WHOOP Podcast - Growth Mindset: Navigating the Path to Entrepreneurial Success with Matt Mullenweg

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by Matt Mullenweg the founder and developer of WordPress, the web platform powering over 40% of the sites on the internet. As the founder and CEO of Automattic, Matt is working to democratize publishing and commerce. Automattic is structured like a holding company, currently valued at over $7.5 billion, and is behind brands like WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Longreads and more. Will and Matt discuss how Matt started WordPress and his passion for open source software (3:05), what open source software is (9:20), creating an open ecosystem on the web (13:25), Matt’s early days as an entrepreneur trying to grow a business (17:40), the WordPress interview process (25:25), developing a growth mindset (32:20), managing stress and creating mental clarity (34:05), how Matt found WHOOP and the power of an executive coach (39:55), and Matt’s approach to a day-to-day routine (44:15).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the Whoop Podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, CEOs, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do, too, to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, I am joined by the 10th. talented and the humble Matt Mullenweg, the founder and developer of WordPress and the CEO of Automatic. Automatic was last valued at over $7 billion. And WordPress, one of the companies underneath Automatic, powers over 40% of the internet. Yeah, that's pretty incredible. Powers over

40% of the internet. Automatic also is behind brands like Tumblr, WooComper, jetpack, long reads, and more. Matt and I discuss how he founded WordPress. One man commented on a blog he wrote, and they started this company without ever having met, believe that or not. That was 20 years ago, 2003. The power of open source software, Matt's working to democratize the internet. Again, WordPress powers 40% of sites on the internet, so we get into that. Matt's strategy as an entrepreneur. We get into his interview processes, some of his favorite questions, how Matt deals with health and wellness, his approach to biohacking and meditation, and how Matt uses Whoop to improve his performance. We talked about sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, and many other

metrics that Whoop captures. For those of you on Whoop, you can now skip the manual entry for nutrition. Your Woop Journal can now auto log matronutrient data from the nutrition apps you already use in Apple HealthKit. Learn how consuming different amounts of calories, carbs, fats, protein, and water help or hurt your daily recovery. Also, if you haven't checked it out, we have a new band. That's right, celebrating Pride Month. We created a Supernit Band. Let's you support your pride. portion of the proceeds from the prime band will go towards flag friends, lesbians, and gays

football team in Boston that is at shop.wop.com also if you're new to whoop you can use the code will W ILL at checkout to get a $60 credit on apparel and accessories be sure to have a band battery pack or whoop body apparel in your cart

at checkout and activate the code here is my conversation with Matt Mullenwey Matt welcome to the Woop podcast. I'm excited to be here. So you started WordPress when you were 19 years old. Why don't you talk a little bit about that moment in time and what you were trying to accomplish? So at the time, I was a kid in Houston. I was, my primary form of income was playing saxophone, actually. But I also, my father was a computer.

programmer. So I had learned a bit about computers and I was building computers and some websites for local musicians. There was a few other blogging systems at the time, but the one I was using had actually been abandoned. So I posted about, it would be cool to take this software and maybe continue it, but also bring together the best features of like live journal and removal type and all the other things that were out in the market at the time. And a gentleman named Mike Little, who I had never met in person, but we knew each other from online, left a comment, said, hey, if you're interested in this, I want to work on it. And that comment on my blog became the spark, which became WordPress.

And this is 2003, if I'm not mistaken, right? Exactly, yeah. It's pretty, I mean, it's pretty amazing to put that story in the content. of 2003, like the idea of starting a company or a project was someone that you had never met before. You know, today a lot of people are meeting each other online and it sort of seems like an obvious thing. You all just celebrated your 20 year anniversary of WordPress, but you essentially met your co-founder for this now very successful business completely online. Well, that's what I call the power of one, right? It's not about how many thousands of views

you have, likes or anything like that, that post that I did on my blog only had a single comment. And it was like, but that was the one that mattered, you know? And so I try when I blog now to not think about like how many hits I'm going to get or anything like that, but just like have like a single person in mind to read it and maybe I'll send them a link to it or something. And if one person reads it, then that is satisfying. that strikes me as a theme in looking at your career this idea of of you know profound depth and you know your whole point about the about the blog it wasn't about getting 10,000 likes it was about having one person emerge who you could then build a business with

is that something that you sort of always recognized even at a young age or is that something you sort of now appreciate looking back on it. I think I was lucky to grow up with a lot of community, whether it's my grandmother taking me to church. We grew up Catholic, joined the Boy Scouts, and I was doing music from second grade, so you're always part of a team, you know? I wasn't a solo performer.

