Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Please put your hands together for Matt Mullenwig. Matt Mullenwig has been making some questionable moves recently. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days. 20 plus years of good sentiment burned in days. You were like a 100% beloved hero of open source and internet. And now you're like in this. A lot of people don't like you.

Starting point is 00:00:23 If you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress, it's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. Previously, like 1% of the world thought I was terrible. And now I feel like it's up to like 4 or 5%. People that don't know what the hell is going on. Well, it's just like the high level overview of what's going on? There's a company called WP Engine. By 2018, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. You know, since 2019, WP Engine has kind of changed a bit.

Starting point is 00:00:47 They started using the trademark. They're offering something called WordPress. I refer to it as like a bastardized, hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand. Why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy? A lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know, get out of bed. Today, my guest is Matt Mullenweg. Matt is the co-creator of WordPress, which powers 40% of websites on the internet today,

Starting point is 00:01:14 including Whitehouse.gov. He's also the CEO of Automatic, which is valued at over $7 billion, and owns products like WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Gravatar's, and Pocketcasts. There is a lot of drama these days around Matt and WordPress. and within the open source community. So I thought I'd have Matt on to address many of the criticisms head on that he hasn't addressed in other places and also just get the full story in what's going on.

Starting point is 00:01:40 We also chat about what incepted him to spend over half his life at this point on open source and creating WordPress. Also why products like Lama are what he calls fake open source and his perspective on AI and open source. Also how AI is actually trained on open source code and what that means for the future and his approach for deciding what companies to acquire within automatic. If you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

Starting point is 00:02:07 Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion and Superhuman and Perplexity Pro and Linear and Granola. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Matt Mullenweg. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercell, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the Fine Grain Authorization Service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale, while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control

Starting point is 00:03:21 or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim, or user management. You should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Ot Zero and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at WorkOS.com to learn more. That's WorkOS.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Cassiopo, CEO and co-founder Vanta, joining me for this very short conversation. Great to be here.

Starting point is 00:03:51 big fan of the podcast and the newsletter. Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for? Sure. So we started Vanta in 2018, focused on founders, helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC2 or ISO-20101. Today, we currently help over 9,000 companies, including some startup household names like Atlassian, Ramp, and Langchain. start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance, centralizing GRC, and accelerating security reviews. That is awesome.

Starting point is 00:04:32 I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources, and nobody wants to spend time doing this. That is very much our experience, but before the company and some extent during it. But the idea is with automation, with AI, with software, we are helping customers build trust with prospects and customers in an efficient way. And, you know, our joke, we started this compliance company, so you don't have to. We appreciate you for doing that. And you have a special discount for listeners.

Starting point is 00:04:58 They can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash lenny. That's va, nta.com slash lenny for $1,000 off Vanta. Thanks for that, Christina. Thank you. Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks. It's a, you know, a big fan, a longtime listener.

Starting point is 00:05:20 happy to be on. I'm a long time fan. I've been wanting to get you on this podcast for so long, and this is such an interesting time to be chatting with you. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days, so it's really interesting. It's almost good that we waited a little bit to talk, so we're going to get into a lot of that stuff. But I want to start with just, what is it that you do, Matt? What are all the things you're involved in, give people a sense of just the things you're working on? So first, when I was 19, I co-founded an open source project called WordPress. with Mike Little, and we started just blogging software, then became sort of a full site thing, and then became like a platform that really tons of stuff is built on.

Starting point is 00:06:02 Now it's kind of transitioning into like this cool WASM can be embedded anywhere, run locally, or make mobile apps. It's like really interesting seeing WordPress use as an engine for powering, like, things I would say don't even look like a website, which is kind of wild to me. But that's kind of the beauty of open source. People do things with that you don't expect. ended up dropping out of college moving in San Francisco and then worked at CNET for a year as product manager actually that's how they are.

Starting point is 00:06:27 I want to talk about that, but go on. And then, you know, had this vision where, you know, instead of like downloading the software and setting up a database and everything, we could make like a SaaS version of WordPress. I pitched it at CNET. They didn't want to do it. So I was like, okay, I got to do this. So I left and started a company called Automatic. The idea was to create essentially like complement the core WordPress software with some

Starting point is 00:06:49 commercial services. things that run in the cloud, like a Kisman anti-spam, which is our sort of machine learning. I guess you call it AI now, but like anti-spam system, or Jetpack, which is like ICloud for WordPress, you know, does the backups in the real-time sync and everything like that. So that was 19 years ago. So that's now grown to be, you know, over 1,700 people in actually 90 countries. So we've actually been fully distributed and remote and asynchronous from the start, which I think is one of our superpowers.

Starting point is 00:07:20 I actually wasn't the CEO in the beginning, but in 2014, so I guess 11 years ago, I became CEO. The original CEO was, well, I guess I wasn't the very beginning, but then I hired Tony Schneider would be CEO probably four or five months in. And yeah, so that is a very full-time thing. And Automatic does a lot of products. That's WordPress.com, WooCommerce, which is open source Shopify, which is now half our revenue. And then we have some really cool apps. So like Beeper, day one, Simple Note, Pocketcasts.

Starting point is 00:07:53 We're trying to fill up your home screens with open web, open source things that are very privacy and user-centric. So that, you know, running that company is definitely like a full-time job. I still run WordPress.org and the WordPress project. So I'm the lead developer there. And so sort of manage all those releases in the community and the, you know, the directories and all the sort of things we do on WordPress. Is that a work? This cool thing called Openverse, we took over from Creative Commons, which is like a way you can find sort of open licensed images and audio and video.

Starting point is 00:08:26 So basically, if you notice a throughput through all these things, it's open source. Unlike the nights and weekends or like side, a few hours a week, I do some angel investing. So I've done over 100 angel investments through an entity called Audrey Capital, which is sort of the, if anything's in the sort of WordPress space, I invest in it through automatic. But if anything's like a little more further afield, um, due through Audrae Capital and I've done, uh,

Starting point is 00:08:51 some really exciting investments there. Everything from sort of name brands like Stripe and SpaceX, but also like, uh, it was in the seat of calm or, um, a lot of home automation stuff like ring, August,

Starting point is 00:09:03 smart things. Um, yeah, just check out Audrey. It's got some fun stuff in there. Daylight computer, which is one I'm very excited about right now. And I guess finally,

Starting point is 00:09:12 I love San Francisco. So, uh, you know, did it. I have a, co-owner of a cool grungy jazz club at North Beach called Keys

Starting point is 00:09:19 with Simon Rowe and so if you Wednesday through Saturday night you want to see some awesome live jazz check out Keys wow okay you said to you too much I get it now jazz club I was not aware of

Starting point is 00:09:33 I got to check this out it's called Keys yeah Keys Jazz Beast truck it's uh yeah over on Broadway in Columbus kind of right around there amazing that was new that was news to me going back to Automatic I think people don't get the scale.

Starting point is 00:09:47 This thing, so just to mirror back a few things and even add to what you've said. 1,700 people worked there, 90 different countries. Also, you didn't share this stat. Something like 43% of the internet websites are built on WordPress, run on WordPress. Yeah, so when we started, a lot of websites were built on custom CMSs, and there's a lot of fragmentation in the space. But now WordPress has grown to be, yeah, over 40% of all websites in the world, which is 10x to number two, which right now is Shopify.

Starting point is 00:10:17 Right. They're like at 4%. I was looking at that list. They're around 4%. That's unreal. It used to be open source was the top three. Unfortunately, like Jubla and Druple have fallen behind. And so now it's like Shopify, Wixper space are the top ones.

Starting point is 00:10:33 But WordPress is still, you know, because we have this flywheel of open source, community, its movements. You know, it kind of has this, you know, like any open source, like Linner's. or Apache or Wikipedia, it has some positive flywheel effects when it takes off. Awesome. Okay. And then there's a few other things you'd mention. I want to get to this later, but I'll just mention now. You guys own Tumblr and you bought Tumblr, which I don't think a lot of people necessarily know.

Starting point is 00:10:56 Sorry, I forgot to mention that. We're going to get into that. Yeah. Yeah, running a social network is definitely the hardest thing I've ever attempted. I thought we knew what we were doing because, you know, WordPress ran so much the web. I thought every content moderation thing you could ever deal with, but social networks are a whole other whole other ballgame. Okay, a couple more fun facts before we get into some other stuff I want to chat about. Fun fact number one is you're super involved in the Bay Lights project. I didn't know this.

Starting point is 00:11:24 For people I don't know what the Baylight's project, if you're in San Francisco, you definitely know what the Baylights project and I'm sure you love it. For people I don't know what this is about, what is this project, then how have you been involved? Why have you been instrumental to make you this a thing? Baylights, you know, there's two famous bridges in San Francisco, the Golda Gate Bridge, which kind of the iconic one. There's actually the Bay Bridge, which is the workhorse of San Francisco. It has like the most, it's one of the business bridges in the country. And it's really beautiful from like an engineering point of view. And so kind of a vision between Ben Davis and an artist Leo Villa Real, who's an amazing

Starting point is 00:11:59 light artist, actually how to start a Burning Man, was to put, gosh, I forget the number. I think 18,000 LEDs on the side of the bridge, like on all the cables and create this really beautiful, gentle, kind of like algorithmic light piece, light art piece. And the, yeah, Ben Davis was dating an artist friend of mine and we were over and having

Starting point is 00:12:25 drink some of my patio when we were looking at the Bay Bridge. And I had this kind of thing where like there's some lights at the top of the Bay Bridge. I was like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if those lights were like Christmas lights and they could do patterns or something? You know, it's the lights to keep planes from hitting it. And I was like, oh, you could like program that. He was like, yeah. It's almost like the social network thing where like a million's cool, but a billion, it'd be really cool.

Starting point is 00:12:44 He was like, you know, that would be cool, but what if we put the whole side of it? And so that, I was like, oh, cool. And sort of made an angel investment in that thing. They hadn't raised anything or had, I don't even think an entity at that point. I was like, you know, to get you started, I forget what it was, 100 or 150K. So I gave him that first bit. And then it kind of blossomed into a thing. And then sort of fast forward, remember there's that timeline, but they were kind of at a final bit of fundraise and they weren't able to close that last bit.

