Profile: The Teams Building Bluesky — Founders, Product Leads, and the Road to Differentiation

Why this matters: a single, verified profile of the people and product choices shaping Bluesky in 2026

Pain point: Entertainment creators, podcasters, and culture reporters need one authoritative place to understand who built Bluesky, why specific product choices happened, and how to use new features like cashtags and LIVE badges for discovery and monetization. This profile connects the dots.

The headline: Bluesky’s team, decisions, and the features changing creator discovery

In early January 2026, Bluesky shipped two conspicuous product moves: specialized cashtags for public-company conversations and a Twitch Live integration that surfaces creators’ live streams via a LIVE badge. Those launches arrived during a moment of switch-over behavior after a major content-moderation crisis on X (formerly Twitter), and they reveal deliberate choices by Bluesky’s leadership to lean into creator-first discovery, financial conversation, and live media.

“Bluesky adds new features to its app amid a boost in installs…allowing anyone to share when they’re live-streaming on Twitch, and adding specialized hashtags, known as cashtags, for discussing publicly traded stocks.” — TechCrunch, Jan 2026

Quick context (inverted pyramid): who matters most and why

1. Jay Graber — the founder and public CEO driving Bluesky’s product philosophy toward decentralized social architecture and creator tools.
2. Jack Dorsey — not a company operator but the original public instigator of the Bluesky project within Twitter; his early framing of decentralization influenced early funding and attention.
3. Bluesky product and engineering leads — an interdisciplinary group of designers, protocol engineers, and community managers who translated AT Protocol ideas into UX features like cashtags and LIVE badges.

Profile: Jay Graber — founder and the product-minded steward

Jay Graber is the figure most frequently identified in public reporting as Bluesky’s founder and long-running executive lead. Her public-facing role since Bluesky’s company formation made her the architectural steward of the AT Protocol vision: a decentralized, interoperable social network that separates identity, moderation, and algorithmic ranking at the protocol level.

Graber’s leadership style emphasizes careful, research-driven product work: prioritizing developer extensibility and clear API boundaries so third-party apps and bots can build experiences on top of Bluesky’s protocol. That orientation helps explain the platform’s recent emphasis on features that serve creators and public conversation — not merely a copy of legacy timelines.

Why Jay’s role matters to creators and journalists: she blends public leadership with technical product focus, which means feature launches tend to have protocol-level rationales and long-term interoperability goals instead of short-term growth hacks.

What to know about Graber’s product instincts (actionable)

• Design for integration: Expect features that can be surfaced by third-party partners via the AT Protocol API — useful for publishers who want syndicated distribution.
• Prioritize creator signals: Bluesky’s product choices favor explicit creator-state signals (like LIVE badges), which publishers can use to automate discovery and cross-posting. See also badge templates and campaign patterns that map to these signals.
• Lean on protocol metadata: When archiving or citing posts, prefer protocol-level IDs and timestamps to screenshot-only citations for durability.

Jack Dorsey: the catalyst who framed decentralization

In 2019, Jack Dorsey publicly seeded the idea of an independent