How I Built This with Guy Raz - WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Matt Mullenweg turned his early passion for blogging into a flourishing business and an unshakeable idea: that users should be able to share and tweak the code that powers their websites, and that most of those tools should be free to use. As far back as college, Matt was collaborating with far-flung fellow-coders to make blogging less clunky and more elegant and intuitive. Around 2005, he pitched the idea for WordPress.com to his bosses at CNET, but they turned him down, so he launched the idea on his own, eventually tucking the service into a nascent umbrella company called Automattic. Today—after many twists and turns—the company has nearly 2000 employees and a valuation of $7 billion; and WordPress powers more than 40% of the websites on the internet. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Hey, really quick before we start the show, did you know that how I built this is also a book? Well, it's now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. So check it out, how I built this, the book. Now to the show. I actually remember this meeting once. It's one of the awkwardest meeting I'd ever been in. It was the publishers I think of news.com, the editor-in-chief, everyone was there. And they said, okay, here is a fully written article ready to go, publish it. And at the time, publishing something took 10 or 20 steps. So all in all, you're looking at like 20 minutes, and we all had to sit there while this happened.

And then the guy pointed to me, it was like, Matt, here's the written article, publisher. I just copy and paste it in the WordPress. I press publish, and it was on the website seconds later. And I just got these like death stares from all the folks there. They were like, who is this kid? Who does he think he is? This is dumb. And it's true.

The software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways. But it was better in a way that mattered. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, how Matt Mullenwig tapped into. to a tiny group of coders who wanted to make blogging better,

and went on to build WordPress, a platform that now powers more than 40% of websites on the Internet. So just think about that number for a second. Something like 40% of the world's websites are built using WordPress. That's a pretty astonishing statistic, if you consider that its main creator, Matt Mullenweg, originally built WordPress as a non-profit blogging platform. That was back in the early 2000s when Matt was about to become a college dropout.

At the time, he moved from Houston to San Francisco, determined to join the tech scene. He was an early enthusiast of both blogging and open source software, basically programs or platforms that are free to use but also designed to be improved by their users. And his big idea was to build a platform, free and open source, of course, that would allow anyone, anywhere, to create a blog. Now, at the time, starting a blog wasn't so easy. WordPress changed that. But when Matt started to get job offers from some of the big tech companies,

he turned them down. Not because he didn't want to work for them, as you will hear, but rather because he knew that going to work for a tech giant would mean giving up his intellectual property. WordPress caught on largely because it appealed to two, very different types of consumers, people who didn't know anything about technology or how to code, and people who were hardcore programmers who believed in open source platforms that they could improve and tweak. Today, WordPress is one of several products that sit under the parent company Matt created called Automatic,

a company now valued at over $7 billion. and a business that technically doesn't have any offices, despite having nearly 2,000 employees around the world. Anyway, Matt grew up in Houston, along with his sister. His mom managed the family and his dad worked as a computer programmer, mainly for oil companies. And as a teenager, Matt was actually pursuing a potential career as a musician, to be precise, a saxophonist. Saxophone's just so cool. So who would play saxophone? Bill Clinton played saxophone famously.

I think Lisa Simpson on the Simpsons played saxophone. Still does. It was just a fun and cool instrument. And I chose it because my dad played it. And I love jazz. And a lot of the music I'd listen to it at the time was probably like what we'd call oldies. And saxophone was much more prominent in music back then. So it's also just fun to hear like sax and popular music.

So for high school, you ended up. up going to a performing arts high school, which became, I think, pretty famous because of one of its most, probably its most famous graduate, Beyonce. And I think her sister, Solange, also went there. This is the high school you went to. Yeah, she went to my elementary school as well, actually. She's a couple years older than you, right? So I think we overlapped in elementary, and we didn't overlap at the same time in high school.

She got pulled out a little early to Destiny's Child. Yeah. What was that high school like? Was it like that show fame, where people were. like, you know, dancing in the hallways and playing instruments in the lockers and buy lockers and stuff? Yeah, it actually really was. It was a fantastic environment.

In fact, I kind of thought that was how I'd make at least part of my living because that was the first way I really earned money was playing the saxophone. How did you earn money playing sex? Gigs. Yeah. So it would be like an Italian restaurant. Right. With a big band.

I would busk sometimes. So it just kind of. like, you know, playing saxophone, you never really play by yourself. You're always playing with people. So I always love the interplay, the collaboration, the camaraderie that came from being in bands. What was the kind of the decision point where you thought, you know, I'm not going to go into music? Was it just clear to you that that was not a, I don't know, maybe it wasn't a practical decision if you wanted to, I don't know, have a stable life? I don't know, what was your thinking around that?

You know, at the school, some of the kids were just true prodigies. And I was more pretty good, but had to work super, super hard to get there. And definitely not the best. So, yeah, it just became clear. And during high school, I also started to get a lot more, probably even before that, into computer stuff. I remember when my dad first started to have a computer at home, because normally he would just have one at work, we would build them. So kind of putting them together was a project, kind of like building a, a kit car or something. We buy the parts. We put them together. So I was always tweaking it and

changing things and trying to overclock it to make it faster for games or whatever it was. And I'd often break it. And if I broke it and my dad came home when it was broken, he would be pretty cross with me. So I'd definitely try to fix it before he got home as like a race against the clock, like trying to diffuse the bomb before it goes off. What about the internet? I mean, were you already You know, talking to people over the internet, were you in chat rooms? Were you active in any communities at all on the internet? Yeah.

I think I found my very first post, and it was on like a Freemason channel. I was really into like this idea of secret societies and things. And so the communities would form around a shared interest, but it would really, it was about the other people. You'd get to know the other 20 folks that were there. There was a chat system called IRC. I would log into and use a lot. So it's kind of like a, think of it like a text-based slack. And then we created them.

So one of the best saxophone players still in Houston and one of my teachers was this guy named David Casares. And so he paid me, you know, 500 bucks and I made him a website. But then for no good reason, actually, I put forum software on his website. So there was like this forum where people could post. And you could ask him questions. But really, it just became like all of his students and jazz people in town would hang out there and talk to each other.

How did you learn how to put a website together when you're in high school? I mean, because it was much more complicated. This was like 2000, 2001. Like, it was much harder to do than it is today. How did you figure it out? Did you get a book? Did you get a manual? Yeah, there were definitely book.

A lot of it was trial and error. There was early website publishing software, web services like GeoCities, software like Dreamweaver or Front Page that would allow you to make, honestly, kind of cool for the time, websites. So a lot of my learnings, and this is true of all computer stuff, is I would just kind of click all the buttons. Yeah. And the other main thing I was doing online was I had started a photo website called Photomat. And I was posting photos.

To a website, a website that you had put together? Yeah. Well, I used some open source software called Gallery. And it was a Ph.P script that would allow pre-Flickr, pre-Fliqr, pre-Flech, pre-any thing to post photos and have galleries online. And it became really popular by my friends. Like, they'd go every day, see the photos, leave comments. We'd have conversations there. And so I guess for college, you decided to go to the University of Houston.

Yeah. And this is a time, like early 2000s, when blogging really starts to, I mean, it starts in the late 90s because I think GeoCities and some of these other sites were people were kind of putting their ideas and thoughts out into the world. Did you have a blog? Did you start your own blog? I'm trying to think when I started my blog blog blog. It probably would have been around the same time, like 2001, 2002. And was it easy to set up? So there were some services that were pretty easy, LiveJournal, Zanga, Blogger, BlogSpotts.

