Matt Mullenweg: Recent Episodes
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I’ve been testing the developer previews of all the new Apple 26 operating systems, which I don’t recommend this early in the cycle, but I like to live dangerously. I’ve quickly become accustomed to Liquid Glass. The iPad windowing enhancements do make it feel more like a real computer, but I usually run things in full-screen mode. My favorite thing to play with so far has been the new Spotlight (what pops up when you press Command + Space) and related shortcuts.
I loved Alfred, I tried Raycast, but a general life goal this year is to simplify wherever I can, so I’ve been exploring the enhancements in the new Spotlight.
What I’ve found the most useful in the past is Alfred’s Open URL Action, which basically lets you type something like “gm united reservation” and it translates that into opening a Gmail search in your browser, with “united reservation” put in the URL in the right place to run a search.
The Shortcuts app in MacOS and iOS is amazing, which I’ve always known, but I haven’t played with it much. This was my chance! After a bit of tinkering, I got it to pop up an input form and then run the search. I Googled a lot to see if it could take input from the Spotlight search bar and every place said no, I’m not sure if this is new in MacOS 26 or not but I found the button that makes it work. It’s not as smooth as Alfred, but it’s pretty decent. I’m going to share a screenshot that shows my Gmail search shortcut that takes input from Spotlight — the key breakthrough was clicking the (i) menu on the right and finding the checkbox for “Receive Input from Search.”
I gave it a “gm” hotkey, pressed enter, and you get this in Spotlight.
Tada! Not as nice as Alfred but it gets the job done. My other shortcuts that people might find useful are LI for LinkedIn search, PY is Perplexity, YT for searching the history of YouTube videos I’ve watched, and AM for searching my Amazon order history. (Because I’m usually trying to find a link for something I’m recommending, or re-order an item.) Here are the search URLs for everything I’ve mentioned:
- https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/ (If you have multiple Google accounts, change the number in the URL to go to the one you want, and then login in that same order every time.)
- https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/index/?keywords=
- https://www.perplexity.ai/search/
- https://www.youtube.com/feed/history?query=
- https://www.amazon.com/your-orders/search/?search=
If you dug this, did you know WordPress also has a cool popup shortcut feature? In 2023, we introduced the Command Palette in the Gutenberg block editor and site editor. To access it on Mac, you press Command + k. I’d like to bring it to every admin page so it can function more like Spotlight or Raycast for WordPress.
Happy to announce that the amazing Clay.earth product and team is joining Automattic. If you haven’t tried the app out yet, here’s a quick video to give you a taste.
TechCrunch has covered the broader strategy pretty well: One of the top requests we’ve heard from Beeper beta testers is they want to tie in more context, like a personal CRM, and some even requested Clay by name. We’ll keep the apps separate, as Clay also has some interesting team uses, but they will complement and integrate with each other as part of our all-in-one messaging strategy.
We share a vision to integrate Clay’s technology, which manages over 140 million relationships, as a layer across many of our products and experiences at Automattic. I’m excited to work with the founders, Matt and Zach, to bring this vision to life. I’ve always felt the missing primitive in WordPress’ content management data architecture was a scalable concept of a Person and Relationships outside of our user table.
Here’s the beautiful announcement on the Clay site and on Automattic’s.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mimetic formation, how a thought becomes an idea, and how that idea gestates and evolves as it’s progressively shared in wider and wider circles.
During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.
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Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.
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Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write.
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Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.
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Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.
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Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss.
This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.
P.S. Happy 22nd birthday to WordPress! Very excited about the new AI team on .org.
It’s a busy speaking season! I just spoke at the Intelligent Change summit, and will be at SaaStock in Austin on May 14, SXSW London, on June 4, Brilliant Minds in Stockholm, and WordCamp EU in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7.
It looks like the code that the newly announced Figma Sites is producing isn’t the best.
There are some cool Figma-to-WordPress workflows; I hope Sites gets more people exploring those options.
Gravatar has always been about giving people control over their identity online. One avatar, one profile, synced across the web, verified connections, with a fully open API.
Gravatar is a true open identity layer for the internet, and now for AI.
For developers, we’ve rolled out mobile SDKs and a revamped REST API that lets you fetch avatars and profile data with just an email hash. Whether you’re building a blog, a community, or an AI agent that needs to understand who it’s talking to, Gravatar provides the infrastructure to make identity seamless and user-centric.
It’s free, open, and built with developers in mind. We believe identity should belong to the individual, not be locked behind proprietary platforms. Gravatar is our contribution to that vision.
If you haven’t checked it out lately, now’s a great time to explore what Gravatar can do for your app or your online presence. And think about how your apps can drive more Gravatar signups.
I’ve checked off a bucket list item: I’m attending a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. It’s really an event! Thousands flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for the legendary Q&A sessions with Warren Buffett and shareholder deals. They’ve made it quite the circus, with every Berkshire Hathaway company having a booth of some sort, and typically selling their goods at a discount or with exclusive items you can only buy there, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Squishmallows (which of course I got, to complement my bronze busts).
It’s strange to have a Dairy Queen booth selling $1 ice cream (cash only!) next to NetJets, but those juxtapositions are part of the Berkshire vibe—it’s very high/low, like Costco (a big Berkshire holding). There’s also an element of WordCamps or a Salesforce Trailblazer event in that you can tell there’s a “type” of person that’s easy to spot who’s a Berkshire enthusiast. A lot of Berkshire brands are also WordPress users: Duracell, GEICO, Acme Brick, Berxi, MiTek. I think there is a lot of mimetic overlap between the values of open source and the values of building a Berkshire company.
As with any big gathering, the side events are also great, and I was honored to have a fireside chat with a friend and Buffett protégé, Tracy Britt Cool. To an audience of about 60+ CEOs in the Kanbrick community, we talked about Automattic’s history and some of the latest happenings in tech; AI was definitely on people’s minds in the Q&A. They had questions for me, but I also feel like I have a ton to learn from this group that has built founder or family-owned businesses with an average of 80-100M of revenue, the kind of thing that is the engine of the American economy.
It makes me pine for the day when we can have more shareholders in Automattic; I think it would be an amazing cohort of folks that believe in open source and the open web, invested together and learning from each other, and I could imagine an event very much like these shareholder meetings. It’s so much more powerful when you build a business where your customers are also a community.
Update: I knew this would be a special one because it was Warren’s 60th, but he really went above and beyond by announcing his intention for Greg Abel to take over as CEO at the end of the year. The standing ovation was a special moment, 60 years of 19.9% compounding returns! I think the future of Berkshire is very bright because he’s shared so much of his worldview that there are others that have made it their own.
I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from.
The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.
My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.
But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.
The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.
So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.
I’ve been blogging now for approximately 8,465 days since my first post on Movable Type. My colleague Dan Luu helped me compile some of the “greatest hits” from the archives of ma.tt, perhaps some posts will stir some memories for you as well:
Where Did WordCamps Come From? (2023)
A look back at how Foo Camp and Bar Camp inspired WordCamps.
Getting Real Feedback as a CEO (2018)
How do you make sure you get good information when you’re CEO? Something we’ve been trying that’s been working is having an anonymous internal forum. Like Blind, but internal to the company, and really anonymous, without anything linking a user ID to a comment.
Wix and the GPL (2016)
That time Wix built their closed-source mobile app on GPL code.
What I Miss and Don’t Miss About San Francisco (2015)
Self explanatory
Advice About Advice (2015)
Why you need to think things through from first principles and not just blindly follow advice.
Why the Web Still Matters (2014)
A guest post by Ben Thompson of Stratechery on why “the web is dead” comments were wrong in 2014. Still true today!
The Four Freedoms (2014)
A discussion of Stallman’s four open source freedoms. Our open source Bill of Rights, if you will.
The Intrinsic Value of Blogging (2014)
On ignoring vanity metrics and blogging for intrinsic reasons
What’s in My Bag 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2025
What I’ve been carrying in my travel bag
Why Your Company Should Have a Creed (2011)
I’m really jazzed that dozens of companies have adopted this or similar ideas since then.
1.0 is the Loneliest Number (2010)
On the importance of releasing quickly and getting feedback.
The Twitter API (2010)
A discussion on the Twitter API missing the boat on, as Jack Dorsey put it, becoming a protocol.
I Miss School (2010)
Just like they say, youth is wasted on the young, I think I squandered school when I was in it.
What Startup Idea Would I suggest? Start a Bank (2009)
There’s been a lot of action in the payments space since 2009. For new companies, we have Square (2009), Stripe (2010), and Wealthsimple (2014), among others. Ally Bank (rebranded from GMAC in 2010) has also been trying to provide a modern customer-focused experience.
Six Steps to Kill Your Community (2009)
Platform and product anti-patterns.
In Defense of the GPL for Open Source Projects (2009)
This was a response to a popular post about how GPL open source projects would lose out to projects under licenses like MIT, BSD, and Apache. I didn’t agree then and I don’t agree now.
The Way I Work (2009)
Self explanatory
Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage (2008)
On the importance of performance, reliability, and security. This was a core priority for us and it shows. We dominate the competition on third-party performance comparisons at the platform level and on the default user experience, and our security is top-notch.
The Price of Freedom and Open Source Licenses (2007)A response to a user who wanted the ability to remove GPL freedoms from WordPress.
The PHP5 Transition (2007)
How PHP5 forced us to divert time and attention away from users to deal with migration costs.
Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg (2007)
At Startup School, Kapor advocated for having team diversity while Zuckerberg advocated for a “young and technical” because the best work comes from young people. Now that Facebook (Meta) has grown up, Zuckerberg is doing what Kapor said companies should do and not what Zuckerberg said companies should do! Zuckerberg’s trusted people aren’t young anymore and aren’t being replaced by the young.
Sun Isn’t Relevant to Startups (2007), and Followup (2007)
A discussion of Sun’s Startup Essentials program and Jonathan Schwartz’s (then CEO of Sun) reply.
The RSS Feed Validator is Dead to Me (2006)
The RSS 2.0 feed validator is old news today but the experience here is a good example of why people didn’t take any of these validators seriously and they’re all old news
There’s No Correlation Between Hours Worked and Work Done (2006)
Self explanatory
Should We Have Hidden Options? (2005)
A discussion of the hidden cost of hidden options.