I was part of a band, and the whole band has to come together and play the music at the same time, the same way. to produce something. That good things always happen with other people was very deeply embedded in me. Also, kind of idea of paying it forward. You know, we were very lower middle class,

didn't have a lot, but didn't, you know, wasn't starving or anything like that. And, you know, I was always amazed how much my, both my mom and dad always, like, made time to give back. And so I was like, okay, as I started to get in software, it's like, okay, I'm coding, let me give back. let me get involved with open source. This idea that open source is software that belongs to all of us

and that we can come together as a community and created together and it belongs to all of us was just so invigorating to me. I was like, why would you do anything else? You wrote on your blog, which I really liked, I think this is about 10 years ago. You wrote in the proprietary world, people are typically called users, a strange term that connotates dependence and addiction.

In the open source world, they're more rightly called a community. It seems to me like you were really pulled in by this notion of open source when, you know, at this super young age. And looking back on it, that was an obvious insight. But at the time when you were getting started, I can't imagine that other people saw it as a massive business opportunity. Not at all. uh so blogging had no business model there was no plans for any revenue it was really just we wanted the software to exist in the world mike and i uh had an idea for you know some different things our software do versus the other things in the market and um and i had friends you know and i was

doing this software but it was always for my friends and it wasn't like i was making the software abstractly for like a market or like a customer profile or something it was like no i want my friend julie who's an artist to write a blog i want her she's using live journal i want to use my software instead so like how do i how do i make it so that like she uh we'll switch over this that was uh that customer centricity was i think a big part of our always success and actually something funnily now that were but later i went out and found a company called automatic commercialized WordPress. It's now 2,000 people. My biggest focus this year for this 2,000-person company is how to make us the most radically customer-centric company in the world.

How do we really not care about our org chart, our divisions, our technology stack, whatever? How do we make it all about the customer journey? Well, it's amazing that this initially kind of innocent open-source project has grown into, I think your business was last valued at over $7 billion. you've got 2,000 people that are working for you. Perhaps for people that are less familiar, just describe what open source software even means and the notion of it.

Sure. So you've all, whenever you sign up for like a new application or something, remember that long list of legalese that you click except on, terms of service and stuff? Yeah, you kind of gloss over it. it and you just click. Have you ever actually read that? I actually have read some of them because, you know, we have our own terms and services

and you need to learn from it. But it's, yeah, go ahead. Almost no one does. And usually what these terms and services say are all the rights the company has or the producer or the software has. It's kind of like taking things away from you. Like you can't, so as you can't do all these sorts of things. What open source does is it takes copyright, which is, again, like that you own something,

and tries to turn on its head and makes it copy left. So the license, when you get an open source piece of software like WordPress, all the license says is your freedoms. It's not all about what you can't do. It's all about what you can do. And there's four freedoms at the core of open source. The freedom to use the software for any purpose. so you could use it for good things, bad things.

You could say, I'm a terrible person. No one can tell you what you can or can't do with the software. The second is to see how the software works. So you can open up the hood and see exactly every line of code how it works. The third freedom is to modify how it works, right? So once you see it, like what if you want to change something? You have the right to change everything. And I know that sounds basic, but like,

