Longtime Wired Editor-In-Chief Chris Anderson Departing To Be Full-Time CEO At Robotics Startup

Chris Anderson, the longtime editor-in-chief at Wired magazine, is leaving the tech journalism stalwart. The news was announced at an all-hands meeting held at Wired’s offices this morning, we’re hearing. It has also started to leak out on Twitter (you can’t trust writers to keep anything secret, I tell ya.)

Anderson plans to shift his full-time attention to taking over as CEO of 3D Robotics, a company he co-founded several years back that makes do-it-yourself drones aimed at the mass market. He’ll be staying at Wired until the magazine finds a replacement.

Anderson has been Wired’s editor since 2001. He’s also become well-known for authoring bestselling books such as The Long Tail. We’ve reached out to him for some more detail on this shift and will be sure to update this with anything we hear back.

This is the second newsworthy departure at Wired today: Several hours ago, Ryan Singel announced that he is leaving his role as editor there to run his startup, Contextly.

We sat down with Anderson a few weeks ago to discuss his latest book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. In our interview he talked quite a bit about 3D Robotics and how it fits into this larger Maker movement. He’s clearly passionate about the Maker space and his company, so while he is very strongly associated with Wired this move should not come as a huge shock to those who have worked with him over the past several years.

You can watch our interview in the video embedded below. He starts talking in more detail about 3D Robotics at around 13:20: