I’m four months into my interim CEO role at Bluesky, and it’s time for an update. Most importantly, as of today, the interim part of the title is gone. I’m loving the mission and the job, and I’m all in as Bluesky’s official CEO.
This job has been energizing from day one, and the Bluesky team has been a pleasure to work with. Since March, we’ve shipped a slew of new features and products, another 2 million people have joined Bluesky, and close to 200 new apps have launched in the Atmosphere, the open ecosystem of social spaces connected by a single account. All of this tells us that the appetite for social experiences on the internet is vast; far broader than the handful of apps the major platforms offer today.
Earlier in my career, I was the founding CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce. WordPress is to websites what the Atmosphere can be to social. WordPress started with indie bloggers and developers and grew to power 43% of the web, with an ecosystem of thousands of companies generating over $10 billion a year in revenue. Automattic is an important part of that ecosystem, but no single company dominates it. As the Atmosphere grows, Bluesky will similarly be an important company within it, alongside many other thriving businesses.
I took this job because I believe in our mission: to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. It’s a privilege to help advance that mission and be part of the larger movement toward an open social web. Every day, more people are joining and creators ranging from writers to professors, politicians and many others are finding highly engaged audiences on our network.
And the network keeps expanding as more apps launch. Thanks to our standard.site integration, Bluesky users can now read articles, blog posts, and newsletters from across Atmosphere-powered apps like Leaflet, Offprint, and pckt. We will add more ways to highlight and integrate new apps as they launch. A few that recently caught my eye: Skysquare, Gifthood, Roomy, Mu, co/core, and Standard Reader. Those are all from just the last few weeks, a snapshot of the breadth of innovation happening in the Atmosphere.
We’re at the very beginning of this story, with a decade of exciting work ahead to build an open web that reflects the full richness of how people connect, communicate, and build livelihoods together. Up next: the ability to create smaller spaces and more private communities in the Atmosphere, which I believe will unlock the next wave of growth and innovation.
PS: Similar to my time at Automattic, I will remain closely connected to True Ventures as a Venture Partner. I’m grateful to the True team and our LPs for believing that operator and investor roles can be fluid and mutually reinforcing.
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