We probably missed some, if there’s a post you think should be included leave it in the comments.
WordPress 6.8 Cecil is out, and it’s a great release. It’s unbelievable that it’s already been downloaded over 6 million times as I write this. That feeling never gets old.
It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions:
- Can we iterate faster with canonical plugins?
- What’s the fun thing we can put in to celebrate 7.0, and when will that be? (I was rooting for real-time co-editing like Notion/Canva/Google Docs.)
- How can we use AI to automate our manual work around WordPress.org?
- Can AI help us make 60k+ open source plugins and themes in the directory more secure? (I think so.)
- What should we do with our 13k issue backlog? (That’s a lot of bug gardening.)
- How will AI change how people build and update sites?
- Just like RSS and web standards supercharged WordPress for the podcasting and search revolutions, what standards or APIs can we ship to help 40%+ of the web work with AI agents? (Plus an entire rabbit hole of all the new sloppy crawlers using so many resources.)
Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one point, I used Google to search for things and would visit their top result, which is great for website owners. Nowadays, Google pulls almost everything I need into the results page, so I don’t see as many random sites. But on Perplexity, sometimes I’ll read the answer and then visit 4-5 of the sources it cites to learn more, so I’m visiting 4-5x more random websites, usually powered by WordPress, than I would have even in the early days of Google. We don’t know how this all plays out yet.
These questions are also against the backdrop of some of the brightest minds in WordPress spending more time with legal code than computer code, which could last until 2027 or longer with appeals.
Speaking for myself, I was in my first deposition today. I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted. Hence, I’m posting about 6.8 after it’s had 6 million downloads. I’m more impressed than ever by what smart lawyers do, and the entire thing, though sometimes imperfect and frustrating, is a blessing to our democracy. However, I can’t wait to return to spending the plurality of my days with engineers and designers again. I’m sure many other folks in the WordPress community would agree.
The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site. This AI agent will make WordPress accessible to an entirely new generation and class of customers, and it will be a power tool for professionals to do things in minutes that used to take them hours.
I was interviewed by Inc magazine for almost two hours where we covered a lot of great topics for entrepreneurs but almost none of it made it into the weird hit piece they published, however since both the journalist and I had recording of the interview I’ve decided to adapt some parts of it into a series of blog posts, think of it as the Inc Article That Could Have Been. This bit talks about some of the meta-work that myself and the Bridge team at Automattic do.
At Automattic, the most important product I work on is the company itself. I’ve started referring to it as the “Automattic Operating System.” Not in the technical sense like Linux, but the meta layer the company runs on. The company isn’t WordPress.com or Beeper or Pocket Casts or any one thing. I’m responsible for the culture of the people who build those things, building the things that build those things. It’s our hiring, our HR processes, our expenses, the onboarding docs; it’s all of the details that make up the employee experience — all the stuff that shapes every employee’s day-to-day experience.
Take expense reports. If you’ve got to spend two hours taking pictures of receipts and something like that, that’s a waste of time. You’re not helping a customer there. We switched to a system where everyone just gets a credit card. It does all the reporting and accounting stuff automatically. You just swipe the card and it just automatically files an expense report. Sometimes there’s an exception and you have to work with the accounting rules, but it just works and automates the whole process most of the time.
Another commonly overlooked detail is the offer letter. We think so much about the design of our websites and our products. We have designers work on that and we put a lot of care and thought into it. But I realized we didn’t have the same attention to detail on our offer letter. When you think about it, getting an offer letter from a company and deciding to take it is a major life decision, something you only do a handful of times in your life. This is one of the things that determines your life path. Our offer letter was just made by attorneys and HR. No designer had looked at it right. We hadn’t really thought about it from a product experience point of view. And so it was just this, generic document with bad typography and not great design. But it’s important, so one of the things we did was redesign it. Now it has a nice letterhead, great typography, and it’s designed for the end user.
I realized that the salary and stuff was buried in paragraph two. It was just a small thing in the document! Well, what’s key when you’re deciding whether to take a job? Start date, salary, you know, that sort of thing, so we put the important parts at the very top.
And then there’s the legal language. All the legal stuff, which is different in every country. We have people in 90 countries, so there’s all the legal stuff that goes in there. And then it has this nudge inspired by the behavioral economics book, Predictably Irrational.
There’s the story about how, if you have an ethics statement above where you sign the test or something, people cheat less. So I thought, well, what’s our equivalent of that? We have the Automattic Creed. It’s an important part of our culture. So we put the creed in, it says
I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.
It’s not legally binding, but it’s written in the first person, you read it and you kind of identify with it and then you sign below that. We want people who work at the company who identify with our core values and our core values really are in the creed.
These sorts of things are key to our culture. And they’re universal. Again, we have people from over 90 countries. These are very different cultures, yes, and very different historical backgrounds and cultural makeups. But what’s universal? We have our philosophies that we apply every day regardless of where you were born or where you work.
It’s so funny that my random re-engagement with Radiohead re-emergence coincides with them doing a new entity that might mean something. I did a poll on Twitter and people preferred OK Computer to Kid A 78%!
Grok told me: “The band has recently registered a new limited liability partnership (LLP) named RHEUK25, which includes all five members—Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Philip Selway. This move is notable because Radiohead has historically created similar business entities before announcing new albums, tours, or reissues.”
With the world changing so quickly, it’s hard to find alpha, but the best way is by following the brightest thinkers. This CNBC interview with Ray Dalio and Marc Benioff is good, but it’s way better if you go to the livestream about 25 minutes in and see the full discussion without the editing. You hear what these great thinkers actually think, rather than what an editor thought you’d enjoy. A little bit of friction gets you a lot more information.
One thing you’ll see on every host that offers WordPress is claims about how secure they are, however they don’t put their money where their mouth is. When you dig deeper, if your site actually gets hacked they’ll hit you with remediation fees that can go from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
They may try to sell you a security plan that for example at Godaddy goes from $300 to $700 a year on top of your hosting. (Don’t be fooled by the low entry price, look at renewal.) It’s heartbreaking to hear stories of non-technical people forced into these high fees to fix something their host should have prevented in the first place.
When a host is powered by WP.cloud, it doesn’t need to do this because hacks are so incredibly rare. (That’s why it may appear more expensive, but the total cost of ownership or being a WP.cloud-powered host is much lower when you factor in human time.)
One problem we’ve had on WordPress.com is we do all these amazing things and don’t tell anyone about it, something we’re trying to change with our focus this year on developers and developer tooling. One great example is we’re so confident about our security, if your site gets hacked we’ll fix it for free! We’ve actually been doing this for the better part of a decade, just never mentioned it anywhere.
Pressable (which is WP.cloud-powered) does a better job talking about these things and has a nice landing page on malware cleaning and hack recovery that says essentially the same thing.
WordPress has done a ton over the years to move the hosting industry around upgrading PHP and MySQL, PHP extensions, free SSL, and in general using our clout to advocate for user rights and freedoms from even the largest hosting companies, and I’m proud to say there are a good number, for example the ones you see at WordCamps, that have not just embraced these values but actually been more commercially successful as they’ve done so. I hope security and auto-upgrades not just for core but for plugins and themes becomes the next standard. (Jetpack does this for free, some hosts charge $100/yr per site.)
One of my must-read newsletters for the past several years has been Lenny’s Newsletter, probably best known for its writing on growth and product management, which really means it covered everything you need to create a great company.
It expanded into a really well-done podcast; Lenny has always had a knack for finding the best guests and asking the best questions, so when he invited me on I was very excited.
He really wanted to address some of the things that people said I wasn’t being asked, so we do touch on the WP Engine / Silver Lake attacks, but we also covered a lot of my philosophy of why open source is important, philanthropy, and why you should build a movement, not just a product.
You can watch it on YouTube, or listen to it on your favorite podcast app like Pocket Casts.
Some others he has done that I really enjoyed are Nan Yu from Linear, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Katie Dill from Stripe, Mihika Kapoor from Figma, Drew Houston from Dropbox, and of course the famous Founder Mode one with Brian Chesky.
It’s been fantastic being in the Philippines for this year’s WordCamp Asia. We have attendees from 71 countries, over 1,800 tickets sold, and contributor day had over 700 people! It’s an interesting contrast to US and EU WordCamps as well in that the audience is definitely a lot younger, and there’s very little interest in “wpdrama” du jour, in fact I’ve had tons of amazing conversations of support and talking about the strength and growth of the community.
Some of the earliest international WordCamps I went to were in Manila and Davao, back in 2008. (I’m going to share some pictures at the start of my talk.) Between that and spending lots of time in Daly City when I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 I have developed a fondness for the cuisine, creativity, family orientation, and warmth of the culture here.
After this I’ll be taking a bit of time off for a trip to the big Hindu religious pilgrimage in India, the Maha Kumbh Mela, which is currently on a 144 cycle. It’s the largest human gathering in the world, with some days measured with tens of millions of people visiting. I’ll be returning to my Photomatt roots as well and bringing my big camera rig, right now a Nikon Z 7II, and two lenses: 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8.
In high school when 5% of your class doesn’t like you it’s like 3-5 people.
Running a company of 1,700+ when 5% doesn’t like you, that’s 85 people! That fills a room.
150k followers and 5% don’t like you now you have a small stadium of 7,500 people.
It’s still 5%.
“You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!” There’s a delightful article on an undergraduate discovering an optimization in a very basic computer science principle.
I’ve been really enjoying the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull of Pixar, it was recommended to me by my colleague Dave Martin a while back and I finally got around to it. There’s an interesting story in it where George Lucas had asked him to develop a film editing system that was digital.
While George wanted this new video-editing system in place, the film editors at Lucasfilm did not. They were perfectly happy with the system they had already mastered, which involved actually cutting film into snippets with razor blades and then pasting them back together. They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable. […] If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible.
This made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.
What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.
You may not have heard of Logan Bartlett, but he’s one of the most hilarious people on Twitter and does a really interesting podcast. (He had a cool episode with Marc Benioff recently.) We sat down for a discussion on managing through crisis, open source and AI, employee liquidity, future of WordPress, and more. You can watch on YouTube below or listen on Pocket Casts.
What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.
The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.
Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process.
Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.
It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.
However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!