So there were a few online services that made it really easy just to go and type things. To run your own software on your own domain was much, much harder at the time. And I first used a software called movable type, and then I found some open source versions. And the one I used was called a B2 Cafe Log. What did that actually mean? It was like a platform where you could just upload your photos in your text and publish it. Am I describing that fairly accurately? Yeah, basically what blogging software did was instead of having to edit lots of files and move things around manually, you'd kind of go to a website, type in a box, press publish, and then it would be on your website. So B2 was this blogging open source platform that you liked clearly? Yeah.

I had already kind of fallen in love with open source. I mentioned the gallery software I used was open source. Basically what that meant was it was put for free online, and people would contribute to it. So they would modify it, fix things. It was like software developed by a community instead of being developed by a company. And I guess you, I mean, you start to contribute to it, right?

You started to sort of make suggestions for changes. Yeah. So, I mean, first there was forums. Right. And I was still learning the code at the time. and as I got better and better, I would read the B2 code to understand it and then start to modify it. So there's an example that I read about, because this seems so weird today, right? But doing like curly quotes was something that wasn't easy to do.

Like if you wanted to just put a quotation mark in a blog, it was those like the double prime mark, right? It wasn't easy to do. Am I right about that? Yeah. When you type what you, what we would call an apostrophe on your keyboard. That's actually not an apostrophe. It is a single prime mark. So that's used for indicating, like, feet as an example.

It's not meant to be in a contraction. It is. Yeah, it's. So when you have the IT apostrophe S, that's actually a totally different character. That's not on your computer. There's no keyboard for it. And so to do it in HTML, what you would type was IT, then ampersand, hashtag, 82, 117, semi-colon, S, if you wanted the proper curly quote.

And there's equivalence of that for M&N dashes. Quotes, ellipses. So when you type three periods in a row, that's not actually ellipses. It's just three periods in a row. Yeah. And so to make any ellipses is a totally different character. So, yeah, I just memorized all these codes to write that. And so when I was writing blog posts, I was literally typing out all these codes.

But that just got kind of frustrating. Yeah. All right. So you started to submit ideas. is an actual code to this blogging platform, B2, which happened to be based in Corsica, the French island and the Mediterranean, and were people like, yeah, this is a great idea.

Like, what was the response? People liked it. They got a lot of good feedback, and I proposed it to the lead developer of B2, which was this guy named Michelle Valdretti in Corsica. And he was like, oh, that's cool, you know, submit it. And so I created a ticket to submit that to the code. And it was accepted.

So then it became part of the official release. So the next version of B2 Cafe Log that came out had this code included. And then everyone who upgraded was running the code. And I got this like complete high of like, oh, my goodness, there's hundreds and hundreds of websites running code I wrote, which was a thrill. All right. So this open source platform, B2, I guess this guy, Michelle, who was the sort of lead programmer, he left. And I imagine it was a tiny little group of people because they stopped. They kind of just stopped developing it, right?

At a certain point, this is around 2002. So what happened was there was other contributors like myself and others. But Michelle kind of had the keys to the whole thing. He was the lead developer. He was, you know, what we call an open source is often a term called like benevolent dictator. Right, right. And so, yeah, it was a little bit of a mystery where he went. And basically what happened was I was literally blogging everything on my mind at the time.

I was a huge overshare. So I did this blog post. I called the blogging software dilemma. And I said, you know, that I really wanted something that was different than anything else out there that's just at the market. I wanted something that was really beautiful with great typography like this system called text pattern. Yep. Really simple like blogger. Sure.

And really what I called hackable or flexible like B2. B2 was really easy. The code was really easy to understand. and modify. I actually still believe the code was beautiful. It was beautiful code. So I was like, what if something could combine all of these? That would be awesome. That's what I would love to use. And also, you know, part of it was, it wasn't just I wanted software. Text pattern was actually my favorite at the time. I liked it better than B2, but it was an open source. And so because B2 Cafe Log was open source under a license called the GPL, the work that Michelle had done wasn't lost. And so part of

the point I was trying to make in this post is that if I disappeared or fell off the Facebook planet, the code that I created would not be lost either. It would still belong to the world, and people could take it and continue it. So this comment, I think a day or two later, was left by a gentleman named Mike Little in the United Kingdom. And he was one of the other volunteers on the forum. Someone else who had contributed code to B2, and so we'd follow each other at blog. And he said, hey, if you're serious about working on this, I'd love to work on it together. And so that's what Mike and I ended up doing, was we took the code from B2-Cafet Law, kind of this abandoned code.

and we did what in open service is called. We forked it, F-O-R-K. And use that as the base to start creating something new. And just standing up these free tools, that wasn't expensive. The tools themselves didn't require a whole lot of money to keep them going? The only cost was time. So you get this comment from Mike Little, and you wrote back and said, yeah, let's go, let's start.

Yeah. You never met him. You didn't know him personally. Did you call him on the phone? Did you have a phone conversation or anything like that? I don't know if we ever talked on the phone. Mike might remember, but probably not, to be honest. We would hang out on IRC. So we'd chat with each other. Okay. We'd probably chat. Maybe we'd use like Skype or AOL, instant messenger or something. But yeah, we'd just talk online and also just talk over the code. So we'd send each other code back and forth and with comments. And so that's kind of how. kind of how you'd work on things together was you'd communicate with the code and then talking about the code. So it was a really fun way to work. It's still how people work on open source today. So all the people, presumably who were in the B2 community, kind of migrate to your community because you're building on it.

And did you call it WordPress from the beginning? So what happened at the time was Mike and I had our fork of B2, and there were five or six other forks. So five or six other people that had the same idea and made their own projects. Right. I was part of a blogger community in Houston at the time. You know, there's only a few people blogging. So, like, we'd all get together at like a coffee shop or a bar and hang out with each other and talk about our blogs and blogging. And, you know, I talked about this idea to start this software.

And one of the bloggers named Christine thought of this name WordPress. And she called me. She was like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. There's this name. And the dot org is available. You should go for it. And I just fell in love with it.

And so that's how we chose the name. She had the idea and then I reached the dot org. This is not in 2003, this is not a business story. You and Mike Little were not starting a business, right? You were just starting a project to make blogging, like, easier, more fun, cooler for everybody to contribute to. Is that right? Yeah, the best word is we were hobbyist. This was a hobby.

This is what we did for fun after our jobs. You know, Mike Little had a normal job. was going to school, making websites. How old was Mike? You were like 19 or 18. How old was he at the time? That's a good question. Mike is definitely older than me.

I want to say 10 to 20 years older, right, I guess. So he was probably in his like 30s. Right. At the time. And I was, you know, 19, 20. And I guess eventually, Michelle, the guy who, the original B2 creator, also joined the two of you in this project. Yeah.

So he came back, which was awesome. Where was he? So we found out later that he had gone through a difficult personal period of depression. And so he had kind of unplugged. I still don't know all the details, but that's what he shared with us. Yeah. But he was fine. He was healthy.

He was back. And when he came back, he had seen that, like, oh, all these things blossomed out of this thing. And so he looked at all the different forks and very graciously sort of crowned WordPress, the official continuation of B2. So it was like B2 Cafe Log is done. But the WordPress folks are going to be, if you want the new versions, essentially go to them.

