At the GeekWire Gala this week, we spent time talking backstage with five of this year’s Uncommon Thinkers — the inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs who were selected in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners for their work transforming industries and the world. 

You can hear the full conversations on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. As I mentioned at the end, I came away with an unexpected sense of optimism. 

Jeff Thornburg of Portal Space Systems spent years building rocket engines for Elon Musk at SpaceX and Paul Allen at Stratolaunch. Now he and his team are reviving a NASA concept from decades ago: spacecraft propelled by focused sunlight.

When I asked what the world will look like “if Portal succeeds,” he made a classic entrepreneurial pivot: “When we’re successful,” he said, “we become the backbone of Earth-Moon logistics.” 

From there, he said, it’s about protecting orbits for commerce, supporting human presence on the moon, and eventually pushing out to Jupiter’s moons.

[Read the profile.] 

Anindya Roy of Lila Biologics is using AI to design proteins from scratch — molecules that have never existed in nature — to fight cancer. He trained in David Baker’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UW, so he saw the before and after of machine learning’s impact on the field.

Before: success rates below 1%, ordering hundreds of thousands of designs to find one that worked. Now: 5-20% success rates, ordering a few hundred designs to find a drug candidate. 

“If you told me a couple of years ago that we can design an antibody from a computer, I would not believe you,” he said.

[Read the profile.]

Jay Graber of Bluesky runs the decentralized social network that has  become a leading alternative to X. But while most tech CEOs build moats, she and her team are building a protocol designed to help users leave. 

She talks about Bluesky and the underlying AT Protocol as a “collective organism,” and describes her role as guiding and stewarding the ecosystem rather than controlling it.

The industry and the world would be better off, she says, if leaders would think about their role “more as guides and stewards, rather than just dictators or emperors as they like to style themselves.”

[Read the profile.]

Kiana Ehsani of Vercept came to Seattle from Iran for her PhD, spent four years at the Allen Institute for AI, and is now competing with OpenAI and Google in the AI agent space with a fraction of their resources.

The ultimate vision is to help people move beyond mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen, letting them interact with computers the way they’d talk to a coworker.

AI agents are still early, she cautions. “Think of ChatGPT three years ago. Don’t think of it today.” Her advice for getting started with AI agents: “Start small, start with simple tasks that you don’t want to do, and then slowly build on top of it to see the magic.”

[Read the profile.]

Brian Pinkard of Aquagga is tackling forever chemicals, the PFAS compounds that have spread through our water, food chain, and bloodstreams. The industry standard is to filter them out and then landfill or incinerate the waste, approaches that don’t truly solve the problem and can simply move it elsewhere.

Aquagga uses technology originally designed to destroy chemical weapons to break PFAS down into inert salts under extreme heat and pressure. Pinkard didn’t believe it was possible until he saw the data. “I’m a skeptic, I’m cynical, I’m a scientist,” he said. “I wanted to see proof.”

His bigger vision is to transform hazardous waste processing entirely. Today, huge volumes of wastewater are trucked to incinerators and burned — which he calls “thermodynamic insanity.”

[Read the profile.]

We’ll speak on a future episode with our sixth honoree, Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, the startup making WiFi-enabled landline phones to help kids connect without screens.

Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Plenty of people wear their heart on their sleeve. Yerjasn (Jason) Ait wore his resume on his chest.

Smartly taking advantage of an event attended by more than 750 members of Seattle’s tech community, Ait showed up at the GeekWire Gala Thursday night sporting a white T-shirt with his resume printed on the front.

For those who missed the fine print, a larger notice across his back read, “Internship Wanted. CV’s on the front.”

During a time of mass layoffs and a tough labor market, when many tech job seekers are having an unusually difficult time landing their next gig, Ait’s fashion choice was a prime example of reading the room — or having it read him.

“I was wondering how I can stand out in a crowd, because I’m an international student, my English is not perfect, and I’m still learning a lot of things,” Ait told GeekWire.

He grew up in Kazakhstan in the city of Almaty and moved to the U.S. a year and half ago to get his Master’s in Communication at the University of Washington.

“It was a big dream when I was a kid to study abroad, especially in the best university,” he said.

Ait is due to graduate in June, and, like the T-shirt says, he’s looking for an internship or early career role that would utilize his skills in people management, product development, problem solving, and more.

The T-shirt definitely got people’s attention at the Gala, where Ait said 25 or 30 attendees tapped him on the shoulder to compliment his idea or extend a business card. It was only his second time attending an event of that kind, and there was some fear to overcome.