Starting point is 00:13:17 And I actually mortgaged my condo and donated the last million, million and a half to finish out that project. The Baylights were online for 10 years. The technology degraded. And so like the environment is very harsh. So actually we just completed a fundraise and are reinstalling the Baylights. They were calling it Baylight 360. So now it'll be both sides of the bridge. It'll be visible from also Oakland and the Treasure Island.

Starting point is 00:13:42 Because the first version, the city was very worried about the like drivers seeing the lights and it might distract them. So we had an angle though that you could only see it from San Francisco, which was a compromise we didn't love. You know, because like we love the East Bay and everything else like that too. So new version is coming online hopefully later this year in the fall. And also that turned into a nonprofit called Illuminate, which I'm on the board of, run by Ben Davis, who I mentioned previously, that does cool public art stuff around the city. So they're responsible for the, you know, the Grace Lights, all the JFK Boulevard stuff, where that's been, has the murals and like the beer garden and all the chairs.

Starting point is 00:14:17 That's all illuminate. So they do fun. Their thing is radical public art. So the thing is it's like art that needs to be free and accessible. And I think that's so important for San Francisco. Like we have great institutions, you know, the SFMO, the opera, et cetera, that have huge budgets, like 100 million a year. and illuminate for, you know, literally one-tenth of that. It's created something that millions of people can enjoy, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:40 and I like to think that anyone along there embarked arrow, you know, you might be going through a tough time. Obviously, we have people who are struggling with mental health and homelessness and everything like that, but, like, maybe seeing a little bit of art can help raise your soul a little bit. And that's how I think about philanthropy as well. Like, you need to work on the base issues, you know, the fundamentals at the bottom of as those highly-grade needs. And then you also have to work on the things that, like, raise your soul a little bit, so arts.

Starting point is 00:15:09 So I like that bar-brail approach to Phyllisbee. Elon has a great quote along those lines. You can't just work on solving problems all day. You need something inspiring to think about and to work towards. First of all, thank you for doing this. It's like, if you live in SF, you're like, this makes the city better just having this around. I didn't realize you were involved in, like, helping come up with the idea itself. I know that you did the mortgage drows to make it possible.

Starting point is 00:15:32 I can't take any credit for the idea. I was exposed to... I had an adjacent idea, and they had a way cooler one with a real artist and everything like that. I was just happy to be... It's like being an angel of a story. You know, like you can support the entrepreneurs and the people who actually really do it. Yeah, okay. And the other funny thing you said is about they were worried about the angle of the lights distracting people.

Starting point is 00:15:53 What's funny is when I drove... Drive across the bridge, you can only see it when you're driving towards San Francisco, looking backwards. So I'm like looking in my rear of your mirror and the mirror turning around to like, kind of And it feels more dangerous than the lights shining in my face. You know, they call it impossible works of art. There were like 13 agencies that had to sign off. They were worried the lights were to strand birds or seals or environmental reviews. And it was really a lot of like public bureaucrats and everyone had to like to make that happen.

Starting point is 00:16:24 There was like 20 places where someone could have said no and it never would happen. So it's very inspiring to see the city come together. And also like in San Francisco, I feel like it's an entering new chapter right now, like going from like the doom loop to the boom loop. I'm a big believer in the city. So much innovation has come here from like food, you know, like the burrito, fortune cookies, all these sorts of things are from San Francisco. So like obviously all the tech innovation that we're all familiar with. It's kind of the city of the future. And I don't know what it is in the water, you know, from like the 60s till now, like cultural innovations, things that happen and influenced the whole world, Bernie Man, you know, Grateful Dead, etc.

Starting point is 00:16:59 like that all starts in San Francisco. So it's exciting to be here. Yes, that's so back, as they say in Twitter. Okay, someone very close to you told me that you're an excellent rapper. I'm not going to ask you to wrap, but if you ever want to answer any questions in rap form, feel free. Oh, man, that would be fun. I've dreamed about being able to do a Q&A and rhyme, but I don't think I'm that talented. I'm planting the seat.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Okay. Okay. So I want to get into all the drama that you're in Swarled in right now, but I want to first lay the foundation of how you got into this and where this all came from. So let's talk about just the origin story of you in open source. You've been more than half your life you've been working on open source. You've been working on WordPress. Specifically, WordPress is such a core community within the open source community. What's kind of the origin story of you becoming obsessed and, I don't know, open source peeled? I was a broke kid in Houston, Texas. And my passions were jazz. Houston has actually amazing music programs in the public schools. And so I was very fortunate to go to some of the best several arts programs, including my high school called the High School for Performing Visual Arts, where Beyonce went, Robert Glasper, a lot of amazing films went there.

Starting point is 00:18:21 And so music was a big part of my life. and actually economics. So I had this fun teacher, Scott Roman, who created, participated in the Federal Reserve Challenge, which was run by the Federal Reserve that sets to interest rates and backs the national banking system and everything like that, has this competition for high school students. It ended up being the first academic competition,

Starting point is 00:18:46 this art school ever won. And, yeah, first year, we kind of didn't get that far. Our second year, we went all the way to nationals. So I got to meet Alan Green's band, Ben Bernacki was our judge, you know, went to D.C., so that was very, very exciting. And so, you know, being exposed to, like,

Starting point is 00:19:03 also having great liberal arts education, you know, the ideas of, you know, Frederick Hayek, Agnes Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Thucydides, you know, all these sorts of things. That philosophy really influenced me. And it'll combine that with that, you know, music lessons were expensive,

Starting point is 00:19:19 so we couldn't really afford them. So I would barter and trade, I'd build websites for local musicians in exchange for lessons. And so these websites, I would start to put software on, like forms or, you know, like different things. And that kind of supposed to be to open source. So, you know, my father was also, you know, an engineer.

Starting point is 00:19:38 He worked for oil companies and things, but his world was all Microsoft. He's all proprietary. And I was kind of grew up in, you know, early days of the Internet. So it was slash dots and, you know, Jeffrey Zeldman talked about web standards and all these things like are really kind of the social malo. zeitgeist that I grew up in. So I, you know, combining all this philosophy I studied, felt that like open source was actually the most important idea of our generation. So like if the founding fathers were around today, I think that would be open source advocates.

Starting point is 00:20:11 As you think about it, as more and more of a lives are influenced and actually controlled by the software we use, if we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software, we're not truly free. So, you know, the WordPress is under a license called the GPL, which has four freedoms. The freedom to use the software for any purpose, so you can use it for anything,

Starting point is 00:20:34 whether I agree with you or not. The terms of services, you could do whatever you want with it. The freedom to see how the software works. You know, open up the hood, see how it works, see every line of code. You can audit it. The freedom to change it is a third freedom.

Starting point is 00:20:49 And then finally, the freedom to redistribute those changes. So you can share that. And the GPL has a fun little hack where if you share them, you have to provide those same freedoms to who you share it with. So it's what's called a viral open source license as opposed to the MIT license or some of the others that aren't. So yeah, just kind of decided that this was what I was going to devote my life to. And so that became getting involved with some early open source projects. WordPress was actually a fork of a banded open source project called B2. So the code base actually started with something that was already out there.

Starting point is 00:21:19 And I was a user and contributor to kind of volunteer on the forums and contribute to code. And then when I was abandoned, and myself and Mike sort of were one of like four or five different forks that started that kind of picked it up and tried to continue it for our own use. And then later for our larger community. It feels like a lot of people are coming around to exactly your worldview in, say, I was just watching a video of Jack Dorsey talking about how we're just controlled by algorithms. And we don't know what's how, we don't know how they work. And we're not in control of our lives. Have you seen that video? No, but I actually love that also some people who maybe made their first billion or whatever from proprietary software, then come back.

Starting point is 00:22:01 And it's so cool to see folks like Mark Andreessen or Bill Gurley be huge advocates for open source. I actually remember one of my early meetings with Andreessen Oritz of Mark andreson. I didn't realize that at the time. I thought it was Tony Schneider and I were sort of. fundraising and Mark really like grilled us. He's like, how can you build a business on open source? How can you be like remote and distributed? Like look around Silicon Valley, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun. Every, every great company has had an office. Like how are you going to build something that can change the internet with, you know, people all around the world? And, and just had this long,

Starting point is 00:22:40 like, hour long debate. And I was like, we walked out of that. It's like, wow, that was the worst meeting ever. They just hate everything we're doing. And then the next day they were like, hey, we're interested. I was like, what happened? I didn't realize that he had kind of this idea where he wanted to attack the ideas and see how we defended it to sort of was how they, hey, battle tested things. I guess kind of like a Microsoft culture or whatever, where you like really like I grill the idea. I just wasn't familiar with that. But it's so cool now that some these folks that I've learned so much from are such a bit advocates for open source.

Starting point is 00:23:14 Yeah, it's so interesting. I just had the community notes team on the podcast, and that's an amazing example of community of open source. Meta is adopting it from Twitter slash X. Speaking of open source, one of the interesting, maybe most common ways people hear about open source these days is AI and AI models, and there's a couple areas here.

Starting point is 00:23:34 One is you wrote this really interesting post where you talk about how Meta talks about Lama is an open source. source project, but you called it a false, false profit. What is it about Lama that is an open source? What are people missing when they see Olamma? And they're like, oh, that is amazing, open sourcing everything. Lama, you can obviously download and run locally and all these sorts of things, right?

Starting point is 00:23:55 You have to use their SaaS service. However, there's a clause in it that says if you're above a certain threshold of monthly active users, I forget what it is. It's big. It's like $750 million. So it's pretty high. You need a license from them. And so that does not give you the freedom to use the software for any purpose, right?

