This episode is presented by Invest Puerto Rico.

If you believe your business can go anywhere, Puerto Rico is the place.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

It's officially 2025, so happy new year. I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

As we mentioned on Friday, all eyes are on blue skies rapid growth. But according to the

social platform CEO Jay Graber, their goal is not to just recreate Twitter. Today, I'm handing

the reins over to TechCrunch senior reporter Max Zeff, who sat down with Graber at our last

strictly BC event. The pair dug into the company's success and why, according to Graber, people

need to, quote, be able to

control the social networks they communicate on, regardless of whether that continues to be

blue sky or another federated social platform. Let's take a listen. Yeah, so starter packs get

a lot of people on at once, basically, because anyone can create one. You create a list of

all the accounts that you want to add to it, all the feeds you want to add to it, because anyone

can create their own custom feeds. And then you can send that with a link to your friend or share

that on social media. You can even put up a QR code, which we did yesterday at the Wired conference,

where people can scan it and then download the app and immediately be onboarded into a curated experience that

your friend made for you. And we did this because actually a lot of people in the team have

tried Twitter multiple times. And for some people, it didn't stick until their friend went in

and followed 200 people for them. And then they were realizing, oh, okay, now I found this niche that I didn't know is here

that I'm interested in now.

So to overcome that problem and also make it easier for people to break network effects

and come over all at once, we built what is essentially an automated version of what my

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