Pod Insights Equity Podcast What’s next for Bluesky? CEO Jay Graber on growth, community, and decentralization About this episode Happy new year, Equity listeners! At the end of 2024, all eyes were on Bluesky's rapid growth. According to the social platform’s CEO Jay Graber, however, their goal is not just to recreate Twitter. Today, Rebecca is handing the reins over to TechCrunch senior reporter Max Zeff, who sat down with Graber at our last StrictlyVC event.
Listen to the full episode to hear pair dig into the company’s success and why, according to Graber, people need to, “be able to control the social networks they communicate on," regardless of whether that continues to be Bluesky or another federated social platform.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Anthony Ha? This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.
0:17 Rebecca Bellan? Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. It's officially 2025, so Happy New Year. I'm Rebecca Beland, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. As we mentioned on Friday, all eyes are on Blue Sky's rapid growth. But according to the social platform's CEO, Jay Graber, their goal is not to just recreate Twitter. Today, I'm handing the reins over to TechCrunch senior reporter Max Zeff, who sat down with Graber at our last Strictly VC event. The pair dug into the company's success and why, according to Graber, people need to, quote, "be able to control the social networks they communicate on," regardless of whether that continues to be Blue Sky or another federated social platform. Let's take a listen.
1:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, so starter packs get a lot of people on at once, basically, because anyone can create one. You create a list of all the accounts that you want to add to it, all the feeds you want to add to it, because anyone can create their own custom feeds. And then you can send that with a link to your friend or share that on social media. You can even put up a QR code, which we did yesterday at the Wired conference, where people can scan it and then download the app and immediately be onboarded into a curated experience that your friend made for you. And we did this because, actually, a lot of people in the team have tried Twitter multiple times, and for some people, it didn't stick until their friend went in and followed 200 people for them. And then they were realizing, oh, okay, now I've found this niche that I didn't know was here that I'm interested in now.
1:45 Speaker 02 So to overcome that problem and also make it easier for people to break network effects and come over all at once, we built what is essentially an automated version of what my friend's friend did for her, which was just follow 200 people that your friend picks for you.
1:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's really smart, and it's really helped the platform grow a lot. I think yesterday, you guys reached 24 million users. Is that right?
2:07 Speaker 02 Yep.
2:08 Speaker 03 And how many do you have? How many did you have at the start of this year? I think it was like closer to like a million or like a few million or something like that.
2:15 Speaker 02 A few million, something like that. Yeah, we opened up in February, so we were invite only. So we were three million, we grew up to three million through the invite system. And then we opened up in February and that was how many we'd gotten through just people inviting each other through invite links. And then we think we grew up to about 10 million fairly quickly from there. So yeah, that February was a public launch.
2:34 Speaker 03 And I kind of wanted to talk about your origins for a second. I mean, you started inside of Twitter. It was funded by Jack Dorsey, who was playing a big role in the origins of Blue Sky. But it was also created largely because of this paper called Protocols Not Platforms. So I'm wondering if you could talk about what that paper is and how much it's influenced what Blue Sky is today.
2:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it's a pretty strange story. I never actually worked for Twitter. I was pulled into the Blue Sky project as an outside expert on decentralized social networks. I was building decentralized social protocols, building a social app on my own as a developer at the time. And Mike Mazanek, this tech journalist, wrote a paper in 2019 called Protocols Not Platforms that put out a vision of how social media could be different if Twitter were originally a protocol, or any of these social platforms were. And, you know, you could treat it more like a public good, more like an open platform that anyone could build on. And he proposed that this could be a path towards resolving some of the thorny issues around moderation and free speech and all these things, because now you have a platform where if people don't like it, they can fork it, they can modify it, they can go off and like, you know, society
3:40 Speaker 02 can sort of co-evolve the platform along with changing values. So Mike now is on the board. When Jack left, Mike replaced him on the board. And we've just been steering towards that initial vision that was set forth in the early days when, you know, Mike pitched Twitter on it.
