My firstminute | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic

Ever wonder what open-source software and jazz music or free pizza and wordpress have in common?

We’ll give you a clue, Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic ($3bn private valuation; makers of WordPress and Tumblr). 

During the episode of myfirstminute from the 20th of May 2020, Sam Endacott, Partner at firstminute capital, covered Matt's journey of founding and growing Automattic, including the story behind developing WordPress, the Open Source software used by over 31% of the web. Sam also explored Matt's depth of experience in operating during a financial crisis as well as his outlook on a post-lockdown world.

Transcript

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First minute capital is a $100 million seed fund,

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probably backed by a number of tech founder keys.

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These study unicorn founders.

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Part of our DNA is to take wisdom from lessons

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learned from one generation of successful entrepreneurs

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and share those lessons and pieces of advice to the next generation.

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Successful founders.

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And that's really what this webinar series is all about.

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My first minute is a fun opportunity to informally speak to some of the world's

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top founders on the first minutes of their careers, how they see the world,

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and generally advice.

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My name is Sam Endicott.

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I'm an investor.

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First, the capital, and today

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I'm speaking to Matt Mullenweg.

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Maybe we kick it off with that with a very

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sort of philosophical question, I guess, which is

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you go from a political science major to building the most

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popular blogging platform, open source blogging platform in the world.

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So so where did it when it what it all started.

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How did you get your first computer?

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How did you get into computer programing?

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I would love to hear what other studies

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show.

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Thank you.

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For me, it was that

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my father was in our computer science major in the seventies

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and later went on to be a software developer, mostly for big oil companies.

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He sent out oil

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and gas is the big industry here in Houston, and that's where he worked.

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That's how we always had computers around the house

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and I just really enjoyed working on them.

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But the deal was if I broke it, I would try to fix it before he got home.

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Otherwise I get in trouble.

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So I had some unfettered access, but it was conditional.

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There was a local nonprofit here in Houston called

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How PC, which stood for a Houston area league, a PC users,

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they ran bulletin boards, if of you remember that special interest groups

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where there were like weekly or biweekly meetings on different things

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but probably the most influential on me besides oh, they also ran monthly

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talks where like Bill Gates came and spoke so down in Houston, spoke to this group.

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It's pretty big.

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But on Saturdays they had this little thing where

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anyone could bring in their computer to be fixed

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and this involved like they were like putting the monitor in your car.

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We had cards so people could like, you know, bring the computer up

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and a group of volunteers, a lot of which for kids like myself,

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which is

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try to figure things out and help people who brought their computers.

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And the only payment was they gave us for pizza. And

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and a lot of what we ended up doing was just,

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you know, kind of searching around or clicking on menus or there was

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actually happened to be a computer store just a few blocks away.

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So we'd have to buy replacement parts and I kind of saw everything

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a lot of the like

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the people who would bring in the things the clientele were much older.

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And I began to really appreciate that these were like doctors, lawyers,

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real estate agents, really smart people who

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I would learn a lot just talking to,

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but they get really stuck on things that you know,

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11 or 12 year olds could figure out by clicking around.

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And that's when I began to develop empathy that it wasn't that.

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And they were always apologizing, say, Oh, I'm so dumb about computers.

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I don't know what I'm doing.

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And I realized that it wasn't them that was dumb.

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It was the technology.

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And the computers were not serving them well.

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And it was poorly designed and

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bad labels and just like things that were hard to do.

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So I just felt the empathy for me and how to

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you can make technology

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more intuitive.

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And also I started my lifelong love for doing tech support

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as a way to inform customer developments.

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So many times, just like everyone would click on this one thing

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thinking it was something else. And so they just put a label at purchase.

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They changed it and I would fantasize like, I wish I could change that button

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and this software be so much easier to use

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for it.

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You know, start making websites locally for musicians and things

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in exchange for lessons and

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you know, the nice thing about that nonprofit and also I guess later

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they were just trying to political science, a Boy Scout or volunteer

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and all those sorts of things was everything was always in communities.

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So it was never like this like myth of like alarm coder or anything.

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Pretty much everything I would do is organizing groups

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and for running an open source project.

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I would say political science degree is way better than a computer science degree

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because it's really about bringing disparate groups together of people who

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are that passionate about a shared philosophy,

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or that might be competitors,

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but have an area of commonality and basically try to reverse the tragedy.

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The common saying, hey, if I worked together on this thing,

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it would be so much better.

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So, you know, a close read of Huckleberry Finn is probably also really helpful

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in a lot of early WordPress as me painting the fence and saying how much fun

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that was and trying to get other people to paint the fence.

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So that was how we got started.

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And, you know, I would say that's very, very true to today.

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You know, in organizing the all volunteer community for WordPress

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was really helpful

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when I started to recruit and build the for profit entity, Automattic. And

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so I've always been kind of a philosophy

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first entrepreneur and then the software as a means to an end.

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That's, that's very interesting.

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And just sort of going back to it

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before we jumped into WordPress, what were you a blogger growing up?

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Was was blogging something you did after?

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Yeah, I end up using a bunch of those early services,

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like saying LiveJournal blogger itself.

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And and what led me to WordPress is actually

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as using the biggest software at the time was called movable type.

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It was based in Perl and it had like 95, 98% of the market share.

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And a company that had Reid Hoffman on the board, Zoe Ito,

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they launched at a TED like the Big Ted and I like one of their taxes.

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So they were just utterly dominant by just kind of software, very frustrating.

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And I was getting into Perl,

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so that was a lot of what led me to, um, to the PDP side of things.

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Got it.

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I'm going to come back to that because I saw an interview that recently

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where you talked about at the MIT Pilgrim and the freedoms Eric is also

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I want to touch on that a little bit and I think you mentioned Google type in that,

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but it

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sort of fast forwarding I guess to the early days of WordPress.

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And I think before that you've talked about E2,

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which is a preexisting open source project.

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How did that happen?

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How did you how did you do this at 18 or 19?

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So all the islands that I was on the pool right now, what was your thought process?

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I kind of helped that, you know, that a comic

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from The New Yorker on the Internet, no one knows your dog.

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Well, now we know in New or care that I was like

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18 or 19 year old kid in Houston with no formal

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training in this.

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That's I'm glad I commute there.

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Thank you

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the and aren't you glad I didn't sneeze

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in the same room with you?

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Yeah.

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All right. So I was just volunteering.

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So a lot of, you know, I loved bulletin boards and BBC is

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and that kind of led to both creating and writing like online forums,

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using like the bulletin or page freebie or other form software at the time.

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And so I started using B to because I thought moves,

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I was a little frustrating B too as an open source page fee based

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blogging system.

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Very, very simple and elegant, I thought and was actually out of Europe.

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There was a thought it was named Michelle Val Jetty and he was in Corsica.

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So I started using it and I had to figure it out.

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So I'd go on the forums to ask for questions

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and this is probably something I was doing every couple of days.

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And just on one of the subsequent visits, I noticed that there was,

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even though I was like very much a neophyte in the software,

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there was someone asking a question that someone had answered for me before.

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So I just pop and that's it.

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And next thing you knew,

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you know, hundreds and hundreds of posts on this for us.

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And so that's something I always tell people, like no matter how

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how little you think, you know, there's probably someone else

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on the Internet you can help out and and point in the right direction.

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What are what forums where you using at the time?

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How are you communicating with the with the community at this point?

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That community was

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on a product, GitHub, which is called SourceForge,

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which is where almost all the open source projects were at the time and then had

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probably a bulletin forum as well.

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So these are just kind of web forums and

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so that was just how we all interacted as well.

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Some also IAC.

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So IAC was all slack

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and I was actually a really key part of the community as well.

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It's funny

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because so much of Slack is based on IAC, but we've kind of forgotten that.

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Okay, come back to that as a I've got that in my pockets actually.

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I'd love to get your views on that, but I'm maybe fast forwarding a little bit.

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So so it's it's 2020 and WordPress,

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as I said at the beginning, is powering 30% of the web.

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When you're a 19 year old, is you still interacting with the community?

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Did you know this was going to happen

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or was there a turning point when you were like, wow, this is going to be big?

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Because, as you said, there are other blogging

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platforms out there at this time, some which are pretty well funded.

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Did you go into this with with a design

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or did this was this just completely organic?

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Wholly organic?

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And in fact, I have never believed you.

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If you told me it would be bigger

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also, because the software that time was very limited in terms of what it could do.

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It was really just blogging and journaling software

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and the definition of what I mean. There were no static pages.

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It was meant to be something you plugged into an existing website,

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not something that ran the entire website.

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And so they're very basic.

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But I think the moment where it kind of flipped for me that this could be pretty

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big was the first translation of WordPress.

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So at that time, WordPress is a collection of,

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you know, 80 or 100 page profiles,

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you know, tens of thousands of lines of code.

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There was no built in translation framework.