On Thursday a prominent developer YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a long time now” (10:22), “I hate this shit, I hate when people are assholes and they get away with it because I’m doing it for the greater good, the fake nice guy shit. I’ll take an asshole over a fake nice guy any day, people whose whole aesthetic is being nice, I hated it.” (11:25), “Honestly I’d rather the license just be explicit about it than this weird reality of ‘If you get popular enough you can still use it but the guy who made WordPress is going to be an asshole to you.’ That seems much worse than most open source models.” (14:39)… it goes on.
Ouch!
However, one of my colleagues Batuhan is a follower of Theo’s and suggested I engage with him. It turns out we were both in San Francisco, and he was game for a livestreamed, no-conditions interview at his studio. I believe discussion is the best way to resolve conflict, that’s why my door is open to Lee Wittlinger, Heather Brunner, Brian Gardner, or any WP Engine or Silver Lake representative who wants to talk to resolve things.
Saturday afternoon I went to Theo’s studio, we had a vigorous two hour debate and discussion with some real-time chat polling that also changed my mind on a few things, and his, too. I left feeling like I had a new friend. ️And met some awesome cats. Check out the video.
Lee controls the board of WP Engine. The board is why WP Engine hasn’t done a trademark deal for their use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
You hide behind lawyers and corporate PR when you’re wrong, not when you’re right.
I’m replying on Twitter, I’m commenting on Reddit and Hacker News, I’m dropping into livestreams with ThePrimeagen and WPMinute. I’m talking to journalists whenever they reach out, and I’m happy to go on any large credible podcast or show to discuss these issues.
Lee could do the same. Why isn’t he?
Lee is a managing director of a $102B private equity firm, he is probably richer than me. (Though I doubt he gives back as much.)
“Because their lawyers are telling him not to.” Why do you think their lawyers are telling them not to?
Open invite: Lee, let’s debate this publicly. Propose a neutral venue and moderator.
Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud the way he runs his business.
I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier today after a colleague pinged me that he was talking about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation.
Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists live?
I’ve been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play.
In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along. Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over.
We offered WP Engine the option of how to pay their fair share: either pay a direct licensing fee, or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks. WP Engine has refused to do either, and has instead taken to casting aspersions on my attempt to make a fair deal with them.
WordPress is licensed under the GPL; respect for copyright and IP like trademarks is core to the GPL and our conception of what open source means. If WP Engine wants to find another open source project with a more permissive license and no trademarks, they are free to do so; if they want to benefit from the WordPress community, then they need to respect WordPress trademark and IP.
Further reading:
- Automattic’s cease and desist to WP Engine.
- WP Engine is not WordPress.
- WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org.
I knew going to war with Silver Lake, a $102B private equity firm, they would pull out every dirty trick to try to smear my name, do oppo research, imply I’m a mafia boss trying to extort them, etc.
I have kept my personal philanthropy private until now. I would like to offer up one piece of evidence for the public to consider, which is the IRS accounting of my 501c3 charitable donations.
This is something I’ve tried to keep quiet, because true philanthropy isn’t about recognition. As you can see, my personal liquidity goes up and down but I give back as much as I can when I can.
- 2011: $295,044.60
- 2012: $401,121.00
- 2013: $2,088,890.88
- 2014: $98,648.00
- 2015: $101,947.00
- 2016: $42,300.00
- 2017: $51,562.50
- 2018: $606,957.68
- 2019: $620,802.65
- 2020: $607,452.48
- 2021: $2,151,602.26
- 2022: $2,780,054.20
- 2023: $2,276,425.06
If Lee Wittlinger, who controls Silver Lake’s investments in the WordPress ecosystem, or Heather Brunner, the CEO of WP Engine, would like to publish their charitable contributions over the past 12 years, they are welcome to do so.
I wrote a bit more on Lee Wittlinger / Silver Lake and WP Engine over on WordPress.org: WP Engine is not WordPress.
Some people have been interpreting my comments around private equity and investors as saying they’re all bad and you should never accept investment or trust a company that does… I don’t agree with that at all. Investors are amazing, they’re the fuel of entrepreneurship and capitalism and responsible for most of what we enjoy today. I can look in the eye of another founder and wholeheartedly recommend Automattic’s investors—True Ventures, Addition, Tiger Global, Salesforce, GIC, ICONIQ, LVMH/Aglaé, Akkadian, Wellington, Sweetwater, BlackRock, Alta Park, Schonfield, Chris Sacca…—and say they’ve upheld open source values and allowed us to nourish the open source ecosystem and flourish as a business. (They’re not an investor, but there are new folks like OSS Capital which are totally open source aligned.)
So investors, even “private equity” ones can be okay, but just like with anything, there are good ones and bad ones, so it is worthwhile to look into their track record. After an investor joins a company, what happens next? Do they change away from an Open Source license? Does the community flourish or wither on the vine as a result of their actions? It can be complex because you can have, as we do in WordPress, some companies contributing and some companies just taking. Some investors, like ours, are minority investors, which means they don’t control the company. Some buy a majority share in companies and control them, and that’s where who ultimately owns things matters the most.
Can they change? Of course. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. I think everyone should be afforded that grace. But it can’t just be in words, it has to be in action.
I may make my keynote tomorrow a deep dive presentation into some specific examples of this going poorly, because I think it’s highly relevant to WordPress’ survival. Tune in! There will be a livestream here.
(This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed.)
Contributor day just wrapped up for Portland for WordCamp US. If you ever have a chance to visit a WordCamp, I recommend it. It’s an amazing group of people brought together by this crazy idea that by working together regardless of our differences or where we came from or what school we went to we can be united by a simple yet groundbreaking idea: that software can give you more Freedom. Freedom to hack, freedom to charge, freedom to break it, freedom to do things I disagree with, freedom to experiment, freedom to be yourself, freedom expressed across the entire range of the human condition.
Open Source, once ridiculed and attacked by the professional classes, has taken over as an intellectual and moral movement. Its followers are legion within every major tech company. Yet, even now, false prophets like Meta are trying to co-opt it. Llama, its “open source” AI model, is free to use—at least until “monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month.” Seriously.
Excuse me? Is that registered users? Visitors to WordPress-powered sites? (Which number in the billions.) That’s like if the US Government said you had freedom of speech until you made over 50 grand in the preceding calendar year, at which point your First Amendment rights were revoked. No! That’s not Open Source. That’s not freedom.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom. It’s a proprietary license, issued at Meta’s discretion and whim. If you use it, you’re effectively a vassal state of Meta.
When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.
Actual Open Source licenses are the law that guarantees freedom, the bulwark against authoritarianism. But what makes Open Source work isn’t the law, it’s the ethos. It’s the social mores. It’s what I’m now calling Ecosystem Thinking: the mindset that separates any old software with an open source license from the software that’s alive, that’s humming with activity and contributions from a thousand places.
Ecosystem Thinking has four parts:
- Learn
- Evolve
- Teach
- Nourish
Learn is about keeping ourselves in a beginner’s mind, the curiosity to always engage with new ideas and approaches.
Evolve is where we apply those learnings to our next iteration, our next version. We see how things work in the real world: it’s the natural selection of actual usage.
Teach is actually where we learn even more, because you don’t really know something until you teach it. We open source our knowledge by sharing what we’ve learned, so others can follow on the same path.
Nourish is the trickiest, and most important part: it’s where we water the garden. If you’ve done the previous three steps, you’ve been very successful; now your responsibility is to spread the fruits of your labors around the ecosystem so that everyone can succeed together. This is the philosophy behind Five For the Future, which you’re going to see us emphasize a lot more now.
That’s the ecosystem. But if it’s the yin, what’s the yang? This openness and generosity will attract parasitic entities that just want to feed off the host without giving anything back. There are companies that participate in the Learn/Evolve/Teach/Nourish loop like a FernGully rainforest, and there are those who treat Open Source simply as a resource to extract from its natural surroundings, like oil from the ground.
Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.
So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers? Newfold, especially since its acquisition of Yoast and Yith, gives back. (I’ve asked them to consolidate their Five for the Future pages to better represent the breadth of their contributions.) So does Awesome Motive, 10up, Godaddy, Hostinger, even Google. Think about that next time it comes up to renew your hosting or domain, weigh your dollars towards companies that give back more, because you’ll get back more, too. Freedom isn’t free.
Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that lasts for generations.
I may screw up along the way, or my health may falter, but these principles and beliefs will stand strong, because they represent the core tenet of our community: the idea that what we create together is bigger than any one person.
(Hat tip to Automattician Jordan Hillier for the great ecosystem image.)
It’s a tough pick, but I think Inside Out 2 might be my favorite Pixar movie. Just everything about it was just so well done. How they incorporated the different aesthetics, neuralinguistic concepts, everything. Chef’s kiss.
I had a huge nostalgia blast today with this video from Lazy Game Reviews showing and setting up a Timex Datalink watch, which was a “smart” watch that would show data that you transmitted to it by holding it in front of your CRT monitor and it flashing a bunch of lines.
It’s hard to describe how much my Ironman Triathlon Datalink watch was my entire world when I was a little kid, I was totally obsessed with it. I filled up every bit of its memory with numbers and notes. And the Indiglo!
I love a good birthday blog post, and Stephen Wolfram has delivered the most epic for his 65th birthday. I’m so honored that WordPress is one of the tools in his toolkit.
This is my 9th Burning Man; I started coming in 2013. It’s incredible how much it has changed and evolved in that time. I love seeing all the technology and engineering advances every year. In my time it has gone from more fire and flashlights to LEDs with rainbow and color everywhere.
I drove in on Sunday, my first time driving in. Logistically, it’s been smooth so far regarding access to power and water, and of course, I set up a Starlink. It’s also been a Goldilocks year with the weather and wind.
I swear this will be my last Burn with Micro-USB, which I consider my personal nemesis. Ultimate Ears has finally upgraded their Booms to USB-C (thank you Hanneke!) but Micro USB came back to bite me unexpectedly this year.
Burning Man is heaven for photographers; the dust makes everything look dramatic. I wanted to return to my “PhotoMatt” roots and shoot this year, so I resurrected back my big camera, a Nikon D5, and I’ve gotten some incredible shots. Burning Man has a principle of Radical Self Reliance, which I tried to practice, but the XQD reader I brought isn’t working. The D5 has a USB port you can connect to, but it’s the one I consider the most cursed of all USB ports: Micro USB B Data.