3:55 Speaker 03 And I mean, you, you have an interesting role, because you are not just the CEO of Blue Sky, the platform, you're also the kind of steward of the protocol that it's built on top of. So if people don't like Blue Sky, the platform, they can join another app that's built on top of the at protocol. Am I understanding that correctly?
4:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. The at protocol, we have heard it described as a toolbox for building social applications. And that's pretty accurate, I think, because there's lots of pieces to it. We made it pretty modular, composable, so you can just use the identity piece, you can build a whole new app on it, you can build a whole new moderation service, or you can do the whole thing from scratch yourself and have the pieces interoperate.
4:35 Speaker 03 I'm curious if you think that those roles are at odds with each other because on the one hand, you're in charge of this protocol, this ecosystem that's supposed to be very open. And then on the other hand, you're trying to grow this platform and you're competing with some pretty big players and you have investors. And I'm just curious if you think that those roles could ever conflict with each other.
4:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, our thesis was that driving growth and dog fooding the protocol, so actually building something that had scale on it was the best way to get attention on the protocol and to make sure that it was really robust and could serve something at scale. Our original goal was to build just the protocol and then get Twitter on it. And so Twitter would be the client application and we would maybe roll it out, you know, piece at a time. But of course, that didn't happen. We went ahead and built our own app. But then the path towards protocol adoption now has been getting devs and users on. And so having a lot of users and an open social graph, open APIs brings more developers who start to check it out. And social has just been really closed for a long time. Like, you know, the age where you could go and build a new client app or build a new experiment on Twitter
5:38 Speaker 02 or Facebook was like 10 years ago. There's a lot of appetite, constant appetite for reinvention, but not having that open network has made it not possible. So now that we've got users and we've built on an open foundation from the ground up, everything is open source, protocols are open, API is open. That means that now this is driving attention into the protocol ecosystem.
5:57 Speaker 03 So the idea is that, you've said this before, you can vote with your feet. You're not locked in to this platform, which is really different from the way that social media has occurred forever, basically.
6:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's a lot of ways to build protocols. There's also a lot of other decentralized social protocols out there. But our design philosophy really, as you said, revolved around allowing users to vote with their feet because, you know, when you try to make something like 100% user choice, there's too much complexity for people to manage. Like, you don't want to have to set up everything about your experience just to use the thing. And so we offer you a lot of defaults when you use the Blue Sky app. But if you don't like our defaults, we give you the option to change them, both within the app and outside of the app if you want to choose a new experience entirely.
6:37 Speaker 03 I think it's really cool what you guys have built and I think a lot of people have thought that this is really cool right now. I mean, that I can go on a social media platform and I can choose my own adventure, kind of. Like, I can choose who I want to see, I can choose who I don't want to see. I can just have like a following feed that doesn't involve Elon Musk, which is something that a lot of people really want right now. But I'm curious how you think about advertisers playing into this, because advertising is the way that all of social media has basically been funded up until this point. And I just, I don't quite understand how it fits into a decentralized social media network like Blue Sky. So do advertisers have a home on Blue Sky?
7:14 Speaker 02 I think advertising, the way it's played out with social networks, is a bit like the resource curse. Because once social networks realized that, you know, you could trap users in here, just give them one feed and push advertisements in it, it turned out to be so lucrative that no other business models were explored. And then because the network effects are so powerful, users found it really hard to leave. And that means that you can degrade the experience significantly until users finally give up and leave. And even if they're done with it, they might still stay on for professional reasons or whatever, because it's become so important. You know, one really important thing for us is to not replicate this model. And we've done that by, in some ways, locking things open. So the fact that we don't control a single feed that we can degrade, if we push a bunch of advertisements into it, people could, first of all, just pick a different feed,
7:59 Speaker 02 because there's an open marketplace of feeds. But then if we close that down, then they could pick a different app. And so that means that we're leaving the door open for competition in this regard, always.