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And there was a gentleman in Japan.

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I actually never met or contacted.

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He only just sat there pseudonym that went and opened every single file

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went through every single line or place, all the English for Japanese

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and, and released it, you know, it's open source so it can be distributed.

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And I downloaded it, kind of figured my way out through the installation

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and it was just the most surreal experience of my life

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because this interface that I built had this beautiful, you know,

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katakana and hiragana, like Japanese script on it, and then when I realized

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it must have been like 200 hours of work for something, they did it.

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I was like, That's, that's insane.

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So on, you know, it was really into the software

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and it must mean a lot to them.

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So we built a translation framework

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so that you could, you know, translate the software more easily.

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But that's

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when we also start to broaden our mission to be more than just blogging software.

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That's when we adopted

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it's probably 2000 for 2005, the mission of democratizing publishing.

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And. We took that very seriously from a philosophy point of view

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for us that meant that something truly couldn't be democratic,

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and it belonged to you just as much as it belonged to me or someone else.

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It needed a Bill of Rights that you,

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the Constitution, need to be completely open and free.

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Democratize is used a lot.

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Now people talk about democratizing ice cream or democratizing almost anything.

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And I think it's important to really challenge

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whenever you hear that, what are the freedoms really embedded?

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Was there was there any governance at this point in the community

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where you running the community at that point?

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Was there a group or do you run in the community?

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And how did you turn this

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into a sprawling group of developers and bring some structure to it?

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And I guess it kind of

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is going to lead on to my next point, which is how do you start thinking about

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what about it and when does that seed get planted in your head?

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Yeah.

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We did not have any formal governance.

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We had a de facto I lead or sometimes

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they open source, they say benevolent dictator for life or something myself.

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But even that didn't come up so many years.

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But I had registered the domain and created the website and hosted it

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and everything like that.

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So that kind of became the de facto version.

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I think my hesitance was around

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other popular open source programs at the time

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where usually under an Apache license or an Apache government

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model, which was, you know, sort of a committee model.

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And I probably started to read some books, entrepreneurship books at the time.

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And, you know, Vice,

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I was always in there was like, you don't want like three CEOs.

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It's better just to pick one of you and have a clear

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line of reporting and hierarchy and decision making

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and then didn't have, you know, something unusual there.

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Now, that said, what I would do is I would,

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you know, pass on responsibilities to anyone who is passionate and showed up.

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So I wasn't trying to hold on to a lot.

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I would do the job myself and contribute to it.

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But whenever someone I contributed, you know, regardless of their background

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or anything, I would just say, Hey, I see you've been doing a lot of patches.

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Would you like to commit or would you like to review other patches or so?

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It's very, very liberal and giving

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responsibility to anyone who seemed passionate and eager

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and and not that worried about the trust side of it, you know,

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because we were kind of developed the trust by working together.

00:14:14:08 - 00:14:15:29
So that was the governance model.

00:14:15:29 - 00:14:18:11
And actually still today our press is down

00:14:19:09 - 00:14:22:13
by so many thousands of people who are working on a regular basis.

00:14:22:27 - 00:14:25:18
And we try to keep things largely informal.

00:14:26:01 - 00:14:28:21
We do have a lot more committees now, but we try to have a clear

00:14:28:21 - 00:14:32:00
hierarchy above them so that we say that maybe there's

00:14:32:00 - 00:14:36:00
a group that can operate by consensus for a given area, but

00:14:36:28 - 00:14:41:20
now there are some hierarchies further up that that could overwrite that.

00:14:41:29 - 00:14:43:03
So I wanted to.

00:14:43:10 - 00:14:46:09
A super interesting and and one of the questions

00:14:46:09 - 00:14:50:04
that we ask a lot of the guests who join us is

00:14:51:14 - 00:14:54:12
did you have any mentors and and this is pretty complicated, right?

00:14:54:12 - 00:14:54:28
What you're doing.

00:14:54:28 - 00:14:56:22
I mean, you're talking to people

00:14:56:22 - 00:14:59:29
all over the world, different time zones, different ages, different skill levels.

00:15:00:23 - 00:15:04:00
And you're building this community, this is Bill of Rights, as you describe it.

00:15:04:00 - 00:15:05:23
It's not an easy thing to do.

00:15:05:23 - 00:15:08:13
And did you have a mentor going through this process?

00:15:10:02 - 00:15:12:17
You know, I felt like my mentors were great

00:15:12:17 - 00:15:15:12
books and writing online, especially in the early days.

00:15:15:27 - 00:15:19:10
There wasn't really anyone in Houston that was into the same stuff

00:15:19:10 - 00:15:19:26
that I was into.

00:15:19:26 - 00:15:22:10
It wasn't till I moved to San Francisco that I kind of found my tribe

00:15:22:27 - 00:15:26:01
and did have many mentors and people who I still work with today.

00:15:26:15 - 00:15:29:03
But those days is really just written things online.

00:15:29:03 - 00:15:33:09
So, you know, the writings of Linus Torvalds are,

00:15:33:17 - 00:15:38:10
you know, the early open source pioneers, Richard Solomon,

00:15:38:10 - 00:15:42:21
folks, complicated people, some of whom now I have done some not so great things.

00:15:42:21 - 00:15:44:06
So they're not really great anymore.

00:15:44:06 - 00:15:45:25
But but they had these really great writings

00:15:45:25 - 00:15:49:04
back in the day and that are still influential.

00:15:49:18 - 00:15:52:10
So much like, you know, some historical writers

00:15:52:18 - 00:15:56:12
atrocities are, you know, like these are tribal characters.

00:15:56:12 - 00:15:58:19
If you look outside of the historical context.

00:15:58:19 - 00:16:01:22
But they created some great works that continue to influence today.

00:16:02:11 - 00:16:06:01
Did you speak to any of those sort of icons in the open source world

00:16:06:03 - 00:16:07:04
in the early days?

00:16:07:04 - 00:16:10:19
Did you ever did you ever try and reach out to them and get their views or

00:16:10:28 - 00:16:12:12
or just wasn't on your mind at this time?

00:16:13:28 - 00:16:14:07
You know,

00:16:14:07 - 00:16:17:21
I do remember posting on some of, say, mailing list or newsgroups or BBC s,

00:16:19:01 - 00:16:22:04
but I don't recall ever getting a direct reply from one of them,

00:16:22:17 - 00:16:25:27
like one of those early open source pioneers.

00:16:25:27 - 00:16:27:16
But it was true.

00:16:27:16 - 00:16:29:06
I might have emailed someone.

00:16:29:06 - 00:16:31:26
I have a vague recollection of maybe emailing the Free

00:16:31:26 - 00:16:34:18
Software Foundation with a question and getting a reply back.

00:16:35:02 - 00:16:38:24
And likewise a lot of folks in WordPress have a story

00:16:38:25 - 00:16:42:16
where they just email their use my contact form early on and I replied

00:16:43:03 - 00:16:47:12
and it's actually part of my the albatross I carry now of emails

00:16:47:12 - 00:16:50:20
that I'll I'll reply to email sometimes that are four or five years old.

00:16:51:07 - 00:16:55:04
And the sad thing is like just as often the email bounces because someone doesn't

00:16:55:04 - 00:16:57:08
have that a domain anymore or something.

00:16:57:08 - 00:16:59:17
But I just have this like personal memory of having,

00:17:00:01 - 00:17:03:06
you know, getting replies from really, really amazing people early on.

00:17:03:17 - 00:17:07:12
And so I really do try to reply to everything still, even though it's

00:17:07:12 - 00:17:10:24
clearly unsustainable and I have emails, probably eight years old in my inbox.

00:17:12:02 - 00:17:14:03
What email client are you using?

00:17:14:03 - 00:17:15:04
I'm sure.

00:17:15:04 - 00:17:16:08
I'm sure some people are interested.

00:17:16:08 - 00:17:19:01
It's now.

00:17:19:01 - 00:17:22:10
So I'm like one of the last remaining Thunderbird users

00:17:22:21 - 00:17:24:23
I which is an email client from Mozilla.

00:17:25:11 - 00:17:28:13
I actually do go to Apple mail.

00:17:28:13 - 00:17:30:17
I really enjoy the search and Apple Mount.

00:17:30:17 - 00:17:34:03
I have an archive email that you know is kind of like the super search.

00:17:34:20 - 00:17:39:14
But more recently I've really loved and use kind of primarily missives

00:17:40:16 - 00:17:42:20
and my ivy

00:17:42:20 - 00:17:44:27
which basically takes email, makes it multiplayer.

00:17:45:15 - 00:17:47:28
So again, trying to get more on top of it.

00:17:47:28 - 00:17:51:01
And with this I have a few other folks that

00:17:51:01 - 00:17:53:23
we can have kind of parallel conversations to an email threat.

00:17:54:05 - 00:17:58:29
So an email can come in and they can do some research or Paris notes.