“I was so scared to speak with people who are very successful — they’re professionals, experts — and it was like imposter syndrome at the beginning,” he said. “Somehow I overcame this fear and just started talking with people. And that’s fun.”

Ait was especially frazzled because he was still getting the T-shirt printed two hours before the event, and a QR code linking to his digital resume was supposed to be part of the design but didn’t make it. Then he had to sit in Seattle traffic getting south to the Showbox SoDo.

The struggle to find work is a real one for people who have far fewer obstacles to overcome than some of the ones Ait has faced. Indeed recently reported on how tech-related job postings remain stuck well below pre-pandemic levels in Seattle. Macroeconomic headwinds and a climate of change in the artificial intelligence era add to increased uncertainty.

“I had everything in my home country. I had a nice job, nice house. It was a great comfort zone,” Ait said. “But I challenged myself to be here in a new country with a total new environment, new language, new people. And sometimes I felt kind of insecure, unsure what I’m doing. But right now, I can see I’m on the right direction. Maybe someday I’ll find my dream job.”

The morning after the Gala, Ait wrote a post on LinkedIn about some of the insights he gained from wearing the shirt. He offered it up as a “small playbook for international students” who are also looking for work or an internship.

Among what he learned: “Go to more events like this. It’s a muscle. You train it. Each time, I get better — more confident, more sharp, more clear.”

The halls have officially been tech’d.

Humans and robots rubbed shoulders and partied Thursday night at the 2025 GeekWire Gala as our annual holiday extravaganza drew more than 750 members of Seattle’s tech community to the Showbox SoDo.

The geeky event — presented by title sponsor First Tech Federal Credit Union — featured games, karaoke, dancing, food, drink, networking and plenty of good times.

• A Selfiebot roamed the floor capturing images of attendees and two Portraitbots drew quick caricatures.
• Robots raced at another station while people also had their pictures snapped in a robot photo booth.
• There was an espresso martini printer, specially printed macaroon cookies, a candy bar, a walking oyster bar and much more.

For the third year, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners once again recognized the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. The honorees included: Anindya Roy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Lila Biologics; Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can; Brian Pinkard, co-founder and CTO at Aquagga; Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems; Kiana Ehsani, co-founder and CEO of Vercept; and Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky.

Special thanks to our gold sponsors, Greater Seattle Partners, Pilot, and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors, MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, IDA Ireland, Microsoft for Startups, gone.com, Prime Team Partners, and Regence.

Go here to see photos from the The Social Production’s robotic roaming photo booth, sponsored by Pilot.

Thanks again to everyone for making our party your party. Happy holidays!

Keep scrolling for more photos from the 2025 GeekWire Gala:

Tonight’s the night for the GeekWire Gala, our annual holiday extravaganza in Seattle, featuring food, drinks, music, dancing, karaoke, games and the best chance to network with more than 700 fellow tech community members.

There are still a few last-minute tickets available, so grab one now for yourself or wrangle some co-workers for a festive night on the town. Make our holiday party your holiday party!

For those attending, here’s a rundown of what to expect. If you have questions, please email us at events@geekwire.com. Big thanks to First Tech Federal Credit Union, the GeekWire Gala title sponsor.

When: Thursday, Dec. 11., from 6 to 10 p.m.

Where: Showbox SoDo, 1700 1st Ave S., a few blocks from T-Mobile Park.

Parking: There are several pay lots within a 2-minute walk of the venue. There is also additional parking information here.

Do I need to bring a physical ticket? No. If you are registered, we’ll check your ID at registration, and provide your name badge. 

Is there assigned seating at tables? No. The Gala is an open floor plan and a free-flowing party, with a number of activities. It is not a sit-down dinner, and there are no assigned tables.  

Are tickets still available? Yes. If you have friends or colleagues who’d like to attend, please encourage them to pre-register on the event site here. 

Festivities: The festive night includes food, drinks, DJ, karaoke, custom printed macarons, candy bar, giant LED games, giveaways and more.

Attire: You have the rare license to don cocktail attire in Seattle. Or wear whatever you want. Tuxedos? Sure. Geeky T-shirts? Yep. Even better, break out your fiercest festive fashion. See fashion photos from past GeekWire Galas here. 

Food: The tasty appetizers will be heavy, but it’s not dinner. And drinks will include coffee, beer, signature cocktails and more.

Age limit: The GeekWire Gala is a 21+ event. Attendees must have valid ID to enter.

Social media: The official hashtag of the 2024 GeekWire Gala is #GWGala on X, Facebook, and Instagram.

