Medium founder Ev Williams is stepping down as CEO, to be replaced by Coach.me CEO Tony Stubblebine; Williams plans to start a new holding company/research lab
Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of Medium. Coach Tony : Hello Medium readers, authors, editors and publishers Connie Loizos / TechCrunch : Ev Williams calls it quits as CEO of Medium Sandee Roston / The Official Medium Blog : Medium names technology and digital media veteran Tony Stubblebine CEO; founder Ev Williams transitions to Chairman of the Board Tweets: @ev : @biz It's been a gratifying, challenging, creative, fun, hard, fascinating journey for me running this company. And it's time for me to hand over the reins. https://ev.medium.com/... Jason Goldman / @goldman : Been reading @ev on and about the web for 20+ years and while he doesn't post as often as he once did, the quality remains incredibly high. ❤️ https://ev.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... Lance Ulanoff / @lanceulanoff : As a longtime Medium contributor, I find this news interesting, though not necessarily concerning. Medium has always had potential but it needs to choose its course and stick to it. https://www.nytimes.com/... Josh Elman / @joshelman : First off - congratulations to Ev. I read articles on Medium every single day. Every day. So many voices get a chance to be heard and discovered. And the business has come a long way too. What he has built and run for a decade is fantastic and I am glad to see new roads ahead https://twitter.com/... Jeff Jarvis / @jeffjarvis : Sad about this but I am grateful to @ev for once again—after Blogger and Twitter—giving more people more ways to speak online. He is a quiet visionary and I look forward to what comes next. Evan Williams Is Stepping Down as C.E.O. of Medium https://www.nytimes.com/... @rafat : Please forgive my momentary lapse into meanness: turns out another-rich-white-guy-with-a-savior- complex, not the freakin savior of media. How many times have we seen this story in last few decades? https://twitter.com/... @anildash : Love this news — @tonystubblebine is a great choice to lead @Medium. I'm hoping they double-down on what they've been great at (for all the pivots & changes, they have a huge audience that's not dependent on shitty hot takes or surveillance-based ads) and help the indie web. https://twitter.com/... Kerry Flynn / @kerrymflynn : RIP the nonstop news cycle of Ev-led Medium pivots My favorite was the “claps” era https://t.co/QIhZGmqFGB Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : *take 2* Ev stepping down as CEO of MEDIUM New CEO @tonystubblebine worked at Odeo way back in the day before Odeo morphed into Twitter https://t.co/rdR6N8Ltaj M.G. Siegler / @mgsiegler : Having used any and every writing platform on the internet over the past 20-odd years, @Medium remains the absolute best CMS from a writing perspective. Which is wild that it's been the case 10 years in a row. Few things hold titles that long around these parts... https://twitter.com/... Ian Kar / @iankar_ : 5 bucks says he ends up in Web3 https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : (Medium's story is over) https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The handoff closes a decade-long arc covered in detail by related reporting: a timeline history of Medium built on Williams' own statements, and a same-day critique of his 10-year tenure arguing the platform got caught between Substack on one side and well-funded publishers like BuzzFeed and Vice on the other.
The departure also follows internal turbulence — current and former employees blamed an April culture memo from Williams for a mass exodus of non-editorial staff in 2021. Williams isn't leaving the board: he moves to Chairman while starting a holding company and research lab.
First-order effects
- Tony Stubblebine inherits a company whose strategic middle ground — neither a Substack-style writer platform nor a funded publisher — is the core problem named in the tenure critique; his first job is picking a side or redefining it.
- Williams' shift to Chairman plus a new holding company/research lab means Medium loses its founder-CEO but keeps him as board-level influence, capping how sharply Stubblebine can break from the founding vision.
Second-order effects
- Stubblebine arrives from Coach.me, a coaching/habit product, so expect Medium's product direction to tilt toward tools and incentives for individual writers rather than editorial network plays — pressuring rivals like Substack to differentiate on economics rather than features.
- With BuzzFeed and Vice already cited as the well-funded flank squeezing Medium, any renewed focus under a new CEO forces those publishers to treat Medium's subscription model as a live competitive threat again rather than a fading one.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, founder-led social publishing platforms of the 2010s are entering a handover generation — founders receding to boards or labs while operators run the business — reshaping who decides how independent writing is distributed and monetized.
- A profit-focused operator at Medium, with LLM-era questions like AI-generated content and training data on the agenda per later coverage, points toward writing platforms being valued less as cultural projects and more as sustainable content businesses.
The trend: Founder-led publishing platforms from the early 2010s are transitioning from visionary CEOs to operator leadership as they fight for a defensible position between newsletters and venture-funded media companies.