Introduction
Lantian "Jay" Graber (born 1991) is an American software engineer and the CEO of Bluesky, a microblogging social platform and public benefit company.
Early life and education
Graber was born in 1991 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her mother named her Lantian, meaning "blue sky" in Mandarin Chinese, as a wish for her to have "boundless freedom".
Graber enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. During her senior year, she won a grant to co-found a student time bank program. Graber graduated from Penn with a Bachelor of Science in Science, Technology, and Society.
Career
In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California. She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, soldering bitcoin mining equipment.
In 2016, Graber began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency. In 2019, she founded Happening, Inc., an event planning website.
Graber was named as the first CEO of Bluesky in August 2021, two years after the project was first announced as a Twitter initiative. Despite her name also meaning blue sky, the project Bluesky was not named after her.