life partner because of the tight-knit nature of the program. Professionally, my career would never have been what it is without Notre Dame.”

After completing her MBA at Notre Dame, Young and about 10 classmates and fellow alumni launched out west to pursue careers in the San Francisco Bay Area’s rapidly evolving tech industry. “It was a fantastic group of people and really like an extended family where we could all rely on each other,” she said. “We helped each other find the right roles, meet the right people and progress through our careers.”

Young initially found her footing at Gap right as the clothing brand was hurtling out of the 20th century and learning how to expand and stand out amid a new crop of online retailers. There were few established internet brands at the time, but most of the traditional brick-and-mortar companies were still struggling to catch up. Seeking an opportunity with a consumer brand that was fully leaning into new technology, Young landed a position in marketing for Netflix in 2004.

“It was a really different concept that you would give your credit card to this company and they would mail you DVDs instead of going down to Blockbuster to see if the movie you wanted to watch was on the shelf,” she said. “I was part of an amazing marketing team that was utilizing all aspects of marketing, including digital marketing, which was relatively new.”

As Netflix grew the user base for DVD mailers, they were also iterating the framework for what would become the most-subscribed video-on-demand streaming service in the world. Streaming itself was a novel idea, but technologically it created a number of challenges the team had never even thought to puzzle over before.

“At that time, the infrastructure to be able to deliver a high-quality experience for 60 or 90 minutes was also just a deep technological challenge that we were solving for,” said Young, recalling how this led to an utterly fascinating exploration into consumer behavior. For example, the marketing team performed an ethnographic study where they placed huge machines into select consumers’ homes.

“These had hundreds of DVDs in a big carousel, like a jukebox for movies,” she said. By providing users with an expansive media catalog, they could probe how consumption habits changed when the limits of using the mail service were removed. This also changed the value proposition, leading to questions about the fundamentals of pricing and marketing.

Another exploration was the Netflix Challenge in 2006. The premise was enticing: $1 million to whoever could improve the accuracy of Netflix’s recommendation engine by 10%. With that prize, and the chance to work with a remarkably large dataset, computer programmers and machine learning researchers flocked to the contest.

“It was an incredibly interesting time just in terms of the evolution of consumer behavior and technology,” said Young.

This experience remained in her back pocket when she joined a decidedly different company, the French cosmetic retailer Sephora. Though far from a streaming service, Sephora harbored massive amounts of data, which Young utilized to help build the Beauty Insider Program, one of the most popular loyalty programs in online retail.

“With the Beauty Insider Program, we had the ability to aggregate people’s purchase, web browsing and add-to-cart activity together in one place, so we could understand the profile of different buyers and the different types of products and brands that they would buy,” she explained. Now a commonplace practice, this was cutting-edge at the time and shaped product development across the cosmetic industry.

“We had such rich data that was really the first of its kind to help manufacturers improve their product development cycle. They could understand what types of products were selling and when people were buying certain types of products together, so they could sell them in a bundle,” Young said. “It was a fantastic opportunity to really flex data and analytical skills in a new and revolutionary way.”

With these experiences, Young witnessed how it was no longer a marketer’s role to simply lobby for a product by telling potential customers why they should want something. Rather, there was a constant conversation occurring and consumers were now collaborating with brands through their online activity. This activity included the purchasing behavior that made up datasets and algorithms, but it also included product reviews and message boards where one’s candid musings could guide others to make purchases.

At Sephora, user reviews were housed within the company’s support site and revealed patterns and insights that Young’s team could bring to manufacturers and to Sephora itself to help guide business decisions. At Zynga, where she was director of marketing following Sephora, the video game developer used social media networks such as Facebook to platform games like the massively popular FarmVille, directly combining game play with social interfacing.

Young’s knowledge of using data to guide marketing strategies and involving consumers in the conversation about products brought her to the travel booking site Hipmunk. Though a short stint in her career, her role at Hipmunk had long-lasting implications.

“You should always invest in building relationships with the people that you’re working with because chances are your paths will cross somewhere down the road,” said Young. Her engineering counterpart at Hipmunk happened to be Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman. When Huffman returned to the social media forum as CEO, he recruited Young to lead marketing.

Though Reddit was, Young said, “a really different product than anything else [she] had ever worked on,” the role was the culmination of everything she had learned about marketing to online consumers.

“We weren’t selling jeans or movie subscriptions. We were offering the opportunity to find a community that was related to anyone’s interests,” she said. “Whether that be cats or cars or cartoons or plants or parenting, whatever the interest, there was a community for it.”

As a large community forum and one of the most visited sites across the internet, the role at Reddit meant Young was ultimately selling advertisers the opportunity to appear alongside conversations that consumers were already having to ensure their message was reaching the right audience.

“This was the first time that I actually had to think on both sides of the business,” said Young. “How do we continue to grow the number of people using Reddit around the world? And then, how do we continue to grow the number of advertisers who are finding value in reaching an audience on Reddit?”

Young leaned on all of the skills she had acquired since her time at Notre Dame, harnessing community and data to aggregate a story that would bring both users and advertisers to Reddit. During her tenure, the platform grew significantly, thanks to its passionate community. Young pointed to events such as the GameStop short squeeze in 2021, when the r/wallstreetbets community on Reddit drove a stock market trading frenzy. This inspired her to create a viral five-second Super Bowl ad that she described as “a manifesto for the power of community.”

“We weren’t trying to sell anything,” Young said of the ad. “We were just trying to showcase and highlight the power of people coming together.”

After transforming the forum into a global consumer brand that went public in 2024, Young decided to step down in September 2025. As she launches her next chapter as a consultant, advisor and mentor, she can’t help but acknowledge what has guided her journey since the very beginning.

“What I’m most proud of as I look back on my experience is learning how to co-create with the community — using their signals to continually evolve the business,” she said.