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

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil IPatel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Tony Schneider, the brand new CEO of the social platform Blue Sky. Tony just took over after a short stint as the interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews to do here on Decoder. A couple years ago we had Blue Sky's founding CEO, Jake Graber, on the show, and she's now the company's chief innovation officer. All that kind of shuffle is pure decoder bait. And a new CEO often brings with them new priorities, which is perhaps the most decoder thing of all. And Blue Sky in particular is a company pulling in a lot of different directions. There's the Twitter like social media app, which is what most people are familiar with, and then there's the underlying technology behind that app called App Protocol. Which allows anyone to build social networking products that interoperate with Blue Sky and one another. As you'll hear Tony say, that ecosystem is vibrant and growing. It's now called the Atmosphere, which is frankly adorable. But the users of Blue Sky the app are not the same as the people building on that protocol. and the goals of a company founded to push forward the ideas of open interoperable social standards.

are not necessarily aligned with all the things the users of the app might need or want. This is a fight that bursts into view on Blue Sky itself all the time. And I wanted to know how Tony thinks balancing all of that with what remains of a fairly small team. Tony's an interesting guy to talk about all this with, because he was formerly the CEO of Automatic. 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 other big players, but that might all 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 getting smaller or getting full of AI slob. So we talked about all that. And about Blue Sky'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 Blue Sky might start to generate revenue. Interestingly enough, it's not just ads.

This is a fun one. I think Tony and I hit on every single decoder theme there is. I think you're gonna like it. Okay, Blue Sky CEO Tony Schneider, here we go. Tony Schneider, you are a venture partner at True Ventures, and more importantly, the now permanent CEO of Blue Sky. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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