Starting point is 00:24:15 If at some point you have to ask for permission, you know, you're kind of at the whims of this company, who you might be aligned with or you might be an enemy with, you know? And also, how do you define that? So, for example, like our WordPress, like our products, don't have 750 million on that and registered users. But we reach billions of people for month in terms of visitors. So is that a, you know, is that defined? So there's just ambiguity there. So I still think what they've done is amazing, and I like that they're releasing it.

Starting point is 00:24:49 I was very confused for why they insist on calling it open source because they actually Meta's been a huge open source contributor, React. They've had incredible improvements to the PHP engine, which we benefit from a lot. So like, they're actually a big open source contributor. I think Mark Zuckerberg really understands and loves open source too. my best guess now, I don't have any inside information here, but there's, I think they're calling it open source because there's some European regulation about open source versus proprietary AI models. So I think it might be like a weird regulatory thing because clearly they understand this is an open source. So when I wrote the blog post, I was just kind of confused and thought like, maybe if I like, you know, get this message out there, they'll change.

Starting point is 00:25:32 And then when they didn't, I was like, oh, there must be something else going on. I think it might be this regulatory thing. We were actually a big part of, actually many, many years ago, I think it was React that they were doing something with the licensing or like a patent restriction on. And the WordPress community actually got meta to change that and reverse something they were doing to lock it down. So, yeah, I consider my role as an open source advocate to actually be my primary thing, you know. and it's it's very much my life mission you know i hope to work on wordpress the rest of my life but also like just open source and journal so i also like you know support triple and jumla

Starting point is 00:26:15 like anything else that's open source like i'm going to be a support of because i think when people choose that versus proprietary software we're increasing the freedom and liberty in the world and so i would love that every sort of like it's incumbent on us that make open source to make a better user experience to make a better product so that people choose it and then, you know, the world becomes more free, not less free. And also feels it's important to you to, I don't know, open source washing, like avoid people using the term when it's not true. And it's interesting in this case that, like, the thing that makes it not truly open source

Starting point is 00:26:48 is the limit. There's a limit where you can no longer use it the way you want. Is that the issue? Yeah. So that there's a, and there's actually like an open source, you know, OSI. There's like a formal definition for like what makes it, what makes an open source. open source license. And there's actually many dozens of open source licenses and sort of public domain license, those and other things. So it's also their stance that this is not an open source license.

Starting point is 00:27:14 Something else that I think is really interesting when it comes to AI and open source. You wrote about this and it blew my mind. It's such a good point that the code that these models were trained on was open source code because that's all they have access to. They don't have Windows code. They don't have Shopify code. and what a cool, I don't know, another success story slash, I don't know, I guess, how do you feel about that? All these AI models are trained on code you wrote in open source community. That's beautiful. It's one of the safest things to train on, right?

Starting point is 00:27:45 Because the license of open source, like, very explicitly allows that. You know, I also like to think about, you know, I have some window where my creative output is useful to society. And if you fast forward, like, 50 or 100 years, I do believe that the utility for proprietary software, eventually, approach is zero. So like when we're sending people to Mars, the operating system of the rockets and the devices and everything like that is not going to be built on the Windows NT kernel as amazing feat of engineering that like that proprietary kernel is, it's going to be built on an open source

Starting point is 00:28:20 kernel, you know, Linux or BSD or something like that. And so like if you want to be be part of something that sort of becomes the fabric of humanity's foundation, like things that allows a can't bring an esprilegeant of things built on top of it, a renaissance of ideas. You want to be involved with open source. And so I really hope that more and more people, I'm a little bit of evangelist here. I'm a missionary where I really want to encourage more and more people to consider, at least making part of their time, even if you have just a few hours a week, you know, contributing to open source because it could be part of something that is a huge impact.

Starting point is 00:28:55 And it's fun, especially if you're like a younger developer, designer, or PM or whatever. or like you can't walk up to Facebook and change their homepage. Or say I'd like to change this feature. But you could come to an open source project, some of which has hundreds of millions of users. You could go to WordPress or, you know, gosh, Bitcoin. Or, you know, there's all these things are open source. Chromium, Firefox.

Starting point is 00:29:23 And you could actually change, you know, a feature or project management things or change of design or improve it. And that's, I think, really really special. And sort of the thrill for me of like knowing that code I wrote is now executing, you know, millions of times per seconds and millions of servers around the world. That kind of thrill, that high is like kind of when I first had my first open source contribution, like such a thrill. And I've been sort of chasing that and enjoying that ever since.

Starting point is 00:29:53 Say someone wants to actually do this. Where do they go? How do they do this? Do they just like pick a project, go to WordPress. and like here's how you contribute. What's like a next step there? Yeah, pick a project that you use or like. I mean, that's obviously a nice one.

Starting point is 00:30:07 For WordPress, we have this. It's called make.org. Now it's where we make WordPress. And there's, you know, different groups. There's accessibility. There's design. There's the core code. There's plugins.

Starting point is 00:30:22 There's all sorts of ways. So really, whatever your account is, there's people who translate, there's people who do support, there's people who write documentation. There's people who write documentation. as people who organize events, you know, so whatever you feel like your talent in the world is,

Starting point is 00:30:36 either that you have or that you want to cultivate, you know. There's so many people, I mean, I learned how to code while building WordPress. Basically, I didn't have too much formal training there. So it's a great way to help to level your skills as well and work with some of the best developers and others in the world. This also made me think about AI agents are coming around, Devin and all these AI-driven bot coding agents you have a prediction

Starting point is 00:31:00 when most of the code contributed to the open source projects will be Devin and AI agents such type projects. I think Google talked about 25% of their code, or characters committed are now sort of AI-assisted.

Starting point is 00:31:17 And they're probably on the bleeding edge. I don't know how much of WordPress's code right now is AI-assisted or something like that. But I think over the next five years, it definitely approaches maybe a majority. And I'm actually very, very excited. So, one of the big challenges that we have as a very open platform is we have this open plugin and

Starting point is 00:31:42 theme architecture. So the 60,000 plugins and themes. And the way WordPress works is these plugins, themes can modify every single part of the code. So you can really customize everything. However, many of these plugins and themes don't have the same sort of robust security and review process that core has. So that's where when you hear about security issues with WordPress, it's very rarely in core anymore. You know, we haven't had a remote exploit and, you know, knock on wood, like I think five years or six years or something. But in the plugins, it can be somewhat more frequent. And so one thing I'm very, very excited about the next year or two is actually more automated scanning. Because obviously that code basis is so many tens of millions, maybe over 100 million lines of

Starting point is 00:32:23 code at this point, it's impossible for humans who review that. So we kind of rely on developers to review that and manage. And of course, we have like bug bounties and everything to that. So when things are reported, we fix it quickly. But I can't wait for more automated scanning there. And I think that could vastly upgrade the security of open source. The other thing that's really exciting is like right now, you see people building apps and stuff. And it's just sort of custom generated code. But I think the next generation of these models, or for the next layer there is because you know, as everyone knows, like just writing the code is just one part of it. It's maintaining it that really becomes the life cycle of it.

Starting point is 00:33:02 And Stuart Brand's new book is all about maintenance, right? Which I'm very excited about. He's publishing, I think, with strike. And it's actually kind of open source. He's open sourcing the book. So as you can see it being written online. But anyway, to go back, I think that if, and they're starting to do that is when the open source models you say like, hey, build me a website, it actually,

Starting point is 00:33:22 installs WordPress and then builds on top of that and then customizes on top of that, then you get for free that core engine that's always being audited and updated and getting past key support or whatever that the new things are sort of continuously. And then your custom stuff can be on top of that, which I think is actually a lot more powerful than sort of building something proprietary custom from the ground up. I love this book on some maintenance. There's a, my sister's partner has this quote that I've always come back to. life is maintenance.

Starting point is 00:33:52 You basically, like, everything you acquire and deal with, like, you get a generator for your house. You have to maintain that forever now. You get, like, you know, this backpack. Okay, and I have to, like, maintain this thing. They keep a nice, nice jacket. Like, everything is maintenance. Everything in your life is just maintenance. And I wonder if that's what the book's about.

Starting point is 00:34:09 Well, that's why I think technical debt is one of the most interesting concepts. You know, there's so many companies as well that maybe have, like, big market caps. But I feel like they might have billions or. tens of billions of dollars of technical debt. And you can cast you in the interface or how their products integrate with themselves for things. And I think about that a lot in our own company. You know, we definitely have some products.

Starting point is 00:34:30 Also, a little bears coming on because you have, like, such great product people. And like, we have some variable quality around some of our things right now. Like, if you check out Gravitra right now, I'm actually really proud of it. Like, it's, I think, a really great user experience, very slick. But there's, like, parts of, well, I always say I'm the unhappiest WordPress user in the world. Sometimes it's like parts of WordPress and WordPress.com. I'm a little embarrassed and shamed of. Like we kind of have to, we have a really large surface area that we cover with relatively few people.

Starting point is 00:34:56 And so there's some parts we haven't looked at a little while that we need to get around to. And it's our big focus for us this year is actually kind of going back to basics, back to core, and improving, you know, all of those kind of nooks and crannies of the easier experience. And also ruthlessly editing and cutting as much as possible. Because we've just launched a lot of stuff over the past 21 years that maybe is not as relevant today or doesn't need to be there. That sounds like excellent work for this AI agent of the future. That's coming soon.

Starting point is 00:35:26 There's one other area I want to mine, and that's community, community building, building this ecosystem that you've created around WordPress. It might be one of the most successful, biggest communities on the internet. I'm curious just what lessons you've learned about what it takes to build a successful community online, especially. And this is probably influenced by economics and jazz, right? So, and economics is all about systems thinking, right? And what are the incentive structures of how you set something up?