00:17:59:04 - 00:18:01:13
We can collaborate on drafts.

00:18:01:13 - 00:18:05:02
So just kind of like multiplayer email and it's been really fantastic actually.

00:18:05:02 - 00:18:09:10
I've gotten a lot better about email over the past year since I adopted that also.

00:18:09:18 - 00:18:13:12
Okay, so so you've built this, this amazing community at this point

00:18:14:04 - 00:18:16:11
and you figuring out your governance and

00:18:17:00 - 00:18:19:25
and everything's, you know, exponentially growing, I guess.

00:18:19:25 - 00:18:22:03
And when does automatic come into your head?

00:18:22:14 - 00:18:24:24
When do you start thinking about a commercial entity?

00:18:25:26 - 00:18:27:10
On top of that, it is this community.

00:18:27:10 - 00:18:32:13
And and what was your thought process in balancing the two?

00:18:32:13 - 00:18:35:20
At some theses it started to reach out like Tony

00:18:35:20 - 00:18:39:07
Conrad is now at your ventures and others,

00:18:39:07 - 00:18:42:12
and WordPress had started to gain a little bit of notoriety.

00:18:42:12 - 00:18:48:15
But I, you know, this was before the time of like founder CEOs and it just

00:18:48:28 - 00:18:50:01
there was no business model.

00:18:50:01 - 00:18:52:06
So it didn't really seem to make sense.

00:18:53:19 - 00:18:56:12
So the calls were just all kind of like, hey, nice to meet you.

00:18:56:12 - 00:18:59:26
That sounds cool. Do you do anything?

00:19:00:00 - 00:19:02:12
But I did visit San Francisco

00:19:02:12 - 00:19:05:08
for a week one summer, and it was fantastic.

00:19:05:08 - 00:19:07:26
It was it was literally like,

00:19:07:26 - 00:19:09:09
you know, pilgrimage to Mecca.

00:19:09:09 - 00:19:12:13
And I visit Google and this is probably 23

00:19:12:29 - 00:19:16:28
and there, you know, the offices were amazing.

00:19:16:28 - 00:19:18:11
They're a visit Yahoo!

00:19:18:11 - 00:19:22:03
A visit kind of you know, that week I was just trying to meet as many people

00:19:22:03 - 00:19:23:02
as possible.

00:19:23:02 - 00:19:24:18
And when I returned to his soon afterwards,

00:19:24:18 - 00:19:27:13
I started to get sort of people reaching out with job offers

00:19:28:09 - 00:19:30:25
from all those companies and saying, hey, you should move out and work.

00:19:31:11 - 00:19:33:03
And the one that I ended up taking was actually

00:19:33:03 - 00:19:36:09
for a publishing company called Connect Networks.

00:19:36:09 - 00:19:39:28
And the reason that I took that job, or one they were in San Francisco

00:19:40:19 - 00:19:43:23
and that city just seemed so much cooler than than all the other companies

00:19:43:23 - 00:19:46:12
which are in various suburbs in the Bay Area.

00:19:46:12 - 00:19:48:22
This is before many companies were in San Francisco.

00:19:48:22 - 00:19:50:24
And two, because they were a media company,

00:19:50:24 - 00:19:53:25
they were kind of the first digital media company in a lot of ways.

00:19:55:04 - 00:19:55:11
Their

00:19:55:11 - 00:19:59:05
pioneer, it seems so early, seems like they never actually spun out.

00:19:59:05 - 00:20:00:03
I see now.

00:20:00:10 - 00:20:04:05
And they would allow me to retain all the intellectual property

00:20:04:15 - 00:20:07:28
rights of the copyright, everything to the software I was writing,

00:20:08:19 - 00:20:10:00
including WordPress.

00:20:10:00 - 00:20:13:18
Or if you went to Google or anyone else at the time, you would sign all that away.

00:20:14:02 - 00:20:18:06
So I, you know, being a student of jazz and music, this idea of owning

00:20:18:06 - 00:20:22:00
your masters was I was kind of like fixated a fixation for me.

00:20:22:12 - 00:20:26:09
So keeping all the copyright for the code I was creating, I was really important.

00:20:26:09 - 00:20:27:29
So I went to CNET

00:20:27:29 - 00:20:31:10
once I moved out, you know, really started to meet a lot of folks and,

00:20:32:13 - 00:20:34:09
and I just want a WordPress to be more popular.

00:20:34:09 - 00:20:37:20
So I wanted to make it more accessible to a wider audience.

00:20:38:26 - 00:20:41:18
And to run WordPress, you had to,

00:20:42:00 - 00:20:44:28
you know, download files, unzip have a server accounts,

00:20:45:18 - 00:20:49:22
set up my sequel and load database manually is a lot of steps.

00:20:50:06 - 00:20:52:19
And so I was like, well, we can make a version of this way.

00:20:52:19 - 00:20:54:21
Just click a few buttons on a web page.

00:20:54:21 - 00:20:58:22
And actually I pitched it at ZDNet like my, you know, I was very loyal

00:20:58:29 - 00:21:01:24
to them having moved me out and giving me a job and everything.

00:21:02:05 - 00:21:07:24
So I really did my best to convince them that this should be a thing that they did.

00:21:08:10 - 00:21:11:21
And I felt and a part of it was that every other major

00:21:11:21 - 00:21:13:20
Internet company had a blogging service.

00:21:13:20 - 00:21:16:14
So Google had already purchased blogger.

00:21:16:14 - 00:21:18:26
AOL had something called 360,

00:21:18:26 - 00:21:21:14
and Microsoft had real hard journals.

00:21:21:14 - 00:21:26:20
Microsoft had a blogging system called 360, and then Yahoo had one.

00:21:27:12 - 00:21:28:28
And that's names Escape Me.

00:21:28:28 - 00:21:31:06
But these were like the Internet giants AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!

00:21:31:06 - 00:21:32:03
And Google.

00:21:32:11 - 00:21:34:16
They all kind of versions of WordPress.com.

00:21:35:03 - 00:21:38:23
So ZDNet didn't want to get into it, but they did agree to invest in the company.

00:21:38:23 - 00:21:41:16
And I ended up starting and I actually ended up staying at CNN

00:21:41:16 - 00:21:44:13
probably three or four months after I wanted to leave and after they

00:21:45:00 - 00:21:47:04
I kind of agree to just to finish up the projects

00:21:47:04 - 00:21:49:10
I was working on because again, I felt a lot of loyalty.

00:21:49:19 - 00:21:49:28
And that's

00:21:49:28 - 00:21:52:07
why I'm the third or fourth employee at Automattic,

00:21:52:07 - 00:21:55:08
because I started to pay the other employees just out of my salary

00:21:55:08 - 00:21:59:19
and credit cards and stuff before I myself left the company and I got started.

00:22:00:21 - 00:22:01:27
That's very interesting.

00:22:01:27 - 00:22:05:17
And how did you did you pitch it to them when when they invested,

00:22:05:17 - 00:22:08:29
were you saying, look, I'm going to be the

00:22:09:19 - 00:22:12:21
the Red Hat to the Linux or the commercial entity for WordPress?

00:22:12:26 - 00:22:13:24
That's what I'm going to do.

00:22:13:24 - 00:22:15:22
Well, was it very

00:22:15:25 - 00:22:17:16
vague at that time?

00:22:18:03 - 00:22:18:28
That was very specific.

00:22:18:28 - 00:22:22:00
It was actually almost exactly what we ended up doing and how

00:22:23:05 - 00:22:25:01
and I can I did my best, but

00:22:25:01 - 00:22:28:19
they were the the zeitgeist at the time was

00:22:28:29 - 00:22:33:05
blogs are mostly known are most notorious for being political.

00:22:33:16 - 00:22:35:17
So there are a lot of political blog blogs.

00:22:35:17 - 00:22:40:17
And they had taken down some politicians where, you know,

00:22:40:20 - 00:22:44:02
some politician had said something and the bloggers jumped on it.

00:22:44:02 - 00:22:47:10
And this is kind of the first beginnings of where things would start on blogs

00:22:47:16 - 00:22:49:15
and the move in the mainstream media.

00:22:49:15 - 00:22:53:18
So kind of very beginning of that, what is now a pretty standard cycle.

00:22:54:09 - 00:22:58:26
And and so people blogs are seen as like adversarial political

00:22:58:26 - 00:23:01:06
or the word blog was kind of a dirty word.

00:23:01:29 - 00:23:03:11
That's why all these other Internet companies

00:23:03:11 - 00:23:06:10
call it something else, like journals or spaces or a360.

00:23:06:22 - 00:23:08:21
They never want to use the word blog.

00:23:08:21 - 00:23:11:29
And also CNET was being disrupted by blogs.

00:23:12:06 - 00:23:15:21
So they had they were like the major tech publication at the time.