No one likes that connector.
People often ask me what Burning Man is like, it’s hard to answer because it’s very much “choose your own adventure.” People can and do have radically different experiences. For me, this year has had highlights that included seeing the most amazing whirling dervish with live music, talking to people coding visualizations on art pieces, and doing dishes! This year I’m camping with Maxa and my work shifts are with the kitchen team. Maxa is legendary for the love and care they put into food, so it’s been amazing to see the effort that goes into making meals for 100+ people three times a day in extreme conditions. As you can imagine, this generates a lot of dishes and I’ve made it a personal goal to be the best dishwasher ever, scrubbing every nook and cranny while trying to conserve water.
If I can get a cable or card reader to download photos, I’ll post them on my Tumblr, so keep an eye out for updates.
There’s an apocryphal story about Ernest Shackleton putting an ad in the newspaper that read:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.
If you’ve read the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, you know how that went. Pretty legendary. One of my most treasured possessions is actually a copy of Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic book signed by every member of the shore party and Shackleton.
You may have heard the news that we’re going to migrate Tumblr onto WordPress. Automattic has put up a similar page calling for talented engineers of any gender who want to join the voyage.
When we had some calm seas while I was on the Drumfire, with my schedule unusually clear and Starlink humming, I found myself writing Python with Claude to export and analyze all of my Swarm check-in activity. I have 14,021 check-ins. So now on my about page it lists the ~70 countries I’ve been to and the top 200 cities I’ve spent time in. But it made me think a lot about what my favorite cities are, so here are my top ten current faves, in no particular order:
- Paris
- Tokyo
- Sydney
- Florence
- New York
- San Francisco
- Stockholm
- Singapore
- London
- Houston
Any of these I would be happy to live in. Honorable mentions but didn’t make the cut: Austin, Jackson, Seattle, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Montreal, Vienna, Reykjavik.
I would be remiss if I didn’t use this as an opportunity to highlight Paul Graham’s great essay on Cities and Ambition.
I’m always trying out new things. First, something fun: my friend Jesse gifted me a very cool Gameboy-like device called the Anbernic RG35XX, at ~$46. It has almost every game you remember, like if you got all the cartridges at Toys R Us or checked them out at Blockbuster. Having something without Wi-Fi, notifications, etc., is nice to relax. Very fun. I’m also keeping my eye on Palmer Luckey’s new ModRetro.
Second, I give to you the Sol E-reader, $399, basically glasses with a Kindle built-in, and a remote you hold in your hand for turning pages. The website is slick, even the packaging and design was nice, but the product is not. Do not buy this. It’s really not pleasant to use. The resolution was so low and the typography so bad it felt like reading on a TI-89 calculator.
Third, I’ve been really enjoying the DC-1 Daylight Computer, $729, which is like if a Kindle mixed with an iPad in the best possible way. This feels like an actually new platform, in that I find myself imagining new ways and places (like outdoors) I’d want to spend time with it. It runs Android, so you can have any app on it, even code on it. This video gives a good sense of the device and its founder Anjan Katta:
I could see Daylight being fantastic for kids as well; it just feels less “toxic” than the hyper-display world in which smartphones have us trapped. Audrey invested back in 2022 and it’s awesome to see how this turned out, it’s so rare that hardware makes it to this stage. I’ve shifted a lot of my nighttime consumption and play over to the Daylight; it’s so fun to play chess or read an article. It has surpassed the Kindle as my favorite reading device. And it looks good everywhere:
I used the Daylight a lot on the recent Sydney to Hamilton Island ~1,000 mile transport I did with the Drumfire crew and my friend Herman/John, which was part of my “learning to sail” goal for this year.
We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an instant. We also have new ethics and attitudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet’s connective tissue to leap over borders—whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order.
— Jeff Jarvis in the book What Would Google Do? Published 2009.
Interesting to revisit as they float trial balloons on breaking Google up (terrible idea) or other antitrust enforcement.
I’ve had many blessings in my life, but the very first was the family I was born into. Today, I’d like to tell you about my only sibling, favorite sister, and best beloved, Charleen Mullenweg.
With a gap of nine and a half years between us, we could have easily been distant from each other, but it was almost like I had a third parent, one who was just the coolest person I could imagine in the universe. My sister paved the way for me, giving my parents lots of experience and training, so they were pretty chill by the time I came along. As a very young kid, I didn’t always understand what was going on. For example, one time, I remember getting jealous of all the gifts she was getting… gifts given after a really intense surgery for severe scoliosis (twisted spine) that required her to wear a brace for many years. She was always gracious and understanding towards the little kid following her around everywhere and trying to be like her.
However, Charleen never wavered in being my biggest supporter, despite how annoying I must have been as an eager kid a decade her junior. All of my early aesthetic and musical tastes were derivative of her early discovery of cool bands like The Police, U2, Counting Crows, and Concrete Blonde. Despite being labeled with her initials, I’d “borrow” all her CDs and tapes. We’d make each other mixes and share books.
I’ve never doubted that no matter what I did, Charleen would always back me up, as she said “I’m behind you 1000%.” I missed her dearly when she moved to Austin in the 90s, far before everyone else figured out how cool Austin was, but that just meant countless road trips to visit and crash on her couch. The distance didn’t keep her from being there for every holiday and major event, including when I started to have jazz performances or host technology events in town. Whatever my interest was, she was there and supportive. As WordCamps started to become a thing, she was there. I always knew however much I messed up or people were mad at me (there were lots!) I could look out and see my sister’s face, there to comfort me.
Her influence on me didn’t stop with music and art. Charleen’s early research into genealogy, which included deep dives into libraries and making rubbings of gravestones, couldn’t be more perfect for my first foray into relational databases. We learned together how to set up the structures in MySQL and phpMyAdmin to represent all of the genealogical information in tables, which complemented the PHP I was learning to create Mullenweg.com, still up today. Before I built any other content management systems the first content I was managing was Charleen’s and my Uncle Colin’s research.
If you’re a sibling and want to be as awesome as Charleen, start with this: Unflappable, unwavering support and honesty. My entrepreneurial path was not straight up and to the right. It included many twists and turns, close calls, borrowing money, huge mistakes and failures, but I always knew Charleen was a phone call away, her sharp intellect able to slice through whatever I was struggling with, able to back and support me however I needed in that situation. You can jump further when you feel like you have a safety net, and my family has always been that for me. There have been times when it felt like the entire internet was calling for my head, nobody liked me, I couldn’t do anything right, but Charleen was always there.
They say there’s family you choose and family that you’re born with. Well, if there’s any sliver of truth to the idea from a movie like Pixar’s Soul that you have some choice in the matter of where you end up being born, I’m delighted that I chose to be born as a little brother to Charleen. Because we saw so many other examples of familial relationships torn asunder, we never wanted that to happen to us, so we’ve always maintained that ability to just let things go that don’t really matter as much as your lifelong bond.
Charleen, thank you for a lifetime of love and support, from my first breaths to our latest adventures. You inspire me to be a better human. I can’t imagine being as successful at anything I’ve done in life without you there behind me. I’ll do my best to follow your example of always being behind you 1000%. You’re the best sister I ever could have wished for. At this half-century mark, let us count our blessings and plan many more shenanigans.
As I wrote the other day, don’t constrain your mentors by their availability. Today, I’d like to highlight someone I consider a mentor, who I’ve never met, and now that he’s passed away, I never will, Jim Simons.
I’m mildly obsessed with the culture and results of Renaissance Technologies, Jane Street, Jump Trading, and Two Sigma because I’d like to create the tech and infrastructure version of that at Automattic. Jim Simons reminds me of my Dad, who also never quit smoking and was super-smart. Finally, I love finding obscure YouTube videos with few views but full of great stuff.
In December, 2010, Jim Simons gave a lecture at MIT called Mathmetics, Common Sense, and Good Luck: My Life and Careers. The entire thing, including the introductions, is worth watching, but I’ll call out
- Do something new. (This ties well with Kevin Kelly’s “Don’t be the best. Be the only”.)
- Collaborate with the best people you possibly can.
- Be guided by beauty.
- Don’t give up.
- Hope for some good luck.
I want to pull out point three, and transcribe directly what he said because it’s quite profound:
Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think, well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that? But it is. What’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Doing it right. Getting the right kind of people and approaching the problem and doing it right and if you feel like you feel like you’re the first one to do it right and I think we were, that’s a terrific feeling and it’s a beautiful thing to do something right. It’s also a beautiful thing to solve a math problem create some mathematics that people hadn’t thought of before, so “Be guided by beauty” is not such a bad principle.
If there’s something I’d add, it’s that there is an art to imitation, copying the masters to further your own work. In jazz, we’d transcribe solos from great musicians, note for note, and try to recreate them perfectly, not because that was what we were going to do when we got on stage, but because that understanding and foundation gave us the mastery to take that work and build on top of it. I think this is also true in open source, which often starts by recreating something that exists in the proprietary world but then goes far beyond.
While Renaissance has its Medallion Fund, Automattic has its A12 stock program, which only employees can access. Both programs share the same idea, and if we’re lucky, A12 will create a ton of wealth over time—I love that a third of RenTech’s employees are registered as having assets of over 5M.
He also lists these points as creating alignment for a great organization:
- Great people.
- Great infrastructure.
- Open environment.
- Try to get everyone compensated based on the overall performance.
That last point is the hardest. Dan Pink’s book Drive has a great overview of how it’s very difficult to align extrinsic incentive models. This post is a birthday gift to Tim.
A nice new WordPress 6.6 is out, our 50th release, on the same day people are getting hit with huge bills from Webflow. I really enjoy working in Open Source. There is no more customer-centric license. There’s some really fun stuff cooking, too, I can’t wait to show y’all.
50 releases… wow. No matter what happens in the world, we’re just going to keep cranking. Three times a year. Relentlessly. A little better each time. Don’t believe me, just watch.
In Torino / Turin this year I decided to give a slightly different talk than normal, building on my post I did for WordPress turning 21.
And here’s the Q&A, where I got challenged and accepted to do a speed build.
It was so cool to see WordPress highlighted (although with a lowercase P in in the closed captioning) on the Apple keynote today.