And he became a contributor as well. So he would actually help out with the code and hang out on the WordPress forums and everything like that. But in that first, the first six months, when you and Mike are kind of messaging back and forth, by the way, when was the first time you ever met him?

You started to work together in 2003. He's in the UK. You're in Houston. When did you meet in prison? person for the first time. I could look that up, but it probably would have been closer to like 2005 or 2006. Wow. So you were building this platform with somebody who didn't know anything about, except you knew he was pretty good at what he did, but you didn't know his personal life or story or anything.

And it was just a leap of faith, I guess. It doesn't even sound like there was a leap of faith. You just, it was, both of you were interested and you were just doing it. Yeah. So we met on in January 25th, 2006. So that would have been almost three years to the day from when he left that comment. Did he look, as you imagined? I remember Mike being super cool.

I think he had been into like the punk scene. And he might have had like some piercings or tattoos or something. something. I was just like, oh, cool guy. It's still a cool guy. Honestly, so lucky that Mike and I always got along and we ended up being people who were very compatible. All right, so you and Mike are sort of pursuing this WordPress idea, and officially, I guess, you launched WordPress, you put it out into the world in May of 2003. Who was the kind of person who would have been excited about this? Yeah, bloggers. Bloggers. It was all bloggers. So it would be people who might have used e-blogger or LiveJournal or something like that.

Totally. Also developers. So part of what I did was reached out to all the other forks of B2 and reached out to them and said, hey, instead of working on these separate projects, why don't we pool our resources and all work on the same thing? So all of the forks, except for one, joined up with WordPress. So WordPress, at the time of launch, probably had like five or six main developers. But dozens and dozens of people would make like one small change or one little tweak to it. So this really was like Wikipedia. I mean, this was very, very similar to that model.

Totally. So when you released it, how many people in those first few months do you think start to use it? In the hundreds? Yeah, hundreds. Okay, so it's pretty good. Yeah. What were your costs? I mean, as more and more people began to adopt this software in 2003 into 2004, what did you have to spend money on besides your own time? Well, first we needed a bigger server just because the website was getting too much traffic that it was overloading it. And this is before Amazon Web Services, right? Yeah.

So we essentially rented a server that was like a box in a building somewhere, and you could interact with it online. And so the first one of those was probably like $89 or $99 a month. But my rent at the time was $425 a month. So this was a pretty big expense for me. Probably servers were the main cost at the time. How did you pay for it? Just out of this income I would get from building websites, building computers, and playing saxophone gigs. So I guess you started to get some attention, including from some websites that kind of wrote about this stuff.

And you're still a student. This is a little over a year after you and Mike Little started to put this together. you got an offer, a job offer from CNET, which is still around. It's like a website. They do reviews of technology and stuff. And they wanted you to come work for them. What do they want you to do? Well, kind of what happened was I had set this sort of goal to be the number one result on Google when you search for Matt on the Internet.

So that what that meant if you typed in Matt and pressed, I'm feeling lucky, that button on the Google. that button on the Google homepage, it would just take you directly to my website. And so every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word mat, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, photomat.net. Et cetera is the number one site for people talking about Matt. And so we started to rise up in the rankings. And I think at one point, pretty much all of us were the first results for our names online. So when this happened, there was this conference and is called South by Southwest I'd gone to.

I'd met a lot of people from San Francisco. And one of them, a browser developer named TonTech Chalik, said, hey, come out to San Francisco. You can crash on my couch. And so my plan was to go to San Francisco and couch surf. And so I just said, hey, I'm going to be in San Francisco, you know, August 1 to August 8th. And if you want to hang out, here's my email and here's my phone number. So I kind of announced the world it's going to be in San Francisco. On your blog.

Yeah. And a bunch of folks reached out. Like who? Who reached out? Google reached out. Yahoo reached out. I think AOL reached out. C-NET reached out. So a bunch of companies reached out to meet me while I was there. You go out there and you meet all these people who wanted to meet you because they had been hearing about WordPress. So did you end up meeting with all these companies with Yahoo and AOL and AISN? It was amazing. It really was the center of the universe. And, you know, in Houston, I had a community. Yeah.

But again, there was like probably sub-100 people who were passionate by the things I was passionate about. And in San Francisco, it seemed like everyone was. And they were the people building, you know, the web browsers and the big services. And so every company kind of had a different idea for what they could do with WordPress. And basically, it wasn't, there was nothing to buy, right? So it was not like they were trying to buy it. They were like, hey, we'll hire you. And you could come, maybe still do the WordPress thing, maybe shut it down, but like work on something for us.

Yeah. And so CNET was kind of the first. internet media company. It's the best way to put it. So not unlike a BuzzFeed or vice or something. Right. And so they invented a lot of like what we call CMS or content management systems, because they were the first to really have hundreds of authors and thousands of thousands of posts and be publishing every day. You know, they had CNET.com, which was kind of a tech site. They had news.com. They had download.com, which is where most people went to get their software. And some of them had started to adopt WordPress organically. So just started to use the open source software for their blog group of the time.

And these companies that were hiring me were talking about salaries like $70,000, $80,000. Wow. And you were 19 or 20 maybe at the time. That would have been 20. Was it? I mean, were you surprised by those offers? This was like winning the lottery. It was my dream come true.

And also, my income at the time was probably, you know, sub-werexed. $1,000 a month. So I'm paying some of my bills, still getting help for my parents and my sister. My grandmother probably, they would always bring over food whenever they visited. You know, they say, oh, you're going to math. Take some food. And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating.

Right. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there. Kind of like a musician giving away their masters. And to me, IP rights are incredibly important, so I only wanted to work for a company that would allow me to keep that. How were you so smart to know that at 20? I just read a lot of blogs and read a lot online. So people would talk about this. And also coming from a music background, I was very familiar, studied a ton of music history.

So I was very familiar with the Motown artist and others that they're sort of original recordings. Just signed everything away. Yeah, they were taken from them. And so sometimes they would be in poverty, even though they had created these, most amazing songs. So IP was always super, super important to me. I still, like, I'm a big believer in copyright. I choose to license my copyright in a way that's accessible to everyone. But the core of that that is a respect for copyright. So CNET was the only one that said, yeah, you can retain everything. We just want, we just want you to work with us. But first of all, you have to tell your parents

you're dropping out of college. For you personally, was it a hard decision to make? You were not going to be a college graduate? We definitely talked about it. I think. I think the thing that weighed on me most was my father had worked so hard to go to college. And the first in his, you know, family to ever do so. And I had it so easy. So I just felt the guilt and responsibility of it. But, you know, living in San Francisco was a dream come true. It was like, was the most amazing place in the world to me.

And I think what happened was my family saw that. They just saw the fire in my eyes, the passion. And so ultimately became supportive. and I negotiated for a higher salary, probably from 70 to 90 or something. Wow. And you were making more money than your dad had ever made in his life, probably. Higher, I found out later that it was higher than his salary at the time, because he was kind of bitter, not bittersweet, but he was happy for me,

but I could tell he had a little bit of forlorn, as I told him the news. Yeah. And then later he started his own business where he made a lot more, again, doing the exact same work you've been doing for 25 years. It's amazing how big companies can really just, if they have a good employee, they can just undervalue them. If that employee doesn't speak out or speak up or just look around. Yeah, it actually, you know, I tear up thinking about it. And I've always, it's been really important to me at my companies that we don't do that.