00:23:16:04 - 00:23:21:14
And but nipping at the heels where are blogs like Engadget and later TechCrunch?

00:23:21:27 - 00:23:24:04
And so there was this kind of institutional

00:23:25:26 - 00:23:29:02
disdain for these, you know,

00:23:29:16 - 00:23:32:13
people who aren't journalists sitting at laptops in their underwear

00:23:32:24 - 00:23:37:03
thinking they can write about technology and cover things like that.

00:23:37:03 - 00:23:39:09
Journalists and they didn't go to journalism school.

00:23:39:09 - 00:23:41:13
They didn't have editors, they didn't have anything.

00:23:41:13 - 00:23:45:14
And so that institutional disdain, I think, kept them from seeing that

00:23:45:14 - 00:23:49:19
this was actually kind of the platform in which in the future,

00:23:49:19 - 00:23:52:12
probably most of the content in the world will be created.

00:23:52:12 - 00:23:55:01
And I actually consider like Twitter, a form of microblogging,

00:23:55:09 - 00:23:57:25
Facebook, Instagram is image blogging.

00:23:57:25 - 00:24:01:04
Like everything that every social network that is, this is basically

00:24:01:04 - 00:24:04:22
a form of the feed or the stream and blogging or publishing.

00:24:06:03 - 00:24:06:23
That's awesome.

00:24:06:23 - 00:24:09:22
And do you remember your first paying user,

00:24:11:00 - 00:24:13:04
an automatic or you got?

00:24:14:01 - 00:24:14:13
Yeah.

00:24:14:13 - 00:24:19:17
So there was no obvious way to monetize CRM, the core software at the time.

00:24:19:17 - 00:24:22:02
And in fact, I didn't want to because I, I was

00:24:22:10 - 00:24:25:17
I didn't like the models because I'm a real kind of evangelist

00:24:25:17 - 00:24:27:19
or true believer, so I didn't like the models.

00:24:27:27 - 00:24:30:23
That's typical in open source where you have the free GPL version

00:24:31:03 - 00:24:33:00
and then you say, Oh, that license is scary,

00:24:33:00 - 00:24:35:05
it's viral, it's going to affect your whole company

00:24:35:05 - 00:24:37:20
and it will sell you a proprietary version of it.

00:24:37:20 - 00:24:40:07
So I never want to do a split license like that or do a license.

00:24:41:12 - 00:24:43:01
I'm so the

00:24:43:01 - 00:24:46:05
first software is actually a SAS service called A Kismet,

00:24:46:06 - 00:24:49:18
which is an anti-spam software because blogs start to get a lot of spam

00:24:49:25 - 00:24:52:28
and everything we would do at the blog level to block the spam,

00:24:53:09 - 00:24:56:17
whereas would work for a few weeks, but then the spammers would adapt to it.

00:24:57:01 - 00:24:59:14
So I want to create a real time SAS service that

00:25:00:16 - 00:25:03:29
that would essentially adapt in real time to what the spammers were doing

00:25:04:05 - 00:25:06:11
and then sort of pull the collective intelligence

00:25:06:19 - 00:25:09:25
of all the people who use the service, kind of like,

00:25:10:15 - 00:25:14:22
you know, the kids in the playground banding together to stand up to the bully.

00:25:16:09 - 00:25:18:13
This used very, very early

00:25:19:18 - 00:25:21:28
versions of machine learning

00:25:21:28 - 00:25:24:10
to be intelligence and doctrine real time.

00:25:24:22 - 00:25:27:26
And it was often I wrote it the first version in the weekend

00:25:28:00 - 00:25:33:00
after I left CNET, and that ended up being the first paid thing for for WordPress.

00:25:33:15 - 00:25:35:00
We also as API driven.

00:25:35:00 - 00:25:38:24
So I also created plug ins for Google Type and Drupal and all the other major

00:25:39:05 - 00:25:40:28
publishing platforms at the time.

00:25:40:28 - 00:25:46:23
And so Kismet actually was and still is one of our, our big revenue drivers.

00:25:47:09 - 00:25:50:29
And until about because it had the secret sauce,

00:25:50:29 - 00:25:56:18
I was actually the only developer on it until I think 2012 or 2013,

00:25:57:01 - 00:26:00:17
the only person besides one system and with access to the code because we had

00:26:00:18 - 00:26:02:27
this idea that we had to keep it super secret of the spammers

00:26:02:27 - 00:26:05:13
would bribe someone at the company to figure out how it worked.

00:26:05:28 - 00:26:08:13
But it's still, I guess, 15 years later

00:26:08:13 - 00:26:12:23
now has over five nines of accuracy in terms of identifying with spam.

00:26:12:23 - 00:26:16:03
So if you have anything that accepts web content on your

00:26:17:04 - 00:26:17:17
on your

00:26:17:17 - 00:26:21:09
service, you should I use the kismet is also really cheap that's awesome.

00:26:21:15 - 00:26:25:01
And I add we were speaking very briefly before

00:26:25:01 - 00:26:28:11
and I promised I dropped this into the conversation, but

00:26:29:02 - 00:26:31:15
some of the world press releases are very interesting names.

00:26:31:15 - 00:26:32:24
Where do they come from?

00:26:32:24 - 00:26:34:23
What's the inspiration?

00:26:35:06 - 00:26:37:18
Yeah, we try to for every word press release,

00:26:37:18 - 00:26:40:00
we try to highlight and honor a jazz musician.

00:26:41:08 - 00:26:45:11
Yeah, I mentioned earlier I did websites in exchange for music lessons

00:26:45:11 - 00:26:49:10
and so I play jazz saxophone a little bit and just love the music.

00:26:50:07 - 00:26:53:15
I love that idea of improvization and having kind of a structure

00:26:53:15 - 00:26:54:29
everyone riffs on top of.

00:26:54:29 - 00:26:57:01
And jazz is also intensely collaborative.

00:26:57:01 - 00:26:59:27
You know, the musicians are listening to each other,

00:26:59:27 - 00:27:02:04
constantly responding to each other,

00:27:02:04 - 00:27:05:07
and it's magic and that something that can happen

00:27:05:21 - 00:27:09:02
one night when you play together, one time when you play together,

00:27:09:02 - 00:27:11:18
never existed before in the world and will never exist again.

00:27:11:23 - 00:27:13:19
Exactly in that way.

00:27:13:19 - 00:27:17:16
So I really enjoy that and I find it

00:27:17:16 - 00:27:20:11
my favorite kind of genre of music as well.

00:27:20:17 - 00:27:21:07
That's fantastic.

00:27:21:07 - 00:27:24:11
And I just wanted to touch a little bit

00:27:24:11 - 00:27:27:12
on on automatic moving away.

00:27:27:12 - 00:27:30:28
So, so again, we're sitting here today and

00:27:32:11 - 00:27:34:24
what's your proudest achievement with the company?

00:27:35:05 - 00:27:40:05
Has it been everything you hope to have achieved when you look back to 2005, 2006?

00:27:40:15 - 00:27:44:11
And would you have done anything differently? And

00:27:45:13 - 00:27:50:23
did you think it was going to be so successful?

00:27:50:23 - 00:27:53:03
Mm hmm.

00:27:54:22 - 00:27:55:21
No. Did not think

00:27:55:21 - 00:27:58:25
it was going to be this big or successful.

00:27:58:26 - 00:28:02:21
You even exist at the time where I feel like I'm saying at the time a lot.

00:28:02:21 - 00:28:05:11
I feel like an old man. I felt. This way.

00:28:05:18 - 00:28:08:21
So the big assets like Stewart Butterfield who now to Slack

00:28:09:02 - 00:28:12:09
his big exit was Flickr which he did with his wife at the time.

00:28:12:19 - 00:28:16:02
And that sold for like $24 million.

00:28:16:28 - 00:28:21:08
The guy I recovered to be the CEO of Automattic, I was the CEO of Odd Post,

00:28:21:08 - 00:28:26:01
which was the first drag and drop email kind of web rich web client.

00:28:27:02 - 00:28:27:14
Yahoo!

00:28:27:14 - 00:28:32:15
Bought it after Google leased Gmail and and that was like a $20 million exit.

00:28:32:15 - 00:28:36:22
So, you know, winning the lottery was selling to one of these giants

00:28:36:22 - 00:28:38:03
for 20 or 30 million.

00:28:38:03 - 00:28:39:21
And Yahoo! Was actually the coolest.

00:28:39:21 - 00:28:44:03
So my hope a little bit was like, ah, maybe in a year or two, Yahoo will

00:28:44:03 - 00:28:47:12
pick this up for like 15 or 20 million and then I can work at Yahoo!

00:28:47:27 - 00:28:51:12
Did you you tell did you tell CNN that when they first invested that?

00:28:53:02 - 00:28:55:23
I don't know if I was really explicit about that, but

00:28:55:23 - 00:29:01:12
I'm one of the first users of WordPress and he ended up becoming my best friend.