For a lot of the things in your life, you actually do not have a legal right to change how it works. It's protected by the proprietary company. And the fourth of final freedom is the freedom to redistribute you modifications. So let's say you change something, you made improvements, you can now share that with the world. So what that means, like I said, WordPress was actually based on pre-existing software that someone else had written, but it was open source. So we did what's called a fork. So we took all of that existing code base and we rebranded it. We called it, it was called B2, we called it WordPress, and we sort of this is a bandit

thing and we were able to use that as our foundation to build new stuff on top of. We didn't have to start from scratch. We were able to start from someone else's work and then take it from there. So those four freedoms, it's kind of like a bill of rights for software. And it's more and more of our lives are, you know, kind of influenced. by software on technology, I think it's so important as like a fundamental human right that software we use is open source, just like it is important to have freedom of religion or freedom of speech. It's important to have those four freedoms. Well, I love the nobility with

which you describe it. And it also strikes me, it's not surprising the enormous success that you've had because I do think that that companies that invent industries like yours has in many ways have this like deep set of principles that drive them and it's just it's sort of fascinating to listen to you talk about open open source software and make a you know this natural analogy to the bill of rights which for most people this first time is like kind of fascinating even though you know this open source thing was more philosophically pure or morally better uh that doesn't matter you have to make a better product. So we got to working really hard and said, okay, if we want like to the world to run

on an open source content management system, which is WordPress, we need to make it better than all the proprietary competitors. So because people don't care that we have this better license. They really just want to solve a problem. It is pretty clear that people do care because over 40% of websites are powered by WordPress. if I have that right. Yeah. So again, it's not because of our license.

It's not because we're morally better than something else. What we did when we created WordPress was we wanted to create not just a product, but a movement. So we thought, how can we make this an open ecosystem? So one of the first things we introduced was it was the core software, which we call WordPress core you download it. We created a plugin system, which would allow people to monitor. modify the software, and we created a directory where anyone could upload these plugins. The plugins were all also open source, so they had all the freedoms and rights that WordPress

itself did. So now there's over 55,000 plugins in the world, and they can transform your WordPress to be forums. It can transform it into online store. It can use it like almost anything. It's like an app store, but that's all completely open source. The other thing we did was theme. so the idea that people want their own design

it used to be like pretty hard to customize the software used to have to know code and everything so we decided to create these packages called themes that people would just click a button and their entire site would transform into a new design and they could buy a theme they could download a theme there were free ones they'd pay ones it doesn't matter you can make your own custom one but this was sort of

a developer ecosystem on top of it, which allowed people to express their individuality through the software. We weren't trying to make everyone look like the same. Like Facebook or Twitter, all the profiles kind of look the same. It lets you change your picture and a header, maybe a color or something. But because they're trying to make everyone look the same so they can put ads on it, that's what they allow on the software. With WordPress, like if you're on a WordPress site, you might never know it.

maybe if if they're nice they left the powered by WordPress on there but other than that like it can look like anything and that's what's cool like I want the web to really express every company's every individual's uniqueness and creativity well I like that you're underscoring this point that you didn't win because of your principles you won because of your product but I do feel like the principles helped create that that product in many ways and and having what you describe as this community that's driving behind the principles to make it more successful. I think that matters a lot. For a lot of WordPress's history, it actually was worse in some ways in the user experience of things from our proprietary competitors, much like when

the Wikipedia started. It was worse than Psychopletor Britannica, the first versions. Right. And something cool, if you want to understand open source, actually, the Wikipedia is a really good thing to look at. For every Wikipedia article, you can look at the history of the article from you can look at a 10,000 word article, go back to when it was just one or two words and see every single change and who made what change when. And what happened is at first, you know, it was worse, but then all of humanity coming together and incrementally making it a little bit better, a little bit better over time, all of a sudden the Wikipedia is way better than every other encyclopedia that's ever come before it, and is now continuing to create something that is like super important for

humanity. So that's when open source works, when the flywheel works, that's what happens. The Wikipedia example is an amazing case study for open source. I mean, it's unbelievable, actually, how often still today I use Wikipedia as a tool to figure out what something is or the history of something. So that's a great reference point. Let's transition for a second to you as as the entrepreneur you've built this multi-billion dollar company you were a few decades or i should say you were 20 years early to uh remote which during covid everyone kind of got a crash course in let's talk a little bit about what it's been like for you going from from two people who met on a blog to 2000.