Starting point is 00:35:59 And then jazz is all about collaboration. Right? So if there's something unique I have for your audience, I would say it's that don't just build a product, build a movement. And to send that we've been successful, I think it's that we give people something to believe in, you know, a philosophy or world. worldview. Even silly things. Like, you know, we had this tagline in the footer of the WordPress dot org when we started. It's still there. It says code is poetry. I got this idea that we're not just writing code. Like we're trying to create something that can have elements. We name every WordPress release after a jazz musician, you know, for the past 60 releases or so. So those sorts of things,

Starting point is 00:36:40 bringing like a little art and soul and some fun into it as well. It doesn't have to be serious all the time. I think, you know, they can give something to believe in and work on and aim towards. That's more than just a paycheck or more than just, you know, the utility, the base utility of the software. So it's not just the software. It's also like, how are the meetups? You know, how are people getting together? What events are you running? How do people, are their forms?

Starting point is 00:37:09 How do people contribute? You know, is there office hours or town halls? I do a lot of Q&A. So like, you know, what are the things you're doing around the software that that's allowing people to get involved? That's inviting contributions. That's long of people to build on top of it. I've studied platforms quite a bit like Microsoft and others. And so our whole ecosystem of plugins and themes is part of what's made WordPress so successful in the moat that we have.

Starting point is 00:37:33 The core features of a CMS, you can kind of write with a few developers in a few weeks or something. Like it's kind of not, you know, it's basically correct operations. But to replicate those 60,000 plugins and themes, gosh, no one's done it. That's a huge mode. And proprietary services can create platforms. Shopify has the third-party ecosystem and things like that. But it's never a true platform.

Starting point is 00:37:59 And that is true platform, it's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether it was the Facebook platform, I'm putting that in air quotes, or the Shopify platform, you know, companies build on it and then they get the rug pulled out from after them. because they're too successful. And then the sort of thing you're building on decides, oh, we want that money or we want that growth. And they sort of change to API or remove your access. There's so many examples of this,

Starting point is 00:38:26 especially on, like, I think Facebook and Shopify and others where people got too successful, and all of a sudden they knock on the door and say, oh, that's a mighty nice app you have there. We'd love to offer you some warrants where we own a bunch of your company or we're going to shut it off or, you know, those sorts of things. And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source.

Starting point is 00:38:46 That's why more and more companies and people are choosing. If they're going to build a business on top of something else, if you build on open source, you have that guarantee. Even if, you know, I grew devil horns, it became evil and automatic, decided to know, whatever. Like, WordPress would still belong just as much to you as it would, to me. People can fork the code. They can still own it. They can still build on top of it.

Starting point is 00:39:08 So those things I think are really important. What a segue to all of those drama that's swirling around you these days. I think a lot of people do feel like there's devil horns that have appeared. And so I'm excited to dig into this stuff. I think I find that every time you go on a podcast these days, if we don't get into this, everyone's just like, why are Matt not answering these questions? Let's get into the hard stuff.

Starting point is 00:39:34 So I'm going to ask you some hard questions. for people that don't know what the hell is going on. They're like, what are you even talking about? Or just have a sense. Something is swirling with WordPress and Matt. I don't know. What's going on? Well, it's just like the high level overview of what's going on?

Starting point is 00:39:48 Yeah, so to set it, you can get WordPress from WordPress.com or, you know, us, but also you can get WordPress from dozens of other hosts. The biggest in the world are like GoDaddy, hosting juror, Newfold. It's not the biggest, but it isn't the top 10 or something. It has about 700,000 word. Press and installs. There's a company called WPNG. In 2019, WP. Engine started as very WordPress-oriented, and they contributed a lot to the community and everything like that. They're very respectful about, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:18 distinguish themselves from core. So people really realized it wasn't officially associated and everything. But in 2019, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. And, you know, anyone who follows business, you know, when private equity buys something, there's some of the good ones, but there's also many, many stories about how they can really kind of hollow things else, you know, really optimize for profits, become user hostile. Actually, recently read a story where one of the reasons there was a shortage of fire trucks, these LA fires, was that the fire truck manufacturers have been kind of rolled up by a private equity and they've been raising prices and, like, their supply constraint and things like that. So there's literally like a shortage in fire trucks right now because of private equity. Of course, if you look at health care or other things like this, so many examples where private equity can really, I think, be one of the darker parts of capitalism. So, you know, since 2019, WP Engine has kind of changed a bit, and they really stopped contributing to core, and they started using the trademark in a way that was very confusing in the marketplace.

Starting point is 00:41:26 And, you know, particularly in the past year, year and a half or so, we just gained a lot, I've got a lot of support for requests for WP Engine. And, you know, when we do surveys, we'd find that, you know, 20, 30, 40 percent of people thought they were officially associated because how they were presenting using our logo and presenting the brand and everything like that was very confusing to people. And as you know, if you don't protect a trademark, you lose it. And also, the version of WordPress that they were offering actually wasn't our core vision of the functionality of WordPress. to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So a cool part about WordPress, that actually one of my favorite features, is every change to every single poster page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So if you make a mistake, you can always undo it.

Starting point is 00:42:12 And of course, as you know, like building a great product, that sort of user's safety of an undo is so critical. Now, obviously, you have to store these revisions. So it takes a more database space. Now, it's trivial. It's megabytes. So on modern databases, it's not that big of deal. But the same money, they actually turned us off.

Starting point is 00:42:28 So they broke the undo feature in WordPress to essentially save money. And so, yeah, this thing where they're offering something called WordPress, it's kind of, I think I referred to it as like a bastardized, hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand. And then it's also people think it's official. So even close friends of mine were like, oh, yeah, I signed up for this thing. I thought I was supporting you. And so, man, it's came to a head.

Starting point is 00:42:52 So past 18 months, they've also, you know, we kind of contacted them and say, hey, you need a trademark license or something like if you're going to use this or change how you're doing things. And, you know, kind of tried to negotiate something and had many different term sheets over the months offer and different things. And they just kept kind of stretching it out. And I was going on here. I think part of what was going on is last year they tried to sell the company. So private equity usually holds things for like five to seven years.

Starting point is 00:43:20 So they were kind of five years into this. They tried to shop around and sell it. They weren't able to find a buyer. They said, well, they don't have any IP. And it feels like they're using your trademark. So they're going to have trouble with you. They don't have a license and things like that. So while they were negotiating with us, it appears they were also like preparing this lawsuit against us.

Starting point is 00:43:41 So again, I've been very fortunate in my business career that, you know, we've invested in dozens of companies. We've acquired lots of things. Like, by and large, 99% of the time, people I've dealt with in business have been ethical, straightforward, honest. I haven't really faced any like bald-faced lying or duplicitous behavior. Very, very rarely, you know, people who just, you know, say one thing and do another or are fraudulent in their behavior. But I think that was happening here.

Starting point is 00:44:16 And so just wasn't prepared for it. I just think I was a little naive and kind of didn't realize. what was going on for a while. So it came to a head and at Work Camp US in September, I was like, okay, well, she's still not going to like even agree to negotiate, you know. I'm going to give this presentation about how I think both private equity has messed up a lot of open source projects in the past and how in particular, Dobby Bingen has done some very bad or evil things.

Starting point is 00:44:48 And they were like, okay. go for it. So I did the presentation. I think it was on a Thursday for Friday. It's kind of spicy. People are like, oh, I can't believe you did that. And on Monday, they launched this with Quinn Emmanuel, which is kind of the baddest, nastiest law firm. It's like who Elon uses when he sues people. launched this big, you know, multi-million dollar lawsuit against both me personally and WordPress style work, so like the WordPress community and automatic. And also, you know, they're spending millions of dollars a month on both lawyers and PR. So they're doing, you know, if you read, I gosh, who was the celebrity that they were recently talking about this? Like the dark PR stuff

Starting point is 00:45:33 where they're like boost things on social networks and like lively. Like lively. Yeah, yeah. So all that stuff is happening. So there's, and I warned, you know, people, I think in the presentation, I said, hey, there's going to be a smear campaign against me. And internally, in the company, I was like, hey, they're going to dig up everything that's ever happens. Anything bad anyone's ever said to me is going to like, all of a sudden become like a news item.

Starting point is 00:45:56 And that has happened. It's been true. So right now, there is a portion of the internet that does think I have devil horns and everything. Fortunately, this is not my first rodeo. I know a lot of people think, like, oh, that was nice for 20 years and then got mean. But one thing, if you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Otherwise, people could take advantage of it in a way that ultimately can destroy everything you've created. So this is probably the fourth time.

Starting point is 00:46:27 The Internet has decided the main character or really evil. And the previous ones we don't remember anymore, it's Hot Nacho or the Easter Massacre of themes or like these other things that aren't even. on my Wikipedia page anymore. But it seems like really big deals of time. Those are your incidents. Those weren't like historical battles. These are things that, yeah, I was involved in. That's cool names at least.

Starting point is 00:46:49 Including some things I had screwed up. Like Hot Notchew was definitely a script on my aunt. Very early in the WordPress side. Wow. Okay, I'm not going to follow those threads, but those are great names. This episode is brought to you by Loom. Loom lets you record your screen, your camera, and your voice to share video messages easily. Record a loom and send it out with just a link to gather feedback at context or share an update.

Starting point is 00:47:14 So now you can delete that novel-length email that you were writing. Instead, you can record your screen and share your message faster. Lume can help you have fewer meetings and make the meetings that you do have much more productive. Meetings start with everyone on the same page and end early. Problem solved, time safe. We know that everyone isn't a one-take wonder when it comes to recording videos, so Loom comes with easy editing and AI features to help you record once and get back to the work that counts. Save time, align your team, stay connected, and get more done with Loom.

Starting point is 00:47:47 Now part of Atlassian, the makers of Jira. Try a Loom for free today at loom.com slash Lenny. That's L-O-O-O-M dot com slash Lenny. So you mentioned this talk you gave it, word camp, and you said at the beginning of the talk, like, I'm, oh no, afterwards, you're like, I was really nervous. to give the stock. And obviously, you can see why. Just like what finally convinced you this was time? Was it just to go, as you described, scorched Earth nuclear? Was it like Word Camp is coming up and this is the moment to go public with this? Was there something else that kind of crossed the line? It was a unique opportunity because we were essentially saying that, hey, WP Engine isn't

Starting point is 00:48:29 going to be allowed to sponsor WordCamps anymore. They're not going to be like a, because we, again, up to that point really done everything to like bring them in and have to be part of the community. So I really had to also explain to our community like, hey, why we're going to be excluding this company that a lot of people saw is doing good. If you go to the WP Engine website, they have whole pages about how much they contribute and give them back and how they, you know, they do kind of greenwash or open source wash a lot of what they do. So all their marketing branding was around this positive stuff. And so I was like, hey, we need to just explain this case. But yeah, again, my defaults and how we've worked with, by the way, every other company in the WordPress space, many of which are much, much larger and make sometimes billions more in revenue than WP Engine is collaborative.