00:29:01:12 - 00:29:04:06
Was my best friend still as a journalist name Al-Malik

00:29:04:27 - 00:29:10:04
and he he introduced me to actually to all the investors and the CEO.

00:29:10:04 - 00:29:11:15
I mentioned Tony Schneider.

00:29:11:15 - 00:29:14:04
He had done a cover article for Business 2.0 on IPOs.

00:29:14:04 - 00:29:16:06
That's how he introduced him to me.

00:29:16:20 - 00:29:21:12
And yeah, he was like, Oh yeah, just, you know, put Mike Moritz on a board.

00:29:21:22 - 00:29:23:07
He's an investor, he's on the board.

00:29:23:07 - 00:29:23:27
Yahoo! They'll,

00:29:23:27 - 00:29:27:26
they'll talk this and in a few years and it's got this is the company idea

00:29:29:27 - 00:29:32:13
but it was actually kind of a funny thing.

00:29:32:13 - 00:29:36:21
So actually two years after we started, when we were only about 18 people,

00:29:37:01 - 00:29:40:20
we did get an offer to sell the company for $200 million.

00:29:41:24 - 00:29:44:18
So there was someone tried to buy it.

00:29:45:09 - 00:29:47:22
And the big wake up call for me

00:29:48:05 - 00:29:50:15
was this was kind of everything I had hoped and dreamed for.

00:29:51:05 - 00:29:53:24
Again, we were 18 people.

00:29:53:24 - 00:29:56:29
I was 23 or 24 at the time,

00:29:57:16 - 00:30:00:05
and I would have personally netted nine figures from this.

00:30:00:18 - 00:30:03:26
So that was

00:30:03:26 - 00:30:06:23
definitely something I thought a lot about.

00:30:06:24 - 00:30:11:21
But I realized that this is also when we were bootstrapping WordCamp.

00:30:11:21 - 00:30:14:24
So I was like traveling all over the world speaking, trying to start like

00:30:14:24 - 00:30:17:25
little pockets collect fight club where Tyler Darren goes around

00:30:17:25 - 00:30:19:12
and starts all the little pockets of fight clubs.

00:30:19:12 - 00:30:22:15
Like I was trying to start WordPress communities all over the world and,

00:30:23:20 - 00:30:24:25
and really enjoying it.

00:30:24:25 - 00:30:30:28
And I thought, well, if I had $100 million, what would I want to do?

00:30:31:20 - 00:30:35:29
And I had found online that story of of the banker

00:30:35:29 - 00:30:39:07
that goes to like the little sleepy town in Greece and goes out on a fishing boat.

00:30:39:07 - 00:30:40:16
And then if they've heard

00:30:40:16 - 00:30:44:06
some version of it where, you know, he tells the fishermen, like, aha,

00:30:44:13 - 00:30:47:18
if you, you know, use this better type of fishing and got this bigger net,

00:30:47:18 - 00:30:50:13
you catch more fish and then you go buy two boats than five boats.

00:30:50:13 - 00:30:51:21
And then like

00:30:52:29 - 00:30:54:15
a fisherman is like and then white and then white.

00:30:54:15 - 00:30:57:14
And next thing you know, he's created a fishing empire.

00:30:57:14 - 00:30:59:15
And then he's like, I then went in, the banker was like, Well,

00:30:59:27 - 00:31:02:09
then you could, you know, sell all that and retire,

00:31:03:09 - 00:31:05:02
and you could go out on a

00:31:05:02 - 00:31:08:10
boat by yourself and fish when you wanted to do what you want.

00:31:08:18 - 00:31:11:07
And as that sort of realization that after all of this,

00:31:11:07 - 00:31:13:24
you kind of want to end up back in the same place.

00:31:13:24 - 00:31:18:12
And I realized that my lifelong passion was making open source software,

00:31:18:22 - 00:31:22:21
working with communities, being close to users, building things I want to use.

00:31:23:11 - 00:31:27:01
I mean, part of a larger entity would probably make that harder,

00:31:27:01 - 00:31:28:22
not easier, and maybe

00:31:28:22 - 00:31:32:03
take me further away from the code and the users and everything else.

00:31:32:16 - 00:31:36:17
So independence seemed like the path for.

00:31:36:17 - 00:31:38:01
So that's one from a business point of view.

00:31:38:01 - 00:31:41:10
We thought, well, if we're saying no to this, what are we saying yes to?

00:31:41:27 - 00:31:44:08
So we raised a series B round of funding,

00:31:45:12 - 00:31:46:07
did a secondary.

00:31:46:07 - 00:31:50:14
So I did take some money off the table, which was transformative for me because I,

00:31:50:16 - 00:31:53:12
you know, at the time I'd only made maybe up to 100 grand a year

00:31:53:28 - 00:31:56:14
and then said, okay, we're going to be in this

00:31:56:14 - 00:31:59:16
for the long term and try to build something really big.

00:31:59:16 - 00:32:01:20
WordPress is maybe 0.6.

00:32:01:20 - 00:32:04:13
7% of websites at the time.

00:32:04:13 - 00:32:06:10
So yeah, we really started to focus

00:32:06:10 - 00:32:09:01
on, well, if we want the world to be open and free

00:32:09:10 - 00:32:11:20
because this is the most important thing for humanity

00:32:11:27 - 00:32:15:04
to have this open and free kind of communication layer to connect

00:32:15:04 - 00:32:18:13
with each other, we had to make the best out of that. And,

00:32:19:19 - 00:32:22:25
and we need to just make it totally ubiquitous because otherwise

00:32:23:05 - 00:32:27:14
the proprietary commercial self-interest forces are going to lead it to be,

00:32:27:25 - 00:32:31:05
you know, like little balkanized islands, and it won't be the Internet.

00:32:31:05 - 00:32:33:18
It'll just be like a bunch of aholes.

00:32:34:05 - 00:32:37:20
And so that's what we're we're trying to fight against that

00:32:37:20 - 00:32:39:01
and still trying to fight against today.

00:32:40:15 - 00:32:43:03
Listen to that's and you touched on on something

00:32:43:03 - 00:32:47:13
and while you were speaking which I which I also wanted to talk about and that was

00:32:48:23 - 00:32:51:00
you mentioned Tony Snyder of Yahoo!

00:32:51:00 - 00:32:56:12
And that was the first, I guess, CEO of Automatic Voice fundraising fact.

00:32:56:14 - 00:32:59:06
If I'm correct, I'm.

00:32:59:06 - 00:33:00:15
Was that a difficult decision?

00:33:00:15 - 00:33:04:22
And what what was the thought process behind bringing on such an experience?

00:33:04:26 - 00:33:09:09
You're right from the beginning, if you're able to share that.

00:33:09:09 - 00:33:11:15
Yeah, I think I just lucked out.

00:33:11:15 - 00:33:14:19
So, you know, I met Tony our first meeting.

00:33:15:05 - 00:33:17:23
I didn't know San Francisco yet, so I was actually like 45 minutes

00:33:17:23 - 00:33:20:11
or an hour late and he thankfully stayed there.

00:33:20:23 - 00:33:23:18
And, you know, it was supposed to be a 30 minute hour meeting.

00:33:23:18 - 00:33:28:13
We ended up going until like seven or 8 hours, like past lunch or dinner.

00:33:28:25 - 00:33:31:06
And I felt like I met my business soulmate.

00:33:31:06 - 00:33:31:25
You know, he was

00:33:33:07 - 00:33:35:15
he had done a few startups before.

00:33:35:15 - 00:33:38:12
So this company to Yahoo!

00:33:38:12 - 00:33:40:05
But and was doing some cool stuff at Yahoo!

00:33:40:05 - 00:33:42:11
He created like that developer network and Yahoo!

00:33:42:19 - 00:33:44:19
He was helped create Yahoo!

00:33:44:19 - 00:33:47:06
Pipes and some really cool things going on there. And

00:33:48:22 - 00:33:52:06
but he's no Swiss-German very straightforward guy.

00:33:52:17 - 00:33:54:09
I got all the philosophy.

00:33:54:09 - 00:33:57:10
It was almost like we were two sides of the same brain.

00:33:57:10 - 00:34:01:23
And, you know, I knew if I raised money, I would need to hire a CEO

00:34:01:23 - 00:34:04:06
because the model at that time was much more like Eric Schmidt.

00:34:04:16 - 00:34:06:18
The adult supervision coming in.

00:34:06:18 - 00:34:08:22
Then I then, you know,

00:34:08:24 - 00:34:12:24
Mark Zuckerberg, this is before Andreessen had sort of the founder CEO thing.

00:34:12:24 - 00:34:14:09
So I was like, okay, well,

00:34:14:09 - 00:34:16:19
if I'm going to have adult supervision, I want to pick it.

00:34:16:19 - 00:34:18:09
And so that was a decision point.

