JayGraber

LubaWelcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.Link

JayThanks for having me.Link

LubaI want to start with a fact that I thought was really exciting, interesting, random, and fun, and it's the fact that your Chinese name, Lantian, actually means blue sky, which from what I've read, is completely accidental. But let's start at the origin story. Tell me more about how you grew up and who were your parents? Why did your mom name you Blue Sky? And perhaps a little bit of the story of her escape from the Cultural Revolution?Link

JayWell, my dad was a math teacher in Oklahoma. His grandfather was from Switzerland. And so that's where I get the last name, Graber. My mom was a Chinese immigrant. She came here in the 80s, and she grew up in that generation that was sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. And, you know, that was a very chaotic period in Chinese history.Link

I think she always felt like she didn't get the full opportunities that she wanted to have. Like, she almost missed going to college. She was in the cohort that was sent down, and then they had like a two year window to apply for college. So she did eventually get into college, but a bit delayed. And then when she came to the US, she felt like she was getting all these opportunities. I learned recently she came here with $6 like, wow, 6 USD, got on a plane, came here, could barely afford a sandwich.Link

LubaThat's crazy.Link

JayYeah.Link

LubaWhat did that look like for her? What did this escape story look like? Why did she decide to board the plane to the US?Link

JayWell, by the time that she came, China was opening up, so it wasn't like she, you know, like some people have dramatic escape stories, like in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't like that. It wasn't like she, like, swam to Hong Kong or anything. Like she, you know, was living her life in China.Link

She was like, you know, teaching, I think, English at a university. And then she had the opportunity to come study in the US. The missionary reached out to her, and then I think she got accepted to two Christian universities, one in the middle of America, in Oklahoma, which is where I ended up, and the other one in New Zealand. And so she chose between the two and picked America and Oklahoma, which I don't think she had any conception of what different cities were like in the US or like where Oklahoma was like, she just kind of showed up and she met my dad, I think, on her first day in the country.Link

LubaOh, wow. On the first day.Link

JayYeah. They met at a party because my dad was involved in the local Asian-American community, because he had taught English in Korea for many years. And so he had a lot of ties to sort of the Asian community in Tulsa, which was very small at the time. And so it was a very small circle. He was a Christian, of course, so he kind of crossed paths in this, like Asian American, Christian, Oklahoma community.Link

LubaVery niche.Link

JayYes. Very niche, very specific. And then, yeah, that's how they met. And, you know, I was the only child and grew up, with just a lot of just, I don't know, a lot of normal experiences of growing up in the suburbs, like, had a fairly normal upbringing, I would say. And, my mom, her hope for me was that I would have all the opportunities that she was denied in China or that she didn't fully have access to. So she gave me the Chinese name Lantian, which means blue sky, symbolizing this boundless freedom and possibility that she had hoped for me to have.Link

And that was always a part of my understanding of my name, which I don't think is super common. At least I don't know very many other Chinese people named that. And then when I saw years later, I saw that Twitter had named this project Bluesky. I was like, oh, this is fate. Like, I'm working on decentralized social platforms. Like, I'm really wanting to build a social network, and it's my name in Chinese, so I have to work on this.Link

LubaYeah. That's crazy. It definitely seems like destiny. Did you hear a lot about the Cultural Revolution from your mom growing up? Because I hear that some immigrants that have left kept those stories very close to heart and didn't really want their children to be exposed to them. But it sounds like your mom was kind of carrying the story and wanting opportunities and freedom for you very much forward because of your name.Link

JayShe actually didn't tell me a ton of the stories until I guess I was much older and I started asking about it, like, not when I was little. I learned, you know, some Chinese history through, Chinese TV dramas, through some stories, things like that. More like kids accessible stuff. And I really learned the history of the Cultural Revolution and all that stuff more when I was in high school and I did a school year abroad in China. So I studied with an American class, but we kind of were stationed in Beijing with, like, you know, Chinese host families and stuff. And we did really intensive Chinese lessons each day. So that's where I actually learned Chinese.Link

LubaOh, you speak Chinese?Link

JayI do, yeah. And my mother tried and failed to teach me growing up, because in Oklahoma there was no incentive to learn. And I was like, when am I ever going to use this? But then when I went abroad and studied for a year, mostly to kind of get out of Oklahoma, I don't think I even had a strong draw towards China. I was just like, I don't want to be in Tulsa anymore.Link

I want to get out of here. And so I spent a year abroad, and then there I really started to appreciate the side of my cultural heritage I was like, oh, this language is very rich and very deep, and the fact that I grew up, at least hearing it spoken meant that my tones were a lot better than the American kids struggling to learn it for the first time. So I felt like this was actually an advantage that I started to appreciate once I was older. Like when I was little, my mom forced me to go to Chinese school on Sunday afternoons, and I just hated it because I was like, I want to be playing. It's Sunday. Why am I in school?Link

LubaSo did you go to Beijing, to China because of your own interest, or you wanted to learn more about your heritage, or it was inspired by something else completely.Link

JayYou know, when I made that decision to go, I was like 14 or 15. And the main thing that inspired me was I was, I started eating lunch in the library during high school with this other girl who was like, reading books and eating lunch every day. And she was going to go to China the next year. And I previously had been really involved in my high school, like, I don't know, student government and debate club and all this stuff, but I think I kind of just got a little bit depressed my sophomore year, and I wasn't doing any of that anymore. And I was like, huh? Going to China.Link

That would really shake things up. And like, I just want to change. And I think I always felt very ready to be away from school at that point. A large motivation for me to study hard was to get into a school that could be like far away from Oklahoma. And I just think I just never really like, resonated with where I was growing up. Like, I just felt that by cultural difference. Plus I grew up with, like, they didn't allow me to watch TV or anything, and so I listened.Link

LubaThey, meaning your parents?Link

JayMy parents, my dad was really old fashioned. My mom was an immigrant. And so they were like, no TV, except maybe like Chinese soap operas with your mom, with your grandma.Link

LubaOnly study hard.Link

JayOnly study hard, basically. Yeah. So I felt like kind of at odds with everyone else around me. Like, all I got to do was, like, read books, you know? But I really dove into reading as, like, my main pastime. And then I decided going to China would be a good way to get out of the local environment and shake things up.Link

And, you know, home life was a little bit difficult. So I was like, I'll get to be away from my mom and all the drama and it'll be great. And actually was really great because I was in this different environment. The kids were very different too. So the main reason we had this program was there was this one Chinese teacher at the school who sent a bunch of kids from my random public school in Tulsa to China every year, and otherwise, most of the kids were from these really nice boarding schools, like much more premier Chinese language programs. And ours was just a random public school with a very passionate Chinese teacher.Link

So she really changed a lot of kids lives like me, the kids who went the year before, like we all just had this very unique experience due to her being a big advocate for us to get out and see the world. So I would credit her a lot with like influencing that decision, because as soon as I talked to her about it, she was like, oh yeah, you should go. Like, I wasn't even studying Chinese in high school. But she was like, you have to go. Like, it'll be so good for you. And so with her advocacy, I applied and got in and went to China for a year.Link

LubaYeah, it's awesome how oftentimes it just takes one passionate person to instill such change that impacts so many people afterwards. Like in my school, I was born and raised in Belarus, but my school had someone really passionate about German and so as a result, they had this exchange program for middle schoolers and high schoolers to go to Germany, which I unfortunately didn't get a chance to go to. But it was all just driven by the one teacher who was so excited about it. And would you say your mom or dad were these figures of influence for you when you were growing up?Link

Because it sounds like you really wanted to get away from their, quote unquote, rules and values. But now looking back. Would you say that the way you are in the world was kind of impacted a lot by how they were? One of them were.Link

JayYeah, I think being a teenager was difficult. Like that was the main thing as I was in high school. But now I really appreciate the fact that I didn't grow up watching a lot of TV shows, like I had this very different education. Like it wasn't like I was homeschooled or anything. I went to public school, but my parents really prioritized education. They really prioritized.Link

They would like, buy me any books I would want to read, but they wouldn't let me watch movies. And so it was kind of just pushing me towards finding my entertainment through books, which made me a very prolific reader. I had an easy time with the, you know, the English section of the SATs for that reason. Like, I just didn't have to, you know, work as hard at like, that side of things because I just grew up reading so much. Even that one year, kind of like we tried to keep up with the high school curriculum, but then I came back and did all these AP tests. And yeah, it didn't really matter that I'd been out that year because I just like, read the textbooks and was like, all right, I'm good to go. I can just do the history AP test now.Link

LubaOkay. So you go to China when you were 14, 15. It's still quite a young age when you were very much developing your worldview. What was it like?Link

JayI think I was, yeah, I turned I remember I turned 16 in China, so it was like 15 to 16. It was a very different time.Link

LubaAnd it was Beijing proper.Link

JayIt was Beijing. It was pre Olympics like I think they were gearing up.Link

LubaFor the Beijing Olympics.Link

JayYeah. So like they were doing stuff like repainting like whole apartment blocks in the city and like, just, you know, huge amounts of change were happening. But I think at that time, people still believe that China was on this path towards democracy and modernization. And it was sort of this arc of history narrative that everyone kind of bought into. And I think actually what we've seen in the years since is people's belief back then was that the internet would lead everything to just be more free and more open and like every country would be on this, you know, end of history narrative of like, we're all going to—Link

LubaAbundance for everyone.Link

JayA democracy, a liberal democracy at the end of the road. And I don't think that's how things have turned out. And in college, like one of the things I started being really interested in was how technology affects society, because in observing how, you know, the internet and all these things existed in China, and yet were so controlled behind the Great Firewall, I realized that, you know, it's not necessarily that the internet is going to lead to democracy or greater freedom. It actually can be a very centralized architecture that leads to more control. And so I just saw the beginnings of that, I think, and that made me really interested in technology's uses and applications, which is more than a simplistic end of history narrative. Like there's actually different outcomes that can result depending on how these tools are applied. And I was aware of that, I think relatively early because of that experience.Link

LubaYeah. I thought it was very interesting that you studied science, technology and society that, you know, is kind of a very unique and I'm sure probably uncommon for the time major, but perhaps I'm wrong. What, like what specifically inspired you to be so observant about social systems in China when you were there? Because I'm sure other kids were, you know, not as interested in seeing all of those dynamics.Link

JayI actually think that it was kind of just the era because it was let's see, like one thing I was reflecting on recently was because it was the lead up to the Olympics. They were getting very controlled about things because they really wanted to control the image of China. And then there were these protests in Tibet. I remember I don't even remember over what. But like we'd been able to access New York Times one day and we would, like, check news from home and stuff, and then the next day we couldn't.Link

And like Facebook access was getting throttled. And I think it was like back and forth for a bit during that time period. Like what stuff you could access and what you couldn't. But it gradually closed down over the years. And so it was this really weird experience being like, oh, like actually, now I can't access The New York Times.Link

Like what's going on here? Because of course, The New York Times is doing reporting on the protests in a way that China didn't like. And so, you know, now, I think that the whole information ecosystem is very siloed. But at the time, it was more in an in-between state. And so we were kind of there for that transition. And so that just naturally made me and I think some of the other kids as well, just reflect on what it means to, you know, have technology in a society not necessarily be opening it up, but actually be something where access can be controlled.Link

LubaWas that those protests specifically that made you, made you think about the digital rights and, society as a whole more deeply?Link

JayI think— well, back then, I wasn't even following political stuff very closely. I mean, I was a teenager. I was mostly just sort of shocked by the fact that one day I could access this Western news site, and then the next day I couldn't. And that that change could happen, I think I didn't really. Hadn't really thought about it deeply before, but then having that experience made me realize, oh, this is something that's possible.Link

And, you know, it just made me think about media ecosystems and how they influence opinion and how who controls access to what you can see and read really matters. And so then I started analyzing my own society through that lens. And I thought that America has freedom of the press. It has all these things that I really value. But how resilient really is it in the long term? Like if, you know, the government changed or if our opinions about it changed, would— is the architecture there ensuring freedom, or is the architecture, you know, one that lends itself easily towards centralization? So that's when I started really getting interested in structural control of media ecosystems as a topic, because I think if you just have social norms preserving the kind of society you want, social norms are liable to change over time. Like, you have good governments, you have bad governments, you have periods of consolidation of power. You have periods of more freedom.Link

And what you really have to look at is what are the underlying, control mechanisms or like architectures, the medium itself. So once I got into college and I was studying science, technology and society, I was looking at the evolution of like radio or the printing press and these other technologies that change society. And there are often periods of, a lot of contest over who controlled it. And like the printing press, of course, there were huge social disruptions that occurred. But one thing about a printing press is it's a, you know, it's a tricky technology to build, particularly at the time. But then once you have one, it's very much localized in wherever you have it.Link

Like if you want to go stop people from printing pamphlets, you have to go physically seize their presses wherever they are. And like if you have a bunch of printing presses spread out across Europe, well, now you can't stop the Protestant Reformation from happening, right? Because it's just everywhere. So I think that was one example of technology just changing society, despite what the powers that be wanted and the internet early on. People thought this about it.Link

They were like, oh, it's going to, you know, the cyber libertarian manifesto and those ideas where it's going to just completely change nation states. It's going to, you know, sweep every old form of governance away. People still talk about this like the network state and stuff, you know, and I don't think it's necessarily going to do that on its own. It's more this technology that is still rapidly changing. We're in the early years of its evolution, and it has both tendencies like it both distributes power out to the individual, and it can be very centralized because architecture has a few points of control. So those are things I think about a lot.Link

LubaWhen you were in college and you were spending a lot of time thinking about the different underlying forces for how society and rights are structured. Were you feeling like you had a lot of agency over change.Link

JayNot at the time, not in college. But I did think a lot about where do you gain more agency for change. And at the time, I was a liberal arts major like science. Technology society is more of a sociology of science. Like I took one programming class, but it's not preparing you to be an engineer.Link

It's more just sort of an analytical background on things. So I didn't feel like I had many of the concrete skills necessary to make change. Right after college, I started working at tech nonprofits like nonprofits that worked at the intersection of media access technology, tech policy, because there I felt like I could understand the issues a bit deeper, but I still felt like what you could actually do was a bit limited. Like you're playing on the political landscape, you're having to make policy changes or suggestions based on what's politically feasible at the moment. And a lot of the changes happening at the forefront of innovation, not in the political realm.Link

By the time politics even gets to noticing like, oh, the, you know, power asymmetry in this industry has gotten really bad. It's already happened. You're kind of in a reactive mode, so the stuff that was more interesting to me at the time was there was like the, you know, Aaron Swartz like, activist sort of strain of things and like, you know, all these like, cyber activists, like doing various things. And the commonality is they all understood technology very well. They could code, they could directly make change without having to wait around for change to happen and stuff like, I don't know.Link

Early attempts at building different social media systems like Diaspora. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but it was this early like pre Mastodon distributed social media attempt. It was like a few college kids who actually did a crowdfund to raise a bunch of money to build this alternative to Facebook, and it was sort of in between Facebook and Twitter, like it had hashtags and stuff. Very clunky and hard to use. It never got off the ground.Link

It never got. But I found it inspiring in that a few college students could just build this. But of course you had to have the skills to do it. And so then I was like, all right, I have to learn programming. Because if you can directly understand the technology and have a change on it, then you have way more leverage than just observing the system and not knowing where you can make a change.Link

LubaWas there a moment when you had that realization that if you really wanted to have impacts, you got to be more technical? Or was it maybe a mentor that was talking to you, or was it literally observing Diaspora trying to get off the ground?Link