I recommend watching the entire keynote, but especially the Apple Intelligence section starting at 1:04 not because we’re mentioned but because it shows the future of computing, which is the future of society.
Apple is an exciting company because they push so much compute and capability to the edge with their devices, it gives people superpowers. The Grammerly-level editing and spell-check alone is amazing, on par with their math stuff. Some of these superpowers will be directed into blogging, and I can’t wait to to see what people do with all these new generative tools at their disposal. I really love the Promethean model where all of us have devices in our pocket or desktop that can turn us into superheroes.
I think it’s actually going to turn the hosting world upside down because complex transformations that would be difficult to run on the server-side will be trivial to run client-side with these millions and billions of processors being distributed through people’s smartphone upgrades. This innovation should exist at the operating-system layer (I include browsers and WASM in this) not be replicated in every application. WordPress Playground plays into this trend. (Interesting that Apple has now started to adopt the playground terminology.)
Gravatar, which has been humming along quietly serving hundreds of billions of avatars into every app you love like Slack, Github, ChatGPT, Atlassian, Coinbase… has a new API which allows people to bring in not just the avatar but more profile data. Check it out. Gravatar continues to be a useful Schelling point for the internet to allow to choose what they want to share and liberate their data from a single platform.
Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.
Convinced @tylercowen is one of the best talent spotters on the internet.
You see several remarkable people and Tyler is in there early helping them at a key point in their early life.
I’m filled with admiration and jealousy.
— Sriram Krishnan – sriramk.eth (@sriramk) June 8, 2024
I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)
- He has blogged consistently on Marginal Revolution since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that’s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!
- He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.
- He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, who was also there.
His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)
I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)
In my life I like to experience things high/low, to stay grounded. So while I’ve been taken on culinary adventures with the best chefs in the world like René Redzepi or Kyle Connaughton, sometimes I find myself on a United flight, as I am today, ordering the chicken.
When you move between two extremes it’s not the big things that bother you, for example I’m sure this chicken wasn’t raised on scraps from Michelin star restaurants, as I was once told in New York, but the little things, like “Why is this butter as hard as a rock?”
Butter, one of the most magical of ingredients, should spread. Yet it is served in so many places at a temperature that makes you feel more like you’re carving Play-doh. So I will now give you one of my favorite travel hacks: On United they nuke the main entree too hot to eat when it arrives, but this is now to your advantage because you can open the small butter tin and put it on the scorched entree and let thermodynamics turn it from rock-hard butter-ice to supple, delicious butter.
The process takes a minute or two, just enough time to eat your salad (be careful opening the pressurized balsamic dressing!) and allow the bread to cool a bit and be palatable.
On occasion I have left the butter in the heat too long, and it liquifies, but then I just use it as a pour or dip my bread into it, imagining myself at Peter Luger’s dipping my steak into the collected deliciousness at the bottom of the dish. If you’re serving at home, softening the butter and warming plates is an easy way to elevate your game.
It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’s work on b2/cafélog.
There’s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I’ve been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond. Here’s 11 opinions:
- Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
- Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.
- Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
- Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.
- Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn’t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!
- Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.
- We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Better to have good marketplace dynamics and engineer automated feedback loops and transparency to users. Boundaries in functionality and design should be pushed. (But spam and spammy behavior deserves zero tolerance.)
- Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.
- Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.
- Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.
- It’s important that we all do support, go to meetups and events, anything we can to stay close to regular end-users of what we make.
What would you add?
Today is my first day post-sabbatical, getting back in the swing of things with Automattic. W.org, all the things. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning process to be infinitely valuable, the sabbatical itself to be interesting experentially, and I’m curious to see what the post-sabbatical effects are. I have that nervous excitement like it’s the first day of school, which I haven’t felt in years. What should I wear? Who will sit with me at lunch?
I could now give a much better talk about the value of sabbaticals, having finally done one myself vs observing the hundreds that have taken place at Automattic. Like having a kid, it’s something you can understand intellectually but the direct experience is profound in ways that are hard to articulate.
There’s so much to catch up on and it’s kind of delightful to check in on progress of things after a few months rather than day-to-day like I normally do. If I had one bit of advice it would be to not get a big surgery (I had a sinus one) or plan for other major health things during a sabbatical, that should be on a different track if you can help it.
At the beginning I allowed myself two goals around sailing and chess. Sailing I decided to postpone to take advantage of a peak opportunity in July, but chess has been a fun incorporation into my daily habits and also incredibly humbling playing with folks who have been at it longer. The thing I didn’t plan for that became actually really important to me was getting back to the saxophone, not even trying to perform but the ritual and zen of long tones and practice is incredibly grounding in a way I didn’t know I was missing.
A few bullet point highlights:
- Rowed to Alcatraz.
- Got Covid the 4th time.
- Went to Super Bowl.
- Spent time at my alma mata University of Houston.
- Toured the modern cathedrals of datacenters.
- Did a ton of health scans, blood tests, doctor meetings.
- Got my DEXA body fat down to 17.9%.
- Skied Big Sky and Yellowstone Club.
- Went to friend’s 40ths and 50ths.
- Got a major sinus surgery.
- Hosted an epic eclipse party from a plane with 100+ flash talks.
- Studied Qigong and yoga.
- Spent time in Houston, San Francisco, Big Sky, Austin, Orlando, Tokyo, Taipei, Amsterdam, Paris, and Mallorca.
- Cleaned up a ton of personal projects.
- Read a ton.
- Swam in the ocean.
- Played saxophone at 40k feet.
- Equine therapy.
- A lot of progress on renovation projects in Houston and San Francisco.
- Hiked many places, walking in general more than normal.
- Tweaked my back. :/
- Couple of podcasts and interviews, a few meetings.
- Binged Three Body Problem.
- Did a lot of solo time and introspection.
Also, there was actually a lot of Automattic stuff happening most notably the acquisition of Beeper! I wasn’t able to unplug as much as I hoped, but I did definitely reverse my normal priorities. One thing I really missed was that I had very high hopes to see a lot of people, but a lot of stuff came up so outside of the events it was probably smaller social circle than I normally have.
It does make me think about apophatic theology or how Nassim Taleb talks about via negativa. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s nice to try the opposite for a while, just to see what happens.
You can’t sing. I can’t sing. But we both should sing, from the depths of our bellies because it’s good for your soul. We don’t sing enough in modern society! Hence, my love of karaoke.
Live band karaoke is the best, which I’ve done everywhere from the basement of Hill Country BBQ in New York to someplace random in Davao after a WordCamp, but when you don’t have a four piece band there are electronic substitutes.
The first hack to do karaoke anywhere, which I’m surprised more people don’t know, is just search YouTube for [the song you’re looking for] + karaoke. You get something like this Fly Me To The Moon. Every modern TV has YouTube and you’ll be singing along with the TV in no time. I went down a long rabbit hole of wireless mics, auto-tuners, speakers, etc, and I have emerged back concluding that a USB-C wireless speaker microphone gives a lot of the benefits without as much hassle.
The next level up, and worth the subscription, is that the Karafun apps are actually pretty good. You can even run it on MacOS with an HDMI cable to the TV and they have a QR code and queuing system. Pretty slick, pretty fun, Sweet Caroline.
Illuminate has crossed the funding threshold it needed to actually kick off the project of bringing the Bay Lights back to San Francisco, as Heather Knight writes for the New York Times. The upgraded lights will be visible not just from San Francisco but also in Oakland, Treasure Island, Berkeley… all across the Bay. It’s felt like the lights have been the lumen-physical embodiment of San Francisco’s struggles: sparkling and inspiring at the start, then facing troubles, a trough of darkness, and now hope for something better sparked and on the horizon.
I’d love to get as many citizens and addresses in San Francisco as donors, however small, to round out the last bit of the funding, so that as many people as possible can feel the ownership and pride of making the city better. Back in January when I promoted this last it was on a terrible platform, it’s now been re-done by the GiveWP team to be totally native WordPress and a slick donation experience, easy to do on mobile and with Apple Pay. (Major kudos to Devin Walker there!) Please share the link to your friends, especially ones that see the bridge from their home, for $10 it’s the cheapest pro-social dopamine boost you can have every time you look at the bridge.
I’m not one to shy away from random things I find on the internet, so when I came across the Scott Alexander article on a discovery in the 80s about people who don’t get cavities, my first thought was “how far is Honduras from Houston?”
So on February 28th, my friend Rene and I became the 50th and 51st people to get our normal mouth bacteria scrubbed away and hopefully replaced by a genetically modified strain of Streptococcus mutans that doesn’t turn sugar into lactic acid. A nice sabbatical jaunt.
In the 9 weeks since, no teeth have fallen out, I haven’t gotten any cavities, really the only noticeable change is that I seem to have less bad morning breath, though I still wholeheartedly recommend SmartMouth mouthwash and travel packets.
The company is working on making it more widely available without travel to another country, and if that works it will be interesting to see how long this takes to spread. Will it be adopted quickly or be like the lemon juice cure for scurvy that took 42 years to become policy? In the meantime, the weather in Roatán is warm!
If you’d like to learn more Cremiux Recueil also has a pretty good deep-dive.
It’s such a delight when a plan comes together and unfolds, especially when it’s something you’ve been working on for many years. Today the announcement went out that we’re combining the best technology from Beeper and Texts to create a great private, secure, and open source messaging client for people to have control of their communications. We’re going to use the Beeper brand, because it’s fun. This is not unlike how browsers have evolved, where solid tech and encryption on top of an open ecosystem has created untold value for humanity. Eric Migicovsky has written well about the plan going forward.
A lot of people are asking about iMessage on Android… I have zero interest in fighting with Apple, I think instead it’s best to focus on messaging networks that want more engagement from power-user clients. This is an area I’m excited to work on when I return from my sabbatical next month.
My old HSPVA friend and classmate Joe Santa Maria has a really cool album that I can only describe as if a Chris Potter big band decided to play Indonesian gamelan music, a type of trance-like rhythmic music which I originally discovered through Aaron Taylor Kuffner’s Gamelatron. You can listen or buy the album here. This is the first album I’ve bought in… forever, I’ve gotten so used to streaming. Feels kinda nice. I need to explore Bandcamp more it’s so cool.
