Who is Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky?
Officially launched in February 2023, the microblogging platform Bluesky, with 33-year-old Jay Graber as its CEO, got off to a timid start. Initially limited to a number of selected subscribers, a year later it opened up to the public and today appears as a safe haven for those who are fleeing X. Developed starting in 2019 within Twitter, Bluesky is now a public benefit corporation that has hybrid articles of association making it both a for-profit company as well as having a mission to make a positive impact on society. Unlike its competitors, it is an open-protocol operation, where the technology is accessible to all and is improved as users add to it. In an interview in March with technology news site The Verge, Graber said that the company's mission is "to build something that's actually a better social ecosystem for people."
Because it's all about stories and the way they're told, Graber likes to tell journalists that, when she was a child, her favorite storybook was about Robin Hood. And her given first name, another fortuitous storytelling coincidence, is Lantian, meaning blue sky in Mandarin, her mother's native language. It holds the promise of "boundless freedom" she told Forbes magazine in 2023, and "the opportunities she [her mother] didn't have." While still a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber learned about bitcoin during an internship in China. Influenced as a teenager by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the desire to be free from banking institutions, she was given a $1,000 (€947) grant to create a time-based bank, a services exchange system without the need for currency.