Because when people pay you with loyalty, you need to repay them. I think that people joke about or say criticize that people jump between companies. There's no loyalty anymore. But I think that's the fault of the company, not other people. It's that they're not treating people like they want them around. for 20 years. Yeah. All right.

So you moved to San Francisco. You get an apartment there, presumably. And what were you doing at CNET? What was your job? I think my title was like program manager or something. And so I'd get special projects. And also part of what I would do is I would sort of evangelize WordPress within the company to all the different properties and just help out wherever I could.

What was that like being? I'm trying to go back to when I was 20. I had a lot of self-doubt. I still have self-doubt today. in my late 40s. How did you deal with that? Did you have any of those anxieties at all? Not as much as I should have. I think two things really helped with that. Or maybe three. One, having just a really loving and supportive family. Two, performing. You know, so I would get on stage a couple times a week and, you know, it's terrifying.

Play the saxophone, yeah. Yeah, you learn how to breathe. You learn how to take a few deep breaths and you go for it. And then finally, doing tech support every week. You know, I'd still go to on Saturdays to volunteer to fix people's computers at this nonprofit. So, like, all of that I feel like really, really helped just for talking about technology, connecting with people. And really, you know, folks who are very, very successful come in, you know, like top lawyers or top real estate agents or something. But their computer would be broken and they wouldn't know how to fix it. And I as a kid was able to fix it.

You just developed all these friendships with folks from all sorts of different parts of society that would come together. because we all love to play with computers. Yeah. So it sounds like when you got there, you didn't feel intimidated by it because there must have been some really, really smart people around you. Yeah, I think that, you know, in music, in jazz especially, maybe there's a sitting gig where people come up and just sit in, and you never know how someone's going to sound.

And you also have been the person that goes up in bombs. So you just treat everyone well. And you always remember the days when you weren't that good. And like jazz, you imagine. I mean, with musicians that you weren't familiar with, you just kind of had to riff, right? And especially as free form, you're just kind of, everyone's kind of playing off the other musician. And I guess there's a similar kind of thing with open source coding. You know, I remember reading in a jazz book early on that you always wanted to be the worst person in the band.

Wow. And it's like, wait, why? Yeah. But what that means is that everyone else in the band is better than you and you're learning from them. I love that. So I think, you know, I was always trying to be the worst person. programmer in the room or the worst designer in the room, the worst computer person in the room. Like, I was always trying to surround myself with the smartest people I can meet in whatever area it was.

All right. So you're at CNET and clearly that they're okay with you kind of working on this WordPress.org, open source thing on the side. And I think it's around this time that you come up with the idea for WordPress.com, which was different. That was going to be a for-profit version and sort of like a user-friendly way for people to make block. right? What was your thinking on that? It was actually what I had pitched to my employer. So I'd gone to CNET and said, hey, WordPress is cool, but it's really complicated to set up. If we can make it easy, you just click a few buttons and you get a WordPress, I think that'd be really popular. Let's do that. And that was my pitch to CNET.

And I even pitched a CEO. But they didn't want to. You needed them to finance it. I really just wanted, I felt a lot of loyalty. I had this great job. They were paying me. I was like, this is a really good idea. You also do this idea. You were going to do it for them internally at CNN. Totally, yeah. And they had all these awesome domains, including some ones that weren't being used.

Like, I think I pitched to use online.com. So I go like, let's say online.com. You know, anyone can come and sign up, and you would get like guy.com. And that would be a WordPress install. And you could customize it and blog and do all this cool stuff that you could do with WordPress. Wow. Just with clicking some buttons. And they didn't want it.

They didn't want it. When we come back in just a little. moment, how Matt alienates users by inadvertently putting spam on WordPress and why he winds up walking the streets of Venice, Italy, while on vacation, desperately seeking a Wi-Fi connection. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2005, and Matt has an idea to make WordPress into a tool that can easily be used to build a blog site. And he's actually presented it to his employer.

But once again, they didn't want it. Blogs were seen as kind of like trouble, where people would go to complain about politics. And CNET ultimately decided they didn't want to host blogs. They didn't want the trouble of hosting all these random people writing about things. Because who knows what they would write about? They could publish false things. They could publish whatever.

Which happened. Which happened. Yeah. And then at CNET in particular, there was an interesting culture where they were sort of a respected media organization with journalists and editors. And the bloggers were seen as like silly amateurs. Right. Because there's no editorial control. There's no fact checks.

There's no spell check. I mean, things like that. But there were early technology blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo that were done by a couple of people. That were really good. And we're starting to compete with CNET, which was, you know, a public company with a building and hundreds of employees. With an editorial structure, right. Yeah, and they were moving faster because the software was faster. They were writing more personally, so it was more interesting and fun to read, often than first person.

They didn't know it at the time, but C-NET was kind of being out-competed. Yeah. I actually remember this meeting once. It was one of the awkwardest meeting I'd ever been in. It was the publishers, I think, of News.com, and then me. And so, like, all the developers of the software, probably a dozen people in this meeting. The editor-in-chief, everyone was there. And they said, okay, here is a fully written article ready to go.

and their content management system. Okay, here it is, publish it. And so they went through the steps, and at the time publishing something was like, took 10 or 20 steps, and then they had to rebuild the website for it to be live on the website. And that took another like five or six minutes.

So all in all, you're looking at like 20 minutes, and we all had to sit there while this happened. And then the guy pointed at me, he was like, Matt, here's the written article, publish it. And I just copy and paste it in the WordPress. I press publish, and it was on the website seconds later. Yeah. And I just got these like death stares from all the folks there.

They were like, who is this kid? Who does he think he is? This is dumb. And it's true. The software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways. But it was better in a way that mattered, which was like speed and ease of use. All right.

So meanwhile, you are still at CNET and you launch the company that will wind up being kind of the umbrella organization for work. press and eventually all these other services. And you called this thing automatic, right? Yeah. And during that time, I ended up just out of my salary and credit cards hiring the first employees of what would later be automatic. So I think I incorporated automatic on a website like Legal Zoom, like one of these like you press a few buttons and it becomes a C-Corp. So I incorporated the company and yeah, just started to pay the first few people, you know, not a lot, like a thousand bucks a month or something. And Automatic has two T's. And is that from the mat? I guess technically it has three T's, but yeah. Oh, three T's right. That's right.

A-U-T-O-M-A-T-T-I-C. I love working puns into as many things as possible. Yeah. Without me or just be Autowick. And was your first hire, was your first hire somebody who you already knew through the community of developers who you just worked with on WordPress.org? Yeah. So remember I said there were the other leaders of these forks? Sure. One of them was this guy in Ireland named Donica O'Keeve. And he had made the version of B2 and later of WordPress that allowed you to run many, many sites in one instance. So instead of just running one site, for instance, you could run thousands. And so he was actually my first hire.

And he was based in Dublin? In Blarney, actually. And you'd never met him again face-to-face. This is somebody you just knew through. We just knew each other online. Yeah. And so the idea was we would create a commercial entity that would sell add-ons to WordPress and then easy WordPress hosting. So basically a way that you would run WordPress without having to be a developer.

And that was what Donico was leading, was this kind of multi-user version of WordPress. To make it user-friendly. So the average person who did not know how to code but who wanted a blog could actually use it. Exactly. Because up until this point, really you couldn't. Yeah, and what happened was easy. When WordPress started, it was worse than all the other software out there. It wasn't very good.

