GoKawiilToday, 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.
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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.
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