00:34:18:09 - 00:34:20:10
It started to make a bit of money for WordPress at that time,

00:34:21:01 - 00:34:22:26
probably a 50, 60 grand a month.

00:34:22:26 - 00:34:26:04
So was enough to support me and the other early developers. But

00:34:27:19 - 00:34:28:22
yeah, to raise money.

00:34:28:22 - 00:34:30:05
We didn't really have anything in the bank

00:34:30:05 - 00:34:33:09
and so I felt really bad saying to these folks asking to leave a job

00:34:33:19 - 00:34:35:20
if something happened to our revenue stream,

00:34:35:20 - 00:34:38:10
which is to all be unemployed and have no income.

00:34:38:19 - 00:34:40:25
So I want to raise money essentially to have a buffer

00:34:41:27 - 00:34:44:21
where if, you know, things were bad, we still have like a year

00:34:44:21 - 00:34:46:08
of salary in the bank.

00:34:46:08 - 00:34:51:21
And I had just I was a soul mate, so he was the CEO for the first eight years.

00:34:52:10 - 00:34:56:08
We passed the baton the day after my 30th birthday, actually.

00:34:56:08 - 00:34:59:28
So four years we've been talking about, you know, kind of switching

00:35:00:09 - 00:35:01:15
and me taking over.

00:35:01:15 - 00:35:06:07
And then he actually stayed at the company until just a few months ago.

00:35:06:07 - 00:35:09:25
So he actually ran a bunch of different teams and and did things

00:35:09:25 - 00:35:13:11
and it was only after know some family issues

00:35:14:13 - 00:35:14:25
got pretty

00:35:14:25 - 00:35:17:14
serious that he he stepped away and now he's just on the board

00:35:17:25 - 00:35:20:15
but still one of my best friends and favorite people in the world.

00:35:20:28 - 00:35:22:25
So it was just that I met that person.

00:35:22:25 - 00:35:26:20
And I also consider myself very lucky that the early investors,

00:35:26:22 - 00:35:29:22
I think folks I got connected to ended up being really good people.

00:35:29:27 - 00:35:33:12
And they're folks who, you know, 15, 16 years later,

00:35:33:21 - 00:35:35:29
I still consider friends and we still work together.

00:35:36:15 - 00:35:37:24
And it's got pluses, minuses.

00:35:37:24 - 00:35:40:22
They still see me as like a 20 or 21 year old kid in their head sometimes.

00:35:40:27 - 00:35:43:11
Like, obviously, I'm I'm very different now,

00:35:44:02 - 00:35:49:06
but they are it's also great having that basis of kind of trust and familiarity

00:35:49:17 - 00:35:53:15
to build on as we try bold things.

00:35:53:15 - 00:35:55:04
You know, we do a lot of automatic

00:35:55:04 - 00:35:57:04
that hasn't been done at other companies before.

00:35:57:13 - 00:36:00:09
And so they they do give a lot of trust to say, okay,

00:36:00:17 - 00:36:02:15
we're going to let you try this thing and see how it goes.

00:36:03:24 - 00:36:05:24
My my last two questions just

00:36:05:24 - 00:36:08:14
before we move on to 2 to 2 people

00:36:09:22 - 00:36:11:26
is is more looking to the future.

00:36:12:20 - 00:36:16:20
And I was wondering if if you had any strong views here on

00:36:16:22 - 00:36:20:15
on what the future of technology looks like and either

00:36:20:15 - 00:36:24:25
from a philosophical perspective, walk or a more technical perspective.

00:36:25:18 - 00:36:28:05
And the second question is,

00:36:28:05 - 00:36:31:06
if you had to, you know, leave automatic

00:36:31:06 - 00:36:34:23
today, go start something else, what would it what would it be?

00:36:35:02 - 00:36:37:26
What's that what would you do today if you

00:36:37:26 - 00:36:40:29
if you had to do something else?

00:36:40:29 - 00:36:44:12
I you know, I probably I'm going to build content management systems

00:36:44:12 - 00:36:45:18
the rest of my life.

00:36:45:18 - 00:36:48:22
It's just my there's a few people out there

00:36:49:00 - 00:36:51:03
I know most of them in the world.

00:36:51:08 - 00:36:53:22
Like like we meet and we're competitors.

00:36:53:22 - 00:36:56:20
But I can get together with from blogger,

00:36:57:10 - 00:37:01:12
from blogger and from Twitter and media or or,

00:37:01:29 - 00:37:05:11
you know, Brian Alvey or people who just build editors, build boxes

00:37:05:11 - 00:37:09:23
that people write on the Internet and publish and we can just geek out

00:37:09:23 - 00:37:14:15
for hours on like content editable and how things work and how, you know.

00:37:14:15 - 00:37:16:24
So I probably go, I do that the rest of my life.

00:37:17:22 - 00:37:21:05
We, you know, automatics big push right now for the past

00:37:21:13 - 00:37:24:26
four years has been an e-commerce and actually commerce in general.

00:37:25:07 - 00:37:27:24
So we want to create the same equality of opportunity

00:37:27:24 - 00:37:31:25
and open source nature to commerce as we have for publishing

00:37:33:05 - 00:37:33:17
our product.

00:37:33:17 - 00:37:35:05
That's called WooCommerce.

00:37:35:05 - 00:37:36:04
We are selling stuff.

00:37:36:04 - 00:37:37:03
I encourage you to build that

00:37:37:03 - 00:37:39:21
on top of WooCommerce as kind of a base layer operating system.

00:37:41:02 - 00:37:44:10
It's growing super, super fast,

00:37:44:27 - 00:37:49:23
over $1,000,000,000 of GMV per month as I going through it.

00:37:50:01 - 00:37:50:26
Actually, I think it's a billion

00:37:50:26 - 00:37:54:23
a half now and that's that's probably doubling year over year.

00:37:54:23 - 00:37:57:09
So there's just it's really taking off.

00:37:57:09 - 00:38:00:09
It's kind of like a WordPress was in 2008 or 2009 and is also

00:38:00:09 - 00:38:03:12
some really cool business has being built on top of WooCommerce.

00:38:03:15 - 00:38:07:07
So I'd say probably commerce is the area I would go into that kind of work

00:38:07:07 - 00:38:11:15
on anything that automatically working on now.

00:38:11:15 - 00:38:13:16
I think it'd be really fun to build a

00:38:14:14 - 00:38:17:05
well I guess a different type of editor is I would probably work on

00:38:17:05 - 00:38:20:04
like I code editors like maybe desktop software for Mac OS.

00:38:20:15 - 00:38:22:29
Okay I love Andy Mac OS software.

00:38:23:07 - 00:38:27:13
And so it's just fun to to build that.

00:38:27:13 - 00:38:29:19
And the other part of your question, I totally forgot.

00:38:30:18 - 00:38:33:03
The other part was and

00:38:34:10 - 00:38:36:22
was what is the future of web development?

00:38:36:22 - 00:38:39:08
What is the future of of the Web?

00:38:41:03 - 00:38:43:01
You know, I think that

00:38:43:01 - 00:38:45:06
the future is pendulum swings.

00:38:45:14 - 00:38:52:06
And so the Web goes between going more open and more closed, more balkanized,

00:38:52:08 - 00:38:55:10
where I think kind of that the pendulum is swinging.

00:38:55:10 - 00:39:00:15
We're at the nadir of probably the closed system,

00:39:00:15 - 00:39:04:22
like the way that mobile operating systems work

00:39:05:00 - 00:39:09:16
and the dominance of the closed social networks.

00:39:09:16 - 00:39:11:09
You know, these things that says their rise

00:39:11:09 - 00:39:13:29
contains the seeds of their own demise.

00:39:13:29 - 00:39:16:28
So what's made them most popular also creates an equal

00:39:16:28 - 00:39:19:00
and opposite force and reaction.

00:39:19:00 - 00:39:24:19
So I believe that, you know, sometime over the next 15 to 20 years,

00:39:24:27 - 00:39:29:14
we're going to have a big, big push into open, decentralized, federated systems.

00:39:30:01 - 00:39:33:18
And now at Automattic, do whatever I can to help drive that.

00:39:35:01 - 00:39:37:19
Now, much like in The Matrix, like,

00:39:37:20 - 00:39:40:21
you know, the one has that has happened five or six times before.

00:39:41:00 - 00:39:43:22
Like that will again contain the seeds of its own demise.

00:39:43:29 - 00:39:48:19
You know, open a federated systems tend to have like usability problems

00:39:48:19 - 00:39:49:19
or maybe it'll be slower.

00:39:49:19 - 00:39:52:20
There'll be some new platform that comes along, perhaps VR driven

00:39:52:20 - 00:39:58:11
or something that, you know, for speed or some sort of proprietary sake,

00:39:58:20 - 00:40:02:28
a company creates it in a a closed way and that'll get really, really popular.

