Good morning. It’s GDC week here in San Francisco. That’s the Game Developers Conference, the annual video game industry gathering that’s been held in the SF Bay Area since 1988—an eternity in game years (Nintendo’s NES console was still in its heyday at the time).
These days, the conference is called the GDC Festival of Gaming, a festive rebrand that seems designed to send a message to that other shindig that kicks off in Austin later this week, SXSW. Speaking of changes, Bluesky has a new CEO. Bluesky, if you haven’t been paying attention, is the microblogging platform that was incubated as a research project inside Twitter, but spun into an independent company which became popular when Twitter became X. Anyway, Jay Graber, Bluesky’s founding CEO is handing the reins to Toni Shneider, while Graber becomes the Chief Innovation Officer. Shneider, who is a VC at True Ventures, will occupy the role on an interim basis while the company searches for a permanent CEO.
It’s hard to know how Bluesky’s 40 million users compares to X’s users base, since the Elon Musk-owned company doesn’t disclose user numbers (Twitter had about 300 million users at its peak). But there’s one metric by which Graber has outplayed Twitter. She lasted more than four years as CEO. By this time in Twitter’s history, the company was already onto its third CEO.