Starting point is 00:49:16 So like if there's a trademark violation, usually it's not even lawyers get involved. It's just like there's an email. We have a conversation. We do a call. We talk about it. That's how things get resolved. And that's my default. I'm a lover and out of fighter.

Starting point is 00:49:29 And that's why this. thing doesn't happen very often. I like to say that, yes, if I was of WordPress community or whatever was doing this like every year, every couple months, yeah, you should worry about it. But it kind of happens like every like 10 years. So if I could mirror back the issues that you ran

Starting point is 00:49:48 into and I want to go through this a little bit more, the problems you had with WAP engine in this case. One is they were using the trademark, both WordPress and WooCommerce without license and they're just abusing it, confusing people. A lot of people thought WP Engine was actually automatic in WordPress official.

Starting point is 00:50:05 They weren't contributing to the project. They were just making basically a bunch of money and not doing the work to off this company they bought and they're just kind of hollowing it out, as you described. And then they're also cutting corners, making the product worse, and that kind of reflects on the whole brand of WordPress. That's a great summer, yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:23 Awesome. I'm curious just like which of those three or is it something even else that most bothered you about this? Like, what's just like, this is the thing that's eating me. And if I had to guess, it'd be, like, damaging the legacy, potentially of this thing you've worked on for most of your lives. Maybe it's that.

Starting point is 00:50:41 Maybe it's just taking advantage of the community. Just like, what's the thing that you think is the root of this? Just like, oh, it just, this needs to stop. Well, I guess the one thing I'd add to your list was, as this was happening, they were pretending to good faith negotiate. And, in fact, at one point, the executive, you know, we were talking about her joining automatic and running WordPress.org and, you know, kind of I think when she thought the VPN she was going to sell, she was thinking about what was next.

Starting point is 00:51:10 So, yeah, a lot of this stuff was, I think that duplicitous behavior also kind of forced this to an age more than even those other things that you mentioned. There's lots of companies that don't contribute back. And it's not as big a deal. So, but yeah, the legal issue was definitely the trademark thing. So what pushed it to the edge? I think just the magnitude of the issue. They would refer to themselves as WordPress Engine and client meetings and other things. They were very cavalier about how they would imply their association with the project.

Starting point is 00:51:46 Obviously, as you can tell on socials, a lot of people are just really upset and a lot of people blame you. There's just, like, like I said, every time you're on a podcast or on Twitter, people are just like, Matt, what about this? Why this sucks? Why are you doing this? And I want to go through some of those things, but just, Not many people go through, like, I think you were like a 100% beloved hero of open source and internet. And now you're like in this, a lot of people don't like you.

Starting point is 00:52:11 Just as a human, just what is that? How do you work through that? How do you deal with that? What's I've been like? You know, if you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress, it's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. And like, when we introduced something like Gutenberg, you know, people hated it. Actually, when we introduced a visual editor, people hated it.

Starting point is 00:52:29 You've had practice. These are huge controversies in the WordPress history. And when, you know, it actually hasn't been a fork or WordPress around all this latest stuff, but there was when we introduced Gutenberg. It's one called Classic Press where people actually forked the software. So how I would describe it is previously like 1% of, you know, the world thought I was terrible. And now I feel like it's up to like 4 or 5%. So it's still like not the majority.

Starting point is 00:52:57 But as you know, something negative. you feel seven times more than something positive. And when people are angry with you, they're more likely to like, it's kind of like restaurant reviews or whatever. They're more likely to leave a bad review than a good review. And, you know, the people who, you know, WordPress, you know, 98% of all the core developers

Starting point is 00:53:21 have stayed and contribute and are working on the next version and are supportive and all these sorts of things. and part of the reason these folks are so good is like they don't spend all their time on Twitter or Reddit arguing with folks and also the arguments could be very frustrating because people don't engage in good faith. They don't really change their mind

Starting point is 00:53:40 when new facts are introduced. And so you kind of, I've done my best actually because I, you know, from the open source side I'm really used to engaging with things. And I think that's been one thing I've learned from this is like in some forums, like it doesn't matter how you engage. And especially if you have like

Starting point is 00:53:57 bots or other things running there. Like, I'd leave comments on Reddit. It'd immediately get like 40 downvotes. I'm like, hey, this is an article about me, and I'm adding a fact to the thing. Like, why is it getting downvoted? This is very relevant to the discussion. But it's literally hidden. So, like, when you see that thread, you'd have to click like three or four times to see

Starting point is 00:54:16 the comment I'd left. And so it can really kind of change the perception. And then when you read these things, I think it's just very human nature. Even very folks very close to me, like, if you read it. a threat and it's all like super negative. It's hard to to not be influenced by that because we're social creatures.

Starting point is 00:54:35 So 100%. Now the good news is I've had lots of you know, sort of like credibility weighted in support from, you know, people like Mark Benioff or other open source leaders or the core people in WordPress,

Starting point is 00:54:51 you know, Batiaz, Mary Hubbard, all the core committers. The international community actually, like just a jibnish. Japan, like they don't care about this stuff. And so these are actually, if you look by like number of commits and lines of code and everything like that, the folks who actually are most crucial in WordPress. So I feel like that's been a good balance as well for me because there are days where I'm like, gosh, am I an idiot?

Starting point is 00:55:14 Or, you know, it could be really down, like reading all these things. So that is part of what allows me to balance to get back to that sort of positive optimistic space that I think you need to be in to do great software and great work. Yeah, the internet can be brutal. Let me go through a couple of specific things that people pointed out because I think you've been on a lot of podcasts and people haven't asked you these questions and I think a lot of people are just like, but Matt, what about this? This is really bad. So let me just ask you a couple of things here.

Starting point is 00:55:42 One is there's just like a frustration in the community around the instability that this has just caused in the WordPress community. I'll read you a couple quotes. Real people are receiving fewer projects on the WordPress because C-Suite are seeing WordPress is unstable because of this feud. And I work in Enterprise and we're very concerned about the stability of this platform on our projects. Just thoughts on that and the impact that is out on the community. Yeah, I think this is until this gets resolved, which by the way, I hope it is soon.

Starting point is 00:56:09 You know, I think it's, there's no business reason for this to continue. Like, I really hope that they, you know, come to a settlement or something. We're ready. They could end this tomorrow. They wanted to. That would be Vinge could. So we can't. We're just defending right now.

Starting point is 00:56:22 So, you know, it's really incumbent on them. All of our competitors, by the way, are like, great. You know, WordPress, the king on the hill, all of a sudden we can use this. And so there's also not just from like WV Engine, but also from all the competitors to WordPress and all the people who would love to capture server users or market share, you know, they're really leading into this. So I've seen white papers. I've seen all sorts of things where people talk about this.

Starting point is 00:56:49 We're actually in the next couple days going to publish something really cool on the WordPress at our blog, though, that shows like if you actually look at the numbers, like the activity, number of commits, plug-in updates, downloads, installs a WordPress, since September 20th when this all started, it's quite healthy. And so I'm not saying that there isn't, you know, examples of where someone lost a project or something like that. I'm sure it's happened. You know, the internet's big.

Starting point is 00:57:13 WordPress has, you know, so many millions of users and developers and everything that you're going to get some examples. But by the numbers, things are actually quite healthy. And in some ways, it's not that there's no press as bad press. it's raised the awareness of WordPress quite a bit. So people who haven't talked about WordPress in years are now like, oh, it's talked about it. And so a little bit of drama, I think,

Starting point is 00:57:35 I wouldn't do this all the time, but a little bit can be a good thing. Okay, so another, one of the most common frustrations I've seen on the internet, people complaining is around the trademark. I don't know, all the details, but my understanding is there's kind of a, you move the trademark to be owned by the foundation,

Starting point is 00:57:52 and automatic had his exclusive rights to use the trademark, And I think people are like, oh, was it? I thought it was the foundation owned it, but maybe Matt still owns it. And then you're trying to monetize it through this agreement WMP engine. Is there anything you can share there that'll make people feel and see your side of the story? Yeah, this is totally fair because it's complicated. But people are saying, like, this has been private. This has all been very public and documented on the internet from the beginning.

Starting point is 00:58:20 So WordPress.org is always been me personally. And I think because it's, you know, part of the reason we started there is dot com was not available. So we started. So like, that's why we started on the dot org and things like that. But I think people also assume dot org means nonprofit or something. And that's sometimes true, but it's not always. It's not a requirement of the dot org domain. Then when I found it automatic and when we did register the trademark, that actually was registered under automatic.

Starting point is 00:58:50 So it used to be for the first, you know, five years of the project or whatever that automatic just owned everything outrights. And again, I had investors in a board, and that was under control of that. Now, as automatic became more successful, I was able to consolidate some voting rights and other things. And at least later advocate. Also, remember, I was like 21 when all this was happening. So it was not like maybe the most savvy about legal stuff or didn't always have the best advice. So later, as I learned more, I was like, oh, you know,

Starting point is 00:59:24 I want to actually take this out of the company and create a nonprofit. And so we ended up, yeah, creating a nonprofit. Now, the rules around 5013C nonprofits around the IRS are actually very strict. So that's also something else people assume is like, oh, doesn't the nonprofit run the software? And we applied for that originally, and it was denied by the IRS. So we actually weren't able to put WordPress.org or the software itself under the nonprofit. But we were able to just have sort of an educational purview. So what was eventually approved was sort of like running the meetups and other things for WordPress doing educational stuff.

