To say that Rose Wang’s career trajectory has been unusual may be an understatement. A decade ago, she was selling cricket meal as an alternative protein source. Now she’s COO of Bluesky, the first major social media platform launched in almost a decade.
Since opening up its initial Beta in 2023, the platform has already hit 30 million users. As one of its leadership team, Wang (@rose.bsky.team) has suddenly become a very public figure. She makes her first visit to South by Southwest this week alongside Bluesky CEO and SXSW keynote speaker Jay Graber (@jay.bsky.team), to take part in several events that put her quite literally on the stage. However, that first foray into startup life as CEO of cricket flour tortilla chip manufacturer Chirp prepared her for mixing the board room and the press room. “We were on Shark Tank and we got a lot of attention. We were world experts on a new area – entomophagy, the whole science and farming behind cricket meal.”
But that experience taught her an even more important lesson about being in a growing company. “Don’t go after your nos. Go after your yeses.” In the case of Chirp, there were always going to be people who would never eat a cricket, no matter the form factor, but there was an eager market out there. As she noted, “Kids already eat bugs.” With Bluesky, the growth has been among users who want to stay on social media but have fled the increasing right-wing radicalism, trolling, and general drop in usability they have seen on the more established platforms, and they’ve liked what they’ve found on Bluesky. For Wang, that’s proof that chasing the yeses works. “Win them over, get them to really, really love your product, and they’ll evangelize for you.”
Austin Chronicle: How much has “chasing the yes” influenced Bluesky?
Rose Wang: The project has always been, let’s run an experiment. Are people interested in a different way of social working? You can’t really force people to use a new product: they either use it or don’t.
Up to today we haven’t spent anything on marketing. We’re a 20-person team. There’s not much that we’re pushing. It’s very much that we built a product, we talk a lot about choice, and rather than spending all those marketing dollars trying to get people on a new app, we focused on the building of choice for feeds, choice for moderation services. Let’s build safety in a way that people really care about. Let’s talk to journalists and other folks that are looking for homes. Let’s talk to them about what they care about. What we found is, you know what? Everyone’s trying to build their audience and wants to own that relationship with that community audience. That’s where we think where the world is moving: Owning your identity, owning your own data, owning that relationship is key.
But how does that translate? At the end of the day, everyone needs to make a living, and so what’s been really awesome for publishers and anyone who’s trying to build a presence is that they see that Bluesky is sending them more traffic than any other platform out there.
At the end of the day you can go and purport what your product does, but if you’re not delivering people will stop using your product. So that’s what Bluesky is focusing on: How do we truly deliver the best experience to the end user? So how that’s hydrated is that we’ve heard from folks that, online, they’re lonely. Shouting into the void is not a great experience for most people, and what we have done is we have created communities. There are all these different feeds where people can meet each other – we call them cozy corners – so you feel like you’re truly getting to meet people with different interests.
Other things we’ve heard are ‘I don’t really feel like I’m having fun because I’m getting dogpiled,’ or ‘there’s a lot of negative comments,’ and there’s a lot we can do to make that experience better. For example, the block on Bluesky is an actual block – not just a strong mute. Looking at comments, we try to run a toxicity filter and so the more negative comments are on the bottom or hidden. We’ve figured out a way to detach your posts from the quote posts, so you can’t keep propagating.
Bluesky is just so focused on the end user versus so many other platforms. They’re not incentivized to think about the end user. They’re thinking about brands and advertisers, because that’s where the money’s coming from. And so, fundamentally, if you build a company with the right incentives – which, for us, if we can’t keep the end user happy we lose because they can just go somewhere else – that’s the whole point.
AC: So many platforms have become so impossibly miserable, basically 4Chan. How have you avoided that?
RW: We’ve put moderation and safety as a priority as a company, where most startups that are focused on growth probably do it and think of moderation as a cost center.
How does that show up in the app? Mark Cuban, for example, talked about how he posted about the Mavs on Bluesky, and there were 500 comments and he literally read all of them, and only five were toxic or negative, and he was like, ‘That’s a crazy proportion!’
AC: Beyond the moderation, beyond the culture, were there any elements that you look at and go, ‘That helped the onboarding experience for new users?’ For me, it was the starter packs.
RW: I think we can get very lost in technology and go, ‘Oh, we need these fancy features!’ But at the end of the day people come because they want to make new friends, they want to have fun, they want to learn new things. If we can keep it to that very simple level of ‘how do people behave in the real world, not online, and how do we really think about what people’s needs are?’ that’s very much how we think about Bluesky.
Take something like starter packs. The way that I think about it is going to a big party or college. Here’s a big mix of people, and on most other platforms you have to just enter and start working out who to interact with. Offline, you never go to a party by yourself. It’s very awkward. So, you tend to go with a small group, and you meet people in other groups that have similar interests, and then you want some combination of people you know and people you don’t know. That’s so much of how we thought about the design of the product, and starter packs mimics that behavior. ‘Hey, come in, here’s a bunch of people you might like, follow, know already.’ It’s a much more familiar place, a cozy place. You come in and you start building connections with people.
Rose Wang at SXSW
Building Communities
Monday 10, 11am, Fediverse House
Monday 10, 2pm AI x Journalism House
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.
