Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down | EUROtoday

Jay Graber is stepping down as head of Bluesky, the social media platform solely introduced to WIRED. Venture capitalist Toni Schneider would be the interim CEO till a everlasting substitute is discovered.

“As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a press release concerning the personnel change.

Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a analysis venture inside Twitter centered on creating a decentralized framework for the social net. She turned the corporate’s first chief govt officer in 2021, when it spun out into an unbiased entity. She oversaw the platform’s outstanding rise and the rising pains it skilled because it reworked from a unusual Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged different to X.

Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to assist Bluesky “become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks.”

Schneider, who will proceed working as a accomplice on the enterprise capital agency True Ventures whereas at Bluesky, was beforehand CEO of the WordPress guardian firm, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He additionally served as its CEO once more in 2024 whereas prime govt Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that point, Schneider met Graber and have become an adviser to Bluesky’s management. In a weblog publish saying his new position, Schneider mentioned he plans to emphasise scaling, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.”

This isn’t the top for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to develop into the corporate’s chief innovation officer, a task centered on Bluesky’s expertise stack reasonably than its enterprise operations. The place was created for her. Graber, who started her profession as a software program engineer, has at all times sounded essentially the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky’s expertise reasonably than its income streams.

Bluesky’s board of administrators will appoint the following everlasting CEO. The members embrace Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was initially a part of the board however stop in 2024.) This means Graber may have enter on her successor. The expertise search remains to be in early levels.

It’s a pivotal second for Bluesky. The firm discovered success by positioning itself as a progressive substitute for Elon Musk’s X. That helped gas the platform’s rise as X’s hard-right ideological flip prompted some customers to hunt new social networks. In 2025, Bluesky grew from 25 million customers to over 40 million, in line with its annual Transparency Report. Its staff is optimistic it will probably proceed increasing whereas staying true to its roots. Masnick says Schneider’s tenure at Automattic “proves you build a real business around open software.”

As far as social platforms go, although, it’s nonetheless a distinct segment providing, and one perpetually topic to pundit-class grumblings about the way it’s too woke or not woke sufficient. (Just final week, in a dialog with WIRED, Dorsey mentioned he wasn’t proud of the platform due to “ideology.”) Meta’s competing app, Threads, has roughly 400 million customers, or roughly 10 occasions extra energetic accounts than Bluesky. Even if it’s not fascinated by chasing the kind of hockey-stick progress historically favored in Silicon Valley, the corporate does must persuade extra folks and establishments to make use of its platform if it needs to stake a declare to the position of digital commons.