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.)
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Bluesky is still small compared to X and Meta-owned Threads, which each have at least 115 million daily active users, according to a TechCrunch report on data from market intelligence firm Similarweb. And much of its recent growth is inescapably tied to the most recent U.S. presidential election, which Donald Trump won with Musk’s support, leading some politically liberal accounts to flee X.
The platform has a reputation for being a politically left-leaning alternative to X, a characterization that Graber pushes back against, saying she sees a wide variety of “communities” on the platform. The point of Bluesky is to “create any sort of community, find any sort of interest you want,” she says.
Regardless, the past four years have been some combination of exciting and terrifying for Graber and Bluesky’s small team of 20-plus employees, she says.
Here, Graber discusses the hectic weeks after Musk’s Twitter takeover, the challenges of running a fast-growing social app amid fierce competition and why her ultimate vision for Bluesky’s success extends beyond its user count.
CNBC Make It: When Musk bought Twitter, what was your initial reaction?
Graber: It was very confusing to navigate. Because we were outside [Twitter], we didn’t get internal company memos, and so we had to read the press to keep up with what was going on. And then our contacts within Twitter started to drop off, one by one. Some were let go. Some left on their own.
I had a bi-weekly standing call with a large rotating group of people [inside Twitter]. One week after the acquisition, I showed up to the call and nobody came. I showed up the next week, and nobody came. I realized that nobody had cleared off their calendars or deactivated their Twitter accounts. They were just ghost accounts, and everyone was gone.
We were like, “Well, what do we do next? Let’s go ahead and build the app.”
As ex-Twitter users joined Bluesky, did you worry that your company didn’t have the manpower or experience to handle the sudden traffic and attention?
It was definitely a lot of excitement, as well as nervousness, about what this meant. We weren’t sure what it meant. We’d been very technology-focused up until then, and our guess was: This wasn’t a million people very excited about the [open-source, decentralized] protocol.
And honestly, we simply weren’t equipped to handle this influx of users. We were suddenly scaling up the production database to [accommodate] 100,000 more users, and fixing protocol bugs on the fly.
People were excited about having a new social app to go to. But what were their expectations versus what were we trying to build? There was always a bit of a mismatch there. We were actually trying to structurally change the nature of social media, rather than just build a Twitter clone. This was hard to get across.
Early on, people expected this to be a one-to-one Twitter replacement. And we looked very similar, [but] we kept trying to communicate all of these features we were building that were very different: This is federated. This has custom feeds [and] lets you bring your own domain name.
What have been your biggest challenges since launching Bluesky’s platform?
Scaling a rapidly growing, viral social app while also building a new, untested open-source technology is a very challenging problem. I think we were all scared that the app was going to fall over, the technology was going to break.
It’s been really about empowering every person on the team — because it’s been a very small team — to rise to meet the challenge and do what needs to be done in order to get us to the next stage.
Something I’ve told the team many times, when it felt like the challenges were just too big for us to meet: ‘This is how everyone else has done it in the past. It’s just the people you have in the room. You haven’t done it before, but here’s your chance. Be the hero you want to see. Nobody’s coming to save us.’
Do you have any personal traits that, in your opinion, make you an effective CEO?
I think I’m very persistent when I care about something, and I’m very clear about the things that I care about.
I spent a lot of time early in my career figuring out what I most wanted to pursue, and then I pursued them. When I got into programming, I wrote down “expand empowerment tech” in a notebook for myself, and then everything I’ve done has fallen under that category.
We’ve gotten further than [other] decentralized social attempts and Twitter alternative attempts. Succeeding on both fronts has been tricky, but I’m proud of what we’ve done so far. We’ve achieved what a lot of people said was impossible early on, and made a usable, scalable, open, decentralized app.
On the other hand, Bluesky hasn’t replaced all the ways that we use social. Long-term, our vision of success is for our protocol to be the foundation for the social web, where every social app builds on an open-source protocol.
I think when you’re focused in what you want, and you stay persistent about it, you can get a lot further than if you scatter your interests a lot.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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