JayI think it was senior year when I there was a lot of sort of tech activism happening in the world at that time. And I realized that all the people who are making pushing, you know, technology activism in different directions, the most influential ones were technologists themselves. And at that point I was like, I have to take a programming class. But it was senior year.Link

It was a little bit too late for me to really go back and get engineering experience. So I just went into nonprofit world without having a ton of engineering expertise, but I tried to learn my own. I kept the programming book from college and was like flipping through it when I could, but it was Java and you can't really learn programming from books like this is where I really met the limits of my original educational style, which was just read the book like that was how I got through high school, and all my AP classes was just reading the textbook, and I tried to do that with programming and I was like, okay, this is making no sense. Like, I cannot sit here and like learn programming by reading it. So what actually taught me programming was doing a bootcamp where you learn by doing as opposed to reading the textbook.Link

LubaWhich bootcamp did you end up going to?Link

JayI did Dev Bootcamp, which was one of the early, I think it maybe was the first coding bootcamp. I got there towards the end of its lifecycle, like it had just been acquired by Kaplan, and so it wasn't as cool as it used to be. It still had some of that very DIY ethos, and I think a lot of what they taught you was overcoming your own mental limitations. So just sitting there and like trying to write the code, whether or not you felt like you knew what you were doing and then getting it wrong, reading the docs, trying again. And just like letting yourself learn and fail over and over again was a big part of their instructional method, which I think that attitude, more than even the programming language I learned, was what helped me in my programming career, which was just being okay with trying a bunch of stuff and failing a bunch because the computer is there to tell you whether you succeeded or not. There's a very binary outcome, like a program works or it doesn't.Link

LubaYeah, I can relate to that because I also taught myself engineering when I decided that whatever path I was on before was no longer viable or wasn't as interesting to me. But why do you think? Where do you think that mentality of wanting to take risk and put yourself out of a comfort zone came from? Because you could have just been, you know, comfortable in the nonprofit world?Link

It does sound like you really wanted to be in a position where you could have agency over change. But there are other, more comfortable ways to try to find that agency. Whereas I assume going into a bootcamp required you to either study so much on top of your full time job, or completely give up on the track that you were on before. To take this bet with a really big belief that you are going to be successful.Link

JayYeah, I think I just like, I'm more inclined to, like, take risks and make big gambles. And I feel like things have gotten too static. So even going to China that year in high school, that was a very big departure from what I was expected to be doing. Like, all of my friends were like, you're going to miss junior prom. Like, how could you miss junior prom? And I was like, I don't really—Link

LubaCare about junior prom?Link

JayAt the time I did, I was like, oh, no. But like, Junior prom does sound fun. But, you know, going to China seems more exciting. Actually, that was kind of a hard decision for me because I had, you know, friends who were, you know, saying, oh, but there's all this stuff happening junior year, like, you know, and I was like, freshman year, I'd been involved in all these, like, student activities. So it felt like maybe I was making a, you know, drastic decision to, like, suddenly, like, exit high school for a year.Link

But I think the thing that convinced me was I was like, mulling over this decision in my mind. And then I was like, well, you know, when I was 12, my mom had sent me with like a church friend to go to Singapore for a month. It was very transformative. You know, it was maybe it was very bold overall. It was a few weeks. Yeah.Link

And I spent, like Christmas break in Singapore. And it was just this very eye opening experience, like a bigger world out there because we went to this, like Asian American Christian church. It was a small, tight knit community. Everyone was very close. But that experience was so eye opening that I think it really changed my I was very shy, like when I was a very small child.Link

And then I think that was like starting to change my personality. So I was like, well, faced with two options, one of them is like the known track and one of them is like the adventurous road I'm just gonna experiment with, like, taking the adventurous road. So I started trying to just apply that to life decisions like, do I do this thing or that thing? Well, which one is the more like adventurous, unknown road? I'll just like take that path. And so that kind of actually was like a rough decision-making guide—Link

LubaFramework.Link

JayYeah, it was a rough decision-making framework. Yeah. And then like after high school, I went and like, hitchhiked and couch surfed around Europe for a few, like after high school. Yeah.Link

Right after high school, I was supposed to go with a friend, and then she got scared and didn't go. And then I was like, fine, I'm going my own. And that was another big decision that was like, you know, taking on a lot of risk, but very fun. And Couchsurfing was actually a website back then.Link

LubaYeah, I remember Couchsurfing. Airbnb. Is that not a thing anymore?Link

JayI think it's still like this, but it's not the same as it was back then.Link

LubaI think Kindred is an alternative to Couchsurfing now. Have you heard?Link

JayMore like, yeah. Close trust. It's trying to rebuild those, like close trust networks. But early on there was like this idealism and enthusiasm about it that meant that people who I think now would be renting out a room on Airbnb or doing Couchsurfing, it was a very new concept, so it attracted a lot more people. Like now, I think Couchsurfing is kind of flattened out into this, like, you know, hippie alternative vibe.Link

But back then it was like I stayed with like, this middle class couple in Paris who just, like, put me in their spare bedroom and showed me around the city and like, all these, like, very unique experiences. I don't think that I could have now if I replicated that trip, but it was in the early days of Couchsurfing you could have all these unique experiences. So that was like all my friends and family were like so scared for me. They're like, terrible things are going to happen. Like as a young girl alone.Link

But actually it was great. And like, honestly, what I learned was the world is less dangerous than like, you know, if you're careful, which I was like, you know, there's like a lot of goodwill out there and like, people willing to help you and you just have to, you know, be street savvy about, like, you know, who you trust and where you go. And it just, like, helped me sort of develop my own intuition for, like, navigating through life. So yeah, I think like gaining the experience of taking risks and then having them turn out well, you kind of know, like what does and doesn't work. And I've done that a few times in high school.Link

So yeah, after high school I went into the nonprofit world and then I was like, okay, it's going to be a big, you know, disruption to uproot my life, move to California, do a bootcamp. But it feels much more aligned with, like, what I actually want to be doing. And if I stay on this path, I kind of know what it's going to look like. Like, I'll spend a few more years in the nonprofit world. If I want to get deeper into things, I'll have to get a law degree.Link

Like that's how you really influence policy. Law degrees are really expensive. It takes many more years to, like, work your way into any position of influence. And then I talked to the lawyers at the nonprofit I worked at, and they were like, oh, you're going to want to end up working for Netflix or something, because the salary at nonprofits is so bad, you'll never pay off your debt. And I was like, well, that kind of makes the decision more clear. Like, obviously programming is a way lower barrier to entry, way higher leverage, and you can just move much faster into that world than you can in the traditional world where the barriers to entry are so high.Link

LubaI want to double tap on learning, because it sounds like you were mostly in humanitarian subjects when you were growing up. You were reading a lot. You were, I assume, pretty good in school, but then you took the more of a sociology path in school. A lot of people who want to go into a technical field have this mindset that they're just not capable of learning something technical because they were, I don't know, never like good at math because they think there is a lot of math in programming or technical things are just not the thing that they're meant to do or have the capacity for doing.Link

Did you ever have any of those beliefs or were you— because it sounds like you were very set on, I can do it. This is the path that I need to try out, and I can learn and take the risks. And, you know, if it doesn't work out, then I'll change my path. I'm curious about this mindset of learning. How have you gotten so good at just giving yourself a chance to take a bet on something?Link

JayYeah, I mean, I was very insecure about, you know, making this transition, and I was willing to take the risk. But I definitely had lots of those internalized narratives of like, oh, you know, like I'm, you know, I'm not as strong in math as I am in English. Like, you know, is this a necessity for programming, like all these sort of thoughts? But I did have several people who encouraged me. One of them was the web developer at the nonprofit. He was like, oh, just look at this code. Like, look at it.Link

LubaSounds like a big nonprofit.Link

JayIt was. It was lawyers. There were developers. There was two wings, one in D.C., one in Massachusetts, where I was, and there was like a web developer who just like, maintained the website, who worked in the Massachusetts office. And he was like, yeah, like, you know, you can read this like, you'll be better than me in like a few months.Link

I was like, no, I won't. And he was like, yeah, well it's fine. Like it's easy. You can learn it. So he was very encouraging and like, you know, kind of flippant about it, which I think gave me some confidence.Link

And then also, after college, I had babysat on the side to, like, supplement my meager nonprofit income. And, one of the dads of the girls I babysat was a programmer who, like, worked from home. And, well, first of all, I was like, wow, this is like a great lifestyle. You can just, like, work from home and stuff. And I was making sure the kids didn't, like, bother him during his work hours. But he had all these books on technology and programming.Link

And since I was interested in, you know, the reading side of things, I would like, you know, peruse the books and like, borrow some of the books. So he noticed I was interested and he was like, you should study programming. And I was like, oh, well, I took one class and it was really hard and I don't know. And he's like, no, no, like, you could definitely do this. And so he was very encouraging of me to just go into that field and make the transition.Link

So when I thought about making that transition, you know, I talked to a web developer, I called him up and I was like, I'm thinking about making this career transition. And he was very supportive. And he was like, look like there's always contract agencies, like hiring junior programmers. So if you can't find a job like, I have a friend who runs a contracting agency so you can at least get like a contracting job. And so I was like, okay, well, I feel like I can at least get a job, even if it's not like a great job afterwards.Link

And then I'll just learn on the job. So that was, you know, part of my thinking, which was, well, you know, I'll try it and I'll throw myself at this problem. And if it doesn't succeed, like I have some amount of confidence that I can figure it out. And worst case, I just go back to nonprofits. But I have this background that's going to, you know, help me understand things better. So I did that.Link

And I also think I just tried to change my own mentality. Like I knew that I didn't have much confidence in myself at the time. So I was like, let me just try new things in general. So I actually, like took up a new workout routine. I started doing several different types of things at the same time, like I started doing yoga, I started doing martial arts.Link

Like I tried to do new things to just break myself out of my comfort zone. I went to ecstatic dance. Like, all these were like very weird new things based on like how I used to interact with people in the world. But I started to feel like, well, if I can like, try all these different modalities. You know, it's kind of just like physically breaking up the patterns of like daily routine. And then that kind of frees up your mind to do new things.Link

LubaThat's really awesome. And I think that it also builds your own confidence that you can do new things, because one way or one of the main things to build confidence is to prove to yourself that you can make progress on a certain thing. And then another thing is this whole situation with worst case scenario, because so often people believe that the worst case scenario is much worse than it actually is. So it sounds like you actually thinking through, okay, I'm going to take a risk on this thing.Link

And then. Oh, okay. At the worst case, I can still go find a job in the thing that I'm already doing, or I can find a contract gig if programming doesn't work out to the same extent that I'm desiring it to work out. And I think this is a very common trope when we think about taking risks, just diving into catastrophe scenario, that I'm just going to be jobless and homeless and things are just going to go to total shit. So that's really awesome that you were instilling that mentality in yourself at such a young age.Link

JayYeah. I will say also, when I did Brazilian jiu-jitsu, that was like the martial arts I picked up because you got to immediately. Like, I love—Link

LubaJiu-jitsu.Link

JayGrappling with other people. Yeah. And that really built my confidence because, you know, I was not as strong as, like, you know, the men in the class and stuff, and there's very few women in the class. But what I learned is that women tend to improve at technique faster because you can't get by on just sheer strength.Link

And that was like a good analogy to, I think, like, you know, what I was going to take into my programming career, which is I don't have the background of like a lot of guys who started programming when they were 12. Like, I'm never going to compete on just like raw horsepower in terms of like programming ability. But if I can be savvier about how I approach them, approach problems like about the things I study, about the way I go about it, then I can still find an advantage. You just have to be smarter about your leverage as opposed to going at it with just like sheer, you know, bravado and strength.Link

LubaAnother interesting point in your story so far that I'm hearing is that you really were shaping yourself up through the things that you were exposing yourself to, because you mentioned that you were a pretty shy kid, and then you were kind of grown in this mentality of just read books and study hard, like, don't watch movies, don't socialize that much. But then you put yourself in a lot of situations that made you feel more brave or more social, or tested out your own strength, or tested out your own mental capacity. How do you view the whole perspective on nature versus nurture? Because so many people are stuck in their ways being like, okay, you know, I'm not very social, so I'm not even going to try going to parties and meeting people is not my jam. Or like, I'm not a good public speaker because naturally I feel more shy or I'm more introverted.Link

JayOh, I think it's totally changeable, but it's hard to just think yourself through a change like it has to be. Change has to be lived and embodied. And so that's one big learning I've taken whenever I need to change my life. It's like, if I'm just going to say, okay, tomorrow I'm going to wake up and I'm going to change everything. It's going to be really hard to do and really hard to stick to it.Link

But if you start, you know, a new workout regime or you do a new activity, then you suddenly start to like break up your old routine and like through lived experience, you become a new person. I think that when I was actually very little, I was more extroverted, but then, sort of being the odd one out in terms of being half Chinese and like not feeling like I totally fit in. I kind of retreated more into my shell, and then breaking out of that was like going to Singapore with my mom's friend, like doing these different things. That kind of broke me out of my shell, like going to China as well. I think that meant that I was able to find sort of like get my feet under me and like get a bigger view of the world.Link

But if I hadn't done that, I don't think I would have been able to do it like on my own, just through sheer willpower. It was more like putting myself in the circumstances that changed the things I was exposed to because, you know, like nurture is very much like, what are you exposed to? And so, like, can you provide the environment for yourself to nurture the traits you want to see? Like, even when I started the nonprofit job, I was nervous on camera. I was getting asked interviews for stuff about the topics that I was doing activism on, and I would freeze up. And so then I decided to start doing Toastmasters, which is this, like public speaking?Link

LubaOh that's awesome. How long were you doing Toastmasters?Link

JayI was in this job only for about nine months, so I would say I did this for about six months, but it really—Link

LubaIt's still a significant amount of time.Link

JayIt was a good amount of time, and it was just a small group of people that would meet in this like classroom at some university nearby. And the way that it works is you would all practice giving speeches every single week. So like, everyone in the room would, like, prepare to give a speech either impromptu or planned, and then you would just have to practice through repetition, the act of public speaking. And it's like low stakes because these are all people here to learn public speaking. And I would see myself improve in these like smaller, low stakes scenarios. And then when I actually had to do it properly, I started to have that same sense of like, okay, this is how to mentally prepare myself. Like this is how to do it without freaking out.Link

LubaA couple of months ago, I was actually looking into whether there's Toastmasters in New York because I really want to get better at speaking and public speaking, and also just being better at summarizing different stories or things that I read. And I think there needs to be some sort of accountability and forcing mechanism to do that. But somehow New York Toastmasters is not super popular. Yeah.Link

I remember when I just moved to San Francisco after school, I actually did do Toastmasters for a couple of months as well, and it was much more popular than perhaps there are like alternative clubs that do that. I want to bookmark how you're putting yourself out of your comfort zone right now, because obviously there's many years that pass, but we'll talk about it in a bit. So you go to San Francisco, you move to San Francisco, right, for the bootcamp. How was that experience?Link

JayIt was very fun, actually, because I'd been learning on my own. Like I started using those online courses like Coursera, like Lynda.com, and programming in the mornings before work, because I wanted to make sure that I could actually do it and that I would actually enjoy it before I actually dove full time and do it. So I did enough to realize I actually liked doing this, because there's a concrete outcome and I can produce something very relatively quickly. Whereas in the nonprofit world, like you work for a very long time on this campaign.Link