Yeah, so a lot of open source projects live on the internet. So because of this thing, remember I talked about how on Wikipedia, anyone can edit the article. Right, there you go. Like imagine that Cyclopedia Britannica before, you would have to go to their office. And there was like maybe a letterpress or a file or something. You'd have to be physically there to change it. And so what open source software did is using something called source control or version control. Put this online so that developers around the world could work on the same code base and not run into each other.

They could make changes and commit it, and you could see exactly who changed what, when. Think of it like track changes on a word document or something, but like for every line of code. So that allows the office to be online. And so that also allows people all over the world to contribute. So like I said, Michael Little and I had never met in person. We just knew each other online. I was 19. He was 41.

I was in Houston. He was in the United Kingdom. Like, we had nothing in common except it's kind of shared passion. And we were able to work side by side online every day. So when I started the company, you know, I was actually in San Francisco, so I had dropped out of school, I took a job at CNET, and I thought WordPress could be, they hired me because WordPress to open source project was already going. They were using the software, but I wanted to create a version that was easier to use that was kind of hosted. So you didn't have to know how to set up a database and download the code, that you just click a button and get at WordPress. And I pitch it to them.

They said no, but they said like if you start a company, well, best in it. So, like, I left and I started the company. And, you know, the first people I hired were the people I was already working with. You know, like, if you're going to hire someone, hire the team that you already know. And so there was a few gentlemen around the world, Donica, O'Quive, Ireland, Andy Skelton, and Rambor. These are people I'd already, like, written thousands, thousands of lies the code with. We'd already gone back and forth on the craft of, like, creating WordPress itself. And so those were the first. tires. And pretty much everyone said it wasn't going to work or it would work like until like 20

people or something like that. But just from first principles, we tried to say, okay, if we want to create a great product, what are the actual constraints and what do we need to get right? Like, we need to communicate well. We need to be have a way to work asynchronously. We need to be able collaborate online. We need to get user feedback, like all those sorts of things. Does that require us all to be in the same physical location every day? No. How did you communicate with these folks? So we're talking like 2004, 2005, 2006, right? What was your primary form of communication? Today we're all on Zoom and stuff like that. The tools were very primitive. So remember broadband, like hide-speed connections were not widely available.

It was still pretty slow. So video wasn't really an option. So we used something called IRC, stands for Internet Relay Chat. It's kind of like a, think of it like Slack, but like text only, like almost like a command-line version of Slack. We would use things like before GitHub,

there was something called SourceForge, which was like a site that allowed you to collaborate online as a developer. And so that's where you could create like bugs or tickets and then resolve them. I work on the code together. We used a lot of open source tools. We used like Linux. You know, basically using open source to create open source.

And that was pretty much it. And then the other important thing was that we decided to do meetups. So we're like, all right, although we're all distributed a couple times per year, we're just all going to fly to the same place. Hopefully someplace cheap, you know, wherever like it's cheap for people to fly to and cheap to get a hotel and let's hang out for a while and then get that in-person time to build trust to get to know each other as people to break bread to share food together and that's really important for a distributed team to get together did you hire people in that

time frame that you had never met in person no one and in fact we'd hire people that we never even talked to on the phone or video it would be all over text chat That's pretty amazing. I mean, that's about as innovative for that time frame as the company you built. Like, I'm trying to think how many, I don't know of other founders who have done that. Yeah, it's funny. Sometimes people's families would not think it was a real job. They were like, wait, you never met anyone, you never flew anywhere.

You got hired? Is this like a real thing? Is this a scam? But it was one of those things, like how we worked together, every day it was online. We were chatting with each other. We were committing code. So we interviewed like we hired. And actually for the first 1,000 people we hired, I did the final chat. So whatever the interview process was, I did the very final chat with each person. I had to stop that once we started hiring, you know, 700 people a year or so I could. But yeah, it was nice. I like doing it on text.