00:40:03:05 - 00:40:06:26
And then all the copycats of that will be closed and it will swing the other way.

00:40:07:07 - 00:40:11:18
So at this will probably happen, hopefully if I live a long time, a few more times,

00:40:11:18 - 00:40:17:25
but I always want to be a champion for that, for the open side of it.

00:40:17:25 - 00:40:21:26
And now we turn to Q&A. But

00:40:26:11 - 00:40:29:19
the point you're making about open source is so important,

00:40:29:19 - 00:40:32:25
the way the way to scale is not to own at all.

00:40:33:16 - 00:40:35:12
It's to have people contribute.

00:40:35:12 - 00:40:37:21
And thank you.

00:40:37:21 - 00:40:40:01
So I'll go back on mute, but I'm enjoying listening.

00:40:40:01 - 00:40:43:05
Thank you. So.

00:40:44:07 - 00:40:47:03
Briefly a question that you hear a lot, but having so many years

00:40:47:03 - 00:40:50:13
of experience in the open source and especially CMOs area like yourself,

00:40:51:05 - 00:40:54:27
how do you expect to landscape actually changing, taking into consideration

00:40:54:27 - 00:40:59:00
the split across all those traditional and have less emphasis in combination

00:40:59:00 - 00:41:00:05
with chapstick?

00:41:00:05 - 00:41:02:23
And secondly, how do you expect devices or better?

00:41:02:23 - 00:41:06:22
The presentation itself changed for like next like 3 to 5 years.

00:41:07:15 - 00:41:09:07
Yeah, it's funny.

00:41:09:07 - 00:41:11:17
You know, part of being older is I don't I don't post

00:41:11:17 - 00:41:13:01
all the things I write anymore.

00:41:13:01 - 00:41:17:01
And actually yesterday morning I wrote like 3000 words against Chapstick.

00:41:18:05 - 00:41:19:14
It was it was pretty bad.

00:41:19:14 - 00:41:21:23
I think I compared it to a

00:41:21:23 - 00:41:26:09
like when a Western commercial food enters countries

00:41:26:09 - 00:41:28:25
and then like the American Samoa or Philippines or something.

00:41:28:25 - 00:41:32:16
And it's like so terrible for the health that needs it and

00:41:33:24 - 00:41:34:16
a jam snack.

00:41:34:16 - 00:41:38:19
First, it's kind of an Astroturf thing, like it's mostly driven by net fly.

00:41:39:02 - 00:41:42:28
And if you really dig into it, there's not a true community behind it.

00:41:42:28 - 00:41:44:27
A lot of it's kind of Astroturf is the term for where

00:41:44:27 - 00:41:47:26
like you pretend to make a community and something

00:41:49:15 - 00:41:51:22
decoupled architecture I think is super interesting

00:41:51:22 - 00:41:56:21
for a certain class of applications, but they're it's being overused for,

00:41:56:21 - 00:41:59:13
I think, more content management types of things.

00:41:59:27 - 00:42:01:27
And so you up needing something like a,

00:42:02:29 - 00:42:04:09
an extraneous or like

00:42:04:09 - 00:42:07:29
you end up building like caching layers and pre rendering layers and other things.

00:42:08:06 - 00:42:12:15
And you have with a very complicated ID system where you know to have

00:42:12:24 - 00:42:16:20
what could be I actually like static websites as a compared to to more

00:42:16:20 - 00:42:20:15
like react front ends or react being used for things where it's not needed.

00:42:20:15 - 00:42:23:15
If it's something where

00:42:23:15 - 00:42:25:10
I guess a good rule of thumb is if a WordPress

00:42:25:10 - 00:42:27:25
theme could do it, you probably should have a WordPress thing.

00:42:29:13 - 00:42:33:07
If there's some of rich interaction there that you need to, you know,

00:42:33:09 - 00:42:37:13
write something more like an application and we do for Gutenberg clip.

00:42:37:13 - 00:42:41:19
So we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of lines of

00:42:41:27 - 00:42:44:12
or more millions of lines of react

00:42:44:25 - 00:42:48:01
type stuff written talking to API as I do that.

00:42:48:01 - 00:42:51:04
But I feel like we overplay it sometimes and the more,

00:42:52:00 - 00:42:55:12
the more kind of words that no one else knows what it means or acronyms

00:42:55:12 - 00:42:57:26
you have in your technology layer. The more fragile it is,

00:42:58:27 - 00:43:01:12
the more people that you need to put a credit card

00:43:01:12 - 00:43:04:11
on file for your website to run, the more fragile it is.

00:43:05:18 - 00:43:07:22
So if you can flatten that

00:43:07:22 - 00:43:11:00
and simplify that as much as possible,

00:43:11:00 - 00:43:14:05
the more robust and antifragile your system will be.

00:43:14:20 - 00:43:17:25
And it's actually amazing

00:43:18:09 - 00:43:23:06
as you get to really, really large Internet scale, you know,

00:43:23:15 - 00:43:25:16
even things like we run a service called Gravity

00:43:25:20 - 00:43:28:14
that's built into Slack and GitHub and everything else.

00:43:28:14 - 00:43:29:25
It just shows a little avatar.

00:43:29:25 - 00:43:34:09
It's actually the email address that at this point serves, you know,

00:43:34:14 - 00:43:37:10
tens of billions, sometimes probably hundreds of billions of requests per day.

00:43:37:23 - 00:43:41:01
And the larger scale something gets, the more the smaller it gets.

00:43:41:01 - 00:43:42:06
Actually.

00:43:42:06 - 00:43:45:11
It's not like at at Google, there's something running like

00:43:45:22 - 00:43:46:22
50 different things.

00:43:46:22 - 00:43:50:10
Like actually the closer you get to like search, they flatten out quite a bit.

00:43:50:22 - 00:43:52:15
So if you can keep things simple in the beginning,

00:43:52:15 - 00:43:54:08
it just makes things a lot easier.

00:43:54:08 - 00:43:58:13
Now what I need is a cool acronym or word for it, kind of like jam stack,

00:43:59:10 - 00:44:02:12
because what they've done so brilliantly is brand

00:44:02:13 - 00:44:05:08
this much more complex and fragile system is modern,

00:44:05:20 - 00:44:08:29
and so that makes you feel like it's a good blog post.

00:44:08:29 - 00:44:12:13
Other day we're like arguing for the simple thing feels like

00:44:12:13 - 00:44:14:22
you're riding around in a

00:44:15:16 - 00:44:19:16
and like an old Volkswagen van blasting Faith Hill or something like

00:44:19:23 - 00:44:23:04
it feels like you're you're completely out of touch with modern web development.

00:44:23:04 - 00:44:26:20
And you almost need to, as I just did, try to prove your bona fides

00:44:27:03 - 00:44:32:01
like, oh, I actually know how to do this other, more complex thing.

00:44:32:01 - 00:44:34:23
So if any of you all have a good idea for what

00:44:34:23 - 00:44:37:07
we could brand that simpler stack, let me know.

00:44:37:07 - 00:44:38:22
And I thank you, Matt.

00:44:38:22 - 00:44:42:12
And we've got we've got another great jam stack right here on home soil

00:44:42:15 - 00:44:43:23
email your off to this.

00:44:43:23 - 00:44:45:22
I know, I know. I actually saw the.

00:44:45:22 - 00:44:47:03
Okay great.

00:44:47:03 - 00:44:47:21
So sorry.

00:44:47:21 - 00:44:48:22
We'll come after you afterwards.

00:44:48:22 - 00:44:50:24
But I said thank you for your thoughts.

00:44:50:24 - 00:44:56:11
And I'm going to go to Matthew Hodson now, who is the co-founder

00:44:56:11 - 00:44:59:29
and CEO of Matrix and and director.

00:45:00:20 - 00:45:01:00
Thanks.

00:45:02:09 - 00:45:02:26
So I had

00:45:02:26 - 00:45:05:19
a philosophical instrument I could see.

00:45:06:11 - 00:45:08:29
Thanks for the amazing interview and both you and

00:45:10:02 - 00:45:12:06
I just had a philosophical question of the technical

00:45:12:06 - 00:45:15:23
one in terms of the pendulum of centralization versus

00:45:15:23 - 00:45:19:12
decentralization, openness versus closed that you were referring to

00:45:19:17 - 00:45:22:20
and as one that we talk about a lot and trying to pitch metrics to people.

00:45:23:00 - 00:45:26:16
And we find that often there's a problem that if we say, look,

00:45:26:16 - 00:45:30:09
we're the kind of nadir of centralization, it's clearly going to swing back

00:45:30:09 - 00:45:32:23
to be open and open scopes. Right.

00:45:33:08 - 00:45:38:10
A lot of people just glaze over and think, you know, it's a mostly take

00:45:38:10 - 00:45:42:06
it as granted the openness good facility, it's good to post, but how good it is.