I was late to discover Tom Scott, it was only after he did his goodbye video that I came across him, but he is a Youtube treasure with an archive of a ton of good stuff. Here’s one where he ties together scraping, APIs, Web 2.0, privacy, Cliffs of Dover, and some philosophy. So beautiful.
I know I share a lot of Jacob Collier content, but this one is particularly interesting because you can see him learning things in real-time, exploring an instrument that is not his native tongue but he’s already world-class in. It’s so interesting to me the polymath musician friends I have who can play so many instruments how they bring the technique and language across their learning, and this video illustrates it well.
Many of my friends are ridiculous overachievers, and Hugo Barra is no exception. In response to my birthday blog post present request he has published a magnus opus of over 10,000+ words on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro from his perspective having been present for some foundational moments for Google, Meta, and Xiaomi. This is my dream, to get people writing more. We need more of this stuff on the internet! It’s fun to go down rabbit holes with experts. Cool that it’s on Hugo.blog, too.
Great for everyone, but if you know a little music theory or Bach you’ll appreciate it even more. It’s never too late to learn music!
I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite allies of financial institutions. Wow!
I’m sure this was not easy to do so Reddit users should understand that at this very important juncture in the company’s history it has gone above and beyond to include you. I’m mostly a lurker on Reddit so my 958 karma doesn’t qualify so I’ll get access with the rest of the normal folks.
If I ever IPO something from Automattic, it will include the same for people who have contributed to WordPress. And every supporting open-source project underneath it. (It’s turtles all the way down.)
My only fear is that code contributions are structured in a way that is easily legible, so is anything that happens on w.org, but we may miss including people who have contributed to the growth of WordPress in non-legible ways.
Going to the Super Bowl with my friends Jaime Waydo and Jason Hoffman was a peak experience, everything about the day felt par none. I captured some Spatial Videos so friends with Vision Pros could watch some of it, but there’s no good way to share those on blogs yet. Friends have asked for some photos from the day, so here they are.
I’m still doing some podcasts as sabbatical-Matt, especially with the WordPress community which for me isn’t really work, it’s building relationships in our community of practice. If you know me, I can wax poetic about WordPress for hours! It’s what I do for fun. Here’s my first post-sabbatical interview with Michelle Frechette. Another unusual thing about this interview is I was quarantining with Covid!
There has been quite a bit of buzz in the WordPress community because during the Grammys red carpet Taylor Swift’s website went down and this is what everyone saw:
Hey there! That looks familiar. What a beautiful WordPress logo! (Hat tip: Alexa Scordato for telling me about this.) The website also had some ups and downs, we haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone on Taylor’s tech team, but if you’re there, we’re standing by and happy to spin up your site on wp.cloud so it can handle any amount of traffic.
This gets even more interesting, because for the first time in my life, after having orbited around the Super Bowl for decades*, I am attending in person. Thanks to the graciousness of my friend and advisor Jason Hoffman, I’ll be in an owner’s suite, wearing a WordPress t-shirt, possibly not too far from Taylor, watching the game. Look for me on TV! I know she loves Tumblr so I’ll have with me a little gift bag of Tumblr swag just in case I meet her.
- How have I been orbiting around the Super Bowl? Even though I don’t follow sports, I’m obsessed with the Super Bowl, and typically host watch parties every year. I love seeing the pinnacle of American achievement. The Super Bowl centers around a number of interesting stories in my life, such as when I was in high school and very poor the Super Bowl was in Houston, and they made McNuggets really cheap, so I ate 104 McNuggets in one sitting. (Sweet and sour sauce, natch.) At that infamous Justin Timberlake / Janet Jackson moment, they needed extras on the field to be their audience and my high school girlfriend was one of the kids in the audience when it happened. There’s so many more stories I could tell!
Balaji Srinivasan posted a great essay on how founders should think about debt vs equity, unfortunately it’s on X/Twitter so the format isn’t great, but the content is gold. As we exit the ZIRP world and go back into normal interest rates, I think this is really important concept for entrepreneurs to understand.
The Washington Post writes The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? This article has some good data, but I think misses the point with sub-heads like “Shine has come off the tech industry.” Really? How is that reflected in their stock prices?
I think a few things are happening.
First, tech companies are typically best at adopting new technology, which leads to productivity gains.
AI may be an obvious example of this, though for all its hype it hasn’t had a huge impact on most companies yet. I agree with Sam Altman when he says there may someday be a billion-dollar company run by one person who is able to highly leverage future AI agents to automate most traditional roles at a company. That said, I think there are advantages to teams including allowing people to go on vacation or take time off, and provide business continuity and succession, so literally one-person is probably an exaggeration. We don’t need AI to see very small teams being valued highly: Instagram had only 13 employees when it sold for a billion dollars to Facebook, in 2012!
Some of this productivity gains just come from adoption of existing tools like Google Workspace or Office 365, issue trackers and version control with tools like Gitlab, Github, or Jira. At Automattic we don’t use email to work or communicate internally, it’s all Slack and P2. We also leverage our distributed nature to effectively have teams around the world coordinating several shifts of product work per day, and 24/7 coverage for things like systems and customer support without the need for “graveyard shifts.”
The way tech companies operate, the pace and culture, would be unrecognizable to people at many more traditional companies.
At tech companies some roles are highly leveraged, like systems, engineering, and design, and everything else in the company really exists to support these. These leveraged roles can create enormous amounts of value, and that’s why it’s not unusual to hear of machine learning engineers working on ads at Google with salaries in the seven figures. (There’s been a weird accounting thing where companies put a lot of their compensation into equity, but I think that’s going away as investors are learning to better account for dilution and employees appreciate the fungibility of cash.)
Creators are also highly leveraged, which is why Joe Rogan can sign a new $250M deal with Spotify (which smartly puts him back on Youtube) after laying off 1,500 people in December. Some people like Hagen Terschüren try to tie this together and say you should avoid Spotify for it, but there’s nothing wrong with a business becoming more efficient to serve its customers, it’s the whole point of capitalism. Capitalism is, as Nicholas Stern says (via Marc), the best way to take care of people we don’t know. There’s no honor in keeping people employed inefficiently, it’s better for them to find someplace in the market where their talents will be better leveraged for society and themselves.
There was a bubble in hiring because tech had so much money it tried to throw people at problems. But the unlock in technology can come from a single person, a single insight. It’s the mythical man-month. Tech-first companies are going to become leaner and more leveraged. Fewer people are going to create more value for society, in ways that will follow power laws and I think we should investigate things like Universal Basic Income to provide for all living beings. Technological progress creates abundance, where we have more than what we need.
At Automattic last year we did not do layoffs, but allowed performance management and natural attrition (voluntary regrettable was 2.9%, non-regrettable 6.8% for us in 2023) to allow our size to shrink down more naturally, on average two people left for every person we hired last year, from a peak of about 2,064 to 1,936 today.
It’s hard to pick a favorite tenor player, but the GOATs that come to mind are Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Michael Brecker, and I’m missing people but if I had to pick someone to express the human condition and soul, it would be Joshua Redman. He has such incredible fluency with the horn you get an amazing emotional experience with his vibrations. He’s probably the greatest living tenor saxophonist. He just did a Tiny Desk concert, and the audio and visual capture was impeccable. I watched this full-screen on an Apple XDR and listened with Airpods Max—the chords they’re using, the subtlety of the interactions— the experience was exquisite. (Also peep HSPVA grad Paul Cornish!) I can’t embed because it’s not on Youtube yet.
What if this VR is training our brains to compute in a different way? How we perceive our thoughts to train the models. We are reconfiguring our model of reality to process things in a way we couldn’t before.
If I were President for a day, the first thing I would do is instruct our national security to patch and secure every American technology company, as they are our gems in the world. I would burn every zero-day I had on a US company and help them patch it. The rest of the world would know our immense defense budget was now being used to secure our companies as well, as China does. Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Arista, Unifi, Qualcomm… I’m probably missing a few, they should all have the shield of our national security defense. Right now each company has to create their own defenses, and they are getting eaten and pillaged by foreign companies with state backing.
I’m a proud supporter of the Vesuvius Challenge, and they just announced the winners and have a great article in Bloomberg.
When I read things like the iFixit Teardown of Vision Pro, I am moved almost to tears at the sheer beauty of craftsmanship in this thing. It is literally incredible. I have so much respect for the big tech companies like Apple that invest in long-term science, research, and development to create innovations like this. It is literally the engine driving our economy forward.
I just replied to an email from 2018. I am tragically, comically, behind on email. Because Automattic doesn’t use email, we use P2, it’s never been a priority for me. But I have been sloppy, careless, and derelict in my duty of answering emails. Apologies to you all. You’re going to get some weird, very late replies.
Okay… wow. The hardware and display are like nothing I’ve ever seen, really feels like it’s from the future. That said, I found the setup clunky and buggy. Some might have been user error, for example I kept trying to “select” things with my middle finger and thumb and not my left finger.
I almost got stuck in the Persona setup, couldn’t continue. I don’t love how my Persona looks. Looking and selecting stopped working and I could only continue by physically reaching out and hitting the buttons. (This must sound ridiculous to someone who hasn’t used a Vision Pro yet. I looked pretty silly!)
I got totally stuck at the part of the setup where it was importing iCloud apps from backup, and I was ready to give up. A friend put it on and was able to get past that step for me. Adding credit cards was a terrible UI, with the security code PIN pad in front of the interface.
I decided to call it a night, and try more tomorrow. Just like I learned to type I think I’m going to need to learn to become fluent in this new interaction paradigm. I did have a before and after feeling, like the world had shifted, not unlike when you saw the first iPod or iPhone. This post probably doesn’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t tried the Vision Pro, but hopefully the team sees it and can take this feedback.
My friend Neal Mueller, who holds a Guinness World Record for longest non-stop row in Arctic open water—1,000 miles over 41 days in 2012—gave me the incredible gift this morning of introducing me to the Dolphin Club in San Francisco, which has a rich lineage of these hand-built rowboats and love of the craft of rowing. It was awe-inspiring. He then rowed me to Alcatraz! We saw a rainbow (third from last photo in gallery)!
We captured some Spatial Video that will be fun to look at on the Vision Pro later (mine just arrived, but I haven’t opened it yet).