LubaAnd it was the EFF, by the way?Link

JayFree Press.Link

LubaOh, okay. Got it.Link

JayYeah. It's like a national sort of media, technology nonprofit. Its motto was fighting for your right to connect and communicate, which I really liked.Link

LubaCool.Link

JayBut it worked on a variety of issues, from like privacy to antitrust to net neutrality was the big issue they were working on when I joined. And as an activist, you don't really get to choose what you work on. It's like what the nonprofit is working on that you work on. But I was sort of deferring policy opinions to the lawyers and just kind of like going along, like going along with the on the ground organizing. But I always kind of like to be at the center of whatever I do.Link

And so I tried to like, read the legal opinions and like, learn what was going on. And the people in the office were kind of like, you don't have to do that. Like, you know, just focus on your job. And I was like, but I want to understand, like, what are the laws exactly that we're advocating for. And what are the details here? And then they're like, well, maybe you want to get a law degree if you want to go do that stuff.Link

So that's when I started considering being a lawyer. And then I realized that I probably could enjoy the practice of law. It's just that the industry is so different in terms of the barriers to entry are very high. And it seemed much more, it seemed much less creative, like it seemed much more like an established playing field with established rules. And in tech, like there's a freedom to just, you know, build a website any way you want. Like one of our first projects was just like design your own website.Link

So I had a lot of fun, like building this big, like, you know, space sort of themed website with all these random geometric shapes floating in it. And I got to exercise my creative side, which I've also really loved art growing up. And at one point I was like, oh, I'm gonna be an artist. But, you know, my mom was like, no, you have to do something more proper. But that let me, you know, be creative as well as do something that had like a technical professional bent to it. So I figured it was a better fit for my personality than law, which was going to be much more establishment.Link

LubaSo at that point, you already left your nonprofit job to do the bootcamp full time.Link

JayYeah, I actually had a decision in between. I was just I knew I was tired of like the, you know, Massachusetts side of the nonprofit. And like I said, that had one arm in D.C. where all, like lawyers were and one arm in Massachusetts where the sort of like field organizers were. And I wanted to move to the D.C. arm so I could be closer to the center of action.Link

But when I thought about moving to D.C., I found local programming groups in D.C. and I was like, okay, well, I can keep learning how to code as I keep this job, but it just seemed like that's not the center of action of programming. Obviously, like D.C. is very focused around politics. And I just didn't feel good when I thought about the decision. You know, I felt like I have to, like, jump through all these hoops and, like, I don't really like politics. I don't like D.C.Link

Like the city does not inspire me. But for one of our campaigns, they sent me out to San Francisco to give a talk, because I'd actually gotten a lot better at giving talks through Toastmasters. And so this opened up an opportunity to go represent our organization at the Internet Archive. And I went to the Internet Archive, and I found the institution itself amazing. It was like in this old church with like server rooms.Link

LubaSomewhere in Ocean Beach, right? Somewhere outside of the city. I've been told that it's a really cool building to visit and a really cool office to visit because it's so historic. And I'm also a huge fan of archive.org as a website.Link

JayYeah, it felt like the church of the internet, you know, it was it's in an old church. It has these like computers at the back, like it has a lot of people really dedicated to technology and like the preservation of knowledge. And then my activist friend who worked at the EFF, this other Bay Area nonprofit around tech policy, she kind of showed me around the hacker spaces and like, you know, I looked at the Computer History Museum, I went out to the redwoods, and I just realized that in California there was this confluence of, like, activism, art, you know, technology, like all this creative stuff like this epicenter was actually out in the Bay Area. So if I wanted to be at the center of things, that was the place to go.Link

LubaOkay. So you moved to San Francisco, and at that point, it already felt like a city that you really liked being a part of.Link

JayWell, I actually moved to Oakland. I moved out— I had a few East Coast friends who were all moving to the Bay Area, for they were doing teaching jobs. I was doing programming, but we all like rented a house in Oakland together and Oakland was much more. It's sort of like the Brooklyn—Link

LubaOf the Bay Area.Link

JayOf the Bay Area, relative to New York, and it was much more artsy and like sort of it was cheaper. It had like more of a indie culture, whereas San Francisco was higher priced. And like, you had to have a good—Link

LubaAlready being overrun by tech being gentrified. Okay. So you moved to Oakland. How long was the bootcamp? And then I remember that at some point you get into crypto. Did that happen right after bootcamp or during your university years?Link

JayActually, I heard about it in my university years, and I wrote a final paper about virtual currencies. So that covered Bitcoin as well as time banks and like other forms of digital currencies. I sort of like wrote this thesis that as the internet becomes more commonplace, there will be more forms of virtual currencies. And then as an experiment my senior year as my capstone project, I started a time bank, which is not a cryptocurrency.Link

It's more of a community currency that uses time as a unit of exchange. But that was a really fun, like community building experience. And then I didn't really get to revisit that interest once I was in the nonprofit world. Like at one point I suggested we take Bitcoin donations for the nonprofit and they're like, no, no, we don't want to do that.Link

LubaLike, that would have been a great decision for the nonprofit.Link

JayYeah, the web developer was on my team, too. He was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's take Bitcoin. And then everyone else was like, no, what's like what's Bitcoin? That's fake money.Link

They were like, what is that? That's like fake like what's not a real thing. And so we didn't end up implementing that. But I think that if they got like millions of dollars in donations in Bitcoin. So we should have done that. But I just had this interest that I never got to pick up the thread on again up until I got out to San Francisco, finished my bootcamp, I was at the Internet Archive doing an Aaron Swartz Day hackathon, actually, like, this is one of these internet activists who tragically took his own life.Link

And there was a commemoration at the Internet Archive every year where people, like did a hackathon in his honor. So I went there. I was working on the EFF's Privacy Badger, which is a little browser extension that would like, protect your privacy. And one of the persons sitting at my table was talking about his blockchain startup, and then I was like, oh, I did the senior thesis on like, you know, virtual currencies and Bitcoin and stuff. And he was like, you should come work at my startup. So that was how I got my first job.Link

LubaWow. And what was the startup?Link

JayIt was Skuchain. And it was a supply chain tracking system through, you know, Bitcoin using Bitcoin as a ledger. But that's sort of roughly describes what it did because it pivoted several times while I was there. Like the CEO kept going and like trying to sell banks on a solution and then would come back with like a new idea. So, yeah, it was one of those startups that never really found its footing.Link

Like it pivoted multiple times in like, the six months I worked there. And I think after I left kept pivoting. But across the table from me in this Mountain View, like co-working space that we were in, there were these other people working more in the open source world, and so they were constantly talking about, oh, there's this new thing, Ethereum. And like it's really exciting and all this stuff is happening. So I was kind of overhearing this and like having FOMO like, oh, I want to be in like open source cryptocurrency world. That's where the exciting stuff is happening.Link

And like this boring enterprise Bitcoin play doesn't seem to be like really taking off. So like it doesn't feel like the most exciting thing. So then, there was like several new cryptocurrencies getting started. Ethereum was brand new at that time. And then Zcash was like a privacy focused currency.Link

And after I left that job, I had the option to go to a, like find another job at like I think I applied to Indiegogo or like some other jobs that like, it's hard for me to apply to jobs that don't have some social welfare angle. And so I wanted to apply to something that aligned with my values. But those jobs were kind of rare, and I wasn't really good enough to get a good, even junior dev job. And so I talked to my friend who— him and his brother started a Bitcoin mine up in Washington state, and his brother still ran it. And I was like, hey, does your brother need any like summer help by any chance at the Bitcoin mine. And he was like yeah sure.Link

Like some guy just quit. And so you can go work at this Bitcoin mine. And so basically I had the summer job up in this very remote area of Washington state where there's cheap hydroelectric power and this very DIY cryptocurrency mine which started off as a Bitcoin mine, then added in Ethereum mining and was like starting to do Zcash mining. Like as these new cryptocurrencies emerged. And it was a very DIY, sort of like homespun operation. And people would come in part time like I did and like work there, you know, just part time while doing other stuff.Link

LubaSo, so random.Link

JayI had a part time job there over the summer while I like, you know, learned Python and like improved my programming skills and got to sort of like stay in the industry and see it from a different angle, which I found really interesting because, you know, the core of cryptocurrency is like the mining mechanism. That's what really distinguishes it from anything else. And I learned a lot and like, you know, down to the hardware of how that whole process works.Link

LubaI'm curious, all these jobs that you took right after the bootcamp, were they driven by interest in open source? Interest in cryptocurrency specifically? Were they driven by your desire for adventure? Because, for instance, taking a job at the mining operations seems a little off from you pursuing this career of being a like a programming technologist. What was it driven by at the time?Link

JayI mean, I'm always down for an adventure. So there was that. The fact that it was like, you know, left field actually kind of attracted me. But I also, I think I liked to understand the center of whatever I'm doing. And the center of cryptocurrency at the time seemed like cryptocurrency mining was like closer to the core of like the thing rather than like selling it to banks.Link

That's like several stages down the supply chain, right? And I was very interested in just the whole concept behind the premise. Like, you know, programmable money seemed like a very powerful concept to me because, you know, in the digital era, money still hasn't really changed. And it seems like that was due for a disruption of some sort, and I didn't know exactly what shape it was going to take. But if you don't, if you don't understand the technology deeply, then you're not going to understand what is going to happen until it does. And so I figured, well, if I learn the fundamentals, then I'll be able to grasp like where this is going faster than other people.Link

LubaYeah, I think going into crypto also at the time, I assume it was around 2015 or so. 2016 was very much a, kind of like a fringe thing to do because crypto was. So I wouldn't say it was unpopular, but it was very popular amongst like very nerdy, technology driven circles. And I think like a regular person who just wanted to go to a coding bootcamp to get a better job and maybe impact change in the original field that you were in, would not even think about going like taking a bet on this technology that was so unproven at the time. What made you convinced that you should bet your time on crypto?Link

JayI mean, yeah, it was very niche. And my friend who originally told me about it was like a PhD student and Microsoft intern at the time, and he was sold on Bitcoin very early, like, I don't know, 2012 or something. And he'd spent years trying to convince me like, this was like the next big thing, and I was interested enough in it to write my senior thesis on virtual currencies. But I was more attracted to community currencies, sort of as a concept, because it was more based around, you know, mutual relationships. And it was more it's more relational than the a lot of the ideas animating Bitcoin, which were more like libertarian and more like, oh, we'll have like our own, you know, form of currencies that are separate from government control.Link

And I didn't really believe that that premise was ever going to fully play out. I wasn't like a complete crypto anarchist. I was like, well, it seems like, I don't know, we live in a society. So community currencies were more attractive to me for that reason. But community currencies didn't have this built in incentive mechanism, which the mining reward of Bitcoin and like the built in scarcity did. And so once I started to understand the incentive mechanics at play, I was like, huh, this seems like it might work.Link

Whether or not I believe in the premise behind it, simply because the sort of scarcity economics of it have this built in growth virality factor that community currencies don't. Like, community currencies are kind of designed to stay circulating in one community, as opposed to being like a speculative, you know, instrument. And plus these are much more these currencies are much more programmable like Ethereum was new at the time, and I found that exciting because you could write these smart contracts that just, you know, did anything like and, you know, in reality there were limitations to what you could do with it, but they really showed you the possibilities early on with like, you know, sample code that showed you how to make a voting DAO and all this stuff that was like sort of hypothesizing where you could take this technology. So I found those, unbounded possibilities very fascinating. Like there's no telling where this could go. That's what it seemed like at the time.Link

And the concept behind programmable money seems very powerful. So if I understand it, maybe there's some way to like, you know, shape the direction of it or understand what's going to happen with it. I mean, I think in reality, the most powerful piece of it was that built in incentive mechanism that just meant it got like viral explosive growth because everyone was like, wow. Like wild West of, like, new financial instruments. That's really what it's become. But at the time, it seemed like the possibility space was like much more diverse than just financial speculation.Link

LubaWhich feature of cryptocurrencies were you personally most excited about at the time?Link

JayLet's see. When I was at the mine, I started playing around with smart contract programming and I was also looking at like neural networks, which was like the AI like thing back then. Like those are the two things I thought were very interesting. And sometimes I'm like, should have studied neural networks more back then. That would have been a great path too.Link

But I think with cryptocurrency at the time, I was excited about the sort of like, you know, novel takes on money and governance. Like, as I had studied the my senior thesis around community currencies, I realized that, you know, however you like, control the money supply of a place, you really affect the economy. And I studied this one town in New York, Ithaca, that had created their own local currency, and that actually kept money circulating in the community because they were printing and issuing their own money to be spent only at local businesses. And so you couldn't extract those dollars out because it wasn't a nationally fungible currency. So basically, that's just an example of how the money supply and like how it gets distributed really changes the social dynamics of a place. So I think I was just interested in that concept.Link

LubaBecause it sounds kind of similar to your time bank idea. It was like very much circulated within people who participated in the pool.Link

JayYeah. And like early cryptocurrencies, I mean, people were like buying pizza with it. It was very much like people who accept Bitcoin. Those are the only people who can like use Bitcoins or like. So it had those elements of a community currency.Link

It was like the libertarian community uses Bitcoin, you know, and then like, you know the hippies in Ithaca use, you know, Ithaca Hours or whatever. But I think the so those dynamics in a very like seed stage look similar. But the exciting thing was how you could do all these novel applications of it. Like you could program a smart contract like only pay out if these conditions were met, and then you could like, do all sorts of new things that you needed an intermediary to do before. And so I thought that was very exciting.Link

Like, now maybe you could like change how I didn't know much about finance, but I was like, you could change how a lot of things work. I'm sure once you can remove the intermediary. And then my other thought was, well, it seems like cash is on its way out, and if you don't have cash, like, how do you have a more decentralized payment mechanism? Is it all going to be like, centralized in one place that seems bad in terms of like distribution of power in society? And so that's what kind of drew me to Zcash, the privacy cryptocurrency, because in the concept of the cryptocurrency was cash. It was like trying to create digital cash.Link

And a large part of the, you know, anonymity piece of it was like, well, cash is, you know, quite distributed because you don't have a national ledger of like who's spending what, where. And so if you want to retain that element, you need a digital equivalent of it. And so that technology I thought was interesting. It was also doing very novel things with cryptography, which I realized everything comes down to like new technical fundamentals or a new social application. But generally you have to have a new technical fundamental to unlock a new application.Link

And, you know, using the mining mechanism of Bitcoin is like what really unlocked a ton of new experiments. And if you're going to even develop new applications in crypto, you have to have new cryptographic primitives. So what Zcash introduced was actually like besides the product of the cryptocurrency, the main thing they introduced was zero knowledge proofs, which previously were like this academic, you know, concept that was getting a very large real time application in Zcash. And so it seemed very risky because I was like, well, either this thing is going to fail and the crypto is going to break and all the money will get stolen and everyone will be mad at us, or it's going to work and will prove this new cryptographic primitive. And so I met the founder at a conference again at the Internet Archive prior to launch, and I talked to him about also, you know, my interest in privacy and like, you know, digital activist background and virtual currencies.Link

And he was actually like, oh, you should come on and like write blog posts and like do marketing for us. I was like, no, I want to do programming. I don't want to do marketing. Like I want to stay on the programming path. And then he was like, well, just come work for us and you can do some programming. And finally I was like, well, okay, as long as I get to do at least 50% programming and not just write blog posts and then right as I joined, the web developer quit to go back to school, I think actually at Waterloo, and—Link