It didn't have all the same features and everything like that. But because there were literally later hundreds of people working on it from all over the world, started to iterate really quickly. So we started to have first all the features that everything else had. But then we started to create new things that other folks didn't have. And we were just moving faster. We were just shipping more frequently. So people really want to use WordPress.

So, okay, you have this. company automatic and in you're trying to get this for profit version of WordPress going WordPress.com. And by the way, how are you funding all of this? So we bootstrapped it at first because I had had some started to get some income, but I definitely overextended myself. I had this pretty terrible instance where I was kind of tapping out like my credit cards and everything like that and someone got in touch to advertise on WordPress.org. And this is going to be great because you're going to get some money from that.

Yeah, I think it was $2,000 a month. But what the advertiser was, history was like, hey, you know, we write these websites, but then people rip off our content so we're not ranking high in Google. So could you put some links on your website to our website with these keywords? And the keywords were things like mesotheloma or, you know, like different diseases or keywords that were very valuable to advertise against. and I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS

to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you were visited as a bot like Google, it would look like the words were on the website, so they would count them as valid links. You were basically accepting money from a spammer. And I couldn't see what it really was. totally blind to it.

Yeah. And you know, there's that famous quote, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when a salary depends on not understanding it. Right. So I, you know, was kind of foolish. Then what happened was someone noticed this. They were looking at the code and be like,

whoa, what are these random links there? And they did this blog post about it. And I was actually on my first ever vacation with my college girlfriend. and we were in Italy. And we had saved up the money. Like, it was really like a special trip. And I called my sister to say like, hey, I'm in Italy. You know, just checking in with her.

And she was like, oh, Matt, like, I saw you on the news. And she started reading this article about how this code was discovered. There was this huge online outcry about it. Then Google came in. And, of course, they were pretty mad that this code had outsmarted their search engine. So they actually removed WordPress for. from Google. Oh, wow.

You know, that's like being taken off the internet almost. Yeah. And all this was happening when I'm MII. Like, literally, I have no idea. I'm offline for the first time in my adult life. And I just freak out. I'm like, oh, my goodness. And start, I think we're in Venice at the time.

And I just grabbed my laptop and start walking around the city with my laptop in the hand looking for open Wi-Fi conditions. Because at the time, people wouldn't put passwords on the Wi-Fi. It was so rare. This is 2005. Yeah. So if you found someone who had a network, you could stand outside their house and, like, get on it. But the hotel didn't have it.

No one had it. And we figured out the only place that we could find that have it was the airport. This poor girl I was dating at the time, she was very kind and understanding. And we went to the airport at, you know, five in the morning. And I just kind of was on my computer for the next, like, two days. Wow. Trying to fix this thing. How long did it take before Google reinstated to repress?

So people were saying really terrible things. But as I was reading it, I was also starting to see the truth. I had really screwed up in a big way and betrayed trust. And so first I just posted a mea culpa. And I said literally what happened? Like, hey, I've been offline. Sorry, I totally missed this. I did put these links on there.

And I took them down immediately. So kind of in breach of the agreement I had with this guy to keep the links up. And it's funny. The guy who did this was actually kind of nice. So I contacted him. I was like, hey, I can't return the money right now. I already spent it, but like, let me give it back to you over the next few months. And he was actually really nice.

He was like, you know what? Don't worry about it. Keep the $2,000 for this month. And, you know, sorry. He basically said, sorry, you got caught. But I've hosted this big apology. And, yeah, eventually Google forgave me. So they forgave WordPress and they put it back in the search.

engines. Yeah. So right around this time, I think you also leave C-Net entirely to focus on automatic. And I think the very first project you do after leaving C-NET is actually anti-spam software, right? So the anti-spam was my Catholic guilt. Right. Right. So the first commercial product I created was called a kismet, named by my sister. A kismet. Yeah. It's kind of the weekend after I left Cynet. I actually had, I was pretty sick. My sister had come to visit, and somehow I had gotten like a flu or something. I'm like wrapped up in a blanket, and she's like making me soup and stuff, and I'm literally feverishly writing the code.

That's part of how she named it, she was visiting me in San Francisco at the time. It's your destiny, a kismet. Yes, automatic kismet. It was essentially a machine learning system that would look at not just one blog, but like all of them, basically, like, thousands or millions of blogs, and look for patterns in the comments. And the spammers would have patterns, which were different from humans. And so then a kismet would essentially return a thumbs up or thumbs down. And if the thumbs up, it was probably a legit comment.

And if it was a thumbs down, it was probably spam. So it would save you the time of having to manually moderate all your comments or have spam on your website. And so it was free to use for personal use. And then the idea is for commercial use. You'd pay like, you know, 50 bucks a year or something. Right. And that was very much my business model. I try to do like Robin Hood business models.

Like Rob from the rich, give to the poor, you know, things would be free for personal use and then paid for commercial use. Yep. And was that going to be your business or was it going to be part of something bigger? The idea was for it to be a business. And, you know, part of the idea was that WordPress would always be free. And that's maybe the razor, but perhaps we could figure out some razor blades we could sell. Some add-on services that would be really most useful to people who are using it more seriously. and then businesses could pay for that. All right, so you now know that this is going to be what you're going to focus on,

but to really do it, you have to bring in some money. And I think by late that year in October of 2005, you did get a little bit of money, a little bit over a million dollars that you raised from a few people, including CNET, right? Yeah, so in that original bootstrapping stage before we raised money, every employer was in a different city all over the country and all over the world, actually. But then what happened was, you know, I realized that there were four or five people who they had left their jobs and they were sort of trusted in this thing. And we were making some money. Maybe we were making like $10,000 a month at that point, $20,000 a month.

But if something happened and we stopped making the money, we were making, would have only had like a month or a month and a half of salaries left. Right. And so I started to fill this real responsibility to all these folks who put their trust in me. So we actually, the money was optional in the sense that we didn't need it to run the business. But I definitely wanted to have that buffer. So if something happened to the business, we would all have enough time to find out the jobs. So how did you start to raise money? So actually the journalist named Olmahak, who was one of the first users of WordPress.

He was a blogger, but also wrote for like Fortune and Forbes and Business 2.0 and all these big magazines. So he introduced me again as a 20, 21-year-old kid, to, like people like these investors and people who had built companies before. And one of them was this guy Tony Schneider who had actually just had one of the biggest startup sales at the time. He had sold his startup to Yahoo. And so Tony and I met, we hit it off amazingly. And then I talked to these investors. But honestly, if I hadn't met Tony, I wouldn't have raised money. Because at the time, the model was not like, if you're the founder, you run the company forever, like Mark Zuckerberg. Right. It was like, if you're the founder, you hire adult supervision.

the model was Google, which had these two founders, Larry and Sergey, but then they hired the adult Eric Schmidt to ruin the company. So people were like, yeah, we'll fund you, but you need to hire a CEO. You need to hire an adult. I didn't like that. But I thought, well, if I can choose the adult, it might not be that bad. And then I met Tony Schneider, who's like my business soulmate. And I was like, okay, this guy I can learn so much from.

He's amazing. He gets open source. He gets the philosophy. He's not going to mess it up. So raise the money. Got Tony to agree to leave his job. and he joined and became CEO. He's a CEO.