In addition to the party atmosphere, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners will once again use the Gala to recognize the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. Read our profiles of the six honorees.

Our gold sponsors are Greater Seattle Partners, Pilot, and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors include MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, IDA Ireland, Microsoft for Startups, gone.com, and Regence.

Now in its third year, GeekWire’s “Uncommon Thinkers” — in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners — recognizes the inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world.

We met six innovators this year who are leading startups that address such things as the design of drug candidates; a throwback idea for phones for kids; a new approach to social media; elimination of harmful chemicals; spacecraft propulsion; and AI that performs computer tasks on your behalf.

Their colleagues call them “creative,” “mission-driven,” “laser-focused,” “incredibly low-ego,” and “brilliant.”

The honorees will be celebrated as part of Thursday’s GeekWire Gala in Seattle.

Catch up on our profiles of each winner below:

Anindya Roy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Lila Biologics

• Anindya Roy’s path from a village in rural India to co-founding Seattle’s Lila Biologics is a story of persistence, curiosity, and boundary-pushing science. After training in top U.S. research labs, including the Baker Lab at the University of Washington, Roy now helps turn advanced protein-design concepts into real drug candidates — from cancer therapies to long-acting injectables — using cutting-edge computational tools. His journey highlights how unconventional thinking can drive the next wave of biotech innovation. Read more.

Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can

• Chet Kittleson is on a mission to bring back something rare in 2025: screen-free, voice-to-voice connection for kids. Tin Can‘s bright, WiFi-enabled landline phones are designed to let kids call each other or trusted contacts — no apps, no social media, no distractions. After raising $3.5 million and selling out its first two batches, Tin Can now has customers in all 50 states and across Canada. For Kittleson, every ring is a sign that parents are craving simpler, more meaningful ways for their children to connect — and that this retro-inspired hardware could be the antidote to screen overload. Read more.

Brian Pinkard, co-founder and CTO of Aquagga

• Brian Pinkard went from “flipping rocks” on trail crews in the Colorado Rockies to engineering a solution to one of the most stubborn pollution problems we face: “forever chemicals.” Now, at Tacoma, Wash.-based startup Aquagga, he’s using advanced chemistry to destroy PFAS contamination at its source. From hazardous-waste research to modular PFAS-destruction systems that have already been tested in Alaska, firefighting-foam cleanup, and municipal wastewater projects, Pinkard and his team are proving that impact-focused engineers can tackle environmental problems others call unsolvable. Read more.

Jeff Thornburg, co-founder and CEO of Portal Space Systems

• Jeff Thornburg is pushing the boundaries of what satellites can do by building a spacecraft that literally rides on sunlight. Through its flagship design, Supernova, Portal Space Systems plans to use solar-thermal propulsion to give future spacecraft dramatic, “science fiction”-style maneuverability: rapid orbital shifts, long mission lifetimes, and flexibility for both defense and commercial missions. Backed by a $17.5 million seed round and building out a large manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash., Portal is transforming from startup vision to production-ready aerospace player — and Thornburg’s journey from SpaceX and Project Kuiper alum to leading a next-gen space venture shows just how far ambition and real engineering can take you. Read more.

Kiana Ehsani, co-founder and CEO of Vercept

• Kiana Ehsani is building AI platforms at Seattle-based Vercept not just to optimize workflows, but to give people back their time to live. With Vercept’s flagship tool Vy, her team has created a system that “sees” computer screens like a human, records workflows once, and then lets users automate tasks with a natural-language command. That means no more juggling dozens of apps, remembering shortcuts, or writing code — and more freedom to hike trails, ski mountains, or simply step away from the screen like Ehsani herself does when she’s out in nature. Read more.

Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky

• Jay Graber is steering Bluesky not as a traditional social-network boss, but as a “pragmatic idealist” building a decentralized digital world that puts power back in users’ hands. Instead of locking content and social graphs behind proprietary walls, Bluesky is built on the open AT Protocol — meaning people can carry their posts, followers, and identity across platforms, even if the original app disappears. Graber envisions Bluesky as less a product and more a living “collective organism,” one that could become the foundation for a more open, flexible social internet. Read more.

The ticket clock is ticking ahead of Thursday’s GeekWire Gala. Don’t miss out on the Seattle tech community’s biggest holiday party — grab a last-minute ticket now!

The Gala is a great chance to make our annual holiday event a celebration for you, your friends and co-workers.

The festive night includes food, drinks, karaoke, games, and plenty of surprise moments. Party alongside the region’s top innovators and entrepreneurs.

