Meet Jay Graber, the Former CEO of Bluesky Now Focusing on Innovation

Jay Graber was born Lantian Graber in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a mom who’s an immigrant from China throughout the Cultural Revolution and a father of Swiss descent. Her mom, who’s an acupuncturist, named Graber “Lantian”, which implies “blue sky” in Chinese language, as a want that she would have “boundless freedom.” She was aptly named for the job she would ultimately be given.

Her father is a arithmetic instructor, and in a 2024 profile of Graber in Cosmico, he’s cited as a supply of mental and educational affect for Graber.

On the College of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Know-how & Society, which is an interdisciplinary program that examines how technological innovation intersects with tradition, politics, and ethics.

Slightly than focusing solely on coding or engineering, this system allowed Graber to discover the broader programs that form how expertise is developed and utilized, an strategy that later influenced her views on social networks and digital governance.

A few of her key guiding views embrace a decentralized web and open supply social media protocols. “We consider that the protocol is the elemental assure on freedom of speech,” Graber mentioned as soon as throughout an interview with Quick Firm.

Graber’s early profession unfolded throughout the first wave of blockchain innovation within the mid-2010s. After graduating from the College of Pennsylvania, she started her profession as a software program engineer at SkuChain, a startup centered on using blockchain for supply-chain administration. Across the similar time, she additionally constructed and soldered bitcoin-mining rigs, deepening her technical grasp of decentralized programs past software program.

Between 2016 and 2018, Graber joined the privacy-focused cryptocurrency project Zcash as a junior developer, contributing to probably the most superior implementations of zero-knowledge proofs. Later, in 2019, she based Taking place, Inc., an occasions app that aimed to assist communities manage and join via shared experiences.

Taking place, Inc. by no means actually took off, however these early roles grounded Graber in each the engineering and ideological foundations of decentralized expertise, which later formed the imaginative and prescient for Bluesky as an open, user-controlled social community.

When Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, first introduced Bluesky in late 2019, it was a small, Twitter-funded initiative tasked with researching an open and decentralized customary for social media.

By August 2021, Dorsey determined to onboard Graber, who was then identified in crypto circles for her work on Zcash and decentralized neighborhood instruments, to steer and speed up the hassle. Nevertheless, in line with an April 2025 profile of Graber within the New Yorker, she rapidly realized that for Bluesky to meet its mission, it must create a social protocol separate from any single company and preserve independence from Twitter.

With Dorsey’s backing, Graber negotiated a proper spin-out by October 2021 and included Bluesky as a public profit company, a authorized construction that allowed it to prioritize consumer advantages and open requirements over shareholder revenue.

Twitter offered an preliminary $13 million in funding to offer the brand new entity “freedom and independence to get began,” as Dorsey publicly described on the time.

Graber’s early transfer to separate Bluesky from Twitter could have saved it.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and renamed the platform X, Bluesky’s independence allowed it to thrive and emerge as a competitor to X as droves of users left the platform.

In September 2023, Bluesky solely had round 1 million registered customers, however this determine climbed to greater than 20 million by the top of November 2024. The meteoric rise got here after a consumer surge in Brazil after X was temporarily restricted there, in addition to 1.25 million consumer positive factors the week after Donald Trump gained the 2024 presidential election.

As of November 2025, Bluesky has round 40 million registered customers. That’s no match for X’s roughly 560 million customers, however it offered another for these dissatisfied with X’s possession and content material moderation.

Graber has taken a refined dig at Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Fb, Instagram, and Threads.

Throughout SXSW in Austin in March 2025, Graber wore a black T-shirt that reads “Mundus sine caesaribus,” which means “a world without Caesars.” The design and font are extensively interpreted as a response to Zuckerberg’s personal Latin slogan shirt, which reads “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” which means “both Zuck or nothing.”

The shirt drew public curiosity, and Bluesky started promoting the identical shirt. A spokesperson for the corporate advised Enterprise Insider on the time that the shirts bought out in half-hour, representing the corporate’s “democratic strategy, the place no single CEO or firm controls your expertise on-line.”

