Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.
Jay Graber, CEO of the Bluesky social network, moved to Seattle during the pandemic, attracted to the region in part by the trademark gray skies, ironically. She doesn’t feel bad about staying inside and reading, writing or working on drizzly winter days.
But she also loves the outdoors. Her proudest Pacific Northwest moment: finding a matsutake mushroom under a fir tree, a species so prized that locations are treated like trade secrets.
Graber, in other words, is someone who values extraordinary things and the environments that allow them to thrive. This comes through in the tech ecosystem she oversees.
Most social networks today are walled gardens, where one company runs the servers, owns the data, and sets the rules. The AT Protocol (which Graber pronounces “at”) is an open technical standard for social media that Bluesky’s team built as the foundation for its network. Bluesky is just one app on top of it, and in theory you could move your posts and followers to another app or server with different moderation or algorithms without losing your social graph.
“The hope is that whatever happens with Bluesky — however big it makes itself — the protocol is something we hope to endure a really long time,” Graber said in a recent interview, “because it becomes foundational to not just Bluesky but a lot of apps and a lot of use cases.”
However big it makes itself. The phrase stands out in a world of tech startup leaders intent on scaling their creations toward billion-dollar exits through force of will.
Graber instead sees Bluesky as “a collective organism,” brought to life by users, grounded in the decentralized protocol like soil on the forest floor. “I did not anticipate what Bluesky became when I started this, and so that very much makes it feel like it’s something that’s growing, that I’m overseeing, but also has a life of its own,” she said.
Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing partner of Avalanche, an early investor in Bluesky, first met Graber in 2022 at a small gathering of technologists, investors, and academics. What struck her: Graber was the only one in the room focused on building, not just talking. While others discussed big ideas, Graber was working through the details of how to make them real.
, 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 calls Graber “incredibly low-ego for being so young and successful.” At the same time, she isn’t afraid to be provocative, like when she wore shift that read “Mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”) at SXSW in 2025 — styled exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”) shirt from a Meta event.
“You can just tell immediately that she’s never going to give up. If Bluesky failed, she’d probably build something similar again.” That’s the definition of “life’s work,” Donnelly said: everything Graber has done to date has led her to this point.
Finding her own way
Graber was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a math teacher father and a mother who had emigrated from China. Graber’s given first name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. It’s a pure coincidence, given that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would later choose the name Bluesky as a project inside the social network long before Graber was involved.
Her mom chose the name to symbolize freedom and boundless possibility, reflecting opportunities that she didn’t have growing up in China.
Those themes emerged early for Graber. Around age five, she resisted her mother’s structured attempts to teach her to read, running around the backyard instead. Her dad took a different approach: he brought her to the library and asked what interested her. She discovered Robin Hood, and read every version the library had, from children’s books to arcane Old English editions. The story captivated her: renegades pushing back against centralized authority.
As she continued to read, she was drawn to stories of scientific discovery, and eventually to writers who imagined new ways society could work, such as Ursula K. Le Guin.
, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology, and Society, an interdisciplinary major that let her explore technology from a humanistic perspective while taking computer science classes.
After graduating in 2013, she worked as a digital rights activist, moved to San Francisco, enrolled in coding bootcamp, and worked at a blockchain startup. she found her way to a cryptocurrency mining operation in a former ammunition factory in rural Washington state — what she calls her “cocoon period” — where she spent long hours studying code in isolation.
She went on to work at a privacy-focused cryptocurrency company, founded an event planning startup called Happening, and kept searching for the right environment for her own ambitions.
Origins of Bluesky
Then, in December 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund a project to develop an open, decentralized protocol for social media. He called it Bluesky.
Graber saw the thread and felt the pull.
As detailed in an April 2025 New Yorker story, Dorsey’s team had set up a group chat to explore the idea. Graber joined and noticed the conversation was scattered — people would pop in, make suggestions, and disappear. No broader vision was coalescing.
Graber started doing the work: gathering research, writing an overview of existing decentralized protocols, trying to provide some signal amid the noise.