8:08 Speaker 03 Right, but does that mean that advertisers can never be on Blue Sky?
8:10 Speaker 02 I don't think that's necessarily true, but I think that the ways that we would explore advertising if we did would be much more user intent-driven. And so we want to keep our incentives aligned with users and making sure that we're not turning into the model where the user's attention is the product, because you've got them locked in and you've trapped a bunch of eyeballs on your platform. But rather, you know, it's user choice that keeps them on the app because they have options to leave. And then whatever kind of advertising you do then has to fit into the model of what users and creators want.
8:38 Speaker 03 Right, so of course you have to think about, okay, what are these other business models that you can explore now? And I think one of them that I think your COO talked about yesterday was subscriptions that are coming this year. Is that right?
8:50 Speaker 02 Well, timelines have kind of been thrown up in the air. We've gotten a lot of growth recently. But yes, eventually subscriptions, because the goal there is to start experimenting with ways we can add value, start to get money flowing through the ecosystem. We really believe that money follows value, so we're seeing what users are already paying each other for, like what users are asking for, what people are building, and then going in those directions. We try to follow the pull of the market in as many ways as we can.
9:14 Speaker 03 So on other platforms, on X, if I subscribe, I get access to like an AI chatbot and verified or something. So what do I get if I subscribe on Blue Sky?
9:23 Speaker 02 Well, even right now, we are selling custom domain names, so you can have like a custom domain as your username. This might be part of it down the road. But as for what's going to be coming out in our subscription model, I will announce that when we have it.
9:35 Speaker 03 Fair enough.
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10:20 Speaker 03 What about verification? Well, first off, I want to ask you just broadly, like, why has verification become this like enormous thing? With every social media platform, that verification comes up time and time again. I'm just curious to get your thoughts on it broadly.
10:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, there's, I think, the question of just authenticity and dealing with impersonation, which can be a real problem, like people can get scammed, or there can be fake news spread around by somebody who's pretending they're someone they're not. And so that's one issue, and that can kind of be handled partly through moderation and other ways through reputation signals of making sure this is the right account. And then there's, I think verification is also in some ways about status. Like, people care a lot about what it means, they care a lot about like what is, and like who's giving it. Generally, the model is the app itself gives it because the app itself gives you every experience you have. And the model that we've built around feeds, around moderation, have these large third-party ecosystems. And whatever we do, we're never going to be the only provider. So the way that verification works right now is through domain names.
11:17 Speaker 02 So if you have a well-known domain, like TechCrunch can be techcrunch.com as your username. And then you know that only TechCrunch could have done that because they have to control that domain name. And that's the only way they could set it as their username. So this builds off the existing trust model of the web. Our goal is to make social like the web again. And after many years of starting to accumulate trust in certain domain names that have a strong brand reputation, we can just build off that. That doesn't solve it for everybody because you might not have a domain name that's associated with you. But it solves it for some folks. So right now, that's what we've been encouraging people to do.
11:51 Speaker 03 And when do you think verification will come to the platform?
11:54 Speaker 02 Beyond that, well, it's an area of active discussion right now. We've put it out there. People have been talking about it on the app, on GitHub issues. And it's something that we want to make sure that there's enough alignment and community buy-in for anything that we roll out so that it's not just something... Because it can really start to change the incentives of the game when you introduce something like that.
12:13 Speaker 03 Sure. And I wanted to talk a little bit about your competitors in the space and who you think your competitors are here.
12:21 Speaker 02 Every social app that doesn't give you the ability to leave and just gives you a single centralized feed.
12:25 Speaker 03 So I mean, there's some pretty competitive folks in there. There's Elon Musk and with X and Mark Zuckerberg with Threads. And there's Mastodon too, which is another decentralized player. But I mean, Musk and Zuckerberg are two people who famously, people say you don't want to compete with them. And it's really interesting, your approach to this where you have this app where you say that people can vote with their feet if they want versus... It's a pretty open approach versus two of the most competitive entrepreneurs of our generation. And I'm just curious, how are you handling the pressure of competing with those two people?