What was your official title? Were you CTO? My title was president. Right. Because I always wanted it to be more than just the tech person. I wanted to be involved in the business and the design and everything. Yeah. How did you begin to attract people to adopt your platform, to adopt the service?

It was really all word of mouth. One thing we did at the time was every website running WordPress by default in the template. it would say powered by WordPress. And so when you visit a website you liked, you would see this link and be like, oh, let me click on that. And then you'd be like, oh, I can run this. I could do this. Also, I would just go to different blogs.

And whenever I saw someone blog about, oh, my website's getting really slow, like, be like, hey, I'm working on this thing called WordPress. You should try it out. It's really fast. And if you want to use it, I'll help you move over. Or like, I was kind of just one customer at a time going to every blog, every website I could, and evangelizing it. Yeah. And the business model was basically free. It was free to use, like Dropbox, right? Anybody could just go to WordPress and start a blog, and it was, they didn't have to pay anything.

Yeah, but we couldn't, we knew we couldn't handle the demand at the time. If too many people signed up, the thing would fall over. Because again, it's just, it's a couple of, you know, old servers patched together with duct tape and everything. So we created a golden ticket system. And basically, it was an invite system where you could get granted this golden ticket. ticket, like an homage to Willy Wonka. And that would get you access to start a blog on the service. Right. And then these tickets started to sell on eBay. So people would get the free ticket, and then they would start to list it or sell it. And tickets were starting to sell for like $90, $100, $120 on eBay. Wow.

And we were like, huh, maybe people will pay for the site. So that really kind of opened up our mind. Those people selling the gold tickets opened up our mind for the business opportunity of it. And so was the idea at the time, the idea at the idea, at the time, a time, 2006, 2007, was not to, or was it to power the internet? Was it for every web page to be a WordPress webpage? Or at that point was the idea still, let's get people blogging. Let's help it make it easy for people to blog. That was one we first started to think that it could be pretty popular. Google had done this survey, published a survey of the internet. It was kind of like

a statistical analysis of all the websites that were in the Google Index. And the code they used. And there was this part of the report that said, yeah, and then on 0.8% of websites, we found this weird HGTP header that was X-Pingback. And me and the other WordPress developers read that, and we freaked out. We were like, oh, my goodness, that's a special piece of code that WordPress adds to its site. And so we were like, wait, does this mean that WordPress sites are 0.8% of all the pages in Google? And that was just kind of. kind of mind-blowing. Like, it really, like, you had to sit down. It was... That's a lot.

Like, fireworks going off of my head. I'm like, that is incredible. Especially because it was just a year old, right? Yeah, maybe two years old, but like... Two years old, yeah. And so we really started to focus on, like, and think about, you know, could there be a day, that WordPress was 5% of the Internet or 10% on the Internet? Wow. I guess 2007, so this is really like, not that long, you know, two years after you really are, focused on this full time, you got an acquisition offer. And I imagine you started to get a lot of

acquisition offers. And you detailed and outlined much of this transparently on your blog, your life. So this is all out there, which is very different from a lot of companies. Like you talk about numbers, you talk about offers. And the offer was for $200 million to buy automatic. I mean, that's a pretty good, it's a pretty good offer. Did you, you must have. have seriously considered taking it. Oh, man. Yeah, I got to tell you, that was overwhelming. Because we were only 15, 20 people at the time.

I still owned well over half the company. And so this idea that the for-profit company that we've been building for about two years was going to be, had this offer, a very serious offer, turned a million dollars, was really astounding. You could have walked with a hundred million bucks. Yeah.

Trust me, I was thinking about that. You were like 23, 24. I mean, that's kind of insane. I was 23. But then, you know, I started to really think about it. I was like, well, what do I do? Do I retire? You know, I work for this company for a while, but, you know,

one of the things I learned at seeing it as well is that sometimes, I don't know if I was the best at working for other people. I really wanted to work for myself. And so I thought, well, I'd work there probably for a few years, but at some point I'd leave. Thinking about retiring just seemed boring. And so I thought, well, I forget who asked me. Maybe it was my sister or my mom and my dad.

It was like, well, if you have $100 million, what are you going to do with it? I was like, huh, what would I do with $100 million? Buy a super cool car or like, you know, buy a house for my parents or I thought some things I would do. But I was like, okay, that's like $5 million. What do you do with the rest? And I was like, well, I don't know. And when I really thought about it, what I would most want to do, I would want to code every day. I'd want to travel the world and meet WordPress users all over the world.

I'd want to make software that people used and do it with people I enjoyed working with and not answer to anyone. Like just, you know, answer to ourselves. So that really was the clarification. I would want to do exactly what I was doing right then. When we come back at the break, how Matt's devotion to open source inspires competitors and copycats. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2007, and Matt has just turned down an offer of $200 million to acquire Automatic, the company behind WordPress.

And at this point, the CEO, Tony Schneider, and all the investors, they wanted to know if Matt had a plan. So what they said to me, with investors and Tony, said, Matt, if you're going to be going to be a new. to say no to this, what are you saying yes to? What's the thing that's better than this? They also believed that WordPress could be way, way, way bigger than what it was in 2007. It could be worth a lot more than $200 million. So what they did was they took the $200 million and they said, okay, that'll be the valuation of the company. Well, do a new round of investment. Instead of putting in $1 million, we're going to put in $10 million into the company and we'll take the early shareholders, including me, and we'll buy some of your shares, what's called a

secondary sale. So it allowed us to do essentially like a partial cash out, make some money from these shares, take some chips off the table, is what they said. Right. And this would also make me not tempted the sell again because I would make a few million dollars. And other people involved could sell some stock that they would all make a really good amount of money. And then we could refocus on building a company that was worth a lot more than $200 million. Wow. The business model was still mainly free to use. Is it fair to say? I mean, But the business model was you would pay for features or you would buy these things. So I have to assume that you knew you were not going to be profitable for a while.

Well, the business model to this day is free to use. Yeah. But we always ran the business around break-even. So we try to grow the company organically. As the revenues grew, we'd hire people. And no faster. That's why we were only like 15 or 20 people. We were probably making, you know, 150, 200 grand a month.

But you also, I mean, turned down that acquisition offer, I mean, a year before the financial crisis began, right? And I mean, there must have been some people around you who were like, ooh, we made a mistake because now everything's just going to hell. Yeah, two things happened. The financial crisis actually crashed the advertising market, which was part of how we were making money at the time. So if you had a free WordPress website, we would put on like some Google Ads and stuff. and other ads on it. And then when you upgraded to pay, you'd remove the ads. So it was like one of the differences

between the free version and the paid version. And still the same today, I think. Yeah, very similar to the day. The other thing was about a quarter or a third of our usage at the time was in China. And China decided that the great firewall would block WordPress.com. So like a huge chunk of our users just disappeared overnight.

They blocked WordPress.com because why? It was a free place where people could publish. and bloggers in China were publishing things that the CCP didn't like. And that combined with the advertising model going out, it was a big hit to the business. But luckily we had this money in the bank, so we're able to dip into the buffer. And it saw us through to the point when the economy and our business and other things started to recover. I guess the adoption rate just grew by 2009. through 10 million downloads of WordPress,

still primarily being used for blogs at that point? 2009, yeah. So actually before that, we added a feature to manage not just a blog, but it could run your entire website. So it could have pages in addition to post. And that became kind of a really key feature because you could have permanent pages, archives, wikis, all sorts of things. So that was WordPress really becoming what today we'd call a CMS

or content management system versus just journal. or blogging software. You know, I'm curious because as you were growing and becoming more and more, you know, widely adopted by bigger and bigger companies as the sort of their websites. And you presumably are seeing these big tech companies with these big offices in San Francisco. And did you guys have a big office that you set up in San Francisco? It was really just Tony and me in San Francisco. and we couldn't afford, but wasn't economical, or good for the people, to move everyone to the city.