And, you know, what that allows as well is interfews are hard, by the way. Like, true. By the way, when I was 20, I was not good at public speaking or talking on the fly or anything like that. Like, I've had to develop those skills over the years. And so, like, someone could be really brilliance, but maybe they're an introvert. Maybe they're shy. Maybe they can't think on their feet. So, like, that in-person interview or coding on a whiteboard seems like not.

actually what we'd be doing day to day. Like never, never in my life as a developer with someone like, okay, quick, write on a wiper with this code. And now it has to, like, you can use Google. You can look stuff up. You can be asynchronous. Like so part of the beauty of these text chats is they would allow people to really think about their answers.

You know, they could think about it. They don't have to answer right away. They could take five minutes to grab to answer. They could ask a friend. They could walk around. They could Google stuff. It allowed people who spoke in English was not very strong to still really show up. It was actually funny. Later, I would meet colleagues in person

and have trouble understanding them because their accent or the spoken English was just not as fluent. But on written English, they could, you know, that was what we were hiring for. Like, written English was a really important skill for us. But like, it doesn't matter to me how you speak or not. Like, it's all how you can write. So it allowed us to get kind of a diamonds in the rough or find undiscovered talent. Because like another company, like a Google or something, would fly them demand of view. They'd put them in a room, high-pressant situation. They would miss these people. So I want to underscore how wild this interview process was, especially for a lot of the time frame that you were doing it, you literally would interview people. And it was primarily a text chat,

so to speak, and it also didn't have a specified time interval, if I'm understanding this correctly. Yeah. It was just kind of open into it. And yeah, sometimes it would, because I was also doing other stuff. So I would be asynchronous too. And sometimes it would take an hour or two. Sometimes it would take a day or two. Okay. So the high end of it would be like a day or two. Yeah, that probably wasn't that common. And at the end of it, if I decided the person was, you know, at the bar of excellence that we want to maintain automatic, I would make them an offer and, you know, give them a title and a salary and everything

like that. And then they could consider that in written form and take their time. And in terms of the type of questions that you were asking, I mean, assuming they'd gotten to you at that stage, they probably had, there had been some process around code and, you know, their, their sort of basic abilities. What were you, like, what would be questions that you would be asking? Oh, that's a little proprietary, but I do have, I'll share some of them. So basically what I would be looking for is the four things that you can't teach. I believe

that people can learn pretty much anything, but you can't teach work ethic, taste, integrity and curiosity. My experience, people come to a job with those or not. So I would try to ask questions that would tease out those things. So often, you know, it would be questions about what brought them to coding or what brought them to this craft that they were doing, you know, whether it was design or customer support, where their passions were outside of work, you know, how they engaged with those things. So I'd also just do this.

things that were fun for me. So, for example, I would, oh, I'll tell you one that if you could ask everyone in the company to read a single book, what would it be? That's a good question. If I ask you that question, what would be the answer? Well, it's changed over the years. My old answer used to actually be a Black Swan by Nassim to Lehm. Great book. But it might be dry by Daniel pink like it would change over the years but so it these are questions with no right or wrong answer and sometimes people might say it's not a book it needs to be an article or listen to this podcast some people would say the bible you know some people would say like they could bring whatever they want there was no right or wrong answers but i wanted to hear the thought process and also

selfishly i wanted to know what book they would pick because i wanted to read those so it became my reading list. And it was a great way to also, like, build our culture. Like, I was trying to get all the wisdom from all the people we were hiring. What's a great question to screen for work ethic? I bring it up, and I'm so curious about your interview process, because I'm probably on the other end of the spectrum of what you're describing, where I get a lot of value from meeting someone in person. I also feel like I get an enormous amount of information from meeting someone in person. And work ethic falls under a category of something that you can really feel on someone, I think. And it's interesting to me the idea of unpacking it solely over text. Now,

maybe you have an advantage in that you've already seen them pumping code out. And so you've already got a lens into their work ethic or their throughput. But to me, that's actually a thing you can bring up. So prior to my final chat, because we were hiring people all over the world, we weren't able to look at resumes or credentials like a normal company would because I don't know what the best technical college is in Pakistan. You know, like, what's the Harvard of, you know, Myanmar? I don't know. So like, and also I dropped out of college.

