Jay Graber
American software engineer (born 1991)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lantian "Jay" Graber (born 1991) is an American software engineer who served as the first CEO of Bluesky, a microblogging social platform. In March 2026, she stepped down as CEO to become Bluesky's chief innovation officer.
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1991 (age 34–35)
Jay Graber | |
|---|---|
Graber in February 2025 | |
| Born | Lantian Graber 1991 (age 34–35) Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Education | University of Pennsylvania (BA) |
| Occupation | 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 that Twitter would work with, but evolved to become a competitor to Twitter following the 2022 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk and the subsequent severing of ties between Bluesky and Twitter.[5][6][10][11] During her tenure as CEO of Bluesky, Graber facilitated the launch and rise of their Bluesky social app and its rise to over 40 million users.[12]
Notably, in a 2025 interview at South By Southwest, Graber made headlines for her shirt with the Latin words mundus sine caesaribus 'a world without caesars', which resembled a shirt Mark Zuckerberg had worn months earlier with the Latin phrase aut Zuck aut nihil 'a Zuck or nothing', a play on the phrase "either Caesar or nothing".[13] The move by Graber was received as a jab at Zuckerberg and tech billionaires, and a nod to Bluesky's promise of being "billionaire-proof".[14]
In March 2026, Graber announced she would be stepping down as CEO of Bluesky and moving to the role of chief innovation officer for the company.[15] While a permanent replacement has not been chosen, venture capitalist Toni Schneider serves as the current interim CEO.[16][12]