LubaSimilar to that mining job person quitting too.Link

JayYes. On the spot. Yeah, yeah. And so then I just took over the website and I was like, look, I promise I can write Python. I just learned how last summer.Link

So like let me do the website. So then I wrote blog posts, but I also did the website, and I managed to avoid getting pushed onto like a marketing path. And at that time, crypto was a very expansive field because we launched Zcash thinking it was going to be a quiet little launch. Like you don't know any other project at that time, but instead it suddenly got press coverage. It got like all this attention, like it was launching into the start of a bull market.Link

And so that just meant that I joined. I happened to join this time when crypto started wildly expanding, and that meant there was opportunities to do anything you wanted. Like, if I wanted to code, I got to code. Like, I was like, I want to work on cross-chain swaps and like, write my own tools. So I got to do that. You know, it was just like in an expanding industry, you can have a lot of freedom and freedom.Link

LubaThat's amazing. You keep saying that or actually it comes out through your entire story up until now that there has always been an element of social welfare of some sort. Was it literally just that experience in China when you were 15 that made you so interested in social dynamics? Or was there anything else that made your interest so prevalent?Link

JayI mean, I'd always done a lot of reading about how the history of science evolves and like how technologies affect societies, and I think that kind of just led me to not take things for granted. I just sort of saw that, you know, technology has improved society, but they can also have they can be used in ways that are very oppressive or in ways that are very liberating, and it's important for people to actually apply them towards liberating ends and to try to guard that outcome, rather than just assuming that the development of technology in itself is going to cause good outcomes. And so I think I found myself a bit at odds with a lot of thinking in Silicon Valley, which was technology's progression is unequivocal good in and of itself. And there's like nothing wrong that can happen if we just accelerate technology. And I didn't see that as very historically grounded, because it's very much about who controls the technology, like how is it developed like to what ends is it put towards.Link

And so, you know, I can't change the broader scope of history, but I did figure, well, the best way to actually be involved in the change is to not just stand outside and critique it from academia, which you can do all day, and it basically changes nothing. Like there's been people saying the same thing since like 2012, and it hasn't had any appreciable impact on technology. But if you actually learn the tools and you learn how to do something with it, then maybe you can make a change. And so I started getting analytical about theories of change. Like in the nonprofit activist world, they often press you to think of your theory of change, which is like, don't just like, you know, we can waste a lot of your time just running around doing things that don't actually change anything.Link

So like, what is your actual theory like, do you think, like, you know, targeting this political issue is going to make the change you need or like, are you going to like, try to redistribute resources like these people who are like, you know, in need? Like what? What exactly is your outcome that you want? And, you know, my thought was, if you want a more democratic outcome for technology, you have several avenues that you can take to make change. One of them is, sort of defensive, which is like privacy technologies, like regulation, like kind of always like protecting people from the downsides.Link

But then you're always sort of on the back foot. The other is offensive, like try to like, you know, I mean, attack, like, you know, surveillance monopolies or whatever. That's what a lot of the cyber activists back then were doing. But it's very personally risky. Like, long term, it didn't seem to stick.Link

It just was like an antagonistic force in the system. Or you can try to, like, build grassroots power and like grassroots change. And that involves building new architectures that try to do things differently. Like building companies that work differently, or building technologies that work differently in ways that structurally change the way power is distributed. And my as I came up with this theory of change, I was like, well, my favorite place to be for myself is in that third category of grassroots change.Link

Like, how do I make sure that technology is accessible enough that people can use it, and that the structure behind it is something that ensures that power is more evenly distributed? Maybe not like perfectly distributed, but at least more than like one entity or one company ending up with all of the cards. And so that was the sort of path I took. And that led me to be interested in decentralization technology, because decentralization in and of itself is distributing power out from one point and then privacy technologies, sort of the defensive side. I was also interested in because it means you can, you know, protect people from all their data going into one place. But it's just, you know, it didn't seem like as I worked in Zcash for a few years on privacy technology, it didn't seem like that was ever going to get wide adoption because people are very in general, they don't care about their privacy until they—Link

LubaNo, there needs to be a strong incentive for it.Link

JayIt's—Link

LubaPrivacy's secondary.Link

JayYeah, exactly. Yeah. It's secondary. And like unless there's like a really big risk or you have a strong incentive, people don't care enough about it to, you know, sacrifice convenience. And so then the third option is like, okay, how do you build architectures that distribute power out more evenly? So that led me to looking at social media. How can we build social media that is more democratic in structure, not just in ethos?Link

LubaWhat was your definition of success for yourself back then?Link

JayWell, when I left my nonprofit job, I tried to get really clear on my goals. So I wrote on an index card: expand empowerment tech.Link

LubaLike that? Was that— wow. That's very clear, very concise.Link

JayI had, like, I thought a lot about all the things I wanted to achieve. And I kind of like, you know, distilled it down to one thing. I had put on an index card, and then I kept that on my dresser and I was like, okay, this will be my like, orienting goal. And I think holding myself to that was also why I had a hard time, you know, interviewing and applying to just like random tech jobs. Because if I didn't feel like it was expanding empowerment tech, well, I was like, well, it's not really why I came to do this.Link

So then that led me towards jobs that were more aligned with, you know, is this something that expands empowerment tech? And I didn't have to check every box perfectly. But, you know, when the opportunity to work at Zcash came up, I was like, well, it's decentralized technology. I'm learning a new form of cryptography. It's like privacy technology that's like enough boxes checked that this will be an interesting learning experience.Link

LubaDid you feel like you were limiting yourself and your potential opportunities by having such a clear and concise mission statement?Link

JayMaybe. Yeah, but like my goal wasn't necessarily to— it depends on what you're trying to achieve. You know, I wasn't trying to like, make a ton of money and I wasn't trying to— I don't know, have the most fulfilled creative life. Although, like, those two things are not, like, unimportant. They just weren't like my primary goal. And so I took opportunities that, like, mostly kept me happy enough on the other dimensions, but like mostly focused on like, is it something that feels like it can expand empowerment tech?Link

LubaSo before you dove into Bluesky, you started a startup, right? Happening. Why? What made you be interested in social event space and what gave you the startup itch to begin with?Link

Because in my mind, it seems kind of like a slightly different detour from everything else you were doing prior to that. But given that you were trying to have people own their own data, perhaps it was still on the same track. But like going from decentralization, Zcash, privacy, I guess, to privacy of your data on event side perhaps does make sense. But what was the broader vision for Happening?Link

JayYeah, that's when I met you back in 2019.Link

LubaYeah that's true.Link

JayYeah.Link

LubaThat's true.Link

JayThat's true. Yeah. I realize you—Link

LubaWere already working on the platform.Link

JayMhm. Yeah. I left crypto during actually a bull market period, and everyone thought that I was crazy for going and doing social of all things in like 2018. Yeah.Link

LubaWhy would you want to do social? Are you working on social?Link

JayYeah, exactly. But social was something that I felt like really needed some sort of change to happen. And there had been several experiments that were very small, but I found very interesting. Like Secure Scuttlebutt was this, non cryptocurrency but cryptographic based, like public private key pair based social networking systems. So it was very sort of cypherpunk.Link

And I met these people at the hackerspaces using it. And you had to, you know, create a key pair and then like if you switch devices everything would break. Like it was all sorts of jank. But it was very cool because it showed that you could have a viable form of social media that was completely decentralized, like that was truly peer to peer, like everything lived on people's devices. It was point to point.Link

There was no central service that made things very difficult to maintain, and I definitely ran into a lot of the challenges using it, but I liked using it and playing around with it. And then one of the first things I did as I was, I went part time at my job first to sort of transition out and make sure again, that I liked doing whatever was going to come next before I committed full time. And what I started tinkering around with was little experiments using Scuttlebutt. So I did like a little Twitter to Secure Scuttlebutt bridge to try to like bridge mainstream social with this tiny indie thing. I did a few other little experiments, and then I started writing my own social media protocol.Link

Like I was like, okay, if I did this from scratch, what would it look like? You know, I don't like the append-only log structure of Secure Scuttlebutt. That means you can never delete anything. It's almost like a mini blockchain, like there's no mining involved, but it's like there's this cryptographic structure that's very inflexible. And I want to delete things.Link

And so I'm like, let me just reimagine the data structures here. I feel like I have enough experience to maybe design something. So I worked with like a friend and like kind of worked on designing a data structure that would be more amenable to deletion, to updates, to, having some hybrid system that's in between a centralized and a peer to peer system. So it's like, okay, well, you know, servers are nice. It's nice to be able to put things in one point and have somebody else control your keys. I'd already lost several cryptocurrency wallets at that point.Link

LubaOh no.Link

JayMy own carelessness. So I was like, you know, I don't think this is private public key. Like, you know, cryptography is for everybody. What if we, like, tuck that under the hood and then just, like, have a server manage it? So that was actually the design that informed the AT Protocol later.Link

Because we've kept a lot of those kinds of structures, like we use Merkle trees instead of append only logs. Like, yeah, all these technical decisions that I sort of emerged through experimentation. But then once I had like designed this fun little protocol, I was like, okay, well, to get usage, I still have to get users. And building a protocol for years is not kind of how I want to spend my time. I want to build something that, you know, figures out how to get user adoption. So I was like, all right, let me analyze the state of social media.Link

Like, what do I wish I had? And I wish I had an alternative to Facebook events because that's the one reason I still keep Facebook. So I started like, tinkering around with what if I just built a social event site that was like, you know, I'm not going to try to connect all the decentralized back end pieces. I'm just going to figure out how to get users right now. And so I was like, let me learn from like the more traditional startup path. That's when I, you know, went to San Francisco again and was like hanging out in the more traditional startup circles thinking—Link

LubaBefore that, at Zcash, you were living somewhere else?Link

JayI was hopping around a lot like doing a remote like digital nomad thing. But I settled back down in San Francisco for a bit, did like On Deck and some, you know, traditional startup stuff and just tried to learn like, okay, what are the basic mechanics of being a founder of like, doing, you know, design, getting users like doing user research and was just sort of like cutting my teeth on all that and like trying to figure out on the fly. And I was just in the process of finding a co-founder, like getting ready to, you know, take my early experiments and turn it into something more real. When I saw that Jack Dorsey tweeted about this new social media protocol and he was like, I want to fund people to build the social protocol and then Twitter will use it.Link

And then I was like, yes. I built a social protocol. And like the whole purpose of doing Happening was to like gain users and then eventually like build this social protocol. Like my real goal was to build a decentralized social protocol. But I was trying to build an event site to get to that end goal, which was kind of clumsy.Link

And as a result, I built out a lot of stuff I didn't need. Like, I wasn't doing the most efficient experimentation because I had profiles, I had comment systems. I had this whole social network behind what really needed to just be a simple event landing page, you know? And when I realized, here's maybe a more direct route, if I could just like, get Twitter to like, use my protocol or like, have me work on this project, I was like, I have to work on this, plus the name thing. I was like, well, that's synchronicity.Link

LubaYeah, definitely. I definitely want to spend a lot of time talking about Bluesky and getting onto that project. But to double tap on Happening on that journey, what was it like to now be a startup founder and doing a lot of things that you were not used to doing before, and most importantly, being a solo and kind of being lonely in that journey. Was it all fun and games or what was it really like?Link

JayIt was a big learning curve. I mean, I think the biggest learning was I was approaching it from the programmer mentality at first, because I had succeeded at totally becoming a programmer like I was doing, you know, C++, like, you know, blockchain programming before I made this transition. So I had gotten deep into the code I'd written some, like I'd even written some like zero knowledge proof intro circuits in Rust. Like, that's like very hard core stuff that I can't believe I did in retrospect, but I'd kind of, like, prove to myself I could get there, I could do it. I could keep going deeper if I wanted. I did at that point.Link

I was like, just like if I wanted to go deeper in the nonprofit world, I would need a law degree. I was like, okay, if I'm going to go deeper into cryptography, I need more of a math background. So now it's like either step back and study or just kind of keep hacking away at it. And then I realized like, well, what do I what is my passion really driving me towards? My passion was actually driving me back towards something more human centered and like more focused on when I did some exploration I like. I actually want to work on social like that affects people more directly.Link

Like, you know, yeah, programmable money is really cool, but not everybody even has money. But like, everybody is on social media these days, you know? So I wanted to work on social. I knew that I tinkered around a bit. And then when I started building Happening, I was still building it with a programmer first mentality, like I spent all my time coding and like not doing very many user interviews at first, like pretty much none. I built out way too much. I like built an unnecessary amount of stuff.Link

LubaThat's a common trope.Link

JayYeah, I was having a good time building and I was proving to myself, oh hey, I can build a web application from scratch. Like, I was proud of doing it all myself. But then at some point I was like, you know what? What it takes to succeed is not being able to build the whole thing yourself.Link

Like, that's nice and all, but it's essentially like a hobby project. If I really want to succeed, I have to get a lot faster about experimentation, talk to more users. So I was starting to like, make that mental shift when I was when I realized, like, okay, maybe I could like, take all this research I've done and publish it and like, you know, try to convince Twitter to do this thing instead. So I kind of pivoted halfway through my founder journey.Link

LubaRandom tangent on the process of deciding what you actually should be doing with your life, because you mentioned that while you were working on Zcash, you had this whole kind of soul searching experience of figuring out what are you actually excited about? So it was either diving deeper into programming and learning more math, or it was caring more about social than you actually realized you were caring about. What was that process of figuring that out like, and what process do you follow these days on figuring out whether you're aligned with what you actually want to do, or whether you're straying away from your path?Link

JayYeah, that's a good question. Thinking back on that period, I did a bunch of journaling. I did some experimentation. Like I said, I didn't leave my job outright right away. I went part time first and then tinkered around with stuff that I thought would interest me, and I thought I might want to do more full time. So I tinkered around on social.Link

I made some little small projects and then presented them at one of the decentralized web conferences at the Internet Archive. So it just got some feedback, like kind of got my early experiments out there. And then based on the feedback, I was like, well, you know, it's probably not. Nobody's excited enough about a new social protocol right now. But, you know, there's probably enough market demand for an event site like I did some initial I didn't do zero user research. I talked to some folks and like sort of gauged demand.Link

And then once I started feeling like, okay, well, this is something that I want the experience of doing whether or not it succeeds. I think that's probably the that's probably the tipping point for me usually is when I reach the point of I'm enjoying the process of this enough that even if it completely fails, I will enjoy the experience. And so, yes, like at the time that I was leaving crypto, I was like, maybe, you know, everyone else is going to be way more successful in crypto and make a lot of money because I'm stepping off the path right now. But if I do this and I fail at building a startup and I fail at, you know, building a new social protocol, that's at least what I really want to do now. And so I will enjoy the experience. And as long as failure doesn't feel catastrophic in the sense that you did something that was meaningful to you throughout the process, then I think it makes it worth taking the risk, because either way, you will have experienced something that you think is meaningful.Link

LubaYeah, and in the end of the day, life is so full of uncertainty that if you dedicate your day to day life to something that is completely miserable and then the outcome is miserable too, then you just spent you kind of just wasted a lot of time in your mind. But if you're enjoying the process, then it's completely different. Okay, so now the big Bluesky chapter. So you see on Twitter that Jack Dorsey posts something about a new project, a new social protocol that he wants to build under the helm of Twitter.Link

You jump on the opportunity, and I know that it didn't really materialize for a couple of years. What were those couple of years like? You were contracting for it? Was there a big team like what was actually happening?Link