Starting point is 01:00:02 We sponsor a lot of like learn to code or, you know, running workshops in other countries. We have this cool thing called Do Action where we'll do like, you know, a weekend where we take a bunch of nonprofits and build websites for them and, you know, stuff like that. So the nonprofit does a lot of exciting things there. and then also negotiated with the sort of investors and everyone at Automatic to sort of actually put the trademark into the foundation. Now, the compromise there was that, you know, automatic at this point is running WordPress.com. So to continue running that, which at the time had already tens of millions of users and everything,

Starting point is 01:00:42 it needed a commercial license. And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org, you know, because obviously I need that. And then automatic would retain the commercial license and the ability to sub-license that. So to sell that to others. So this is kind of a grand compromise and create this tri-partite structure. You know, I was very inspired by the three branches of government.

Starting point is 01:01:13 So there's sort of power in each of those that I think sort of checks and balances. inside of it, which is on purpose. Wow. Okay. I get why it's complicated. I get why people would be confused. This makes me think about open AI. I had a really strange structure and I got them in a lot of trouble. And it feels like when you're 21, you're like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. What a great concept we've come up here. And then all this complexity just adds to a lot of confusion around what's going on. So thank you for addressing that. Another, there's a kind of a related question I've seen a couple of times.

Starting point is 01:01:44 It's just why don't you let that.org be run by a community? Why not just like give that up to someone else? and not just you. Thoughts there? Yeah, and the frame of that question is kind of interesting because it implies like, I'm the only person making WordPress, which is obviously not true. If you look at the daily commits

Starting point is 01:02:01 and activity and everything, it is run by the community. So it's hundreds of volunteers every day that are actually doing the day-to-day work and making the day-day decisions and everything that happened. So there has been a radical delegation. However, there's ultimately,

Starting point is 01:02:19 a hierarchy, and I'm kind of the CEO. So I'm like the final, final decision maker. And so I think what people advocate for around this governance point of view is like, okay, well, install a board on top of you that ultimately makes decisions for the product or, you know, things like that. And there are other open source projects that have this structure. None of them have been successful as WordPress. So, you know, I think your audience in particular, like,

Starting point is 01:02:49 is great software ever created by committee? Or does it more often reflect a vision of a leader or, you know, something that can allow us to? And I think particularly, you know, WordPress not just remaining relevant, but actually accelerating growth over huge technological shifts over the past two decades. You know, when we started, there was like, you know, dynamic web apps or Dhtml or JavaScript script wasn't really a thing, and then like social web and then iPhones, and then all this sort of stuff that's changed over time. And we've surfed a lot of these technological changes, which is very, very hard to do. Like most products do not remain relevant over multiple

Starting point is 01:03:30 generational changes like that. And that's been because sometimes we've had to make very unpopular decisions. Like Gutenberg is a huge part of why WordPress is relevant today. And it's actually an open source project we do is the block editor. It's actually bigger in WordPress, you know, because it's not just used on WordPress. It's used on everywhere. WordPress site, but also like Tumblr, other people. I would actually love a Squarespace or Wix adopted Gutenberg. It's meant to be like a really open source framework. But anyway, if we had voted for whether we should do that or not,

Starting point is 01:03:59 everyone would have voted against it or the majority would have. It was really a few core people of us in the community, you know, Matias, myself, other core contributors, Ella, Andrew Oz, that said like, hey, this is the future. And it's going to take 10 years to do. And it's going to be a long bet. it's going to suck for the first three or four years. And so everyone's going to hate it in the beginning.

Starting point is 01:04:20 But then later, with iteration, we've had, I think, now 200 releases of Gutenberg. We do sort of a very strict every two weeks release schedule since it started. It's going to get pretty good. And it's at that point now. It's actually getting pretty darn good. And the next phase of it, actually, I'm so excited about it's going to be collaboration. So all the real-time co-editing that Google Docs and Motion has is coming out to this open-source thing. And with the technological changes, we're actually able to do it peer-to-peer.

Starting point is 01:04:44 so we don't need a centralized server. We can use WebRTC and other cool technologies. So, I mean, anyway, I'm going sidelining, but I think that, you know, that's sort of more, and if you look at a lot of great companies, like, you know, there's a board or whatever, but like ultimately there's an executive. And, you know, some of the most iconic companies

Starting point is 01:05:05 of our generations are ones where the executive has, you know, retains some majority of voting control or other things like that, which I've been able to do with automatic and with WordPress, and I definitely think about succession planning and everything like that. But if or when I'm gone, I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can have a role similar to mine and really sort of try to be a steward.

Starting point is 01:05:32 And there are ultimately layers of check and balance on that because, again, the community could leave. They could fork the software. People could change. And so you're in charge, quote unquote, but you're also at surface. So it's a lot more being like a mayor than a CEO and that you ultimately are accountable

Starting point is 01:05:52 to the folks who are contributing and new users and everything like that. So I do feel like there is a balance there. Some of this as well is that there's some people who aren't part of leadership who feel like they should be. So as you look at like the Yostok crew and things, these are folks who actually aren't like don't have commit status. They haven't contributed to WordPress over the years

Starting point is 01:06:10 and server normal hierarchy of, you know, the meritocracy of how you, you get like, you know, the ability to commit code or things like that. They're like, hey, I want to be, I want to lead a release. And so that, I mean, that's cool, dude. But like, there's a process. We have different people leave releases over the years. But, like, you know, they kind of work their way up to it.

Starting point is 01:06:28 This makes so much sense to me. It's one of the themes of the podcast, just the power of a singular visionary and leader founder mode, as we've all heard as a trending these days. You made famous, yes. I wouldn't say that. It was, yeah, Ryan shared it. but then Paul Graham pointed afterwards, and then I renamed the title of that episode, Founder Mode.

Starting point is 01:06:48 I really, actually. Kind of if I zoom out what I'm sensing here is there's, like, people that have this ideal of how something like this should run, but they've never actually worked at a place, like where nonprofit board runs it, runs a thing, and I've seen what that actually looks like. And so I think there's like a big disconnect between the ideal in theory and, like, how does great stuff get built?

Starting point is 01:07:11 And one of the things I think we've tried to demonstrate with WordPress is actually there's kind of like a open source side and a nonprofit side and a for-profit working in concert. So, and one of the things people don't necessarily appreciate as much about why WordPress has been so successful

Starting point is 01:07:27 is because of automatic. And things like a Kismet doing anti-spam or WordPress.com, having a free version of WordPress that has introduced over 100 million people to the software in a way that you could just sign up for free. You don't have to pay for hosting or download it yourself or things like that. So that kind of for-profit, nonprofit, open source working in concert, I think is a really interesting model that we're starting to see a lot more companies do.

Starting point is 01:07:52 It's actually very exciting to me that some of the things that were controversial when we started, like open source or distributed work, are now the default for so many exciting new startups. And this whole ecosystems of like really, really cool, like open source, like cow.com for open source calendar. There's so much cool stuff out there. actually, you know, there's a whole generation of like younger entrepreneurs that I find very, very inspiring because they're also bringing like modern design and web development everything to open source, which is very neat. I anticipate a block post one day. I told you so, guys. Open source, remote work. Imagine there's a few more things there. There's one other thing I want to address. I haven't seen you talk about this. It comes up a bunch. It's around, this is like varying the weeds, but I think it's really important to people. And there's something that, something here for a lot of people. the way you guys forked advanced custom fields. So I think what happened here is you guys forked an existing plugin.

Starting point is 01:08:47 I think somebody else's plug-in and then kind of push people to this plugin versus the original plugin. What can you share there? Yeah, this is very complex. So WordPress.org has kind of like an app store. You know, after WP Engine started suing us, you know, creating millions of dollars of legal fees and things, we blocked their access to WordPress.org.

Starting point is 01:09:13 So this plugin they had advanced custom fields wasn't able to be updated. At the same time, a number of security issues were found in it, including some we reported. And so there had to be an update to it. So we're like, okay, we'll ship the update for you, essentially. And then we're like, okay, I think we need to call it something different,

Starting point is 01:09:36 right? Because it actually isn't. there is anymore. And they still offer advanced custom fields on their own. People can download it from them, et cetera. So we made secure custom fields, which was originally under the same directory listing. So again, because we want all the users of it to get the security updates. This is controversial.

Starting point is 01:09:58 And actually, they actually got a preliminary injection. So the judge said reversed this. So this has all been reversed, by the way. There now is a separate fork under separate listing of secure custom fields, which actually we have, you know, a team on it, developers, designers, and we're creating, just like WordPress is a fork. We've actually forked this. Actually, WooCommerce was a forked, a lot of things of works.

Starting point is 01:10:19 So we've forked it and now have a new name, new everything, that we're doing a lot of product innovation and like Peruvian. So there's a separate project now and separate directory listing for secure customer fields. So that's kind of fast forward to today. They now have access to WordPress.org again. They have updated the plugin. And everything's kind of back to how it was before. And there's another

Starting point is 01:10:41 this separate thing called Secure Custom Fields that the WordPress project is officially supporting. So I'm hearing essentially you block WP Engine as a part of this. We're just going to simplify WordPress, reduce confusion. They're being bad actors in the space. So we're going to block them. And in that block, there's like a dependency

Starting point is 01:10:57 where people couldn't do a thing that they needed to do. So you're like, and as the one that exists, there's a problem with it. So we're going to make that dependence, like release a version that you can actually. use and fix the security issues. That was the intention. I think that there was a lot of perceptions around it that were different.

Starting point is 01:11:12 But yeah, that was the goal. Okay, okay. Great. So maybe just the last question. We talked about just like a lot of people see you with devil horns these days. They think you're doing a lot of, you're doing bad things and they don't like the approach you're taking. You talked about there's this WP Engine spending a lot of money on PR and hiring this agency.