13:00 Speaker 02 I mean, at heart, I am a digital rights activist. That's how I started off my career. I think this is just the direction society needs to go. People need to be able to control the social networks that they communicate on because it's become really vital infrastructure. So I just think it's necessary to be done. Like, you need to have open social networks that can evolve along with society. And there have been very visionary founders in social, but I think we've seen that whoever started the company can change. And, you know, people can come in with new ideas. And you're putting a lot of trust in one person to be right when you have a very centralized model that does not allow other kinds of evolution. And so I think social needs to be something where anyone can come in and start trying a new model of curation, of moderation,
13:42 Speaker 02 because these are hot topics where there's a lot of social implications of what social apps show you. And there should be the ability for builders who want to contribute to solving some of the problems that social media has created to be able to come in and start building again and innovating.
13:56 Speaker 03 Do you think that your business is reliant on Blue Sky, the platform, growing a lot? Or do you think that if people are building more successful apps on the at protocol, that there's also business opportunity for you there?
14:13 Speaker 02 I think there's paths to success through both. We watch the market, we watch how it evolves, and we take advantage of opportunities as they come up. Like I said, we follow the pull. And so when a lot of users are choosing us because they want a better experience, we listen to them and we see what they're saying. And right now, a lot of journalists are saying this is a place where they can get a lot more eyes on their work. We don't deprioritize links or anything like that. Like, you can get tons more engagement, tons more click-throughs. Creators are saying that, you know, they're making more sales, they're making, converting more people to subscribers on wherever they have subscriptions going for their own work. And that is just really positive and compelling. Like, we want to provide that for people and give people what they need.
14:52 Speaker 03 I mean, you raised a Series A. It was $15 million. You announced it in October. I think it was closed maybe a little bit before that. But I'm just curious, I mean, you had about half as many users then, and I think this was pre the era where everyone was talking that Blue Sky has the juice. So I'm just curious, are you guys looking to raise again soon? Are you getting attention from investors right now?
15:13 Speaker 02 Definitely getting attention. And again, I think we kind of, yeah. I've learned that fundraising is a very continual process, ideally where you like build relationships over time. We also really like to get to know people and we have pretty close relationships with the people who've invested. Early on, we had angel investors who, for example, one of them used to lead the dev platform at Twitter before they were opening up the APIs and they shut them all down again. And then he was like, oh, the only way that this is going to work and people are going to build again is on an open protocol. People like that have been super helpful. And so we just try to build relationships with the right people over time and find ways to bring them into the story.
15:46 Speaker 03 What are you telling these investors right now? Because I think that right now, the business model, I think of it, is still super young. I mean, you're in this growth stage right now. So, you know, what are you saying to investors right now to get them on board?
15:59 Speaker 02 Well, growth is super important to us right now. We're really focused on scaling, growth, user retention. We're a really small team. We have 24 million users and 20 team members who are holding this all together. And so we're just following the demand of the market at the moment. But I think we try to communicate our protocol vision, the dev ecosystem vision, so that people see that there's more than just a social app here. There's more than just one path to success, but also the social app is like a lobby to the open social web that we're building. And so we're bringing a lot of people in the door right now. And it's kind of like a hotel that's under construction. There's other wings out back where people are building things. Some of them are just, you know, custom rooms, like the custom feeds or moderation services. Some of them are like entire new buildings being constructed out back, like new apps. But right now, we're trying to make the experience in the lobby really good so people don't turn around and leave.
16:44 Speaker 03 Yeah. And one of the ways you're making that experience better is through content moderation, which is a thing that has to happen on every social media platform, including Blue Sky. And I think I saw recently that you are up to 100 people doing content moderation on Blue Sky now. Is that correct?