I think what I learned this morning is there is something deeply profound about the act of rowing, of being in harmony and synchronicity with others on your boat, how good it feels when you’re in sync, and how obvious it is when you aren’t. I’ve done rowing machines before many times but never been on the open water, and I saw also the impact of the variability of the ocean, currents, and waves had on the rowing. I think there is also something related here to when autistic people (and myself!) rock back and forth when something feels like it’s in alignment.
Luckily I was with literally one of the world’s best rowers, so I always felt safe and was able to enjoy the feeling of being on the water, and really felt the heritage and respect of these beautiful craft we were on, Cronin-1938. I introduced Neal to the concept of the Ship of Theseus, one Matias and I love to talk about in the context of Gutenberg. One of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in San Francisco. Here are a few photos from this morning.
My sabbatical is off to a great start.
Today is the day! The first day of my sabbatical. What an experience it has been. On Thursday I delivered my very first Ignite talk on the subject! Here it is.
The Ignite format is a tricky one as a speaker! I will do better next time. My friend Connie has delivered seven Ignite talks now and I thought hers and Adam Savage’s were the highlights of the ones I saw. (I didn’t see everything because I was popping in and out.)
Preparing for this sabbatical has been the most fun I’ve had working at Automattic, ever. It brought so much clarity to things, we’ve been able to resolve in hours things that have lingered for months, including two acquisitions, several hires, big strategies, and more.
After this talk I caught a redeye to NYC to meet with the WordPress.com leadership team and hand off my leadership there to Daniel Bachhuber.
It is a beautiful symmetry that the first-ever sabbatical taken at Automattic was by its CEO at the time, Toni Schneider, which gave me the opportunity to step in and try on being a CEO, and it’s an incredible gift that Toni is returning to be CEO of Automattic while I’m out for the months of February, March, and April.
What am I going to do with all this free time? Blog a ton. So follow along if you want to see this journey. I’m going to try to open source all the things.
I was interviewed by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, who is one of the most insightful people in the SaaS space and runs great events. Check out our conversation.
Considering I am going on sabbatical in 83 hours and passing the CEO torch to Toni Schneider until I return in May, it seemed like a perfect time to do a giant re-org! Just kidding. But we did introduce a concept into Automattic that I think will provide a lot of clarity for the teams within Automattic, and hopefully for the broader WordPress ecosystem that works and partners with us.
The frame is there’s a game, each person gets a card: Be the Host, Help the Host, or Neutral.
You cannot change cards during the course of your day or week. If you do not feel aligned with your card, you need to change divisions within Automattic.
If you’re Be the Host, you are hyper-competitive. You are trying to make the case to a customer for why they should host with you and not consider anyone else. This is what everyone assumes all of Automattic is, but it’s actually just one sub-division, which is a minority of our revenue.
For Help the Hosts, your word is ecosystem. You plant the seeds of open source software that grow everywhere. Every WordPress is precious to you, wherever it grew up. You want every host to be as successful as possible, because the real threat is from the Big Proprietary folks outside, who steal all your good ideas and don’t let you touch them again. You want to get to know every WordPress in the world, however it grew up, and help it out by selling it attachments.
Neutral treats everyone equally, either because they don’t care (Day One, Pocket Casts, et cetera don’t have a horse in this race) or because they are a support function like finance or HR.
Whenever you meet or talk to an Automattician you can ask what their card is.
Also, WordPress.com is going to orient itself more towards developers, and have an experience that feels similar to WordPress hosted other places, less Calypso more wp-admin.
The big tension this surfaced was Woo Express, going forward that team is switching under WP.com, and Woo.com will recommend a variety of hosts (like W.org) to get started with Woo. Now people can meet with Paul Maiorana, who leads Woo, or James Grierson, who leads Jetpack, and know they have Help the Hosts cards as their teleological goal.
Jamie Marsland has this great Youtube video where he rebuilds TechCrunch.com just using core blocks in WordPress 6.3 in 30 minutes. Worth checking out!
Zeynep Tufekci has a great article, One Thing Not to Fear at Burning Man, that covers well what I have experienced as well growing up in Houston through hurricanes and other natural disasters—that in times of need people help each other in ingenious ways.
WordPresss.com just announced its hundred year plan. This was very fun to create and plan for, and I hope it gets people and other companies thinking about the long term. Very inspired by The Long Now Foundation and The Internet Archive. See also: Derek Siver’s Hundred Year Host.
Jon Weeks from the Evening Standard interviewed me for their How to Be a CEO podcast about Tumblr, and as I often do we mostly talked about open source. If you can’t listen Techcrunch’s Sarah Perez posted a really nice summary of the interview.
One of the cooler things the WordPress community started doing in 2006 was putting on these events we called WordCamps. A big one is about to kick off in National Harbor, Maryland (which is basically Washington DC, but we’re calling it National Harbor for some reason). You might be wondering where the name came from: … Continue reading I Love WordCamps! →
Version 6.3 is out! Time to fire up your updating engines. 😄 This is actually a really big one. (As a reminder, we do three major release of WP per year and each one is a +0.1, 7.0 will just be the next release after 6.9, so big things can happen in random version numbers.) … Continue reading WordPress 6.3 →
Ottawa reminds me a lot of Houston. A city that is a microcosm of Canada’s diversity and vibrance. When you visit Ottawa, I’d recommend checking out Aiana Restaurant Collective (powered by WordPress, natch!) and Stolen Goods Cocktail Bar to see craftspeople operating at the top of their game. Riviera was also nice.
Woke up this morning to a lot of people sending me the link to the Axios scoop that Vox Media is moving from its proprietary CMS Chorus to open source WordPress VIP, and doubling down on its premium ad network Concert and commenting platform Coral. This is very exciting because I’ve been a fan and … Continue reading Chorus and WordPress →
I had a great time at WordCamp Europe in Athens this year, here’s the keynote “Variations on a Theme” with presentations from Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Matías Ventura, and Q&A from all three of us.
Whoop is an excellent biometrics bracelet I’ve been wearing for a few months since my friend Jaime Waydo joined as their CTO. After many years of being very in the Garmin 945 camp, I now do an Apple Ultra for all the smart stuff, and Whoop for all the great sleep, HRV, and recovery information … Continue reading Whoop Podcast →
Apple almost never fails to wow, and they had a lot of cool announcements at WWDC yesterday. Apple’s previously favorite (app of the year!) journaling app was Day One, one of Automattic’s products, but they announced their own Journal app. One nice thing about competing with Apple is they only really interoperate with their own … Continue reading Apple Journals & Day One →
Check out this great article on an exciting discovery of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy playing together. The album comes out July 14th. Hat tip: Aaron Wieczorek.
I think part of what Mike Little showed with his comment on my blog that led to the creation of WordPress, is that it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.
All it takes is a spark.
That’s what is beautiful about blogging. It’s too bad the advertising and social media platforms got us all caught up in status games for the past 15 years.
All you need is one view, one like, one comment, to change your life.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.
Twenty years later, I am proud and humbled by what the community around WordPress has created, and jazzed about what we will create in the coming decades.
I’m also excited to mark this milestone by publicly launching the Audrey Scholars program. It is, like all things, an experiment, but I’m curious to see how it unfolds and perhaps one day an Audrey Scholar could even take the responsibility of leading WordPress, when my capacity to do so has passed.
Last week I had the honor of being on stage at the Royal Society of Arts in London with Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, and Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, which is one of the open source projects I have the most respect and admiration for. This is the conversation that ensued.
I was on the Design Better podcast hosted by Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery, we talked about jazz, generative AI, distributed work, and my journey as an entrepreneur.
We just launched polls on Tumblr, and it’s been pretty fun. Cool to bring together the Crowdsignal (née Polldaddy) technology into a new world.
The last year of my thirties! WordPress turns twenty this year. Automattic is now ~2,000 people across 98 countries. There’s so much that has happened in the past decade yet it feels very much like we’re on the cusp of something even more exciting.
This morning started well; I pulled the hammock out of the garage (it had been hiding from the rain) and read for a bit, trying to get my 5-10 minutes of sun in the first 30 minutes like Huberman suggests.
Candidly, the last year was a really challenging one for me personally. There were some beautiful moments, and I consider myself the most lucky in my family, friends, and colleagues, yet among that same group there was a lot of loss, existential health challenges, and that weighed heavily on me.
Usually when people ask me what I want for my birthday I don’t have a good answer, but this year I do! As Heather Knight wrote about in the SF Chronicle, the beloved Bay Lights are coming down in March. This has to happen — the vibrations and corrosive environment of the Bay Bridge is taking lights out strand by strand. Fortunately it’s now been a decade since the lights first went up, and there’s much better technology both for the lights and how they’re mounted and attached to the suspension cables. Finally, the lights were not visible from Treasure Island or the East Bay before, but this new version 3.0 will be, which is why the artist behind the lights, Leo Villereal, is calling it Bay Lights 360.
Like the Foundation series, we can’t stop the coming period of darkness from happening, but if we raise $11M we can bring the lights back. If we raise it soon we can shorten the time they’re down to just a few months, so I’m working with the 501c3 non-profit Illuminate to help fundraise. The idea is to find ten people or organizations to put one million each, and raise the final million in a broader crowdfunding campaign, to re-light the Bay Bridge and give an incredible gift to the people from every walk of life that see the bridge, and hopefully have their spirits lifted by the art. I’ve heard 25 million people see the Bay Lights every year.
It’s a lot to raise, but every little bit helps so please donate here, and if you are interested to do a larger gift please get in touch. I’m committing a million dollars to the fundraise, and myself, Illuminate director Ben Davis, and the artist Leo Villereal are happy to personally connect with anyone considering a larger donation.
Because of some family health reasons I’m back in lockdown, so going to try and throw an online party tonight in the “Matterverse.” We’re going to party like it’s late 2020.
