Jay Graber

Lantian "Jay" Graber (born 1991) is an American software engineer who is the CEO of Bluesky, a microblogging social platform, created in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, Inc.

Jay Graber
Graber in August 2024
Born	Lantian Graber 1991 (age 33–34) Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.
Education	University of Pennsylvania (BA)
Occupation(s)	CEO of Bluesky, software engineer
Years active	2014–present

Early life

Lantian Graber was born in 1991 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a mother of Chinese descent, an acupuncturist by trade, and a mathematics teacher father of Swiss descent.^[1][2] Her mother, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and emigrated in the 1980s, named her daughter Lantian (蓝天), meaning "blue sky" in Chinese, as a wish for her to have "boundless freedom".^[1] The similarity between Graber's given name and Bluesky is purely coincidental; Jack Dorsey had chosen the name "Bluesky" for the research initiative before Graber became involved with the project.^[3]

Graber enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and later graduated in 2013 with a BA in Science, Technology, and Society.^[1][4] During her senior year she won a grant to co-found a student time bank program.^[1]

Career

In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California.^[1] She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where she soldered bitcoin mining equipment.^[1] In 2016, she began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency.^[1][5][6] In 2019, she founded the event planning website Happening, Inc.^[1][5][6]

In August 2021, Graber became the first CEO of Bluesky, a microblogging social platform and public benefit company.^[7][8][9] Bluesky had been conceived as a new initiative by Twitter's original owners in 2019, but evolved to become a competitor to Twitter following the 2022 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.^{[5][6][10][11]} Her net worth is estimated at $5 million.^[12]