So like, why are we like looking at these other credentials or years of experience is like ways to hire someone? So what we did was we created something called a trial project where everyone who came in, we would pay them $25 an hour to do a little bit of work. And obviously this work wasn't something we were actually going to use. It was kind of like a sort of standardized thing. And for different roles, it would be hard to create a trial project. But like if you were coming as customer support, we would have the answer customer tickets. If you were coming as a developer, we would give you like a plugin and say, fix this project.

plug it. And we would look at not just what you did, but how you did it, how you communicated, how you documented your work, how you, if how long you took, but not just how long you took. It wasn't like faster was better, but like if you had to like not look at it for a couple days, did you tell us and say, hey, I can't look at this until Monday. So, but I'll be back. You know, all those sorts of things. Because those trial projects were really, it felt like the most meritocratic way to actually see what people's abilities were, regardless of their educational or whatever background they might have. And so that trial project was really important. The final interview around work ethic, I think you would get work ethic from the trial

project. Yeah, that's right. What I would look at is also like something I think about a lot. I forget who the author was, but there's this idea of like a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Totally. And I think I'm not going to do justice, but like a fixed mindset is like things happened to me. I am a certain way and I can't change that. And a growth mindset says that like, all right, I'm not as I was. I'm not good at public speaking. I don't say I'm a bad public speaker.

I say I am not yet good at public speaking. and I need to put in the hours of the work and the practice, deliberate practice to get good at this. And so I'm going to read books about it, find a coach, find a trainer. I'm going to record myself and listen to it, even though that's really painful and like critique myself. You know, what is the like way to practice? And I got this from music really. They say when you're practicing your instrument, if you sound good, you're doing it wrong. You need to sound terrible when you're practicing because you need to be working on the things that you're working.

that, not the things you're really good at. And so it's really just like repeating that like measure over and over again, repeating that series of patterns with a deliberate practice to get better at it. And that's very applicable across almost every craft. Well, the growth mindset, it's no surprise to me that you brought that up because in order to go from a 19 year old to, you know, a successful CEO of a of a global business with thousands of employees, you have to keep growing and growing. And I started whoop when I was 22. And so it's a familiar feeling of, you know,

knowing that you're not, you're not good enough yet. And you have to keep getting a little better, right? Like that sort of imposter syndrome. And a huge imposter syndrome. I'd never done any of this before. Totally. So like, okay,

I need to just read all the books and like learn all this stuff before they figure out. I don't know what I'm doing. Right. Right. Yeah. there was certainly a feeling of outworking everyone as a way to sort of mask huge weaknesses or areas of incompetency. Yeah, I can't control how I was born or how much money my parents had

or how good my schools were or weren't. That was all kind of like stuff I was born with. But I can 100% control how hard I work and how I seek out the best information and seek out the best, you know, mentors, which I use in a broad term. Like, Plato could be a mentor, books could be mentors. Like, you know, seek out the best teachers. You know, the mind is such a beautiful thing. We have an ability to learn. It's probably the most important thing. Now, how have you approached managing stress and your health? One of the things that I love about the podcast is I get to meet people who are on whoop too. And I understand you've been wearing whoop for a little while.

So we'd love to hear that. Got it right here? My man. It's interesting. I've always been really into biohacking or sort of like a, what's the word for something self, quantified self? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, in engineering, we say you have to profile before you can optimize, meaning like you have to analyze the code and see where actually the bottlenecks are where things aren't working before you make optimizations because if you make a it's called a premature optimization based on what you think it might not be the real thing so our bodies are machines beautiful machines like the most amazing machines ever created god's gift you know that we have this and so I started to find like originally like I was very much like just again my school had no gym. I had no physical activity. I was kind of like a, my mind isn't a bat, you know, like my body doesn't matter. And I had no exercise, no physical, but I was young, so I could kind of get by