By early 2021, Dorsey and then-Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal were interviewing candidates to lead the project. Graber stood out in part because she didn’t just tell them what they wanted to hear. She accepted, on one condition: Bluesky would be legally independent from Twitter.
It was a prescient demand. That November, Dorsey resigned as Twitter’s CEO. The following spring, Elon Musk began buying up shares. By October 2022, he owned the company, and promptly cut ties with Bluesky, canceling a $13 million service agreement.
Graber was on her own. But that was the point.
“You can’t build a decentralized protocol that lots of parties are going to adopt if it’s very much owned and within one of the existing players,” she told Forbes in 2023.
‘High agency, low ego’
Today, Bluesky has more than 40 million users and a team of around 30 employees. The company has no official headquarters — fitting for a decentralized social network — though Graber and several employees work out of a co-working space in Seattle.
The platform is still far smaller than X, which reports more than 500 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, which has around 300 million. Mastodon, another decentralized alternative, has about 10 million registered users. But Bluesky has grown steadily, and its open protocol gives it a different ambition — not just a destination, but the infrastructure on which others build.
Graber runs the company with what she calls a “high agency, low ego” philosophy.
“Everyone on the team exercises a lot of agency in how they do their job, and what they think the right direction is,” she said. “They try to pick up stuff that needs to be done whether or not it’s in their job description — that’s the low ego part.”
Overall, she said, this has made for a very effective small team, although she acknowledges the trade-off: “Sometimes people have strong opinions and wander off in their own directions.” So getting people back in alignment, she said, is a big part of her job.
She describes her leadership style as collaborative rather than top-down. “I try to cultivate people’s strengths on the team and bring together a synthesis of that,” she said.
Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board in the early years, is no longer involved. Ultimately, he and Graber saw things differently: Dorsey wanted Bluesky to be more purist about decentralization. Graber wanted to “catch the moment” and bring people into something accessible, even if it was somewhat centralized at the start.
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“When we disagreed, he ended up just going his own way, as opposed to trying to force me to do a thing,” she said. Based on her experience, Graber said, Dorsey would hold his position and disagree, but not use his power to mandate a specific direction.
Mike Masnick, the TechDirt founder and writer whose essay “Protocols, Not Platforms” helped inspire the project, now holds Dorsey’s board seat.
Graber describes herself as a “pragmatic idealist.” Pure idealists, she said, pursue visions that can’t work in the real world. Pure pragmatists never produce meaningful change. The key is holding both: a vision of how things could be, and the practical steps to get there.
The implications of AI
Graber sees the same dynamics playing out with artificial intelligence. The question, she said, isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s who controls it.
“If AI ends up controlled by only one company whose goal is power or profit maximization, I think we can anticipate that will lead to bad outcomes for a lot of people,” she said. On the other hand, if AI tools are widely available and open source, “you have this broader experimentation” — with all the chaos that entails, but also the potential for solutions that serve users rather than platforms.
She imagines a future where people might bring their own AI agents to a social network, the way Bluesky already lets users choose their own algorithms and moderation services.
“Maybe you can even run this at home in your closet,” she said. “Then you have your own AI agent that protects your own privacy, doing things for you — that’s a human empowering technology that’s working in your interest, not in the interest of a company that does not have your welfare at heart.”
She thinks a lot about historical trajectories. The printing press, she noted, ushered in a period of chaos — new technology disrupting society — followed by the construction of new institutions that made use of widespread literacy, such as universities. academic journals, and peer review.
“We’re in another period of chaos around new technologies,” she said. “We have to build new institutions that everyone having access to the internet.”
The AT Protocol, in her view, could be something like that. Bluesky the company might rise or fall, narrow into a niche, or lose relevance with a new generation. But if the protocol takes hold, it becomes the foundation for something larger than any single app or company.
“If the protocol becomes widely adopted, that’s a huge success,” she said. “If people rethink how social works, and Bluesky becomes the origin point for social media to change, that’s a success.”
However big it makes itself.