JayWell, those are the Covid years actually. So I have no idea what the original plans were, but Jack announced that December 2019, and then early 2020, I was publishing a lot of my private notes and research stuff on decentralized protocols to sort of get it out there, and—Link

LubaYou already folded Happening at that time, or you were still working on it?Link

JayIt was sort of in limbo, like I was a solo founder. What I, what I did was I split with the potential co-founder, and we'd never gotten so far as incorporating, like we were just about at that point. And so then we just I apologized. I was like, I really have to pursue this opportunity. I'm sorry. Like, we should part ways.Link

LubaHow are you supporting yourself during this entire time?Link

JaySavings I'd made in crypto.Link

LubaGot it. Okay. Makes sense.Link

JayBecause I, like, you know, entered the market during the bull market. Yeah. Yeah. So then I was like, okay, well, you know, and the savings weren't unlimited, but I could, like, afford to take a few more chances. And I decided I will spend some time just sort of like publishing all my work and trying to get involved in this new Bluesky project. And like, I am an expert on decentralized social.Link

I think, like, not that many other people are working on this, but I need to establish a name for myself. So I was just like published all the stuff I'd been writing. The Internet Archive knew that I'd been doing this work as I presented at their conference, so they invited me to give an overview of all the protocols which I'd been researching. So they had this like sort of session where different builders were presenting on their projects. But I presented this sort of overview of all of them at the outset. And so I did that, and that's where I met Parag. He'd come to the Internet Archive to sort of like peruse some of these new—Link

LubaOh, Parag? The Twitter Parag?Link

JayYeah. So like, I think like Jack sort of delegated, you know, figuring out who was going to do this to Parag. And so he and some of his folks showed up to this event where I gave a talk, and then we got in touch and he was like, oh, you should, you know, get looped into this project and getting looped into the project then was being added to a Matrix chat room.Link

LubaSo it wasn't really seeing the tweets on Twitter, it was seeing the tweet on Twitter. But nothing happened then. But you actually—Link

JayDMed the account, like, this long, impassioned—Link

LubaYeah, yeah, no one has responded.Link

JayNobody ever responded. Oh yeah. And I'm sure, like, a thousand people DMed the account. Yeah, yeah. But then it was actually, I think, meeting Parag in person.Link

LubaOkay, so I'm seeing the Internet Archive has been like a very long—Link

JayIt's an institution that's done a lot to push forward decentralized technology across the board. And so, like, whenever there's decentralized, social, decentralized, you know, archiving technology, like they've sort of cultivated that over the years and really been big supporters of it.Link

LubaOkay, so you meet Parag and he's like, okay, you should join this project. You join a chat room and, are things happening? Is there a lot of people in the chat room? Are there roles assigned to who's working on what?Link

JayYeah. So, early on, I had a conversation with Parag, and he's like, well, we hope, some, you know, we hope a leader just emerges from this chat room of a dozen people. And I was like, oh. Because my experience at Occupy in this, like an era of political fervor in like, 2012 was complete structural looseness leads to—Link

LubaYeah, no one's taking charge at all.Link

JayYou know, an article, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", which means that, like, actually a few people who, like, you know, default into a position of authority because nobody's, like, formally in charge. But then it's really hard to, like, figure out how to make change because there's no, like, formal processes. That was kind of the state of the project early on. The people actually in charge were the Twitter people, but like, they didn't actually have the expertise through like consistent attention to like move the thing forward.Link

And then the people in the chat room were just like a bunch of people like me, like, I don't know, a dozen or so of us just throwing out ideas. Like, it was very chaotic early on, like there was an initial burst of energy. People threw out a lot of ideas, and then Covid hit in 2020, and then everyone just kind of scattered to the winds. Like, you know, my life was disrupted, everyone's life was disrupted. Twitter, I think, went into complete chaos internally because of all the vaccine stuff and this or that.Link

They had no attention to pay to Bluesky basically. So it just kind of languished for months. And we kind of self-organized into a group that kept meeting. So we would like to have regular meetings and like try to move something forward, but it was unclear who was leading it. It was unclear what was happening, basically like nothing was happening.Link

LubaHow was the project positioned within Twitter? So they were like, we want to build the social protocol, but what was the optics like? Are you aware of? Were they like, we're going to build an app eventually? I assume that was not the case. Are we going to actually make it public and onboard some set of users on it? Like what was the narrative?Link

JayI mean, I never worked within Twitter, so I don't actually know how it was perceived internally. I know that the goal was to have Twitter run on this new protocol. I don't know what the trial period was supposed to be like. Like, I proposed rolling it out much like Birdwatch, where you had some subset of users opt in. You trial it out with like a controlled beta and then roll it out more widely.Link

LubaAnd the idea was similar to what Bluesky is today, where you can control your own feeds. You can control what you see. You have more of your own governance over your social media consumption. Or was it completely different?Link

JayIt was more open ended, like they named it Bluesky because there's like the, you know, the phrase like a blue sky project because they were leaving it completely open ended.Link

LubaYeah. Which is fair.Link

JayThey were like, let's see.Link

LubaWhere it goes.Link

JayOkay. Yeah. And so all sorts of different ideas were floated around early on. And, you know, there were some ideas that I think were like they had a bunch of articles that inspired them. So there was like this giant pile of like, you know, articles, writings like blog posts that, like, the people at Twitter had read and thought were inspirational. So one of the first things I did was do a literature review of all that. Like, I read it all and I summarized it, and then I was like, okay, this is the state of what we know and what we're thinking and—Link

LubaAnd what triggered the project to start to begin with. Was it Jack's passion for it, or was it certain employees within the company that pushed for it? Like, was there some sort of trigger point that made it a reality?Link

JayWell, in the literature review, one of the most important papers was "Protocols, Not Platforms." And that was a post by or it was a paper by Mike Masnick that was basically advocating for a more protocol approach based to social media. Yeah. And so this essentially was arguing about the inherent challenges of moderation at scale for billions of people and one company and one set of policies, never being able to appease so many demographics. And basically it said, like the way out of this trap that social companies have found themselves in, through pretty much the externalities of their own power, is to decentralize that power and delegate it out, because that's actually going to resolve these problems, like create a better position for the companies and for society at large. And that paper, I think, was influential to Jack.Link

Like Mike later said, he shopped it around to Facebook to like other companies, and Jack was the only one who really picked up on it. And Jack, of course, I think at this time had gotten interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and so was picking up on these ideas of decentralization more. And then I think Jack just ran with it because he was like, oh, you know, early on Twitter was supposed to be more like a protocol. It was this SMS based thing that turned into this giant company that is now, but we actually want to reinvigorate that early spirit. So I think—Link

LubaIt's coming back to the ethos of what they wanted to create in this—Link

JayOf all the social companies, Twitter was most protocol-like in its DNA, and Jack was most amenable to the idea.Link

LubaSo during Covid, people were kind of all over the place. But you guys still maintained meetings. What was actually happening in the meetings? Was there any progress being made? And were you guys building? Were you discussing what could it be? What was happening?Link

JayPretty much nothing was being built. There was a lot of discussions. I was, you know, I had gone out in the country during Covid. Like, you know, I had stopped working on Happening because I was like, who's doing live events right now? Like, I can choose to revitalize Happening or I can just, like, choose to do something else. You know, I'd like, spend a few weeks just like baking bread and like, trying to figure out what I was going to do with mine.Link

LubaAs a lot of us did.Link

JayThat a lot of us did, just coping with the moment. I like, you know, planted a garden and grew some bread. And then I was still involved in this, like Bluesky working group, I guess it would be called.Link

LubaAnd who was a part of it?Link

JayJeremie Miller, who's now on our board, several like protocol folks, like the founder of Matrix and like some other people who are like, you know, evangelist or leaders of like various other protocols, plus a few random people like myself, I guess, who are just like, interested, connected enough, like knew enough about the topic to sort of get pulled in. And.Link

LubaYeah, I think during Covid, there were a couple of those groups that were trying to move certain idea or movement forward. I remember Balaji had 1729, and it was also a working group that I think was a predecessor to the current network state. It seemed like a very fortuitous time for a lot of the thinking, because Covid was potentially changing the world so much.Link

JayYeah. And people had a lot of time to think.Link

LubaYeah, exactly. And bake bread.Link

JayYeah. So then I started pulling together. I liked doing like big, you know, research overviews when there's like nothing else going on. So in that moment I was like, I'm going to write an overview of every big social protocol or decentralized protocol out there. Like, I already started some of this work from my own notes. As I was researching protocols, I'd written several blog posts, like comparing IPFS and Dat and like these other early decentralized social protocols.Link

And I decided, well, those are just decentralized data protocols. But I decided to do an overview focused on social. And I was like, well, we have a lot of people in the room here, like the Matrix guy is here, like, you know, all these. I either know them or they're in the room. So I'll just like write this big research overview. So I started writing this research overview, and then I pitched Twitter on paying me to do it.Link

And they're like, well, I don't know. And then I was like, look, if you just like pay me as a contractor, I'll write the whole thing and then you can publish it under the Bluesky account. So it looks like something happened in the past year, you know, of 2020. And so then they paid me essentially just a lump sum as a contractor to write this thing I was already doing. So I pulled together this overview that pulled in a lot of data from various folks. And so, you know, basically everyone in the space at that time, I either interviewed them, talked like pulled the data or like had them look over the final product to be like, are these numbers right?Link

Is this description of your identity system right. And I tried to compare each of them across the same verticals. So like I analyzed how every system did identity, how every system dealt with data, like how many users were on every system. And through this kind of was able to mentally place what everything was doing at that time. And it was very fruitful for myself in terms of understanding what was going on. And I think it was a valuable contribution to like as, like a piece of research for people building in the industry at the time.Link

LubaAnd what was your idea for why you're working on Bluesky at the time? What were your hopes for the project? Was it just like a fun tinkering thing to do? And I know you were kind of figuring out where to spend your time specifically then, because you already stepped away from Happening and then this working group continue going, where was your head at?Link

JayWell, I still wanted Bluesky to work. Like I thought if Twitter was actually going to commit to this is the best chance for decentralized social to go mainstream, because trying to get mainstream adoption out of a weird protocol, it's going to take years and years of dedicated research and effort, and it's generally like a two opposing sets of skills people who are good at building low level cryptographic protocols cannot get mainstream adoption. And people good at like mainstream adoption, aren't thinking about any of this stuff. And so I was like, well, this is like maybe a very rare confluence of circumstances.Link

So it's worth pushing on even if it doesn't look like it's going to work out. So I kept, you know, people gradually dropped out of that group over time because people started to think, well, Twitter's not going to do anything. But I kept staying involved because I thought that, you know, even if this never goes anywhere, it's worth trying to like make it a thing, because if it exists, then it can potentially, like really touch the mainstream in a way that no other decentralized tech like, I've been in that space for a while, and I just saw how marginal it was, and I was like, this isn't going to reach mainstream adoption for years, if ever. And so this is kind of the moment and like opportunity if it's going to get any traction. So then—Link

LubaWere you kind of thinking on the side, what else I could be doing with my time? Or were you very much committed to seeing this through to an extent that you could?Link

JayI was committed to seeing it through, but I was also like, I wasn't doing this full time. I was like, you know, started doing some creative writing because I was like, you know, going back to some earlier interests like early in life, I wanted to be a writer. So I was like, well, I'll try doing some creative writing. And, you know, kind of like, you know, did some like tinkering around with other stuff during Covid, but this was the main like professional interest that I was investing in. And then there was little bits of traction like Twitter would come back to us and say, oh, we actually want to hear proposals. So like, can people write proposals and like, here's the things we want to see in the proposal.Link

And then people went off and wrote proposals. But some of the people who should have written proposals at that point were like not believing in Twitter's, you know, like seriousness. So they kind of opted out. And some of the ones that I was in touch with, I encouraged them to write proposals. And I was actually like, I will ghostwrite this if you just like, you know, give me the ideas for how you would build this. So I actually co-wrote two proposals that were not my own, plus my own, because I just thought that like, this should be built.Link

And I was like, I was kind of technology agnostic. Like, I think a lot of people in that group were very focused on like, you know, they should use this protocol in that protocol. And I was like, I feel like this should exist whether you use this stack or that stack, and there's so many trade offs, like the Matrix guy was saying, you should build it on Matrix and like you would have to modify the Matrix protocol a good amount, but you could have built it on Matrix like it's not impossible. You can always make these things work. So I helped him write a proposal. I was like, you know, you should really submit one.Link

Like, what if we just like, you know, create a proposal that like, and whenever I was writing that I was truly devoting myself to figuring out how could this work on Matrix? And then I helped Christine Lemmer-Webber, like, write a proposal on how to do it with, like, ActivityPub and Spritely, like she was working on these like new next-gen, like, you know, Mastodon iterations and like I was like, okay, those are interesting ideas. I don't fully understand all of them. But like, you could also do that. And basically I felt like there were multiple paths towards making this happen. The most important thing was that this actually gets a chance to happen, as opposed to languishing and fading into obscurity as a project that Twitter just killed.Link

LubaHow were you able to detach your ego from it so much because it sounds like, you know, with the project that you're co-writing someone else's proposals, you're ghostwriting proposals, you had such an unwavering belief that it had to exist, that you were kind of putting yourself and your own work aside, like you weren't really, you know, waving there, being like me, pick me like I did this. How so?Link

JayWell, it wasn't, you know, it was something I thought was really important, but it wasn't also like the center of my life. Like in that time period, I was just—Link

LubaLike a fun project.Link

JayDoing creative writing. Like growing squash. Like trying to stay sane. Like doing this project. I thought it was really important for the world.Link

So I was like, I feel like this should be like my contribution to society right now. But other than that, like, it's something that it's one of those things that I think should exist. And I think when I get really motivated as like, oh, this should exist. I really put other considerations aside and I just like, really work towards that. And also even my own proposal, like I worked on it with a friend I like thought through it, but I was like, I don't know if this is the best overall. Like most efficient architecture for decentralized social, it's just kind of like a proposal on the table that I think is pragmatic enough and makes these trade offs, and I like it, but I'm not I'm very much not a technological purist.Link

And I think that in technology, you get a lot of people who are very attached to like their protocol, their technological outcome, because they're technologists through and through. But I've never been a technologist through and through. I'm also more of like a sort of a humanities, you know, background. And so I'm like, well, various technologies could achieve this end goal of distributing power out from the social company. The most important thing is that here's a social company that seems willing to give up some power in exchange for, you know, a chance at self-disruptive innovation. And that seems like an opportunity worth cultivating.Link

LubaAnd the proposal was the stage at which they were picking the leader for the project.Link

JayYeah, it was a long interview process that took another year after that. But like a year, maybe like six months, like a long time. It was like many months.Link

LubaMostly because it wasn't a priority or because the interview process was so rigorous?Link

JayIt wasn't— I have no idea. Like it was multiple interviews, but also I think Twitter in that period had a lot going on. There was Covid aftermath stuff. Like old Twitter seemed to move fairly slowly on everything as well. It just didn't seem to like, you know, speed towards decisions or, you know, outcomes on anything.Link

LubaAnd what was the interview process like? Like what were they actually looking for? Whom were you interviewing with? Were you spending a lot of time on prep at that point? Were you kind of like, okay, this is an opportunity to make this happen? Or again, it was like a part of the Rolodex of things that you did.Link