for a few years. As I started to approach 30, and I read a really amazing book called Brain Rules by a neuroscientist named John Medina. And the first rule was exercise. And he talked about how when your body's moving, your brain works better. I was like, okay, well, my brain is pretty much all I got. My brain and my hands are my moneymakers. So if I want my brain to work better, maybe I need to exercise. And I was very lucky that one of my early friends, like as he was just getting started, was Tim Ferriss. And so, you know, as he did the four-hour work week, like the four-hour body, he was always talking about optimization and health and everything like that. And so, you know, he would test stuff out on me. He would tell me to, like, go do kettlebells

or whatever it is. So I was always just kind of like trying to be personally experimenting with myself, but really for a purpose, you know, like I don't need to look a certain way or anything like that. It's really like, how do I accomplish this mission in the world? My life purpose is the democratized publishing commerce. So I want to create the open source standard that, you know, hopefully 100% of the web runs out someday that humanity can build on and then we can build stuff on top of that.

So how do I serve that best? And my mental clarity, how I show up, everything like that is really, really important. Well, in Woop terms, we describe it as manage what you measure. And, you know, most people think sleep's important, but they don't measure it. And then it's very hard to know actually what you should be doing to improve it. What are behaviors that you've found help you with mental clarity? Meditation. sleep movements I like I said it's not I'm not an athlete I'm not a anything so I'm

always trying to find like what's the minimum viable amount to do something and I also need to hack my brain because you know it's very easy for me to just like go straight to my computer or something like that so there's times when like I wasn't exercising and I was like all right I'm just going to do one push up a day. And that was ridiculous, right? One push-up doesn't make a difference. But it's also so ridiculous that I couldn't, like, forgive myself if I missed it. Right.

Right. That means I have no discipline. Like, I'm just doing one push-up. So I try to look for things that are, you know, like the seven-minute workouts or something that's currently in my life is sun salutations. I learned this from Lila, Jena. You know, I could just roll out of bed, do this kind of like yoga movements that, and I add some push-ups. to the Chattaranga part when I go down. That's like, kind of like move my body, stretches, you know, gets me flexible and does it.

I did running for a while and did some half marathons. I found a lot of mental clarity in that. Meditation is huge. And then also I'll say like, you know, therapy and psychedelics, you know, sort of delving into your inner mind. I think is really, really important. And that's something that Tim and myself have been funding a lot of the research around at Johns Hopkins, different universities around the world. Like there's these molecules, just like caffeine is a molecule or alcohol is a molecule, ethanol, like that can change your mind. Great book by Michael Pollan called How Will To Change Your Mind?

You know, as a tool, they're worth exploring for treatment for depression, PTSD, all these sorts of things. and I was very fortunate. I didn't have any big T trauma in my childhood, but I had lots of things that were holding me back, lots of self-limiting beliefs, lots of little T traumas. They say even like your mom not coming to you when you wanted food, that could like be something that in your body, there's a great book called Body Keeps His Score,

could be embedded in there and could then later show up in other relationships or other communications. so it's hard work to work on these things like you kind of have to delve into your inner consciousness and psyche but when you unlock it it sort of allows your emotions your intentions your integrity to flow a lot more freely in a way that could be really powerful for achieving what it is that you should believe in have you found any relationship between some of these practices that you do and like meaningfully improved sleep or lower stress levels or things in your whoop data oh nothing nothing novel all the standard stuff so yeah it's just

nice to have the feedback loop so i know that like if i have that extra glass of wine or i get to sleep too late or i wake up you know i have to set my alarm because our company's international so I have a meeting at 6 a.m. or something like that. Like, my path to whoop was actually, I went through a lot of other things. It was actually through like self-development that I came to whoop because I realized that, you know, all the top performers in the world have coaches. So I was like, okay, I don't want one, but I'm going to figure out a coach. So I found this coach named Joe Hudson.

He put me as part of the CEO group of executives that were kind of doing our cohort, we're coaching together. And one of the people in that group was an amazing woman named Jamie Waito, who is now you're a CTO, I believe. That's right. Yeah, we're very lucky to have Jamie on our team. Who you hired. And so through this coaching group, you know, we became very close.