17:02 Speaker 02 We usually don't give away the exact numbers. I don't know if some people on the team might have said, but yeah, it's just that we have a content moderation team and we use a combination of automated systems and human systems. And we have a stackable approach where on top of what we build, anyone else can run a moderation service. So the same way that we do moderation, we use a software called ozone, so the protective ozone layer for the atmosphere. And that's open source. Anyone else can run it. There are people running versions of this and they run their own custom lablers that any user in the app can plug in and have that moderation be a part of their experience. And then if you want to move away from the defaults that we have set, it's possible for other apps to just take these pieces and recombine them any way that they want.
17:42 Speaker 03 I mean, Meta came out recently and said that they've been ham-fisted with their content moderation on threads, which I think is true. And I think you could look at X and say, they've been pretty lax about content moderation in the last year. So where do you fall in this, on the X to thread spectrum?
18:00 Speaker 02 I mean, content moderation is just one of those eternally really tricky problems. We try to take a middle path of making the right trade-offs, making the right compromises on things, and then we try to create a good experience. At the end of the day, we're really focused on user choice and user experience. And so that is meant prioritizing things like anti-harassment tooling and from automated systems to the way that, you know, quote posts work. Like, we let you opt out of quote posts if you feel like you're getting dog piled through the quote posts. We let you go in and, you know, moderate your own reply section under your threads that you start because that's something that people have asked for. And we think of each person's microblog as essentially like their blog. Like, it's actually very similar. You can host it yourself if you want, on your own hardware.
18:43 Speaker 02 So then our approach to moderation here is just, let's create the best experience for the most people that we can come up with. And then if you want more stuff on top, you can build more on top. And if you want to move outside of it, again, you can vote with your feet and leave.
18:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, and I mean, you just had this event yesterday, which people are calling like the first breaking news event on Blue Sky, which is like the South Korea event with their government there, this like, you know, alleged coup. And I'm curious, like, did you run into any problems yesterday with content moderation for, you know, such a hot event like that?
19:14 Speaker 02 I think we're always just adapting. I mean, it's like also a moving target because, you know, every social platform becomes a site where there's bots, there's like people coming on trying to disrupt. And so, you know, we have both a combination of like automated and human systems where we're trying in real time to respond to how are things changing given this event or this new influx?
19:33 Speaker 03 Yeah. And last question for you, I know we're out of time here, but I just wanted to, you know, talk about this is a really kind of bold approach to social media that a lot of people have been trying right now and for several years now. But I'm just curious about, you're the platform, you're the person who seems to be doing it right at this moment. And I'm curious what your vision is for the next generation of social media?
19:58 Speaker 02 Make social like the open web. Have the ability for people to build things, you know, new sites to spring up, new experiences to be built, for the core layers of it to become standardized so that people can build on this and know that it's stable, long-term infrastructure. And then have people be able to rely on this as something that becomes part of their digital life that sticks around. So the apps and the services and the ways that people will use social will always come and go, like new trends will come along, people want to do new things. But then things like your online identity, we hope to be something that becomes something you can port between sites and becomes a lot more durable, like email or a phone number. Because, you know, creators are told these days, a lot of the advice on blogs is make sure you build your own email list, because that's what's going
20:42 Speaker 02 to stay around if, you know, the algorithm changes or you get demonetized or something. Because email is a protocol and that's stuck around. So we want the at protocol to be like that. So in the future, if I ask like, where are you at online, you can give me your at protocol and that's your website. It's like your domain name that you own. And underneath that is Blue Sky and every other app that's built on the at protocol, all linked together. And then, you know, I can follow you on Blue Sky if I have that, or if not, I could just, you know, connect with you through some other means.
21:08 Speaker 03 All right. Well, thank you so much for your time, Jay.
21:10 Speaker 02 Thank you.
21:13 Speaker 02 Check out Blue Sky.
21:18 Speaker 04 Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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