JayOnce they looked at the proposals, then they picked some proposals to interview people on and then, you know, everyone went into their own, like, I'm prepping my own proposal mode. So I worked on my own pitch, like, you know, worked on how my presentation. And they asked you to consider a lot more beyond just the technology. They were like, you know, how would you build this? Like, what organization would you do it through? Like what?Link

How would you know? How would all these other things work? And so that's when I really sat down and thought about the things most important to me in terms of what I wanted to achieve, like algorithmic choice. That was something I really put in there, like customized moderation. I really thought through, like, what are the most important pieces to try to innovate on, and what pieces can we use off the shelf pieces on? So that was when I really sat down and like, thought through how I would do it because I was like, okay, my proposal was like being taken seriously.Link

Now I should really think through, like how I'm going to do this. And at that point, once I really thought through it, I was like, well, whether Twitter does this or not, maybe I should consider getting independent funding to— yeah, to start it. And so I did talk to a few folks to like look into the possibility of starting this. But then I was like, okay, but, you know, I would still be back in the position I was in early at Happening, which is trying to build a protocol without any user adoption. And, you know, if I just build a headless protocol, it's still going to be years towards adoption. So, I'm just back in the same place as I was with Happening, which is like, how do I get users?Link

LubaAnd you got selected as a head of the project. That project was still under the helm of Twitter. What was it like to get it to be independent?Link

JayIt was actually, both harder and easier than I expected. Hard because it took like six months of negotiation.Link

LubaI guess. What was the trigger? So you started working on it as a leader? I guess you had more freedom to make the decisions that you thought were right.Link

Were you assembling a team? Were you still a contractor? Yeah. What were the details?Link

JayYeah, I was only a contractor for that one research project I did, and then I wasn't working with Twitter again. Twitter actually came back to me, and, like, I was about to be like, oh, well, you know, this isn't going to happen. Maybe I'll get another job. And they're like, oh, but like, we're hiring for, you know, a crypto research position. So I actually applied to Twitter for a crypto research position, thinking maybe I'll like, you know, learn how Twitter works from inside and like be able to like, you know, work on getting some pieces of decentralized technology into Twitter from that perspective.Link

I actually got hired for that job, and then I was like, all right, well, maybe I'll do this instead. And then before I like even completed onboarding or like joined Twitter, like in just in that interval after like getting a yes and taking the job. They were like, actually we want you to lead Bluesky instead. And I was like, all right, this is a lot of like back and forth. But ultimately that's what I wanted to do in the first place. So I thought about it for a bit.Link

I'd just gotten myself in the headspace of like, well, I've never worked at a big company. What if I did? And then they were like, what if you led Bluesky instead? And I was like, well, that's actually better, because I wouldn't have to learn big company bureaucracy and could like, build out a small team. So then I accepted the Bluesky lead, and my condition at that point was very much, I need independence because Twitter moves very slowly. Like I don't want to be like tangled up in all the bureaucracy of everything.Link

And I want to be able to, like, experiment with the small team. So at that point, I started hunting for team members to recruit, and I trawled through GitHub. I like looked at all the interesting projects doing stuff in the space. I just emailed a few folks and one of them got back to me and was like, sure, I'll— like, I pitched him, like, can you help me work on a demo? And so this is how I hired my first engineer is I found Daniel through GitHub and then got him to help me with a demo. And I was like, well, I don't have money.Link

LubaThe demo was to—Link

JayIt was a demo of, you know, that early protocol I talked about where I was like, I'm going to revise security and build a new protocol from scratch. I was going to take that and build a little demo, a social media app out of that. And so I was like, look, here's some really crappy code I wrote in 2018, like, can you turn this into a real thing? And he was like, sure, I can do that. And so he was working on that, and I promised to pay him out of my old Happening funds, which I sort of self-funded. And I was like, well, if Twitter doesn't come through, like, don't worry, I'll pay you through.Link

LubaTwitter was not really willing to fund or were they—Link

JayThey were slow. They were, on paper. But it took six months between them saying, okay, you're the Bluesky lead and me actually getting any money.Link

LubaWere you trying to convince Jack Dorsey for Bluesky to go independent, or was it someone else that you were in conversation with?Link

JayI think a lot of it was kind of Twitter's like legal team, like having all these concerns like, oh, how is this going to work? How is that going to work? And then there was a lot of negotiation over like equity control. Like, how is this going to be structured?Link

Is it a subsidiary? Is it this or that. Like there's just so many structural questions that had to be worked through. And I ended up like getting my own lawyers so I could be negotiating from a position of independence.Link

LubaWhy do you think they were willing to do it to begin with?Link

JayThey were both, I think I mean, I think they were both willing and not willing. Like part of the company was like, yeah, let's do it. And Jack was like, yeah, let's do it. And then people within the company were like, oh, I don't know about this. Like. And so I think that ambivalence showed in like the back and forth, like there was both like, you know, hey, we want you to do this, but also like here's all these roadblocks and concerns to resolve.Link

And it was like resolving those one after another that took many months. In this time period, I was publicly announced as CEO or not CEO or like Bluesky lead, but it didn't have an organization like we didn't have anything set up. And then everyone was like, come on. Like, it's been years, you haven't done anything. And I really felt like The Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Like trying to, like, make it look like things are happening. When I was mostly just trying to get an organization set up and like, hire anyone at all.Link

LubaWow. Paints the state of the world at that time.Link

JaySo that was post Covid, but there was still like masking mandates and stuff like that. Things were still kind of uncertain and chaotic. And, I felt like decentralized social media was more important than ever. So I was like recommitting to doing this, particularly once I had the go-ahead, I was like, well, even if Twitter doesn't eventually come through at this point, I was starting to feel like if I have a team, if I have like an idea, like it's getting further refined day by day eventually, even if Twitter never gives me the money like they've already publicly named me Bluesky lead, I'll just pivot that into like actually starting something if they, like, never end up funding this. So I started to like be more and more committed as I just worked through the roadblocks.Link

But, it did seem like if I could get Twitter's buy in, that was the happiest outcome. Like, then I could, you know, I saw it sort of a little bit naively at the time of, like, skipping the hard problem of like getting user adoption. Like now that I have, you know, got a ton of users, you still always have to constantly work on iterating and growing your user base. But at that time I was like, well, if Twitter just uses this, then we just have to build a great protocol. So like, I'm going to build a protocol team and just like try to pitch Twitter on using it.Link

LubaSo you were very much under the idea that you're not building a new social app. You're building a protocol that Twitter and perhaps other social media companies are going to be using.Link

JayThat was very much the initial idea. Like, I definitely ran into some roadblocks, like Twitter's internal resistance was visible, you know, and I was I think I talked to a few other companies during that time, like I got put in touch with someone at, you know, Reddit or like some other companies. And there was also that sort of like, oh, this is cool. But also like, no, we want to do this other thing. And then Reddit was like, what if we team up and work on like our crypto thing?Link

And I was like, but it's not a crypto thing. It's decentralized, social. It's different from a crypto thing. Oh, everyone also assumed I was like building it on Bitcoin or something. And I was like, no, no, no, it's not on Bitcoin. So it was just a lot of confusion to work through.Link

But then I started to think about a plan B because I was like, okay, look, if this never gets off the ground, like, let's say Twitter never gives any funding to it, or if Twitter never adopts it. Like, what do I do? I was like, well, I guess I have to build a social protocol and or my social app to go with the social protocol. I hadn't put a ton of thought into it, but I was like, well, what it does need to do is it needs to have custom feeds. It needs to have composable moderation. Like those are just the pieces that I knew needed to exist.Link

And then, yeah, I think that the reason Bluesky looks like a Twitter alternative is we just never like as a team. Like once I got the first two people on board as well. We never sat down and like designed a social app that was different from what we were building for Twitter. And because we were kind of just like having that mentality of, we're building this for Twitter and oh, looks like they're not going to use it. Okay. Now let's just like build what we're going to build for Twitter, but with like the differences that we set out to sort of highlight, which is the control over your own algorithm.Link

LubaAnd for someone who's listening and doesn't have an understanding of what decentralized social actually means, can you explain it in simple terms?Link

JayYeah, decentralized social is a social experience where you have control over core components of the experience. So that might mean being able to take your data and move it with you when you move services. That might mean being able to choose your own moderation service. That might mean being able to control like what feed you use, like installing your own feed that shows you a custom timeline. Bluesky allows all those things because we built those interfaces in.Link

So that decentralization gives you direct control. And ultimately it means that one company can't unilaterally control your experience. Other companies can come in and freely build. You can take your data and migrate somewhere else. All of it is sort of in your hands at the end of the day, to choose your own adventure.Link

LubaI'm surprised that a company like Twitter, whose primary business model is ads, was interested in putting themselves onto a decentralized protocol. What was the thinking behind it?Link

JayThat's why I think there's a lot of internal resistance. And the company was nervous because it would require a lot of self disruption. Like you'd have to create a new like you'd have to, like, move your service back in the stack to the protocol side of it, as opposed to relying so heavily on like a locked in client and ads. Like Twitter was more open in the beginning, right? Like you had TweetDeck, you had these different sort of services that built off the API. They closed that down over the years as they consolidated their market position.Link

And this was also coinciding with the push on opening up the API. So Jack was creating an API initiative that would let developers build again. And like they burned a lot of trust with the developer community over the years, but they were trying to get that back, like in the same time period. So it was I think Bluesky was a multi-pronged, like, you know, strategy, part of a multi-pronged strategy to open Twitter back up again, like they're going to open up the APIs. They were going to try this decentralized like radical restructuring. The goal was to just like make Twitter a protocol again.Link

LubaWhy did it end up such that Twitter internally was not down for that, given that there was so much excitement? Seemingly.Link

JaySome people were. So I had some allies in the company who were like, yeah, this is cool. Like, I really want to, you know, see this idea pan out. And they were, you know, the Birdwatch people were interested because they were their own little experiment within Twitter. There were other people introduced me to other folks, like, had me start like, you know, you have to kind of it's like a big political bureaucracy, like these large companies. You have to get to know everyone.Link

So as I slowly work my way around getting to know various people at Twitter and sort of like explaining how it would work, there were a lot of misconceptions. Like people thought decentralized meant moderation was impossible. I had to clear that up. I was like, no, no, it just means like, you know, moderation happens at different layers, but like, you can definitely like a huge design goal of like what we were building based off these early conversations was you have to be able to moderate the exact same way you used to be able to, because if you make moderation too difficult, they're going to like particularly the legal team is going to be like, no, absolutely no. This is an intolerable level of risk, right? And so we made sure that, like, the architecture allowed you to have the same user experience, the same moderation policies, like it can work just like old Twitter on the surface, but under the hood, you've changed how it works fundamentally.Link

LubaWhat was the trigger point that made Twitter decide that, hey, we're not. We're actually not down.Link

JayTwitter— old Twitter never made that decision. Old Twitter was working towards, you know, working with us. And like it was slow going. And there was some people who were on board, some people who weren't.Link

LubaIt was Elon taking over.Link

JayIt was that transition. Yeah. Like I was having weekly calls with people at Twitter and like trying to move forward the state of our collaboration, because we were essentially like, an external company collaborating with Twitter at this point. And we had weekly calls that were like a standing call. I had like various outside calls with people at Twitter.Link

I was just like networking my way through the organization. Right? And then when Elon took over, like so many people within a very short time either quit or were fired. And so I showed up to one of these standing calls one week, and nobody came calling me on the call. Were you starting next week? And nobody came and like, it just looked like the calendar invite had never gotten deleted, but like, everyone was gone.Link

LubaWere you working closely with Jack at all, or was he did he just assign someone to the project and then project was off to its own races?Link

JayWell, he was on our board, so like, nominally involved, but not super.Link

LubaNot super heavy. Like, with Elon during negotiation— hey, there's this project Bluesky. Please consider taking it into good hands. That was not a part of the conversation.Link

JayNot that I ever had any like influence over, like my access to Jack was also like it. And like other people I've talked to, it just seems like he's spread across all these things, you know, like he had Square, he had Twitter. I mean, he did step back from Twitter, but still, like there was, you know, I'm sure like stuff to tie up. Like, you know, he was on the board of Bluesky. He was doing like, all this stuff and like, it seemed like he really wanted this to happen, but it wasn't like top priority for him.Link

LubaAnd so I personally remember when Elon took over, there were these different alternative social media platforms that people could go to as a protest to the new Twitter and Bluesky, I believe was a part of that narrative. It was like, okay, well, if you guys hate Elon taking over Twitter, you can go to Mastodon, you can go to Bluesky. There was this thing called Post, I think. Okay. It doesn't matter. There was another startup that was trying to do news and news feed. What did it feel like for you to be an alternative to Twitter and basically a protest to Elon?Link

JayIt was weird to suddenly be, you know, one of these places people were going. It also felt a bit like we had been building this, like novel boat building technology, sort of like off the side of this big ship. And then suddenly the ship starts, like, wildly swerving and like, people start like, jumping off and they're like, let me get on your lifeboat. And we're like, ah, we're building boat building technology, not a lifeboat, but like quick, inflate it. Like make it work. And so we're like trying to like, finish it on the fly as all these people are like, trying to hop on board.Link

So, yeah, it suddenly felt like we were building a lifeboat, like, unbeknownst to us, and our novel boat building technology was like getting overlooked for the fact that we were actually just like a lifeboat for people. And that's an important role to play, you know? So we tried to, like, play that role as best as we could while as a team, not being fully equipped for that. Like we did not come from a we're going to build an alternative to Twitter background. We came from we're going to build a protocol background. And so the team had no large social company experience. We were all like protocol builders and like, you know, open source hackers.Link

LubaDo you remember the moments when you were like, oh shit, now I'm a social media company CEO?Link

JayYes. I mean, like very many times early on where like suddenly you have a bunch of users and you're like, oh man. There's like, you know, all these edge cases, like all these like, you know, moderation controversies, like all this stuff to like, think about now that like, we didn't and we didn't come like people also were under the assumption that we'd spun out of Twitter and they're like, why aren't you operating like Twitter? Like, where's your head of trust and safety? Where's your legal counsel?Link

Where's your— and we're like, we're like six people. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like we're tiny. Like we were a tiny team just getting spun up. We were essentially like in this research project mode.Link

And we were not like a huge company. But people had this association that this is a Jack Dorsey project. Therefore it was like a huge, well-funded endeavor. And like, you know, we might have been like relatively well funded, but we didn't have the sort of like institutional capacity of a big company. And so we were in very much like firefighting mode for, I mean, I would say we still are in firefighting mode, but we've been in firefighting mode for years.Link

LubaWhat was the perception of you as a leader of the project? Were you kind of worried about the fact that, you know, now this is an anti Elon project, and I don't know if you've already seen a bunch of hate related to it or not at all. It was like a completely different narrative and situation. What did it feel like for you and what actually was happening?Link

JayWell, early on we were actually perceived as a Jack Dorsey project. Like, that's what the press referred to Bluesky as. It was all like Jack Dorsey was the headline, and people assumed he was the CEO and he was actually minimally involved. Like, he popped in, like here and there and would like post a little bit early on, but he and I actually diverged in terms of like what we thought the project should be about, because he actually thought we should, you know, kick people off the lifeboat, go back to like building ship building technology.Link

Like he was like, just focus on the protocol. Like, don't even, like, build a client. Like, throw out a reference client and then, like, let other people build clients and just focus on the core protocol technology. And it's like, yeah, but like nobody's going to use it then. Like the whole point of doing this was to like get mainstream users on and like, we have to work on building for users.Link