It cost a living. Even then, San Francisco was way more expensive than pretty much every other place in the world. And to uproot like Donica from his family and Blarney just seemed strange. And we'd have to deal with immigration. It was just like it didn't make sense. So we were doing something that was really heterodox and revolutionary for business, but actually that open source projects had been doing. for over a decade, which was just bringing people together to collaborate online.

You didn't need to be in the same office to work on the same code together. You left San Francisco, moved back to Houston in 2011 because you could. It didn't matter where you were, I guess. You have never, I mean, do you have offices? Do you have physical offices in cities around the world? So basically what's happened over the years is we would try to keep a small meeting space. And then often when we would acquire companies, they would usually have an office. Usually what happens is when the company joins, we acquire them, they say, oh, we really need their office.

We say, okay, we'll pay the rent, we'll keep it going, we'll keep the lease going. But then once they start to learn our way of working, fewer and fewer people go into the office until at some point they're like, hey, yeah, we don't need this anymore. If we want to get together, we can always rent an Airbnb or conference room. And so right now, we still have a New York office, kind of the vestiges of the Tumblr acquisition. But that has happened with, yeah, literally every company we've required. It even has happened with Tumblr. How did you create a culture, right? You hear a lot about companies that, you know, companies that are focused now much more today than ever before in culture, building culture.

And obviously, the pandemic has changed everything. But this is pre-pandemic. You were already distributed. How did you develop a WordPress culture where people felt connected to the company when everybody was kind of working on their own in their own apartments or houses around the world? So we'd say like a week or two a year, we're good together. We'd do these meetups where people would come together, like where we'd fly everyone into San Francisco. We rented a house up in Stinson Beach, and then we just kind of worked there. And then all the rest of the time, we were just talking constantly all day and all night, online.

Yeah. What I'm trying to figure out is like you guys had to sell an enterprise product to enterprise customers. You needed like business development people, people going out there and selling, or am I wrong? Was it all the traffic, all the incoming traffic was just coming through websites and people inquiring about how they could sign up? It was really organic. And the first probably five years of the business, it was all consumers. So people just swiping a credit card and buying things for a few bucks. month usually. Later, around 2008-2009, we did start to develop our VIP program, which was enterprise. It was big businesses. But the first big businesses, it was folks already using WordPress, sometimes using it to a large scale. Blogs like TechCrunch, what started was just one guy

blogging were turning into major media companies. And they were still on WordPress as they did. So with WordPress.com, right, which is the service that today most people interact with it as this is how they create a website. If it's all open source, everything that is on WordPress.com, like if I'm a company, why wouldn't it just copy everything that you make available for everyone to see and just create a competitive brand without having to invest any of the money? I mean, you could do that in theory, right? It's a very good question.

So WordPress is a type of open source that you can basically do anything with it, but it has one restriction. if you modify it and you distribute those modifications, you have to give your users downstream people the same freedom that you had. So they also have to have the freedom to modify it. They also have to have the freedom to redistribute it. So you can't just take the code and make it proprietary. You have to take the code, you can modify it,

but you have to share those modifications. But of course, that can lead to conflict. Like you got into a dispute with a competitor called Wix, all about this. So how do you manage that type of thing? Like, how do you enforce it? It's just copyright law and licenses and everything. So we actually had lots of competitors at WordPress.com that would take the same code and compete with us. And that was totally fine, actually. What we often go to bat for and fight for, including with this company called Wix, is what they did was they took her code. And then the code they derived from it, so the modifications

they met were, they said we're proprietary and secret. to Wix. And so what we said is, no, he can't do that. You're violating the copyright. That's happened not just with Wix, but with other companies over the years. And now we fight, because that's taking away people's freedom. Will you go to court? Usually we're able to settle it through the court of public opinion is probably the easiest way. Right. Which is good, because honestly, when Wix did that, they had way more money than us. So a legal battle would have taken years and even possibly bankrupted automatic, depending on how long it went. So it was a little bit of a brinksmanship because, on one level,

we're threatening them that we're going to go to court to fight this violation. But I also knew that if that happened, that would really put the company in a tough spot. Yeah. By the way, it's totally okay to copy ideas. That is completely allowed. WordPress has no patents. We have no anything. Right.

You can compete with us. You could call it Guy Press and sell it. You could modify it. You could, you know, do whatever you want. But you just have to make those modifications also free. I mean, it's interesting because, you know, a lot of times these, like, I'll interview founders and I'll talk about, ask about competitors and they'll say, oh, I never paid attention to competitors. You know, we just focus on our product. And I know that's not true because I've been in this business for 25 years and I always look at competitors.

You're open about this. You really, it seems like it's a personal affront to you. You know, I don't harbor ill will anymore. We have plenty of competitors that have borrowed ideas from WordPress. You know, Shopify is a $170 billion company. Their dashboard looks a lot like the WordPress dashboard, especially the early versions. How do you feel about that? Totally fine.

That's part of the free marketplace of ideas. People learn, things get invented, then people copy it, they modify it, they remix it. WordPress has done that many times over its history. Yeah. Honestly, like I said, when we started WordPress, there was lots of blogging software out there already. There was blogger. There was all these others. I even said, I was inspired by them.

There was a point, and you can probably see it on the blog, I was really mad at Wix. Yeah. I read this, I was reading a Buddhism book, and it came across this quote that said, hate is like a hot coal you hold in your hand hoping to pass it to someone else. I was like, oh, that's what I'm doing. why am I getting worked out? Why am I losing sleep holding this grudge? So I would say I was obsessed with competitors before.

I still check them out for ideas. But now I'm very much like, hey, it's a big internet. We can grow the whole pie. And so I agree with you that everyone looks at competitors. You shouldn't pretend you don't. But if you can't lead by them, if you're always copying, you're always going to be two steps behind. You became CEO in 2014.

After really working under Tony for, I guess, at that point, 70 years, what did that mean? I mean, was that a really a significant change in the way you lived your life? Because I'm assuming your fingers were not, you know, you weren't in the kitchen, so to speak, as much anymore once you became CEO. I was still writing code, yeah. Basically, so we did the Passover of becoming CEO, actually the day after my 30th birthday. And part of what had happened was, you know, I'd been working with him for, and known Tony, for eight or nine years at that point. We've been working together at the company in like seven years.

And he was teaching me. Like he enjoyed being leading small things and WordPress was getting a lot bigger. I was really passionate about bigger things and growing and getting to scale, taking us from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000. And then Tony actually stayed at the company, which was really powerful. So he demonstrated something that's very important to Automatic Culture, which is like, you don't always be the need to be the lead. If someone else could be a better lead, you should pass it to him. And you can still be at the company and find something in terms. passionate about. So he went to lead a smaller group, a group, basically like an R&D group that's

creating new products. And it did that for, I think, another seven or eight years after stepping down a CEO. You wrote a really beautiful blog post just after your father passed away. He passed away in 2016. And you talked about something that I struck me and I think struck a lot of people, which is that grief is this thing that we don't, we can't anticipate, that it's not a one-time event that you, that you experience, but you wrote about aftershocks of grief that lasted a long time. It may still come up now and again, a song, just to drive or just seeing somebody or something would just remind you of him. Did you take time off of work? I mean, what were some of the ways you kind of dealt with that?

