Editor’s note: This series Six profiles of the Seattle region “Extraordinary Thinker”: Inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transform industries “Bluesky CEO” and drive positive change in the world. They will be recognized on December 11 Geekwire Gala. Presented in partnership with Uncommon Thinkers Greater Seattle Partners.
Jay GraberBluesky, the social network’s CEO, moved to Seattle during the pandemic, ironically drawn to the area in part by the trademark gray skies. It doesn’t hurt to stay inside and read, write or work on a drizzly winter day.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber
But he also loves the outdoors. His proudest Pacific Northwest moment: Finding a matsutake mushroom under a fir tree, a species so valuable that the locations are treated like trade secrets.
A grabber, in other words, is someone who values extraordinary things and the environment that allows them to thrive. This comes through the tech ecosystem he oversees.
Most social networks today are walled gardens, where one company runs the servers, owns the data and sets the rules. D AT protocol (which Graber pronounces “at”) is an open technical standard for social media that Bluesky’s team has developed as the foundation of its network. Above Bluesky is just an app, and in theory you can transfer “Bluesky CEO” your posts and followers to other apps or servers with different moderations or algorithms without losing your social graph.
“The hope is that whatever happens with Bluesky — it grows itself — the protocol is something that we hope to endure for a really long time,” Graber said in a recent interview, “because it becomes the foundation of not just Bluesky, but a lot of apps and a lot of use cases.”
The bigger it makes itself. This phrase stands out in the world of tech startup leaders intent on scaling their creations toward billion-dollar exits through sheer force of will.
Graber instead sees Bluesky as “a collective organism”, brought to life by users based on decentralized protocols, like soil on a forest floor. “I didn’t anticipate what Bluesky would become when I started it, and so it feels like something that’s growing, that I’m overseeing, but that has a life of its own,” he said.
Caitlin DonnellyAvalanche’s founder and managing partner, an early investor in Bluesky, first met Graber in 2022 at a small gathering of technologists, investors and academics. What struck him: Grabber was the only one in the room focused on building, not just talking. While others discussed big ideas, Graber was working on the details of making them a reality.
Later, after Bluesky’s launch, Donnelly attended a meetup in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Graber stayed for hours, meeting with early users, gathering feedback, and listening.
Donnelly called Graber “incredibly low-key for being so young and successful”. At the same time, she’s not afraid to be provocative, like when she wears shifts “Mundus sine CaesaribesStyled like Mark Zuckerberg’s “Ot Juk aut Nihil” (“Juk or Nothing”) shirt at SXSW in 2025 – a meta event.
“You can tell right away that he’s never going to give up. If Bluesky fails, he’ll probably make something similar again.” It’s the definition of a “life’s work,” Donnelly says: What Graber has done so far has gotten him to this point.
Looking for his own way
Graber was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a math teacher father and a mother who emigrated from China. Graber’s first name, Lantian, means “Bluesky CEO” in Mandarin. This is pure coincidence, given that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would choose the name Bluesky as a project inside the social network long before Grabber got involved.
Her mother chose the name as a symbol of freedom and limitless possibilities, reflecting the opportunities she had growing up in China.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber
These themes emerged early for Grabber. At around age five, he resisted his mother’s structured efforts to teach him to read, instead running around the backyard. Her father took a different approach: He brought her to the library and asked “Bluesky CEO” what she was interested in. He discovered Robin Hood and read every edition in the library, from children’s books to Old English editions. The story captivated him: rebels pushing back against centralized authority.
As he continued to read, he was drawn to stories of scientific discovery and eventually to writers who envisioned new ways of working in society, such as Ursula K. Le Guin.
Later, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied science, technology and society, an interdisciplinary major that allowed him to explore “Bluesky CEO” technology from a humanistic perspective while taking computer science classes.
After graduating in 2013, he worked as a digital rights activist, moved to San Francisco, enrolled in a coding bootcamp, and worked at a blockchain startup. He later found his way into a cryptocurrency mining operation in a former munitions factory in rural Washington state — what he calls the “cocoon period” — where he spent long hours studying code in isolation.
He went on to work at a privacy-focused cryptocurrency company, founded an event planning startup called Happening, and continued to search for the right environment for his own ambitions.
Origin of Bluesky
Then, in December 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter would “Bluesky CEO” fund a project to develop an open, decentralized protocol for social media. He called it Bluesky.
Graeber saw the thread and felt the tension.