And if we don't like, really figure out what the problems of like, real users are, then we're kind of still building a protocol, like disconnected from the end user. And so I was like, no, we should take advantage of this moment and like, bring on the users who want an alternative and like try to show them that decentralization benefits them tangibly beyond just the idea that, you know, I felt like just building a protocol would be too disconnected. But his opinion was like the project should be more focused on just the core protocol technology and like, not turn itself into a social company and like, not do that. But I was like, well, I feel like this moment kind of like requires like I think we still could have done that, but I don't think we would have had I don't think anybody using the protocol, I don't think we would have had this level of like interest in the technology, because nobody's really here at the end of the day, for technology in and of itself. They're here for what it can do for them.Link

LubaIt's the same thing. Privacy. Like when we're talking about Zcash and privacy. People don't really care about privacy in and of itself. If it's a friction to their day to day being. But if there is any usability, then of course privacy is a great secondary effect.Link

JayYeah. And I would say that the ways that people care about our technology at all tends to be what it enables them to do. Like the fact that they can choose their own feed or choose their own moderator. Like those are things that do matter to people. Maybe not enough that they're willing to completely switch for that reason, but those are value adds.Link

The fact that as a developer, you can freely build and the firehose is open. That's a huge value add, like, you know, larger for developers. And I would say for the average user, because it's an open technology that lets anyone hack on it. So like, those things are very real benefits that show up for users. But we really try to focus on like, how does this technology benefit users as opposed to how do we get users to use our cool technology?Link

LubaYeah. How many people signed up initially when you guys were launching a client or when you were positioning itself, or the media was positioning you as a Twitter alternative. And what were those initial audiences like? Like what were their interests? What was the ethos?Link

JayThe very first sign that people were going to use this was when we announced that we're building a Twitter client. We basically announced this, and I think I looked back at the thread on the Bluesky Twitter account, and it's like in a long thread, 12 tweets down. It's like the 12th tweet in the thread saying, hey, by the way, we're building a client. Here's a wait list. And that got retweeted so much that we actually got 30,000. Like I think like 40,000 signups that very first day, which was way more than we were expecting.Link

LubaProbably way more than Happening had.Link

JayWay more than Happening had. Yeah. Happening at its best. Had like, you know, 2000 users or something. And so we were like, oh man, there's a lot of demand for this.Link

Like the client wasn't even built yet. So we just like figured out how to get it. First of all, get a bigger like system to store an email list. A developer is just like, let's just like, start writing them into the file. Like we can't, like, store them all in the service. It's like too expensive.Link

And then over the weeks that followed, we got more and more interest. Like it just snowballed into people signing up because our timing was uncannily good. We just like put that out and the next week the sale went through and Elon bought Twitter. So then we got this first bump. And then like once Elon bought Twitter, more people signed up and then we suddenly had a waitlist with like a million users on it. And like, those weren't 100% real emails, but like, a lot of them were like, there were definitely like, you know, hundreds of thousands of real emails in there.Link

LubaDo you remember what were you thinking then? Were you like, oh, shit, this is this—Link

JayI was like, we have to build a real app. Like, we're going to have to, you know, hire a DevOps person to run the thing. You know, like we had a team that was very under-resourced for what we were trying to do. And so we hired we put out a job posting for a DevOps person.Link

I was the only person able to do hiring interviews because my other like, you know, folks were coding, pulled in a friend, and then hired two DevOps people, one of them who ended up not doing DevOps because I was like, we just need all hands on deck. But hiring is always a bottleneck, particularly in periods where you have a very short time frame. You just like, don't have enough hands on deck. You just have to do the best you can. So we hired whoever we could and then did the best we could from there with like— I think we launched our initial version with like six people on the team.Link

LubaWow. That's insane. And how many people were you supporting? Millions at that point?Link

JayEarly on, we controlled it very closely. So there were only a few hundred people. But like, we kept hiring, I think we launched and we got several. We got up to several tens of thousands with like, you know, 8 or 9 team members.Link

LubaHow would you describe the culture of Bluesky at the moment? Who are the primary users? Why are they using the platform? Because I think especially with social media companies, which I'm sure it's such a feat to run a social media company because there is so much pressure that you probably didn't expect to have in making decisions and potentially upsetting one set of users and making other set of users happy, no matter how much of an idea and roadmap you want to have for the type of user you're building for. It's still kind of the users still have the life of its own, and the culture is being formed, probably through the initial sets of users that come to that social media platform and then the type of conversations they're having, the types of communities that they're forming. What is Bluesky right now?Link

JayI think we're a lot of people looking for alternatives. And so that's people who are looking for an alternative to Elon, people who left Facebook looking for alternative to, you know, Zuckerberg's empire. Like last March, I wore a shirt, "A world without Caesars."Link

LubaOh, yes.Link

JayOn stage at South by Southwest. There was kind of a response to that. Yeah, Zuck had made, which I just found really obnoxious, that he's like, oh, he's proclaiming himself or styling himself as sort of like Emperor, because, you know, like this is a collective effort to build this. You know, social media is like us posting pictures like us, like, you know, writing posts and like, I think this data ultimately should belong to people. Like, it's like people's relationships, their efforts that go into creating these empires. And then you have the, you know, titans of industry claim—Link

LubaDo you think he actually was proclaiming himself as Caesar, or was it just kind of a strong fascination with Roman history?Link

JayThat's true.Link

LubaHis daughters are named after—Link

JayYeah. I don't know. Like, you know, I'm not in his head. I don't know, like, how seriously he takes it. But, like, if anyone in this modern world has a claim to that level of power.Link

I mean, yeah, he does have the power of, like, a Roman emperor. Like, I don't think that's good for society, but like he does. Like, you know, it's not like wrong for him to style himself that way. It's just like I said, it's obnoxious because it's very anti-democratic. Like, I think I want to live in a society where we have a more democratic ethos where, you know, we I prefer the George Washington ethos as opposed to like the Julius Caesar ethos, you know.Link

LubaSo generally when you hear about the types of people that want the, decentralization of platforms and they're anti-Elon or anti-Zuck, because the States are so divided, you think about left and right automatically. Would you how do you feel about that perception. Because in my eyes, it seems like Bluesky is perceived as a very left wing platform. Is that actually true? And given that I'm in, my impression of you is someone who is quite centrist is how does it feel to run a platform with a specific perception in the eyes of the world?Link

JayYeah, to some degree. I mean, I think of the US demographic like we got a huge growth surge after the election as well. And like that really like when you get like a huge group of people on here because they're here because they're like, you know, sick of this political thing. Like, of course it's going to be very polarized around the world. We have a lot of Japanese users.Link

Early on, we had the first actually big bump of users very early days was Brazilians. I don't even know why, but like when we first started opening up the waitlist, it was a ton of Brazilians and like they pulled on more of their friends. And so we had an invite system early on. So like we had this very early network effect. And at first we thought we were running a Brazilian app and then like it turned into a more US centric app. And then around our public launch, it was like all Japanese users, like, oh, now it's a Japanese app.Link

And like at various points I've been like, am I going to have to learn Japanese or Portuguese? Because now we're a Brazilian app. That happened multiple times. Actually. We had another two big Brazilian bumps that like turned the demographics of the site, like largely Brazilian for a while, but now it's largely US.Link

And in the US it does feel largely political, but not as a global app. I would say, like the Japanese community tends to be like a lot of artists, a lot of people using social media in a more like, conversant like social way, like, you know, live streaming or like, not live streaming, but like live posting your day and like being really chatty and like a big developer community and like stuff like that. So there's definitely a lot of other niches beyond politics. Right now. We're having a lot more sports posters coming on as well. There's just like a strong demand for a place where people can have a sense that it's like a real time news stream, but it's not biased.Link

Like, you know, it doesn't feel like the owner is trying to push you a certain direction. It doesn't feel like the algorithm is constantly inserting stuff. And I think their experience on like Threads or X is like either the algorithm is like so sensitive. It's just like throwing you a million things about hurricanes after you clicked on, like one hurricane post. Or it's like very much focusing on what the owner of the site wants you to see.Link

Whereas I, you know, try to stay out of it in terms of, like imposing my opinions on the site, I very much not just like in terms of like the ethos of how I run it, but structurally, like I couldn't fully impose my opinion on the site if I tried, because you can default away from the main feed. We only control one out of like 50,000 feeds— if you don't like Discover, you uninstall it and then we have no control over what you see. And that's by design. Like by design, I don't think the CEO of the site should, like, be primarily determining what you see. That's too close to like, you know, news broadcasting for me. But at least with news broadcasting, there's different channels like on social media, you have basically one channel.Link

And again, like I said early on, there's this illusion of mass democratization going on because everyone has access to the microphone. But the truth of social media is like all the microphone makers are concentrated in one hand. So as soon as you like, change the algorithm or you change like the moderation rules, suddenly everyone's affected. And like, that's just caused a ton of discontent, because the sort of pitch of social media is anyone can post like, this is your site, like, you know, connect and communicate, build friendships, like do all this stuff. But then the reality of it is if the site owner changes the rules, the ownership changes, the rules change.Link

Like suddenly you don't have a site that feels like it's yours anymore. And so our goal is to restore a site where, look whether I change or not, like you can have a site that's yours. And even if Bluesky, the site which is under my control, changes. There's a lot of other sites, right. Like there's a lot of apps that interconnect in this ecosystem. And the goal is to have a resilient enough ecosystem that you don't have the same thing that happened with Twitter repeat in this world.Link

LubaIs it a challenge at all to get specific types of users, given the public perception of the site?Link

JayI think so, yeah. Like once you sort of have an early, you know, social network effect, it gets very sticky. And so like that's just an inherent like aspect of social spaces. But I think that the underlying technology we're building is very agnostic as like who's using it. And the bigger challenge has just been convincing people like, you know, what is the technology?Link

What is it good for? Even after people have seen what happened to Twitter and they migrate here, they still feel like, why would I need, you know, control over my own site? Why don't you just be a good leader? And so there's a lot of pressure on me to just, like, be better than everyone else. And, like, if you're just, like, the best leader possible of a social site, then nothing bad will ever happen again. You know, and I think it's a very it's a very tempting way to think, which is like, if we just had a good leader solve everything for us, then why should I worry about, like, your stupid technical answers or like, you know, think about the structure of this thing.Link

But you know, I'm pessimistic about power. Even when I hold power. You know, I just I think that in the long run, you don't have a good system unless it's set up for seamless transitions of new leadership. And so we're trying to build the technical architecture well enough that if you don't like my decisions, you can go elsewhere. And then you tell people that, and then sometimes they get mad because they're like, well, why don't you just make the decisions I want you to make? Because you are in power right now.Link

LubaYeah. But then it's completely antithesis to what you're trying to build.Link

JayIt is. And like, it's not that I don't try to, you know, run Bluesky well, like, we try to run it to the best of our ability. And, like, we take a more rule of law approach than Elon is taking. Elon is kind of like Elon's word is law. And we're like, okay, well, we have our moderation policy.Link

We'll only update it like through a structured like change process. And then we try to stick to it and we try to run things in this like, you know, principled philosophical way. But when it actually comes down to it, people are going to be upset about this or that. And at the end of the day, like the true freedom we offer people is the freedom to leave and build your own thing while staying connected to all the people. And like the data on here.Link

LubaHow do you continue being so grounded around this, given all the pressure, and I'm sure even different types of hate from different users whenever decisions are being made, because I'm sure you know, it all makes sense when you talk about it that, hey, you know, we're really focused on technology. As long as we build the technology correctly, it's all going to be fine. That's actually what we're focused on. But I'm sure the mental pressure of it is really immense and enormous. How do you deal with it?Link

JayYeah, I mean, we've had a lot of moments where, you know, people on the team, people externally have all advised us, just lean into the political moment. Like, if you're going to be the alternative, just like just own that and being like, all right. We're like the, you know the left X now. Like that's our identity. But I've always resisted that because I think it really actually undermines the broader picture here.Link

Because ultimately what we're trying to do is a very political project in the sense that it's redistributing power. Right. Politics is all about power. And what we want to do is something very radical, which is saying power should go out to, you know, communities, not one site owner. And that more structurally threatens the business model of every social site out there than just being a left alternative to something.Link

But, you know, the market pressure is kind of there to say no. Like pigeonhole yourself in this box that like, you know, your users are like the press is wanting you to be in. But I think if we did that, we would be selling out our deeper values. And I think some advice that I've like, kept in mind over the years is like, you know, there's always a risk of failure, but if you fail, like, what are you willing to fail for? Are you failing because you pivot away from your values and then like, didn't get the market traction you expected and failed?Link

Or are you failing because you know you stuck to your values and it didn't work out, but you stuck to them anyways. And I would prefer to be in that latter camp, which is much like in my own career changes. Like if I do something and it doesn't work out, like did I enjoy the process? Was I like doing it for an authentic reason? And I think with the way I'm running the company, it's like, well, if you know, nobody ever cares about this technology, this whole premise of like decentralized social doesn't work out. At least we've gotten it as far as we can.Link

We've, like said, why we think it's important. And I still fundamentally believe that this is the most pivotal thing we could do for society at this time, which is make sure that there's forms of communication that stay open, that stay controlled by more than one party. In a moment where I think that people could be very tempted to consolidate power into like one social platform, like, you know. Like, you know, you look at again, my other reference point is China over the years and there's like a few government sanctioned apps, and then everything kind of gets siloed through them. And like, you know, state and industry power is very consolidated and it's a very tight hold over everything.Link

And then dissenting opinions are all just crushed, you know, and that's architectural in the way that like their social media ecosystem is set up. So I think we want to avoid that outcome. As a society. It's very dangerous to have one person have all the power. And so ultimately, I don't even want to be that person.Link

I just think a central point of failure is bad. Like you should have a system with more than one point of control. And then that way if you want to fully, you know, control speech in that society, you don't have one person you can go to and pressure. There's like very many individuals out there, and some of them are always going to keep the free speech alternatives going. Right. So I think that this is like the ultimate thing that I think is best for society, that I'm willing to, you know, bet the company on.Link

LubaAnd how has sticking to these guns have worked out as far as the user base? So obviously you could be like, okay, lean into the political moment and get a huge boost in users. And there is a lot of philosophies about building anything that you need to focus on a very niche user type, and then you can expand later and you guys are going different route where you're sticking to the premise of technology in hopes that people who resonate with it will find it and will kind of cut through the noise of how the platform is being viewed publicly. What does that actually look like for the platform right now?Link

JayWell, we don't only go after like, you know, users who care about the technology. Like I said, we try to cultivate different user groups, like developers are one group we cultivate. But also right now we're like, you know, there's been a lot of organic traction in sports. And then we've been trying to accelerate that. There's like, you know, finance people looking for a new home.Link

So we've tried to make sure that Bluesky works well for finance and like, you know, different you know, different interest groups like at various points that kind of start a local cluster migration, we try to fuel it. So we definitely still do that approach of like group by group, like interest by interest, community by community, like science. Bluesky got very big. And at one point we suddenly realized that this research tracker was showing that more research papers are posted on Bluesky than X over the equivalent time period, which is a huge increase showing. Just like how much of science, you know, academia and like scientists have migrated over to Bluesky.Link

So those are some successes in terms of just like localized clusters. And we still try to grow that way. But the technology is more like a value system that we want to make sure that everyone we hire believes in, that we never deviate from that value set. And like, for example, branding ourselves as like a left alternative isn't what we set out to do. It isn't like what the technology serves.Link