It all takes place at Showbox SoDo at 1700 1st Ave S., not far from T-Mobile Park. The event from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. is 21+ and all attendees must have valid ID to enter. Dress to impress, bust out your holiday flair, or just keep it geek chic.

In addition to the party atmosphere, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners will once again use the Gala to recognize the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. Catch up on our profiles of the six honorees:

• Anindya Roy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Lila Biologics
• Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can
• Brian Pinkard, co-founder and CTO at Aquagga
• Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems
• Kiana Ehsani, co-founder and CEO of Vercept
• Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky

Big thanks to the GeekWire Gala title sponsor, First Tech Federal Credit Union; gold sponsors Greater Seattle Partners, Pilot, and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, IDA Ireland, Microsoft for Startups, gone.com, and Regence.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Jay Graber, CEO of the Bluesky social network, moved to Seattle during the pandemic, attracted to the region in part by the trademark gray skies, ironically. She doesn’t feel bad about staying inside and reading, writing or working on drizzly winter days.

But she also loves the outdoors. Her proudest Pacific Northwest moment: finding a matsutake mushroom under a fir tree, a species so prized that locations are treated like trade secrets.

Graber, in other words, is someone who values extraordinary things and the environments that allow them to thrive. This comes through in the tech ecosystem she oversees.

Most social networks today are walled gardens, where one company runs the servers, owns the data, and sets the rules. The AT Protocol (which Graber pronounces “at”) is an open technical standard for social media that Bluesky’s team built as the foundation for its network. Bluesky is just one app on top of it, and in theory you could move your posts and followers to another app or server with different moderation or algorithms without losing your social graph.

“The hope is that whatever happens with Bluesky — however big it makes itself — the protocol is something we hope to endure a really long time,” Graber said in a recent interview, “because it becomes foundational to not just Bluesky but a lot of apps and a lot of use cases.”

However big it makes itself. The phrase stands out in a world of tech startup leaders intent on scaling their creations toward billion-dollar exits through force of will. 

Graber instead sees Bluesky as “a collective organism,” brought to life by users, grounded in the decentralized protocol like soil on the forest floor. “I did not anticipate what Bluesky became when I started this, and so that very much makes it feel like it’s something that’s growing, that I’m overseeing, but also has a life of its own,” she said. 

Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing partner of Avalanche, an early investor in Bluesky, first met Graber in 2022 at a small gathering of technologists, investors, and academics. What struck her: Graber was the only one in the room focused on building, not just talking. While others discussed big ideas, Graber was working through the details of how to make them real.

Later, after Bluesky’s launch, Donnelly attended a meetup in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Graber stayed for hours, meeting with early users, gathering feedback, and listening. 

Donnelly calls Graber “incredibly low-ego for being so young and successful.” At the same time, she isn’t afraid to be provocative, like when she wore a shirt that read, “Mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”) at SXSW in 2025 — styled exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”) shirt from a Meta event.

“You can just tell immediately that she’s never going to give up. If Bluesky failed, she’d probably build something similar again.” That’s the definition of “life’s work,” Donnelly said: everything Graber has done to date has led her to this point. 

Finding her own way

Graber was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a math teacher father and a mother who had emigrated from China. Graber’s given first name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. It’s a pure coincidence, given that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would later choose the name Bluesky as a project inside the social network long before Graber was involved. 

Her mom chose the name to symbolize freedom and boundless possibility, reflecting opportunities that she didn’t have growing up in China. 

Those themes emerged early for Graber. Around age five, she resisted her mother’s structured attempts to teach her to read, running around the backyard instead. Her dad took a different approach: he brought her to the library and asked what interested her. She discovered Robin Hood, and read every version the library had, from children’s books to arcane Old English editions. The story captivated her: renegades pushing back against centralized authority.

As she continued to read, she was drawn to stories of scientific discovery, and eventually to writers who imagined new ways society could work, such as Ursula K. Le Guin.

Later, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology, and Society, an interdisciplinary major that let her explore technology from a humanistic perspective while taking computer science classes. 

After graduating in 2013, she worked as a digital rights activist, moved to San Francisco, enrolled in coding bootcamp, and worked at a blockchain startup. Later she found her way to a cryptocurrency mining operation in a former ammunition factory in rural Washington state — what she calls her “cocoon period” — where she spent long hours studying code in isolation. 

She went on to work at a privacy-focused cryptocurrency company, founded an event planning startup called Happening, and kept searching for the right environment for her own ambitions.