Part of my grieving process was this feeling of helplessness that terrified me. And part of what allowed me to feel in control was I really dove into work. And it was a real solve for me. solve, solve, something that sort of comforted me, you know. There's his quote from Simone George that says, grief is a raging river. You have to get in to get to the next place. But it wasn't until after he died that it hit me,

that things weren't going to go back to normal. And I had to get in that raging river. And it was really, really overwhelming. And then I couldn't look at that computer. I couldn't do any of that stuff. So the thing that had been a solve for me while he was in the hospital, I just didn't have the mental capacity to think about. So it was almost like I was leading a dual life where sometimes I would be almost like a machine, you know, just kind of like coldly pushing down all the emotions and all the everything going on and trying to get something done. You know, be strong for my family and everything like that.

And then other times I just like, yeah, just break down. I think for a lot of people that experience changes how they interact with other people going forward, especially those who are dealing with grief. And I wonder whether that experience in some ways helped prepare you for what would happen with the pandemic. because it's interesting. You were a distributed company, right, already. And so I think most people might assume that you were super well set up for the pandemic, that there was no friction, it didn't affect anything. But from what I understand it, actually was not the case.

Like many companies, you also had some big challenges to deal with, even though you were already distributed. It was like living in two worlds simultaneously. We were able to work just fine. Right. Everyone could log into their computer. We're very lucky in that we needed to go out to the world to do our job, so people found it very easy to isolate.

So that was lucky. But then, of course, pandemics take tolls on people. People were getting sick. Family members were getting sick and dying. And so I feel like early on, probably because people would start to work even more because there was something they could do. We really started to see people get burnt out. And then, of course, the impact on people with kids was tremendous.

I mean, how did you deal with the kind of the cultural challenges of it? I mean, you know, it's been a really, you know, challenging moment in human history, right? Especially in the United States with divisions over politics and expectations over what companies should do or say. And, you know, we had Brian Armstrong on a show a couple of months ago of Coinbase. And, you know, I think most listeners will know a certain point. He basically said, let's just know more politics in the company. Do what you want outside. But in this space, we're just not going to talk about politics anymore because it's become too problematic or challenging or divisive.

How do you view that? That was a really tough and divisive time. Because at the time, you know, we had the terrible tragedy of George Floyd and others, protest in the streets. The discussions internally, you know, we have these internal forums at automatic where employees can talk about just whatever. some of them anonymous, some of them under their names. And these got really, really spicy. The fights got worse than I've ever seen. And things would be compared to genocide or Nazism or other things really, really quickly.

And it wasn't people just trolling. They really felt this. But we had another ingredient that I think a lot of other tech companies didn't have, which was we were super truly global. I have colleagues in 93 countries. And the issues are different in other countries than they are in the U.S. The history is different. Yeah.

And the oppression is different. And slavery is different. Like the politics is different. Everything's truly different. Right. And so we had things going on in the U.S. But then we also had, we had a colleague get arrested in Belarus because he was blogging and speaking out against the dictatorship there and things.

And so, like, really, like with even our direct colleagues, some of them were being super affected in different ways. ways. We're also seeing the pandemic play out differently all over. And I've lots of colleagues in India. And like as the Delta wave and other things started just rage through that, you know, they have colleagues dying. Are their family members dying every day? You know, that's not a conversation about moral relativism, but it is a conversation about there's a lot of issues in the world. And we can't compare them, but you can't acknowledge that, you know, what's going in China with the Uyghurs is really important. And it's different than what we're what's going in the U.S. with police violence.

And these things evolved. So I think that allowed us to take the conversation to a place of shared humanity and understanding. And we never banned talking about politics. We did ban talking about some of it anonymously. Right. So we said some of these things, if you want to talk about this, that's fine,

but do it under your own name. You've described your company as sort of, you wanted to be like the Berkshire Hathaway at the internet. You've acquired a bunch of companies. companies along the way, Tumblr Pocketcasts, a podcast app, which was really cool. Adivist, Longreads, that's just a few, and there's many, many more. The company, I think Automatic is valued based on all the rounds of fundraising. It's done over $7 billion.

You power 40% of websites. What's the plan? I mean, is there a plan? Is it go public? Is it get acquired? I mean, at some point the investors are going to want to get paid? I don't know. What do you think?

Our mission, which has been pretty much the same since WordPress started, is to democratize publishing and commerce. And I don't talk about it as much because it's not really unique, but we've built a really big business at Automatic 2. You're profitable. Yeah. Investors value it not for $7 billion plus because of they like my philosophy. They do it because of the revenue and the business and the growth and the customers and the millions of subscribers and things like that.

But you wouldn't go public? You know, a public offering could be one form of exit. And there's a lot of things I'd love about it because I'd love for more of the WordPress community to be able to own a chunk of automatic. The way the laws work, that's not really possible unless you're public. But for investors, they can buy a small piece of automatic. And if they ever get tired of it, they can sell it. There's new investors who are more than happy to buy it. Sure.

So, you know, I'm a CEO. I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders or community, everything. But you can serve that in many, many ways and kind of honestly more than ever as a private company. Companies like Stripe, SpaceX, they've gone to 100 billion plus valuations as private company. So you don't need to go public anymore. That's true. How much of your, of this story and your what happened from this little community in Corsica, based in Korska that you joined in 2002 to where you are today,

how much of that do you think has to do with your skills and your talent and how much would you attribute to luck? You have to work really hard. And what I got from my dad is just I'm going to work harder, and I'm going to be impeccable. And when we were pressed hard, I definitely wasn't the best programmer. I was like, I'm just going to work more than everyone else. And ideally work on something that you would do doesn't feel like work.

I was working on something that I would want to do even if I had all the money in the world in every course. And a lot of the stories we talked about, there was a lucky break. I was very lucky to be introduced to Tony Schneider, who was like an amazing first CEO of the company. I was lucky to have investors that were supportive of us doing things differently and building something a different way than all the other companies at the time. So that's a lot of luck, to be honest. And then when fortune comes, when an opportunity is there, you're able to really capitalize on it. that's Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automatic and co-founder of WordPress.

By the way, you can learn a lot about Matt from his own blog posts of which there are many. For example, a while back, he blogged that his very first Gmail address was M, M, M, M, M, M, M, at gmail.com. And he said that was because Matt was too short, and Matthew was taken. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rumpteen Arablewe. It was edited by Neba Grant with research help from Claire Murashima.

Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. Our production staff includes Casey Herman, Julia Carney, Elaine Coates, Liz Metzger, Carrie Thompson, and Alex Chung. Our intern is Margaret Serino. And just a quick note, this is the last episode with our executive producer Jeff Rogers. Jeff has been part of this show from the very beginning and is a major reason why this show is what it is today. His kindness, brilliance, and mentorship will be missed by the whole team at how I built this. Thank you so much, Jeff. You've made everything we've done so much better. I'm Guy Raz. I'm Guy Raz. and you've been listening to how I built this.