as i waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city's waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less. Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber showed up, the haze lifted. Elliott Bay glittered in the sun. I could see past Bainbridge Island's rolling hills all the way to a snow-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally blue. Graber's tenure at Bluesky has had this felicitous quality, starting with her given name, Lantian, which'in a triumph for the nominative determinism crowd'means 'blue sky' in Mandarin. (That the name she's gone by for years, Jay, can also mean a winged creature that takes to the skies adds to the serendipity.) When Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, it was an...
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