00:45:42:14 - 00:45:44:12
But you almost find it quite hard.

00:45:44:12 - 00:45:47:11
So we find it quite hard to sort of pick a single thing

00:45:47:11 - 00:45:50:13
that is the kind of take home as to why this actually is a good thing.

00:45:50:19 - 00:45:52:27
So at the risk of putting you completely on the spot,

00:45:53:07 - 00:45:56:24
what would be your sort of single punchy

00:45:57:03 - 00:46:01:05
one liner to to persuade your typical,

00:46:01:09 - 00:46:05:27
I know VC or somebody that's actually democratization

00:46:05:27 - 00:46:10:21
and openness is actually a good thing for humanity rather than a kind of placebo

00:46:10:21 - 00:46:14:22
buzz word that makes people glaze over.

00:46:14:22 - 00:46:19:04
I do try to tailor it to the person, but there's a ton of analogies you can use.

00:46:19:08 - 00:46:23:14
So sometimes I say it's like if you open the trunk of your or the hood of your car

00:46:24:01 - 00:46:27:09
and the motor was just a black box, you know,

00:46:27:09 - 00:46:29:21
and you could only get it repaired by certain people.

00:46:31:04 - 00:46:31:21
I talk a

00:46:31:21 - 00:46:34:23
lot more about freedom than openness.

00:46:34:23 - 00:46:39:24
I feel like that's a fundamental human desire that exists across every culture.

00:46:39:24 - 00:46:41:24
Everything is we want agency.

00:46:41:25 - 00:46:43:17
We want to be free.

00:46:43:17 - 00:46:47:16
And so democratization is powerful.

00:46:47:16 - 00:46:52:17
In that context, democratization and of itself is a model word.

00:46:52:17 - 00:46:54:21
And, you know, you don't want

00:46:54:21 - 00:46:56:29
you don't want the first thing people to think about is TRUMP

00:46:56:29 - 00:47:00:03
You're talking about democratization or something like that. So

00:47:01:15 - 00:47:03:23
I also try to look for examples in their life,

00:47:03:23 - 00:47:06:03
like if they have an iPhone, I'll say like, hey,

00:47:06:18 - 00:47:09:00
you know, is an Apple calendar terrible non-Jewish?

00:47:09:00 - 00:47:12:09
When you clicked on a calendar, it could launch something else

00:47:12:09 - 00:47:15:20
or, you know, just look for examples in their life of where

00:47:16:01 - 00:47:18:10
to be honest, arbitrary, ego driven

00:47:18:23 - 00:47:21:21
decisions that are self-interested for certain commercial entities

00:47:22:02 - 00:47:25:15
make people's lives using this technology immeasurably worse.

00:47:26:03 - 00:47:29:12
And simple things like even opening up defaults on on iOS,

00:47:29:25 - 00:47:32:25
which I'm amazed they've gotten away without doing this long

00:47:33:16 - 00:47:36:04
and would make all of our lives

00:47:36:10 - 00:47:39:22
that much better day to day and Apple would still be fine.

00:47:39:24 - 00:47:41:27
You know, it's not like they're going to do any worse.

00:47:42:06 - 00:47:44:25
It's just purely like, I think some sort of egoism

00:47:45:09 - 00:47:48:05
or they still think of themselves as the underdog and have the scarce

00:47:48:15 - 00:47:51:23
scarcity mentality from maybe the nineties or something

00:47:52:05 - 00:47:55:04
that that prevents them from becoming more open.

00:47:55:15 - 00:47:58:23
So there's also just, you know, when I talk to folks like a

00:47:58:23 - 00:47:59:24
Tim Cook or something,

00:47:59:24 - 00:48:02:19
like I just try to challenge them and say, what's the worst that could happen?

00:48:03:06 - 00:48:04:22
And I've got 200 billion in the bank.

00:48:04:22 - 00:48:08:09
If you open up this one thing and your worst fear was realize

00:48:08:10 - 00:48:10:26
like Google somehow used the default calendar

00:48:10:26 - 00:48:13:03
as a way to like get an end or something like that.

00:48:13:03 - 00:48:17:03
Like then what, you know, then do you improve your calendar software

00:48:17:16 - 00:48:21:15
by what's, what's the worst thing that happens there?

00:48:21:15 - 00:48:23:28
Do you just put a little pop up that says, hey, switch

00:48:23:28 - 00:48:26:20
to this other thing, which by the way, you could do anyway, like they have.

00:48:26:27 - 00:48:30:15
The downsides are pretty low and that's also I always say that

00:48:30:15 - 00:48:31:12
with WordPress as well.

00:48:31:12 - 00:48:33:23
Commonly this is would be like, well if someone just takes your software

00:48:34:02 - 00:48:35:03
and makes it competitive.

00:48:35:03 - 00:48:39:00
WordPress.com And the truth is people have done that many times and actually

00:48:39:00 - 00:48:43:06
early on there was one that was growing faster than us and,

00:48:43:13 - 00:48:45:09
and it kind of pissed me off at first.

00:48:45:09 - 00:48:48:00
Then I woke up, I was like, Well, whose fault is this?

00:48:48:00 - 00:48:49:22
Is this their fault or mine?

00:48:49:22 - 00:48:53:05
Like, if they've taken the software that I wrote and done a better job

00:48:53:10 - 00:48:56:26
connecting with users, that's my fault and I've done something wrong.

00:48:57:04 - 00:48:58:02
And so I really start.

00:48:58:02 - 00:49:00:26
That's when I started to learn about marketing and say like, Huh,

00:49:01:03 - 00:49:02:01
what have they done?

00:49:02:01 - 00:49:04:28
They, they essentially they packaged it better and presented it better.

00:49:05:08 - 00:49:07:14
And I was like, okay, well, I've got to get better at that

00:49:07:14 - 00:49:10:06
because if they can take my own software and do better with it,

00:49:10:12 - 00:49:12:18
I'm just going to end up working for this other guy down the line.

00:49:12:28 - 00:49:17:13
And so this is going to be really key to kind of for my agency and freedom.

00:49:17:19 - 00:49:22:02
I need to figure out this part of the distribution cycle.

00:49:22:02 - 00:49:25:16
I think I think this conversation could go on for hours, which I'm

00:49:25:16 - 00:49:28:21
sure it has done in the past and will maybe in the future.

00:49:29:08 - 00:49:31:03
I mean, but I think we're running out of time.

00:49:31:03 - 00:49:32:14
But I just wanted to

00:49:33:18 - 00:49:34:09
close it off by

00:49:34:09 - 00:49:38:03
saying maps hugely appreciate you joining us.

00:49:38:03 - 00:49:42:24
And I also just wanted to give a shout out to my colleague Clara, who

00:49:43:19 - 00:49:44:22
I guess you want to tie.

00:49:44:22 - 00:49:47:15
It could have been an equivalent to a fishing holiday

00:49:47:26 - 00:49:50:20
in the Indian Ocean where you guys where you guys met.

00:49:50:20 - 00:49:52:08
So huge, huge.

00:49:52:08 - 00:49:54:28
Thank you for putting this together.

00:49:55:06 - 00:49:58:20
And I got a gas subsidy and it's been it's been awesome.

00:49:58:20 - 00:49:59:26
So thank you.

00:50:00:01 - 00:50:01:18
I say one quick thing closing.

00:50:01:18 - 00:50:03:20
Yes, I'm a little bit of a sell it

00:50:04:27 - 00:50:07:29
and I try to be pragmatic as well.

00:50:08:05 - 00:50:12:03
So while I held this very strong philosophical views and I apologize

00:50:12:03 - 00:50:14:19
to the person here who's maybe in the James Dark

00:50:15:08 - 00:50:17:02
comedy or something,

00:50:17:19 - 00:50:20:01
I'm also very open to the opposite being true

00:50:20:01 - 00:50:23:16
and I do think that it's worthwhile trying almost anything.

00:50:24:10 - 00:50:27:15
But I encourage people to really, whenever you're here,

00:50:27:15 - 00:50:31:15
whether it's for myself or others, like, really challenge it and dove deep into it

00:50:31:24 - 00:50:35:20
and sort of do a lot of introspection from first principles where you can

00:50:35:27 - 00:50:38:22
and say, okay, what would need to be true if this were true?

00:50:38:22 - 00:50:41:01
What happens in ten years? What happens in 50 years?

00:50:41:18 - 00:50:45:16
What is the second and third order effects of something being true

00:50:45:18 - 00:50:48:16
or being false and really trying to challenge that?

00:50:48:16 - 00:50:51:25
And I think that's the way you can create products that can last decades.

00:50:53:21 - 00:50:54:16
Thank you.

00:50:54:24 - 00:50:55:22
Thanks, Matt. Great.

00:50:55:22 - 00:50:56:13
Really appreciate it.

00:50:56:13 - 00:50:59:21
And and thank you to everyone for doing it.