Starting point is 01:11:32 I guess is there anything else that, like, why do you think so many people are looking you as the bad guy. Is it mostly that you think? Just like, where do you think it's coming from? Why are, like, comments always so negative? And we talked a bit about it, but anything more there. I don't know if I can say why. I do think one thing I've learned is that a lot of these things we've talked about are nuanced. So one essentially thing I've learned in this process is that it's hard to explain this stuff in, you know, 240 characters or, you know, some mediums do not lend themselves well. to discussing this. And so I tried, you know,

Starting point is 01:12:08 but I'm, you know, participating less on like Reddit or Twitter and trying to do more informed things like this where you can actually have the context and things can be taken out of context. Also, I think there's something where, you know, social networks sometimes are tuned to promote outrage.

Starting point is 01:12:25 And it was very interesting. We ran a sentiment analysis recently. We were kind of like looking at different social networks, analyzing all the comments. And we found actually that the negative, you know, the sort of devil Horn fraction on like, what was it, like, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram was like 8%. It's actually pretty small.

Starting point is 01:12:45 On Reddit, it was like bigger. I forget the exact number. But on Twitter, it was 52%. You're like, whoa, what's going on there? And so there's something in the algorithm. And again, we can't see how the algorithm works or what the incentives are. But it can promote kind of the most controversial things. And I think that's not a novel perception.

Starting point is 01:13:03 Like there's a lot of discussion around how social media. might be creating more fragmentation in society. And I think this is just an example of that, where when you have networks, when people are getting the majority of the information from social networks, and those networks are not designed to provide nuance or balance or even promote truth necessarily, you know, misinformation can get spread far more than, you know, what's the saying? Like, a lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know. Get out of bed.

Starting point is 01:13:31 Get out of bed. Yeah. There's been a lot of that. So there's actually been a lot of misinformation on untrue things. like go viral and then the correction you know the the untrue thing gets like 700,000 views and the correction gets like 20,000 views so there's been some of that happening and uh you know one one mainstream media has covered this uh it's actually been a lot better so there's been some actually really good articles and uh you know some business publications and other things that that sort

Starting point is 01:13:59 of look at a more nuanced and balance view and i think the podcast has been pretty good uh but uh definitely on Twitter, like, I think you can get a version of all of this that is both, I think, not entirely true and also, like, pretty more negative. Yeah. I imagine people are going to be like, Lanny, you didn't ask him this thing. Here's the thing he said that I want to learn more about. I'm sure I missed some stuff. But from an outsider's perspective, this all make sense.

Starting point is 01:14:27 There's a company, like, I'm not, I don't think P.E. companies are bad innately, but their job is by a company and make it run more efficiently. and then I'll oftentimes sell it for more. So it makes sense that they buy a company, make it more efficient, cut some corners, don't put a lot of effort into making it awesome. Even though I'm sure there's awesome people working in there, trying really hard to make it great.

Starting point is 01:14:47 And like basically what I'm feeling is you just, they got to a point where this is hurting the ecosystem. They're feeling really dishonest with working with you, and there's just a stalling technique. And so makes sense to me why you just have to stand up and fight back and it's hard. It's hard to do that. Is there anything else along this thread

Starting point is 01:15:09 before we move on to a different topic? Anything else you want to share before we close out this chapter? Well, if people have more questions, they can come to Word Camp Asia. I do going to do open Q&A there. We do town halls in the WordPress.org community.

Starting point is 01:15:22 There's a slack people can get on and ask questions. So there is kind of like a lot of open ways to engage. Awesome. I'm definitely happy to do that. I'm probably not going to do it on Twitter as much,

Starting point is 01:15:34 but like, oh, yeah, when there's longer form opportunities to have a discussion here, particularly if it's more like real time like this. I'm very happy to. And that's why, if you look at it, there's actually a big difference. WP Engine has not done any podcasts and no press. They don't respond to journalists. They don't talk about this. And I've done the opposite, or I'm really trying to be out there and engaged.

Starting point is 01:15:56 And everyone's like, why don't you just let the lawyers do the talking? And it's like, well, but we have a community. And also, I feel like we're in the right. So when you're in the wrong, you probably say only have the lawyers talk. And when you're in the right, like, you know, I think you should be out there and tell the story. I remember at the end of your word camp talk, you're like, any questions after this big controversial talk? And I'm curious how it felt like every, all the questions initially were nothing to do with this. It's what it felt like.

Starting point is 01:16:20 You're just like, oh, they already had these questions. They didn't even know what you said maybe. And I bet you're just like, wait, does anyone hear what I just said? Did it feel like that? Well, also like, that's really like a WordPress community event. So it's a lot of the core developers and things. So, like, they have just WordPress questions. So that is something.

Starting point is 01:16:37 You're like, hello. I'm not on hundreds and hundreds of these town halls and QAs, and I really enjoy it because you never know what's going to come up. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about all the companies that you're bought and will buy in the future. It's kind of like you're building a little Berkshire Hathaway. I think you've described it that way.

Starting point is 01:16:53 It's kind of what it's feeling like. And Tumblr is really interesting. I didn't, like, until I started prepping for this, I didn't even know you guys own Tumblr. I haven't heard this story. What's just, why did you guys buy Tumblr? What is it going on with Tumblr? It was like a big deal back in the day.

Starting point is 01:17:07 What is the current state of Tumblr? What is the story there? Oh, Tumblr is so interesting. I mean, you know, at the time, I think it was one of our best competitors. You know, they created this really amazing sort of hybrid of like blogging and social networking. And if you kind of zoom back, a lot of things that are now standard on other social networks, like even the ability to embed an image with a post. again was not supported originally on Twitter and other things remember they used to have like what was it like tweet image or like you have to like linked out to other things to post

Starting point is 01:17:37 an image to Twitter it wasn't native functionality and Tumblr had like these multiple post types you could post like a chat image you know they were I think one of the first support video so they did a lot of I think product innovation on the leadership of David Karp was like a really amazing entrepreneur product leader funny story both David and I or whatever at CNet at the same time. They'd hired both of us. What an alumni group. Whoa.

Starting point is 01:18:01 Oh, yeah. They could have kept both of us probably, but anyway. The Tumblr then, I forget the year, but they sold, I think, the same time that Instagram date for a similar amount, $1.1 billion. To you or just someone else? Instagram bought by Facebook, obviously. Tumblr. And Tumblr bought by Yahoo.

Starting point is 01:18:21 Oh, wow. Who was at the time, again, Yahoo, we don't think about it now, but I feel a little old. But at the time Yahoo was like one of the internet giants and had recently, Mercer Meyer, who was, or mayor, who was one of like the big early people at Google, I think part of creating the APA program and everything like that, was the CEO of Yahoo. This was, I think, one of her first big acquisitions. Now, subsequently, obviously, we know how Instagram went. I think, you know, people are like, I can't believe you bought this for a billion dollars.

Starting point is 01:18:53 And obviously now it's worth hundreds of billions. So that's had a really good trajectory. At Yahoo, I think things became more challenged. So again, this is a little bit of history, but Yahoo then had like this thing where they owned part of Alibaba, which then became like more valuable than the rest of the company. They had activist investors. I think they had some CEO switches.

Starting point is 01:19:14 I think Rissomir, like, leaves or gets fired at some point. You know, there's all this like turnover. And I think Tumblr really languished under that their ownership. And from what I can understand, the team was actually held back a lot from things they wanted to launch or ways they wanted to iterate. Then Yahoo mergers with AOL, which is another kind of early Internet thing. That goes for like a little while. So again, the tumblers just kind of stuck underneath this stuff.

Starting point is 01:19:43 Tumbling along. Tumbling along. And then that gets bought by Verizon. So fast forward to 2019, you know, for our, Horizon wants to get rid of Tumblr. And so they're kind of put it up for sale and had a number of bidders. Automatic ended up buying it for a de minimis amount. I think it's been reported.

Starting point is 01:20:09 We bought it for like $3 million. What a deal. Three million. But obviously that represented a lot of value destruction over the years. Tumblr had some tough times. They actually were banned from the app store at one point for not moderating things well enough and having, you know, kind of maybe a little too much porn. Obviously, Twitter, Reddit have porn, but like, they might have, maybe we're a little too

Starting point is 01:20:33 out there with it, and we're doing a good job filtering it and, and keeping away from app store reviewers or whatever. And so Verizon, to their credit, though, there were people bidding more. Actually, I think a porn company was bidding on Tumblr that would pay it a lot more money. They really were looking for an acquire that they felt like would be a good steward. And for my point of view, I had such incredible respect for Tumblr as a product and the community. You know, still, despite all of this sort of stuff that had happened, I think at that point still was like, you know, I forget the exact number. But like, call it 15, 20 million monthly active users. So really sort of active core.

Starting point is 01:21:16 And one of the things that's so fascinating is over half of that user base was under the age 25. and actually had a huge, I think it was like 25 or 30% LGBT plus. And so, you know, I think a very unique place on the internet where people could have a social network where they could be anonymous, they could put on different identities, they could be someplace their parents weren't like Facebook or Instagram, like really still could take a special spot. So we didn't buy it.

Starting point is 01:21:47 Now, people like, oh, you bought it for $3 million, but we bought it sort of taking it. sort of taken on all liabilities, including, I think they were under investigation by the FTC, there were lawsuits, there was all this sort of stuff. So it was free like a puppy, not free like a. And a pretty big team, I think 185 people. You know, we're taking a lot of burn. It was burning a ton of cash. And yeah, that was 2019. And so it's been, I think, a humbling experience, you know, running a social network. it was very, very different from all the other products that we've done.

Starting point is 01:22:22 And I think there's some incredible things about Tumblr and that I'm still very excited about. So we're like WordPress has primarily like a desktop and web user base. Tumblr is obviously like 85% app based as an younger demographic. And so part of the vision that now we're executing on is actually we wanted to create a path for people using Tumblr to actually being powered by WordPress on the back end. So Tumblr users could unlock themes, customization, plug. tokens, et cetera. Actually, we're the process right now of migrating the half a billion Tumblr sites to WordPress, probably one of the largest data migrations. That makes sense.

