Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble

Today, I’m talking with Toni Schneider, who is the brand new CEO of the social platform Bluesky — he formally took over after a short stint as interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews to do on Decoder, because a couple years ago, we had Bluesky’s prior CEO, Jay Graber, on the show — she’s now the company’s chief innovation officer, and all of that kind of shuffle is pure Decoder bait. And a new CEO often brings with them new priorities, which is perhaps the most Decoder subject of all. Bluesky in particular is a company pulling in a lot of different directions: There’s a Twitter-like social media app, which is what most people are familiar with, and then there’s the underlying technology behind that app call AT Protocol, which allows anyone to build social networking products that interoperate with Bluesky. As you’ll hear Toni say, that ecosystem is vibrant and growing — it’s called the ATmosphere, which is adorable. But the users of Bluesky the app are not the same as the people building on AT Protocol, and the goals of a company founded to push forward the ideas of open and interoperable social standards are not necessarily aligned with the things all those users might need or want. This is a fight that bursts into view on Bluesky itself all the time, and I wanted to know how Toni thinks about balancing all of that with what remains a fairly small team. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Toni was formerly the CEO of Automattic, which makes the huge WordPress web content management platform, and you’ll hear him make the case that this period in social networking feels a lot like the early days of the web, and that success looks like a vibrant ecosystem with lots of big players that might take a decade to fully develop. That’s quite a vision, but here and now, the open web is falling apart, and the social products of today are fragmenting and in many cases either get smaller or full of AI slop. So we talked about all of that, and about Bluesky’s reputation as a bastion of leftists insulated in their own little bubble sitting next to the increasingly hard right bubble of X. And of course, we talked about how Bluesky might start to generate revenue — and interestingly enough, it’s not just ads. This is a fun one that touches on almost every Decoder theme there is. I think you’re gonna like it. Okay: Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Toni Schneider, you are a venture partner at True Ventures, and more importantly, the now permanent CEO of Bluesky. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I am very excited to talk to you. What is happening with the open social web is maybe the most important thing happening for media. It does not get as much attention as AI, but there’s something very big happening on these interoperable social networks. I know that you are a believer in it in the same way that you believed in the web when you were the CEO of Automattic, which is the company that makes WordPress. So let’s just start at the very start. Describe what you think Bluesky is today and what you think the opportunities with these new kinds of networks are. Bluesky today is really two things. There’s the Bluesky app, which is what a lot of people are familiar with. It’s a social network. We think it’s a better social network. It’s more human focused, doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t have algorithms. But more importantly, underneath Bluesky is an open protocol called AT Protocol. And Bluesky is only one of now over a thousand apps built on that protocol. The whole point of Bluesky was to demonstrate that this open protocol could scale and attract other builders, building lots of apps, lots of social experiences that all interoperate and connect with each other, which is what we believe the future of social media should look like. It’s what is actually going to make social media something that we believe in, which is that the future of social media should serve the public good. That is what motivates us, and that’s why we built the protocol first and then the app. There’s a lot in there already that is just pure Decoder bait, including the notion that Bluesky, the product, and the ATmosphere and AT Protocol, the standard, are all intermixed in one company that you now run. Right next to that is maybe the purest Decoder bait of all: the fact that Jay Graber, who was the CEO of Bluesky – she was on the show about two years ago – stepped down into the role of chief innovation officer. You were the interim CEO, and now after four months, you are the full-time CEO. Fundamentally, that is just the story that Decoder loves to tell the most. Talk me through that. What made you step in as the interim CEO, and why did you decide to become the full-time CEO? It’s actually really cool and inspiring that a founder, after she worked on this for six years, got it off the ground. She started inside Twitter, got it out of there, made it an independent thing. There are a lot of reasons why Bluesky is facing long odds and she got into this place, and then felt like it’s at a scale now where [it’s in] her sweet spot, the things that she loves working on, which is vision, innovation, new ideas. She felt pulled back towards building, especially also because of the advent of AI and how AI and AT Proto can interoperate. She felt like that’s what she wants to go work on, and it’s time to find somebody else for the CEO job. I was already involved with this project because I met the team a little bit over two years ago, probably around the same time Jay was on your podcast. We became investors through True Ventures. So I’ve been following it as an investor, supporting it. The team approached me and said that my background with WordPress and open source was a really good fit. And so I agreed to be interim CEO initially because I was still a general partner at True and it’s a firm I helped build. It’s an amazing firm that I didn’t want to leave behind. But also, at True, we’ve had this model where we’ve moved back and forth between operator and investor. I did that while I was running Automattic. So I stepped into it. After working on it hands-on for a few months, it just got more and more fun, more and more energizing. You just feel the momentum. Also, True just switched to a new fund. So actually the timing was good where I could say, “Okay, I will switch my true role to part-time, become a venture partner,” which is what I used to be when I ran Automattic, “and I’ll go all in at Bluesky.” Tell me about the difference between being the interim CEO and the full-time CEO. When you’re the interim CEO, it feels like there are probably some boundaries in what you can do. And then the full-time CEO can obviously do everything that a full-time CEO can do. What did you feel like the boundaries were as interim CEO? On the inside, it hasn’t felt very different. I actually think the move to drop the “interim” is more important on the outside, especially for the ATmosphere and the AT Proto community, and people building on this platform and in this ecosystem just to say, “No, I’m here for the duration. This isn’t just some interim gig and then somebody else is going to show up.” So I felt like, to the outside, that makes a big difference. On the inside, the job really hasn’t changed much.. So many of my conversations here in Decoder are really about the timescale of decisions. I’ll make the comparison to my newsroom because it’s easy and it’s easy to understand. Our reporters make decisions in like 30-minute increments. A story comes up, they write it, they publish it, they move on to the next thing. I make decisions maybe in like week- or month-long increments. What are we going to cover? Where are the resources going to go? It seems like in the interim CEO role, the timescale of those decisions is necessarily short or it has the appearance of being short. And then I’m reading your note that you published when you became the full-time CEO. In the very beginning of it, you say we’re at the very beginning of the story with a decade of exciting work ahead. And I’m wondering if the timescale of the decisions you’re making now are a decade. Yeah. It touches on something really fascinating with this project. In general with decision making, one of the frameworks I really like is the reversible and irreversible decisions. A lot of decisions we make are actually reversible. I like to optimize to just make those decisions quickly and then make sure you can undo the decisions if you need to change them. And then there are a few decisions that really do have very long-term implications. They’re much harder to reverse. With this project in particular, there are decisions made at this protocol level that we’re going to have to live with for a long time. There’s a part of the company in this community that thinks very, very, very long term. This is a protocol that is going to be around for decades already. It’s in enough use that it’s going to be around for a long time. Those decisions you really need to be careful about. Then it goes all the way to things we try in the product that work or don’t work. I wasn’t in the interim mindset as much because I am also an investor in the company, so I care very much about the long-term picture. What attracts me to this whole endeavor is that it can have a really important long-term impact. I always think about, okay, how will this play out? Does this truly serve the core mission? It’s okay to make some of these harder decisions now that won’t pay off for a long time because this is going to take a while. It’s not just one company. It’s already thousands of others that are building together. That’s just a different timeframe and decision-making process than your typical just “go fast, scale as quickly as possible” [methodology]. I like it. I’m comfortable with it. I just want to stick with Bluesky, the company that is both responsible for the standard and the protocol, and the product that a lot of end users love and sometimes hate. That is the core tension of the company. The user base of Bluesky is or is not interested in the development of AT Protocol, is or is not interested in the wider ATmosphere. Under Jay’s tenure, the company was very focused on building out the protocol because the product literally could not exist unless the protocol was robust enough to stand up the product. You could see that back and forth. I have always felt that the company is far more interested in the protocol than the product, that the product was merely there to show what people could do. But now the product is big. It might be waxing or waning. It will come to whether you need to turn it into TikTok or not. Tell me where you, as a CEO with a decade-long vision for all of this, see the balance inside of Bluesky between the product, the thing that looks like a Twitter app, and the protocol, the thing that should enable thousands upon thousands of other social experiences? I see the Bluesky app and the product as enabling the ATmosphere. It’s an on-ramp, or maybe a lobby to the ATmosphere where it’s just a great way to get lots of people in, get people exposed to the idea, and then realize as you use the product, “Oh, there are other things here. This isn’t just a microblogging app.” An example from the last couple of months that’s gone super well is this format called Standard Site that emerged. The history of that is that Bluesky’s a microblogging app. People are asking for longer-form posting. A bunch of other apps started popping up that were for newsletters and blogging. In particular, three apps called Leaflet, Pckt, and Offprint. They got together and said, “Hey, why don’t we define a format for all of us to work together on the ATmosphere for all of the posts that we publish?” We looked at it and said, “Great, we can now take that and surface it in our app.” So now, if you’re posting a blog post on Leaflet, it just shows up in the Bluesky app and we can make that a seamless experience. This went over really well to the point where now WordPress is supporting Standard Site and lots of other publishing platforms. They’re realizing the benefit of, “If I just publish to this new format now, it’s going to show up and work across all these other platforms without me having to do anything.” It’s caused this really nice ripple effect throughout the ecosystem where people can work together just by using this format. Nobody has to do deals with each other. Nobody has to get permissions and no money has to change hands. And it’s just taken off. I’m hoping more and more Bluesky users will see those kinds of integrations and go, “Oh, cool. I’m not just getting Bluesky content here. I’m getting content from all these other apps, all these other networks. And it just works. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to go sign up for 10 different apps. It’s just one signup, one account, and it just works.” You’re describing two different kinds of things. There’s a lot of work to be done at the protocol level. There’s a lot of work to be done to support new kinds of experiences like Standard Site. Then there’s Bluesky, a product which has 45 million people, and probably needs to be substantially bigger if it wants to be the aggregator for a massive network that can displace some of the other social products out there. That needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people. It needs to find different kinds of product market fit. How big is Bluesky the company now, and how is it structured to point in two different directions? We’re now at 50 people, still very small. The biggest challenge is clearly trying to do everything you’ve described with a small team. We do have an ecosystem of hundreds and thousands of others working on it, so that helps. We do our best to coordinate everyone. I would say we’re making good progress. We’re seeing good momentum, especially on the ATmosphere side. The things we look at are the number of daily active apps on the network, which has doubled since the beginning of the year. It’s about to hit a thousand. We look at SDK downloads for our tools that have tripled. It’s going to hit a million downloads a month by later this year. Those are the numbers that show that not only is it scaling, but we’re able to scale it with the team that we have. How is that team structured? About 50 people, all remote, structured into small teams. I’m a big believer that six to eight person teams, highly aligned, highly incentivized, and motivated are the way to get things done. Probably the only way to get things done. There are three core product teams. There’s the app team that deals with the Bluesky app. There’s the ATmosphere team that does all the developer-facing stuff. And then there’s a third product team called the exploration te