Origins of Bluesky

Then, in December 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund a project to develop an open, decentralized protocol for social media. He called it Bluesky. 

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

Graber saw the thread and felt the pull. 

As detailed in an April 2025 New Yorker story, Dorsey’s team had set up a group chat to explore the idea. Graber joined and noticed the conversation was scattered — people would pop in, make suggestions, and disappear. No broader vision was coalescing. 

Graber started doing the work: gathering research, writing an overview of existing decentralized protocols, trying to provide some signal amid the noise.

By early 2021, Dorsey and then-Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal were interviewing candidates to lead the project. Graber stood out in part because she didn’t just tell them what they wanted to hear. She accepted, on one condition: Bluesky would be legally independent from Twitter.

It was a prescient demand. That November, Dorsey resigned as Twitter’s CEO. The following spring, Elon Musk began buying up shares. By October 2022, he owned the company, and promptly cut ties with Bluesky, canceling a $13 million service agreement.

Graber was on her own. But that was the point. 

“You can’t build a decentralized protocol that lots of parties are going to adopt if it’s very much owned and within one of the existing players,” she told Forbes in 2023.

‘High agency, low ego’

Today, Bluesky has more than 40 million users and a team of around 30 employees. The company has no official headquarters — fitting for a decentralized social network — though Graber and several employees work out of a co-working space in Seattle.

The platform is still far smaller than X, which reports more than 500 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, which has around 300 million. Mastodon, another decentralized alternative, has about 10 million registered users. But Bluesky has grown steadily, and its open protocol gives it a different ambition — not just a destination, but the infrastructure on which others build.

Graber runs the company with what she calls a “high agency, low ego” philosophy.

“Everyone on the team exercises a lot of agency in how they do their job, and what they think the right direction is,” she said. “They try to pick up stuff that needs to be done whether or not it’s in their job description — that’s the low ego part.” 

Overall, she said, this has made for a very effective small team, although she acknowledges the trade-off: “Sometimes people have strong opinions and wander off in their own directions.” So getting people back in alignment, she said, is a big part of her job.

She describes her leadership style as collaborative rather than top-down. “I try to cultivate people’s strengths on the team and bring together a synthesis of that,” she said.

Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board in the early years, is no longer involved. Ultimately, he and Graber saw things differently: Dorsey wanted Bluesky to be more purist about decentralization. Graber wanted to “catch the moment” and bring people into something accessible, even if it was somewhat centralized at the start.

Embed from Getty Images

“When we disagreed, he ended up just going his own way, as opposed to trying to force me to do a thing,” she said. Based on her experience, Graber said, Dorsey would hold his position and disagree, but not use his power to mandate a specific direction. 

Mike Masnick, the TechDirt founder and writer whose essay “Protocols, Not Platforms” helped inspire the project, now holds Dorsey’s board seat.

Graber describes herself as a “pragmatic idealist.” Pure idealists, she said, pursue visions that can’t work in the real world. Pure pragmatists never produce meaningful change. The key is holding both: a vision of how things could be, and the practical steps to get there.

The implications of AI

Graber sees the same dynamics playing out with artificial intelligence. The question, she said, isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s who controls it.

“If AI ends up controlled by only one company whose goal is power or profit maximization, I think we can anticipate that will lead to bad outcomes for a lot of people,” she said. On the other hand, if AI tools are widely available and open source, “you have this broader experimentation” — with all the chaos that entails, but also the potential for solutions that serve users rather than platforms.

She imagines a future where people might bring their own AI agents to a social network, the way Bluesky already lets users choose their own algorithms and moderation services.

“Maybe you can even run this at home in your closet,” she said. “Then you have your own AI agent that protects your own privacy, doing things for you — that’s a human empowering technology that’s working in your interest, not in the interest of a company that does not have your welfare at heart.”

She thinks a lot about historical trajectories. The printing press, she noted, ushered in a period of chaos — new technology disrupting society — followed by the construction of new institutions that made use of widespread literacy, such as universities, academic journals, and peer review.

“We’re in another period of chaos around new technologies,” she said. “We have to build new institutions that make use of everyone having access to the internet.”

The AT Protocol, in her view, could be something like that. Bluesky the company might rise or fall, narrow into a niche, or lose relevance with a new generation. But if the protocol takes hold, it becomes the foundation for something larger than any single app or company.

“If the protocol becomes widely adopted, that’s a huge success,” she said. “If people rethink how social works, and Bluesky becomes the origin point for social media to change, that’s a success.”

However big it makes itself.