When Jay Graber became CEO of social networking startup Bluesky, she’d never held such a high-profile job.
Then a 30-year-old software engineer, her only experience running a company came at the helm of “a small, marginal project” called Happening, an events-focused social platform she founded in 2019, she tells CNBC Make It. Her pathway to her current job was unconventional: She was originally hired by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to run an internal research project called Bluesky.
The vision, essentially, was an open-source, “decentralized” version of Twitter where individual moderators, unaffiliated with either company, could host their own versions of the social media platform — each with their own rules around content moderation, data privacy and censorship.
Graber, now 34, officially became a CEO by spinning Bluesky off into its own company in October 2021, explaining later that the project needed less bureaucratic oversight to quickly grow. Bluesky and Twitter remained close until April 2022, when billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X and severed all ties with Bluesky.
As rival platforms jumped to poach ex-Twitter users, Graber decided to join the fray and launch Bluesky as its own social media platform. Since then, it’s grown where multiple other so-called Twitter alternatives have shuttered or stagnated. It now has an estimated 38-plus million registered users, up from roughly 13 million in October 2024, according to Bcounter, a website that tracks the app’s users. (A Bluesky spokesperson declined to comment on traffic numbers.)