Starting point is 01:22:59 That's happened in a while. So we're kind of trying to do this in a way that's invisible to users on the front end. So changing at the back end, well, maintaining the APIs and the interface and everything. So it's a fun engineering project. I kind of posted this like kind of call to arms. You got a lot of fun people applying for automatic. We hired a lot of great folks around this sort of like audacious project, this big hairy audacious goal. And so that's where it's at now. I sort of ran it personally for a few years while we're doing turnaround. But there's a great team there.

Starting point is 01:23:34 But still, I still challenge, you know, still not profitable. So we're still subsidizing it from the rest of automatic businesses. Fortunately, the rest of our business have done really well, so we were able to do that. But I definitely want to get to a place where it's sustainable. And one of the things we're also experimenting with is can Tumblr have not just an advertising-driven model? Because I think ultimately the incentives of advertising social networks can lead to the kind of dynamics that you see on the more negative side of like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera. And so really trying to create a subscription model or a sort of like first-party user-driven advertising where like you promote your blog post or something like that or you promote a book commerce product or something where it's like not a third-party ad ecosystem, which I think has a lot of. like weird code and malware and lots of stuff I don't love.

Starting point is 01:24:21 Wow. Sounds like a lot you took on with this acquisition. And I love the choose. You said you ran it initially. So this is a good segue. To maybe my last question, I'm curious where this goes. Just how do you, well, let me zoom out. There's a lot of people these days that are excited about role of businesses.

Starting point is 01:24:38 I'm going to buy a bunch of companies, make them better, make them awesome, save money, and then just keep building this holding company sort of. I think you guys are doing that and it's working well. What do you look for? How do you decide a company's right for automatic? What are kind of the factors that are like, we should buy this, we can turn this around and turn it into a big success?

Starting point is 01:24:57 I don't know if I would do another turnaround like Tumblr again or at least not for many, many years. You know, it's definitely a different thing. The vast majority of things we acquire, it's simply something that's done well and we want to accelerate it. Or sometimes, you know, aqua hires. We're like we're plugging it into one of ours. existing projects or we're taking the team and putting them on something we're already doing.

Starting point is 01:25:19 So it's a really talented team. You know, Tumblr, I think we ended up ultimately replacing like 85, 90% of the team as well. So that's just very different difference. And yeah, so I do think there are different ways of doing it. But if you look at our other acquisitions like day one, et cetera, like founders still here, many years later, we're accelerating. Like, you know, stuff like that. We brought it to Android or brought it to web. It's more of like taking something good and making it better.

Starting point is 01:25:47 And probably our best example there is WooCommerce, you know, which was, I have a small company, I think 35, 40 people based out of South Africa and has obviously grown to, you know, again I said, you know, automatic makes about half a billion dollars a year now. And WooCommerce is a majority of that. Speaking of that, actually, you haven't shared the revenue number. I know it's public. Just like give people a sense of automatics revenue. Can you just share those numbers? because I think it might blow people's minds. I think we say publicly,

Starting point is 01:26:16 it's about a half a billion dollars and sort of ARR we're going to right now. Incredible. Okay, I'm going to, I have a question for you. It's kind of a hot seat question as you talked. I wonder, I feel like people are thinking of this. So you've been talking about PE companies being often bad. You're buying Tumblr.

Starting point is 01:26:32 You've talked about laying off a bunch of people turning it all around. How's that different from a PEP company, Matt? Yeah, and I agree with you that like, PE, just because it's private equity, doesn't mean it's bad. And also I say something people say is like, hey, wait, don't you have private equity investors as well at automatic? And we do. Now they own usually a small percentage, like sometimes under 1% and they don't have control of the company. So I think there's a

Starting point is 01:26:59 distinguish. Is it a minority investment or a control investment? And with WP Engine Silver Lake controls the company. Now when they control the company, I think there's a spectrum of actions. You know, obviously, being more efficient is great, and we should all strive for that. And I think every business does, whether it's private equity or, you know, our business or things that are founder controls. You always want to be more efficient. Now there's some spectrum there where you over-optimized or you could have dark patterns. You know, right now on WP Engine, it's very difficult to cancel your account. Because they're actually, I think, as of today, 45,000 sites have left.

Starting point is 01:27:36 So they're, I think, down to like 600. Yeah. Well, because their customers have realized like, hey, this isn't WordPress, this isn't, yes. Or they're suing the guy who started WordPress. So, like, maybe we should not support this commercially. So we have this site WordPress EngineTracker.com that sort of shows in real time the sites that are leaving. It's kind of an exciting thing to see that number tick up. Actually, maybe a good example as well.

Starting point is 01:28:01 Like, even though there's a lot of negativity, if you actually look at, like, how people are voting with their wallets, they're leaving. So I think you have to judge as well, like just look at the track record. So one of the things are very proud of with automatic is we are an acquirer of first resort. And we have founders that have sold to us. Paul Main at day one is a great example that didn't need to sell. You know, you could easily, wildly profitable. We could have run it themselves for a long, long time. But people choose to join because they feel like we'll be good stewards of it in the future.

Starting point is 01:28:33 And ultimately, just have to look at the track record. So I think, you know, don't judge it by what it's called, judge it by the actions over time. And I hope to continue building that reputation for a place that's a good steward of communities and software and everything else for many years to come. Matt, we covered so much everything. I asked you all the hard questions and more. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with,

Starting point is 01:28:59 any last thoughts, comments, insights, stories? Oh, yeah, follow VM. at Photomat, P-H-O-M-A-T-T on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, everything like that. I post a lot about other stuff. I post a lot about AI and open source and other things. Some WordPress things in there as well. You know, I have these life missions to democratize publishing and commerce. We added a new one last year, which is messaging.

Starting point is 01:29:22 So it's in beta mode right now, but relaunching in a few months as a product called Beeper, which takes all your telegram, Instagram, DM, signal, everything, brings it all into one app. and you can do some really cool stuff like that. And especially when you start to imagine search for AI, local AI, around that. So very, very excited about that relaunch. So I encourage people to, you can check out the beta now. Go to people.com slash beta to get like the new version. And we're going to relaunch that later in the year.

Starting point is 01:29:50 So, yeah, very excited about that. It's kind of fun to be working on something that's at the stage where WordPress was in like 2003, 2004. So, yeah, WordPress is quite mature at this point. WooCommerce is kind of where WordPress was in like 2000. and then the other Beeper stuff, the messaging stuff, is where we were in, like, 2003. So it's one thing that keeps me inside is working at, like, different stages of this. Yeah, this feels like a reason to be doing your approach to Berkshire Hathaway is just, like, stay active in early-stage stuff and not just optimize, established things. So it's beeper.com, by the way, awesome domain.

Starting point is 01:30:26 Photomat is that, what's the story of Photomat? You're into photography, I imagine, is the story? Yeah, it's a little of a pun. you know, there's a photo, a photomat is also like F-O-O-M-A-T-T is a place that you would go to like develop your photos back when you'd have film and develop things. So originally my username was sax mat because I played the saxophone. And sometimes people mishear that. And also like as, you know, I started I started traveling so much because it has been years I do like 400,000 miles of air travel because I go around the world to like go to WordPress events and meet the

Starting point is 01:31:01 community. And, you know, as a distributed company, we do lots of meetups. And so it became hard to carry my saxophone around. So my method of artistic expression became photography. And that's actually kind of how WordPress started. It was actually originally a site where I could share my photos, you know, before Flickr, before Facebook and everything like that, sort of use this gallery software, actually open source gallery software, PHP software, to sort of share all the photos I was taking. And actually now on my website, I think I have over 38,000 photos I posted. And yeah, that's it's still one of the things I really love. So it's also a username that was available everywhere.

Starting point is 01:31:36 And I still do it. So I'm actually going to the Mahakumela, the big 300 million person gathering at the Ganges River a few weeks. And one would just decide to experience that. It happens like every 12 years. But two, I'm just really sad to like take some time to do photography. And yeah, I really enjoy it. You forgot to mention your website where your blog,

Starting point is 01:31:58 that your WordPress site itself, where you blog, of MA. TT is the domain, which is amazing. I will point people to one of my favorite ritual you have on your blog, which is you share what's in your bag. You talk about how you travel all this. And I think every year you're like, here's the gadgets I use most and bring with me everywhere, right?

Starting point is 01:32:18 It's my most popular post of the year by far. I'm not surprised. You need Amazon just buy everything button. Yeah, because basically you're just trying to optimize for the least weight and most utility, right? out of all these gadgets that you're bringing with your own trips. Yeah, actually weighing it is something I just started doing this year. Because my bag actually got really heavy, kind of like 35 pounds or something.

Starting point is 01:32:39 And so, yeah, some friends were like, hey, why don't we weigh everything and just go through. So now we're posting the weights. Oh, my God. Okay. Anyway, we'll point be able to that. Matt, thank you so much for doing this. This is awesome. Lenny, thank you so much.

Starting point is 01:32:51 And I really appreciate the ability to discuss these things in a longer forum. And also just your audience. And so, oh, I guess the final thing I'll say is we're hiring a ton. So you have one of the most incredible audiences in the world. I recommend your podcast and newsletter to a lot of my colleagues. And so if you're someone who loves this kind of stuff, I think there's a big opportunity at Automatic to have an impact on these things. What roles are you hiring for most, and where do people find these roles?

Starting point is 01:33:15 Automatic.com. A-U-T-O-M-A-T-T-I-C. There's a work for this page. You kind of see how we work. We're fully distributed and can manage that forever. We sort of started that. Another interesting thing is we actually pay the same salary globally. So whether you're in California or Italy or Nigeria or wherever, we pay global

Starting point is 01:33:37 salaries. So yeah, a lot of opportunities. And we're hiring for kind of everything. I would say, but particularly like people with great design or product skills is probably one of the areas that you can have the biggest impact at automatic right now. All right. If you've made it this far into the podcast, you should definitely imply. Matt, thank you. Thank you for being here. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Starting point is 01:34:09 Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.