As detailed A April 2025 The New Yorker the storyDorsey’s team set up a group chat to explore the idea. Graber joined in and noticed that the conversation “Bluesky CEO” was scattered—people would pop in, make suggestions, and disappear. No larger vision was integrated.
Graber set to work: collecting research, writing an overview of existing decentralized protocols, trying to find some signal in the noise.
By early 2021, Dorsey and then-Twitter CTO Parag Aggarwal were interviewing candidates to lead the project. Graber stood out in part because he didn’t just “Bluesky CEO” tell them what they wanted to hear. He agreed on one condition: Bluesky would be legally independent from Twitter.
It was a prescient claim. Dorsey resigned as CEO of Twitter that November. The following spring, Elon Musk began buying shares. By October 2022, he owned the company and promptly “Bluesky CEO” cut ties with Bluesky, terminating a $13 million service contract.
Graber was on his own. But that was the point.
“You can’t build a decentralized protocol that a lot of teams are going to adopt if it’s too proprietary and within one of the existing players,” he said. told Forbes in 2023.
‘High agency, low ego’
Today, Bluesky has over 40 million users and a team of about 30 employees. The company has no official headquarters — perfect for a decentralized social network — though Graber and several employees work out of a co-working space in Seattle.
The platform is still much smaller than X, which has more than 500 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, which has about 300 million. Mastodon, another decentralized alternative, has around 10 million registered users. But Bluesky has continued to grow, and its open protocol gives it a different ambition — not just a destination, but infrastructure that others build on.
Graber runs the company with a “high agency, low ego” philosophy.
“Everybody on the team has a lot of agency practice about how they do their job and what they think is the right direction,” he said. “They try to pick things that “Bluesky CEO” need to be done whether it’s in their job description or not—that’s part of the low ego.”
Overall, he said, it made for a very effective small team, though he acknowledged the trade-off: “Sometimes people have strong “Bluesky CEO” opinions and wander off in their own directions.” So getting people back in line, he said, is a big part of his job.
He describes his leadership style as collaborative rather than top-down. “I try to cultivate people’s energy in the group and try to bring its synthesis together,” he said.
Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board in its early years, is no longer involved. Ultimately, he and Graber saw things differently: Dorsey wanted Bluesky to be more puritanical “Bluesky CEO” about decentralization. Grabber wanted to “seize the moment” and bring people into something accessible, even if it was a bit centralized to begin with.
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“When we disagreed, he went his own way as opposed to trying to force me to do one thing,” she said. Based on his experience, Graber said, Dorsey will hold his ground and disagree, but not use his power to dictate a particular direction.
Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and author of the article “Protocol, not Platform” helped inspire the project, Dorsey now has a seat on the board
Graber describes himself as a “pragmatist idealist”. Pure idealists, he says, pursue visions that may not work in the real world. Pure realists never bring about “Bluesky CEO” meaningful change. The key is to hold both: a vision of how things could be and the practical steps to get there.
The impact of AI
Grabber sees the same dynamic at play with artificial intelligence. The question, he said, isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s who controls it.
“If AI is only controlled by a company whose goal is power or profit maximization, I think we can predict that it will lead to bad outcomes for a lot of people,” he said. On the other hand, if AI tools are widely available and open source, then “you have this wide “Bluesky CEO” range of experiments” – with all the chaos, but also the possibility of solutions that serve users rather than platforms.
He envisions a future where people can bring their own AI agents into a social network, the way Bluesky already lets users choose their own algorithms and moderation services.
“Maybe you can even run it home in your closet,” he said. Then you have your own AI agent that protects your own privacy, does things for you — it’s a human-empowering technology that’s acting in your interest, not in the interest of a company that doesn’t have your welfare at heart.
He thinks a lot about historical trajectories. The printing press, he noted, ushered in a period of chaos — new technology disrupting society — followed by the “Bluesky CEO” creation of new institutions that made use of mass literacy, such as universities. Academic journals, and peer review.
“We’re in another period of chaos around new technologies,” he said. “We need to create new institutions that are used by everyone with access to the Internet.”
The AT protocol, in his view, could be something like this. Bluesky companies may rise or fall, narrow into a niche, or lose relevance to a new generation. But if the protocol holds up, it becomes the foundation for something bigger “Bluesky CEO” than any single app or company.
“If the protocol is widely adopted, it’s a huge success,” he said. If people rethink how social works, and Bluesky becomes the focal point of social media change, that’s a success.
The bigger it makes itself.