Blueskys CEO is stepping down. Heres why.
Source: Mashable Tech
Leadership change
Bluesky’s former CEO, Jay Graber, announced on the company’s blog that she is stepping down from the role. In the post on Bluesky’s website, Graber said she is leaving the CEO position to focus on building new products, not to leave the company. She will remain at Bluesky as the organization’s first Chief Innovation Officer while a new, more experienced CEO is recruited. Bluesky now has more than 40 million users.
Interim CEO
Venture capitalist Toni Schneider, a partner at True Ventures and former CEO of Automattic (the parent company of WordPress), will serve as temporary CEO while the search for a permanent leader continues.
Graber’s history with Bluesky
Graber has been with Bluesky since its early days in 2019, when it was a project inside Twitter (now X). The initiative later spun off into an independent organization working on a decentralized social‑media platform.
Reason for departure
Graber cited “several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up” and the need for “a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things.”
User‑growth context
Bluesky gained traction as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. The platform’s user base surged following the 2024 election as more liberal and progressive users sought spaces that were less far‑right than X, as reported by Mashable. (source)
Perception of Graber
As Wired notes, Graber began her career as a software engineer and has always been more enthusiastic about the technical side of Bluesky than its business operations.
Community reaction
“Toni is a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful exec, who has shown that you can build a real business around open software. Finding someone who can execute and who understands the vision of an open protocol at the same time is rare—Toni gets it. I’m excited to see what Toni and Jay build together.”
— Mike Masnick, @masnick.com (March 9 2026, 12:15 PM)
Graber also enjoyed broad support from Bluesky’s users. A shirt she wore at SXSW 2025 that poked fun at Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg quickly sold out on the platform’s online store. (shirt story, sell‑out coverage)
Succession process
Graber will help select her successor. The board of directors—comprising Jeremie Miller (founder of Jabber), Mike Masnick (founder of TechDirt), and Graber herself—will ultimately appoint the next CEO. Graber will remain on the board in addition to her new role as Chief Innovation Officer.