And the technology is sort of like it's not on the same playing field as left versus right, like it's a single point of control versus many points of control. That's like how it's philosophically distributed. It's just like a different axis of change. And so that is one thing that I really want to it's like the principle that I never want to leave. But then in terms of user growth, you know, we've gone after different groups of users based on like what where the traction seems to be at that moment.Link

LubaWhat was the moments when you felt like you were Bluesky's CEO versus Bluesky's project lead?Link

JayIt's a good question. It feels like it happened, transitioned sort of over time in my bio. For a long time, I still had Bluesky CEO and AT Protocol steward because I felt like the protocol was this ecosystem that I was growing and stewarding, but don't have full control over by design like other developers are making it what it is like community members are organizing conferences like it's growing beyond me. And I think that's very good. The Bluesky company and the Bluesky app are very much within my control and my domain of influence.Link

But even that I try to like, make sure that pieces of it are like, you know, the feed ecosystem is fueled by third party developers and stuff like that. But that dual role was something that I wore for a long time. And then I finally got feedback that people don't really get what this means. So I took that out of my bio. But I still think of myself as wearing multiple hats in that regard.Link

LubaSo there wasn't a specific moment where you were like, okay, now I'm taking on the risk and all the decisions for the company, and I feel like a true CEO of it.Link

JayThere was it was more like, I guess what I'm trying to say is I started off being a protocol like builder and cultivator, and then the CEO hat kind of like really descended at one point once the company became like a very, very much a real company and a real application. And then I still feel like I am continuing to wear both hats. But the CEO hat has like gotten bigger and bigger as, like as of the time the company has grown, I would say it's probably once we got, you know, our first serious users. Once we hired our first, maybe once we hired our first people at the company that weren't just open source hackers. Like, we got a head of trust and safety, we hired a moderation team that was like, more than just like we started off with a few people on Upwork, you know, just like very scrappy and then like it started to turn into, like a real organization. And then like once the business functions, the company started to be built out. That's when it started to feel more than just like an open source project.Link

LubaWhat has been the hardest moment so far?Link

JayI don't know, there's been a lot of them. I would say moderation crises just in general are very difficult because there are these governance questions where we're trying to do something. It's like you're trying to design a new system of governance, but you're also running a city at the same time and you're like actively involved in, like, city management and like municipal waste problems and like all these like very discrete small issues. And at the same time, you're trying to, like, create a democracy in a world where previously there is a monarchy and you're doing it city by city, but you're running a city while you're trying to create this new thing called democracy that nobody believes in. Like, that's kind of what it feels like.Link

Like it's, you know, we're trying to innovate on how social media is governed while also governing it. And I think the constant tension between that is really hard to juggle. And it's just hard to run a social platform. But in addition to just running the social platform, my constant consideration is like, how does this affect, you know, the protocol? How does this affect the long term? You know, adoption and understanding of these technologies as a form of redistribution of power beyond just is Jay making decisions I like or not?Link

LubaYeah, I'm sure it's really tough to be under that scrutiny all the time when people have certain expectations for you. Even though, as you said, the platform is decentralized and is meant for the users to choose their own adventure. What's like a typical day in your life?Link

JayA lot of meetings these days. I also that's another transition point where my life went from, you know, early on I had a few meetings with Twitter, but a lot of it was like, you know, still talking about the technical architecture. I was, you know, still attempted to write some code early on, like the last code I wrote was to parse all those emails we got. But yeah, no more writing code these days.Link

Almost nothing except meetings all the time. And that started to feel like, okay, I'm a CEO now. My life is like governed by all these like external and internal stakeholders. It's just like trying to be the glue that holds it all together.Link

LubaDo you feel like you have to be on 24/7? Is this like working through, you know, all holidays, all weekends? What does it actually look like to stay sharp and productive and to be capable during crisis? Which it seems like there is a lot of.Link

JayThat's what it felt like for the first few years, which is constant crisis. But then I realized that even small things I was treating too much like a crisis, and my nervous system was never getting a reset. And I had a CEO friend give me some good advice, which was you actually need to, as part of your job, structure in your downtime so that you can relax and reset so that you're prepared for the next crisis. Because for a while there, I just felt like I was lurching from crisis to crisis and like, never slowing down. And then it was just like everyone on the team was exhausted. I was exhausted, and then I was like, okay, you know what?Link

Like what is actually a crisis? What is not like sometimes you can just do things suboptimal and just being like, you know, this doesn't have to be a crisis. It's a crisis. If we try to, like, solve this problem perfectly. But if we were just, like, good enough. Like, sometimes, like, that's as best as you can get.Link

And you're saving your energy for, like, the next big thing. So I started to take that attitude more, which is like, when can I actually take time off? Like for example, like the past 2 or 3, I think like three Christmases now we've either shipped something or had like a really big milestone over the holidays, like either right before Christmas or right before New Year's. Like we launched our new logo right before Christmas. Like, we like shipped a big change like last year. This year I was like, okay, you know what?Link

Code freeze. We're not shipping anything over Christmas. Everyone go home. Like have a holiday. Because if you're creating, if you're like, keep the pressure on yourself constantly and you keep the pressure on the team constantly, you're just like burning people out and it gets too exhausting. So I'm structuring it in time for both myself and the team to just, like, get some rest.Link

Because oftentimes, particularly in social, you're governed by external events that you have no control over. And like when something happens that you're gonna have to respond to, you're just going to have to respond like it doesn't matter if it's a night or a weekend or holiday like last Thanksgiving, me and many of the engineers are working around the clock because we had a huge growth spurt. We were growing like a million users a day.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JaySo the holidays were completely shot. But you know, this year, if we don't have to do that, then we should take some downtime.Link

LubaDo you have some sort of productivity protocol, like what's keeping your cup full and you feeling like you have enough energy for any sort of big decisions that could be coming up?Link

JayThe main thing I've just been trying to get better is prioritization, which is like what is actually the most important thing to move the needle forward at any point in time? And I think it's important for we're still a small team. We're still 30 people relative to like, you know, Twitter at the time, like 8,000 people. Now even after the cuts, it's like still 1500. So just like relatively speaking, we're tiny.Link

And so we have to decide what we're going to do. And my day has to be ruthlessly prioritized, like my team's time has to be prioritized. So I'm constantly asking myself, like, is this really necessary? Like, do I have to do this? If it's not necessary, then like, consider cutting it.Link

LubaWhat do you think of Elon as a leader and as an innovator?Link

JayI think he's very, authoritarian in governance style. Like, his word goes, like, the thing I liked about Jack, in contrast, is Jack respects other people's agency. Like, even when he disagreed with me, he wasn't trying to come in and, like, force me to do what he wanted me to. He just kind of ended up going his own way. He's like, well, okay, well, if you don't want to do the thing I want, then I'll leave the Bluesky board, right? Like, for example, if I had ended up working under Elon, I'm sure I would have gotten yelled at and fired dramatically if I, like, disagreed with him.Link

LubaI had a conversation with some friends about this the other day that a lot of, really, I guess, like what we see as successful nowadays, CEOs have this ruthless, authoritarian attitude and attitude that doesn't really treat people as a result well, because they're considered as kind of like jerks and people who are very short, who don't really, who don't give people as much agency as they should have. And that the only way to cut through the noise is basically be like ruthless dictator who doesn't really have a lot of empathy and, good like attitude towards treating people well. Do you find that's true, or is there a way where you could give people agency, treat people well and still make a dent?Link

JayI mean, I also think to some degree that's cope for people without agency to justify their way of moving through the world. I'm sorry. Without empathy. People without empathy. Because, yeah, I mean, like, you can build a— and like, there's different types of organizations that function very differently.Link

And you can build an organization where it's like CEO's word goes for everything down to the smallest detail, like constantly overrides. That's just not the kind of organization I've built. It's like, not my nature. It's not. I don't think it suits the nature of the thing I'm doing.Link

Like, I think like if there is a scenario for that kind of leadership style, it might be like during a giant high stakes crisis scenario like war time, right? Like if you're, like, under fire. Like, literally, it kind of makes sense to have one person just shouting orders and everyone being like, all right, we're going to, like, not deviate from the plan. On the other hand, I read this book on culture as I started the company that talked about Navy SEAL teams that actually operated with like a strong degree of individual autonomy because in like high pressure conflict scenarios, like, every team member has to be expected to like make life or death calls with like a high degree of trust from their team members. And that was more that I think this book is called like *The Culture Code* or something. That was more of the ethos I wanted to cultivate, which is like everyone in the team is like, valued and respected, and we have each other's backs and we trust each other.Link

And the company is like focuses more on team building as opposed to like falling back on like one leader constantly, like having an authoritarian take where they're like, you know, right. All the time. Or if they're not, at least the easiest thing to do is to get on board. And I you know, I think that as I think a lot about the trade offs of centralization versus decentralization, this is about a centralized leadership style versus a decentralized one. And there's trade offs like you, if you try to do things completely by consensus, you're going to do things very slowly.Link

Sometimes you hit stalemates, so we don't do things completely by consensus. Like if there's a stalemate or an impasse or a decision needs to be made quickly, or it's like high stakes, I'll come in and override. And just being like, we have to do this. On the other hand, if there's a design space where everyone's input actually should be heard because it's not clear what direction we should go. I try to hear everyone out and make sure that we're getting everyone on board, because over the longer term, if you're like having people really buy into your vision, you need them to understand it and like, believe in it themselves.Link

Because if they're just executing on a vision that they don't buy in on, they're not going to do their best work. They're just like, they keep going back to you to being like, okay, what's next in the spec? You know, like I don't get it. And like that's happened a few times where I've like overridden things and like said no. Like, let's just do this and then, you know, I become the sort of backstop on every decision. And that's not how I really want to run an org most of the time.Link

LubaWhat is your definition of success now?Link

JayMy definition of success is changing social media so that we have this resilient social ecosystem where you can always have an alternative and that social media as a whole, it's still very many years off, I think.Link

LubaAnd where do you find most meaning these days?Link

JayI think staying grounded in the day to day is something that I found really meaningful. Like, I've always been inspired by, like the big picture in vision, but even, like now, on the day to day, you can't always just be driven by like, the big, abstract, long term vision. So I find a lot of value I learned, and just building a good team, like making sure that the team is functioning well, that the team is happy, that people are just like making sure people's opinions are heard. But we're moving forward consistently. Even on like the moderation and support side, like we've built out, we do things in-house rather than outsourcing them all. And recently I learned that a lot of the members of the moderation teams got Bluesky tattoos because—Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JayThey're just so excited to be working here. And like, they have their own little culture. Like, it's like a completely different, you know, sort of team than like the engineering team. But the fact that we've built a really good organization for them.Link

And like that, that team has developed a lot of like, you know, cohesion and pride and identity feels like a success. Like even if, you know, literally everything disappeared tomorrow. We've made a difference in people's lives through, you know, just building a good company. So I think there's always a tradeoff to be made between, like, you know, is this the perfect workplace versus like, are we pushing as hard as we can on our goals? And I believe a lot in finding balance across a lot of things.Link

LubaYeah, I really resonate with your point in finding meaning and kind of happiness and fun in day to day versus over indexing on the outcome of something. Is this a shift that you have experienced recently, or were you always emphasizing the day to day?Link

JayI think I used to be more motivated by the big abstract, like, expand empowerment tech, is a very lofty long term goal, but then you have to like the day to day. Like I had to actually enjoy programming to do it long term. You know, I have to actually enjoy company building to do it long term. And so I've been trying to figure out like, what kind of leader and company builder am I, and I think some of the things that, like, give me relatively more energy is like, well, first of all, like the vision side, the creative side. But as the company grows, you get less and less opportunity to do that. And so the other side of that now is like organization building and like thinking about, you know, what kind of organization are you building as like an entity. And that's kind of independent of even what you're building. Like every group of people that works together is an exercise in organization building.Link

LubaAre there any leaders that you particularly look up to?Link

JayI wouldn't say there's like any one that I emulate, but like in the various books I've read on culture, like I like leaders who build organizations that, like, make the best of the talents on their team, I would say. And, you know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley look up to more of the Steve Jobs model or like the model of the leader who has like all the visions and like, comes in like does hard overrides and everything. That's probably what you were talking about earlier in terms of like the authoritarian founder persona. That's very much just not me personality wise. And it's not like what I believe makes good work force. I would never want to work for one of those people. So I guess I just kind of want to design a workforce or a workplace where I would want to work.Link

LubaI wonder if there is also a difference between men's and women's leadership style, because women are naturally more empathetic, they're more people oriented, and I think we just haven't had enough data points to see a lot of women leaders and how organizations are built under them. But I wonder if there is going to be more figures that have that give people agency and treat people well and can still have a really massive dent in the world, with a different organizational style, potentially.Link

JayYeah. Like this leadership and tech program, which is like Stanford's Touchy Feely class exported. I did that, and it was very interesting how I was led by a woman, and it was very much focused on like how to, you know, cultivate more empathy in the workplace, like where to show vulnerability, how to build a team that respects people as well as get things done. And I think that model is just like a template that needs to be further refined and taught so that you can show that it actually is great business to let people feel bought in and understood and seen in the workplace. It's just sort of a there's a way of doing it that I think needs to be more well understood. And I think, I think a lot of people in business like to borrow military metaphors and like military culture.Link

Like I said, I think influences a lot of things. And that's maybe the right circumstance for that authoritarian style that business leaders tried to emulate across the board. But it's definitely not the right application everywhere. And like, not all of life is a battlefield. Not all of life is like that level of, you know, we should all just get in line and like, you know, put all our individual needs aside. Like, I think finding a workplace that is more sustainable long term is actually one where people's needs are more taken into account, where their thoughts and their creative visions are more taken into account.Link

LubaI just have a couple lightning round questions. What is your life philosophy in one sentence?Link

JayLife philosophy in one sentence. Mhm. Live in accordance with the nature of the universe. And that's kind of vague.Link

But for me, I think the universe is trying to come to know itself better. And so for me that expresses itself through like truth seeking, trying to understand other people better, trying to understand the world better. Remaining curious about learning and like being empathetic and like, you know, focusing on relationships and things that matter in the world. Because I think that if you consider that everything's, you know, all one in the end, then you want to approach life with that perspective.Link

LubaThat's beautiful. What's one trait that you're really grateful for?Link

JayCuriosity. I think I've stayed curious a lot of my life, and I see a lot of people are curious as kids. And you have that open wonder as a child, and then it kind of tapers off as you get older. And there are domains of life that I've gotten less curious about as I've gotten older, which I wonder if that's just because the pressures of work kind of force you into like, okay, I can only afford to care about so many things, but overall, I still remain open to new things, and generally I feel like more curious than a lot of people I see get very solidified.Link

LubaAnd what's one thing that you're excited to learn or explore this year?Link

JayI think organization building, like I was talking, that's probably just what's top of mind for me, because we're at this inflection point of really growing past 30 is 25 to 30 is generally this big phase change in the life of a company. Like we're no longer a small startup, but we're not like a big company yet. So I'm reading about that transition. I'm talking to people and trying to understand what does it take to kind of get across that bridge.Link

And there's a lot of stuff to do on the product side and a lot to do, like, you know, just in the building of what we're doing. But that's I've hired product leaders, like, I'm no longer directly involved in every piece of what we're doing. My ultimate job being the day now, is like building the company itself and making that as effective as it can be. So like cultivating leaders, like building the company for this next stage. That's really what I'm thinking about.Link

LubaAwesome. Jay, thank you so much for your time.Link

JayThank you.Link