In comparison with different Silicon Valley CEOs who run main social media platforms, all of whom are billionaires, Graber has a really modest web price.

Estimates of Graber’s web price fall between $2.95 million and $5 million, largely relying on her fairness in Bluesky. Since Bluesky just isn’t a publicly traded firm, Graber’s stake within the firm and her annual compensation should not publicly disclosed.

As of early 2025, Bluesky’s valuation is estimated to be round $700 million.

Graber positions Bluesky as a brand new type of social community.

Bluesky is constructed on an open-source Authenticated Switch Protocol, which decentralizes social networking and fingers extra management to customers reasonably than a single firm or govt.

“The billionaire proof is in the best way all the pieces is designed, and so if somebody purchased or if the Bluesky firm went down, all the pieces is open supply,” Graber advised CNBC in an interview in November 2024.

“What occurred to Twitter could not occur to us in the identical methods, since you would at all times have the choice to right away transfer with out having to start out over,” Graber added, referring to Musk’s buy of the platform that’s now named X.

In contrast to conventional social platforms like X or Fb, Bluesky is constructed on an open-source ecosystem known as the ATmosphere, powered by the Authenticated Switch Protocol. The system provides customers the flexibility to design and customise their very own rating algorithms, carry their posts and followers with them throughout totally different apps, and keep away from being topic to any platform’s arbitrary or politically pushed moderation selections.

Bluesky turned a platform extensively utilized by progressive activists and neighborhood organizers.

The Tesla Takedown movement, a pushback in opposition to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s involvement with Donald Trump and the White Home’s DOGE workplace, famously unfold through Bluesky when actor Alex Winter contacted a sociologist in Boston to construct a web site the place individuals may manage native protests.

However the progressiveness of Bluesky additionally appears to have spooked some politicians. Semafor’s media reporter Max Tani wrote in Might 2025 that some congressional staffers advised him that they gave up on using Bluesky as an alternative choice to X, as a result of “their bosses saved getting yelled at by Democratic customers indignant at their impotence.”

Graber is unfazed by Bluesky’s slower progress by way of registered and lively customers.

In an interview in Might with Quick Firm, Graber mentioned that experiences of Bluesky’s loss of life are “drastically exaggerated” and that progress “is available in waves,” with new communities being established at every stage.

“We’re nonetheless seeing a whole lot of neighborhood formation, and probably the most thrilling issues is how structurally totally different that is,” mentioned Graber. “It isn’t simply one other social web site that must be a singular winner-take-all in an ecosystem with current incumbents.”

In 2025, Bluesky nonetheless added round 10 million newly registered customers.

Graber has tips about methods to thrive in an era of AI, and reliance just isn’t the reply.

“AI can deal with many reasoning duties, but when we totally outsource our considering, it isn’t adequate,” Graber advised Enterprise Insider.

She added that for college kids, that may imply writing essays by hand to “construct the muscle for essential considering.”

At Bluesky, Graber mentioned AI is used for moderation and curation however by no means runs by itself, as a result of whereas AI delivers packaged experience, human worth lies in judgment and adaptableness.

For job seekers, Graber encourages staff to undertake a generalist mindset and grasp core expertise similar to writing and coding.

“If you do not know what good code appears to be like like,” she mentioned, “you will not have the ability to consider AI’s output.”

Graber is beginning a brand new period in 2026.

On March 9, Graber mentioned in a public assertion that she might be stepping down as Bluesky’s CEO and transitioning right into a place made only for her: chief innovation officer.

“As Bluesky matures, the corporate wants a seasoned operator centered on scaling and execution, whereas I return to what I do finest: constructing new issues,” Graber wrote in a weblog on Bluesky.

“As we have grown, I’ve discovered that folks thrive after they’re in a task the place their passions overlap with their strengths. That is as true for me as it’s for our staff,” Graber added. “Transitioning to a extra centered function the place I can do what brings me power is my method of placing that perception into observe.”

Graber’s new function focuses on Bluesky’s expertise stack reasonably than on progress and enterprise operations. She may also play a task in selecting her successor. For now, enterprise capitalist Toni Schneider might be Bluesky’s interim CEO.