Exclusive: Jay Graber Steps Down as Bluesky CEO, Toni Schneider Takes Over as Interim Leader

Social media platform Bluesky has shared the news exclusively with WIRED: Jay Graber is stepping down from her role as the company’s top executive. Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will step in as interim CEO while the startup conducts a search for a permanent replacement.

“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 statement about the leadership change.

Graber first joined Bluesky in 2019, when the initiative was still an internal research project hosted at Twitter, focused on building a decentralized open framework for the social web. When Bluesky spun off to become an independent entity in 2021, she took the post as the company’s very first chief executive. Over her tenure, she oversaw the platform’s explosive rise and growing pains, guiding its transformation from an experimental offshoot of Twitter into a fully developed, standalone alternative to X.

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

Schneider will keep his role as a partner at venture capital firm True Ventures while serving in the interim CEO post at Bluesky. He previously held the CEO role at Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, from 2006 to 2014, and stepped into the role again in 2024 when top executive Matt Mullenweg took a sabbatical. It was during this 2024 stint that Schneider first met Graber, and he later joined as an advisor to Bluesky’s leadership team. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider noted he will prioritize scaling the platform, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth.”

Graber is not leaving Bluesky altogether. She will transition into a newly created custom role: chief innovation officer, where her work will focus on Bluesky’s core technology stack rather than daily business operations. A software engineer by training, Graber has long been far more enthusiastic talking about Bluesky’s underlying technology than its revenue streams.

Bluesky’s board of directors will lead the search for and appoint the next permanent CEO. Current board members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused venture capitalist Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber herself. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, an original founding board member, stepped down from the role in 2024.) Graber’s board seat means she will have direct input on selecting her successor, and the talent search is still in its early stages.

This shift comes at a pivotal moment for Bluesky. The platform found early success positioning itself as a progressive alternative to Elon Musk’s X, and X’s hard-right ideological shift drove waves of disaffected users to migrate to the platform, fueling its rapid growth. According to Bluesky’s 2025 Transparency Report, the platform grew from 25 million users to more than 40 million over the past year. Its leadership team remains optimistic it can keep expanding while staying true to its decentralized, open roots. Masnick notes that Schneider’s tenure at Automattic “proves you can build a real business around open software.”

Even with its recent growth, Bluesky remains a niche player in the global social media market, and it faces constant criticism from pundits across the political divide, who argue it is either too progressive or not progressive enough. Just last week, Dorsey told WIRED he was unhappy with the platform’s direction, citing concerns over its “ideology.” Meta’s competing social app Threads boasts roughly 400 million users, around 10 times Bluesky’s active account count. Even though Bluesky has no interest in chasing the hyper-growth that traditional Silicon Valley startups prioritize, the company still needs to win over more individual users and institutions if it wants to cement its place as a major independent digital public commons.