A few weeks ago, but what feels like a lifetime ago, I was in New York City with a few dozen extra special people from around the WordPress world. Alongside Josepha and the community we presented this review of how WordPress did in 2022, and vision for what’s coming:
This is a big deal. There are a lot of big deals happening right now, it’s honestly a very exciting time to be in tech. I feel like a sailor in a tumultuous sea, and they should have sent a poet. T. S. Eliot was actually the inspiration for WordPress’ tagline “Code is Poetry” and I’m reminded of this from The Dry Salvages:
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, and since we’ve been tapping away trying to make the best podcast client for people who love listening to podcasts. And! The team has been working really hard to make those clients totally open source and available to the world, and it’s now happened. You can see all the […]
Tumblr launched Community Labels yesterday, which allows consistent tagging of addiction, violent, and adult content, and for people to hide, blur, or show that content. It’s gone pretty well so far. We’ve still been getting a lot of questions if it’s going to be free-for-all with adult content again, and the short answer is no, […]
I joined episode 681 of This Week in Google and it was fun with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Ant Pruitt:
WordCamp United States was in San Diego this year, a really lovely town. It felt like a throwback because of the venue we had to limit tickets quite a bit, so it felt like a WCUS from a decade ago. I’ll probably do this year’s State of the Word in December again with a livestream […]
If I had to pick one reason why I’d suggest every person should attend Burning Man at least once, it would be the art. (Second reason would be seeing the principles in action.) This year I am particularly excited to support two pieces, the first being the Sonic Sphere which has this great video introducing […]
You can now subscribe to updates from this blog in this Telegram channel! Right now it will get updates from Ma.tt and Matt.blog, and hopefully my Tumblr in future once the bot supports that as a content source. If you’d like to set this up for your WordPress site, check out this tutorial on Jetpack.
From a nice new Polygon article, Our favorite Neil Gaiman books, comics, and more: Before I elaborate — yes, people still use Tumblr and it’s far more popular than most people think. Neil Gaiman has been an active Tumblr user since 2011, and he still actively uses the microblogging platform to this day. This is notable, because […]
Today is the 19th anniversary since WordPress’ first release, which is especially exciting for a number of reasons: The community put together an awesome site celebrating the occasion at wp19.day. We just had an awesome 6.0 “Arturo” release. Next week June 2-4 WordCamp Europe returns in-person in Porto, Portugal, and I’ll be there and so […]
I spoke with Guy Raz about the early days of WordPress and Automattic on the latest episode of “How I Built This (listen on Pocket Casts).” We ended up talking for over four hours and the show has skillfully edited this down to just over an hour. We discussed my time at CNET, how I […]
In a podcast interview they’ve titled How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird (listen on audio here), I spoke with Nilay Patel on economics of abundance vs scarcity, Amitabh Bachchan, the future of Tumblr and adult content, Gutenberg, Promethean app design, web3, NFTs, and more. A nice follow-up to our conversation in 2019.
I usually wouldn’t do a post about this, but I was so surprised I had to share. I picked up a Jabra Evolve2 30 UC wired headset, with USB-C, because my friend Hugo loves the wireless Jabra and I’ve been using an older USB-A headset and thought it would be nice to not need an […]
This is an unusually late birthday post (still backdated to January 11). I woke up on my actual birthday and was not feeling it. I was locked down even more strictly than January 2021 because I was trying to be extra cautious prior to a surgery my Mom had later in the month. I was […]
My birthday is coming up soon so it’s that time of the year when friends start reaching out and asking where they should fly to and how we’re going to celebrate. After a good run in the post-vaccinated-and-boosted part of 2020 that felt relatively “normal”, including traveling almost 200k miles, I’m going back into a […]
David Pierce wrote a deep profile, over 4,000 words, for Protocol and asks the question in the headline, Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet? Which brings to mind Betteridge’s law of headlines (née Hinchliffe’s rule), “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I can’t save the internet. But […]
Update: Here’s the recording! I’m very excited that we’ll be broadcasting the State of the Word “live from New York City” this coming Tuesday, December 14th! There will be a very small “studio audience” of community members there in person. Recording the solo version last year was actually one of the hardest things I’ve done […]
One of my favorite magazines, that I have issues going back to the 40s and 50s, has relaunched and redesigned their site on WordPress and it’s gorgeous. Speaking of great redesigns, the new Grist is pretty great too.
Since Frontity launched their open source framework, they have been making the integration between React and WordPress easier. Their proven drive and experience with clean technological solutions will benefit our efforts as we continue to make the block and theme APIs a joy to use and WordPress the best development platform on the web. The […]
In February of this year, Automattic closed a new primary funding round of $288M, bringing in some great new partners including BlackRock, Wellington, Schonfeld, and Alta Park. Existing investors ICONIQ and Aglaé (Bernard Arnault) also participated. This round was common stock, and like all funding since 2011, included a proxy assigning me the right to […]
One of my big themes is that open source will transform every industry, with key examples being WordPress in web publishing, WooCommerce in online commerce, Wikipedia in reference, and Bitcoin/Ethereum in finance. Medicine, though, has been relatively unscathed so far. Here’s a great video introducing the Open Insulin project, which for the past 6 years […]
I’m not sure when I first came across the critically acclaimed Day One product, which is the best private blogging and journaling app out there, but I began seriously using it daily in 2016 when my father was in the ICU and later passed. Having a private, safe place to write what I was going […]
I just wrapped up a fun session with Matías and Brian, and though we covered a lot of ground we weren’t able to get to all the questions from the audience. Starting at 2:58: So this is an open thread, if you have any question from the talk please drop it in the comments here, […]
Today marks eighteen years since the very first release of WordPress. I consider myself so lucky to have co-founded the project alongside Mike Little. Who could have imagined that our nights and weekends hacking on blogging software, a fork of b2/cafelog, could turn into something powering over 40% of the web? Or that nearly twenty […]
My streaming setup post last year got an amazing reception — there are similar setups being used by executives across the board, from companies fundraising to several I know of with 100B+ valuations. Since that original setup, I’ve updated my own usage of hardware and software combinations to achieve similar or better results for about a […]
Squarespace filed their S-1 last month, and went a direct listing route for their stock today under the ticker SQSP, so I’ve been getting lots of questions on my thoughts on their business. It’s easier to share here in a blog than individually. Squarespace’s CEO Anthony Casalena is a thoughtful, creative leader. It’s amazing what […]
The WordPress community has long advocated for a repository with GPL-compatible images, and it’s time to listen to that need. CC Search, a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) image search engine, is joining the WordPress project with over 500 million openly licensed and public domain images discoverable from over 50 sources, audio and video soon to […]
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of […]
It’s not every day you see noted writer Cory Doctorow refer to a column as “the piece I’m most proud of,” and his essay in Locus Magazine on IP doesn’t disappoint, connecting the free software movement and the evolution of the term “author’s monopolies” to “intellectual property.” The essay on DRM and Apple, available on […]
On a Founder’s Field Guide episode with Patrick O’Shaughnessy we had an interesting conversation that covered a lot new ground, including an idea I’ve been playing around with on, as Patrick put it: The idea from @photomatt that the best companies are those that build intricate worlds (in the same way that J. R. R. […]
Excited to welcome Parse.ly to the Automattic family, in an acquisition that’s closing today. They’ll be joining our enterprise group, WPVIP. The deal has been nicely covered in the Wall Street Journal and Axios. As a bonus, here’s Parse.ly co-founder Andrew Montalenti’s first comment on this blog, in 2012. Great article, Matt. I wrote about […]
I learned something novel about how the ice age happened from this Freakishly Strong Base post by Morgan Housel: The prevailing idea before [Wladimir] Köppen was that ice ages occur when the earth’s tilt supercharges the wrath of cold winters. Köppen showed that wasn’t the case. Instead, moderately cool summers are the culprit. It begins […]
Very excited to share the news that Revue is joining Twitter. I’m a huge fan of the idea of better newsletters and Automattic was the largest investor in Revue. I’m looking forward to seeing what the very talented team will do as part of the Twitter network. Also many thanks to Kevin Kelly and Om […]
After you’ve watched the amazing poem from Amanda Gorman, check out the new WhiteHouse.gov that re-launched today using WordPress & Gutenberg with a number of cool features including dark mode, text zoom, a totally responsive layout, and a Spanish version of the site. The site is clean, fast, and accessible. It’s exciting and an honor […]
I wanted to share with you all a short film I made with the help of Stephen Bollinger, with videos I made a few years ago on a photography trip to Iceland with Om and Mark. I hope it provides five minutes of serenity in your day.
I turn 37 today. I look around and I feel incredibly lucky to be writing this after a topsy-turvy year. I have health. I have friends whom I love. These are all good reasons to feel optimistic about the future. A few unconnected thoughts today:
My father had me when he was exactly 13,300 days old, and this year I passed that number of rotations of the Earth.
It’s hard to plan when so much is changing, so resolutions this year haven’t felt the same. But in times like these it’s even more important to plan for the long-term. A look back, once a year, is enough to remind of what remains.
I’m so thankful for the internet. It’s where I learned and practiced my trade. It’s where I connect every day with the most interesting and eclectic group of people I could imagine, a modern day Florence during the Renaissance. I hope to make a lot more internet and enable others to do the same.
Many years ago I said “Technology is best when it brings people together.” This quote has taken on a life of its own on motivational posters and images. When I first said it I think I had in mind WordCamps and meetups and other physical gatherings; this year it transformed for me seeing how technology brought together those separated by the pandemic. This year has appeared divisive, so it’s easy to overlook how many times people came together. It’s like the old saying, it’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get up. Fall thirty-six times, get up thirty-seven.
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38.
Of all the smart home upgrades I’ve made, replacing all my regular smoke detectors with Nest Protects (Google’s smoke detector) has been the one that I regret the most.
I don’t really need a smart smoke detector. It doesn’t need to talk, connect to wifi, and cost hundreds of dollars. I don’t need it integrated with my Google account which is impossible to share, so I need to be personally involved to replace one.
But other smoke detectors are just so unsightly, and the Nest is light years ahead of the competition from a design standpoint.
There’s such an opportunity for something that looks as good as the Nest, but doesn’t require two-factor authentication to replace. I didn’t want to call it dumb but beautiful, so let’s say “autonomous and beautiful” appliances and home devices. I still want it to be smart, but if you’re going to have the risk profile of a device that connects to the internet, it needs to be worth it, like Brilliant, Sonos, smart TVs, or connected cameras.
I’m becoming more wary of any hardware that requires an app, just because of the natural decay of non-SaaS and non-open source software. Van Moof bikes are beautiful, but will they still connect well when iOS 24 is out and Bluetooth has been removed from iPhones for security reasons?