Week 2 at Bluesky

Happy to report that week 2 has been just as energizing as week 1. I’m still meeting lots of new people and learning the ropes. In addition to spending time with the Bluesky team, I met with several Atmosphere folks: Boris who is working on organizing the ATmosphereConf (more on that below), Jared from Leaflet, Devin from Graze, and Mike from Surf. Each is building cool products that demonstrate the power of apps that connect to each other across open social. 

We also made a bit of news this week, shipping an app update with bot labels, as well as belatedly announcing a $100m fundraise. This money provides several years of runway for Bluesky which allows us to continue to build the long term value we see in this platform. There was some confusion about why we waited so long to announce the fundraise, because it actually happened last year, and I want to address this directly. 

It’s not unusual for a startup to wait for the right moment to announce a raise. In this case, an obvious moment never presented itself, the team got busy with lots of other priorities, and time went by quickly. We did want the world to know though, so we finally released the news. We could have omitted the exact timing of the raise (most startups do that), but I wanted to be transparent that it was raised under Jay’s leadership, not mine. In retrospect, there might have been a less confusing way of doing it :).

There’s lots of prep work going on for next weekend’s ATmosphereConf, a gathering of the people building new products for the Atmosphere. I very much look forward to meeting community members, as well as many of the Bluesky team members in person for the first time. (The team is remote, so I’ve interacted with almost everyone online only.)

Regarding these blog posts: I agree with feedback from some of you that it’s weird that these posts are separate from Bluesky. Fixed! Thanks to the beauty of open systems, and help from Matthias, my blog now publishes posts directly to the Atmosphere (both Bluesky and standard.site) via this WordPress plugin. This is my first post to try this, I hope it works 🙂

Looking forward to seeing folks in Vancouver!