"The vast majority of Facebook's revenue is from ads. All the major centralized social media companies are advertising companies, which means they trade in traffic and the users' attention," Wang told TechCrunch in an interview this week. "The main difference between an open protocol versus a closed one is that the closed ones will never tolerate the existence of applications that take the content of the graph away, and take user-attention away from their properties."
This turnaround, a speed underscored by the fact that the fund doesn't even have a website yet (it does have a Bluesky profile, though), is testament to several things: the hype around Bluesky, which is emerging as a lifeboat for millions who have abandoned X (née Twitter). But there's also an almost tangible hope that by starting afresh on a new social platform built on an open, decentralized network such as the AT Protocol, we might avoid the ad-driven, walled gardens that permeate social networking today.
Wang is co-founder, chief AI and innovation officer, and former CEO of Anaconda, a company built upon the eponymous open source Python and R distribution that helps data scientists build, test, and deploy all their data-driven projects.
Separately, Wang has been an avid backer of the decentralized web, providing financial support for projects such as Blue Link Labs, which developed the peer-to-peer open source web browser Beaker.
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