We got to know each other really well. And so when she went to join Whoop, honestly, I was like, I don't need another thing. I've got my Apple Watch, I've got my Garmin, 935, I've got all this stuff. I'm pretty dialed in. I'll wear it for two weeks just to give you some product feedback, you know, just because you're starting this new job, try it out. Gosh, what I found was it gave me a view into my own body state, the way that you present like the recovery score, the HRV, and everything like that,

that would help me navigate my day. So it's not that if I'm starting a day at like 20%, I just want to be aware of that. Like maybe I need to etchicotamacha. Maybe I need to like take more time to like maybe do some jumping jacks before a meeting or something to like get a little more energy. So I just need to be aware of that. So I want to have an awareness. And yeah, I'm converted.

I did previously. Now I'm wearing it every day. and you convert me so all right you're a whoop member well we're lucky to have you and uh and again thank you to jamie for connecting us and getting you on the whoop podcast i want to circle back just to this this point you made about coaching i think a lot of executives listen to this podcast and probably wonder themselves like what does it mean to have an executive coach how can i benefit from coaching what's your advice to them in every field of development it's great to have someone else

to reflect on you your own development whether you're all musicians have teachers all athletes have coaches and if you look at the people at the very top of the field like a LeBron James he'll have a coach for all little micro things in his body

or his day or things like that and so if you can find someone and this is a really beautiful relationship as well, between a coach and a person that can reflect on you, your own goals, help you set goals, but also, like, show you where you're not, you know, hey, you told me this thing two weeks ago. You're saying it again. They can do that.

It's worthwhile. And also, coaching is something that's really important. So in my company, like, I coach other people. And so by being coached, it makes me better. at helping other people navigate through situations. So it's one of those things like learning is really important, as equally important as teaching, and you don't really know something until you teach it.

So I feel like that the practice and craft of coaching is something that everyone should incorporate in said life. You strike me as someone listening to you that has a very sort of dialed in, Like, I bet you have a great morning routine, a great evening routine. Can you speak a little bit about what those practices might look like? I've gone through phases where I was, like, super rigorous and had, like, a crazy thing. I'm not in one of those phases right now, to be honest.

That's good, too. My role right now at Automatic is we're trying to create, like, a digital Berkshire Hathaway. And so my day-to-day can be very different. You know, so I'm being drawn across the 2,000 people to maybe it's a project, maybe it's an acquisition, maybe it's an investor, maybe it's everything. So my days, no two days look alike. But what I'm trying to do is give myself as much freedom autonomy in my day. Like not too many standing meetings or anything like that. I basically have almost no standing meetings to work on whatever seems to be the most important thing.

And that is where I've ended up, but also, like, I think there's also different approaches for different times. Like, there's been times in our company history where it's like, all right, we need to be super ultra-disciplined. And so we're going to, like, we need to, like, crank out these five things. let's, you know, have a standing meeting at 7 a.m. every day and like, yeah. So think of these different approaches, not as one is right or wrong, but they have different tradeoffs, just like every organizational structure is a series of tradeoffs. What tradeoffs are you making and what are you prioritizing and how you work? It's really well said. And obviously, coming from someone who's had to see enormous evolution for your company and your own personal growth over the last

20 years. So anyway, I congratulate you on, on, you know, what you've built, Matt and powering over 40% of the internet's no small feat. So, you know, kudos to you. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for a creative product that has really enhanced my life, you know, the feedback mechanism of the, of the whoop. And I really appreciate the intensive detail, how the app works, like everything. And so when Janeway joined the company, I knew to take it seriously. I previously ignored the product. And I see why she joined.

You've got something really special there. And I can't wait to see how that improves humanity, right? Because every person who's using this improving their life is then going to have a better impact on everything else they do. Well, it is rewarding to work for a company that, has a very clear mission and so I admire that you have that and I certainly feel that way about whoop and in our mission to unlock human performance. Well, Matt, this has been this has been terrific. It's been a real pleasure having you on the Woof podcast and thank you also for being a

Wook member. Thank you. Thank you to Matt Mullenweg for coming on the Wootch podcast. Big thank you to our CTO Jamie Waito for getting him on the podcast and connecting us. If you enjoyed this episode of the podcast, be sure to leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ombed. If you have a question, you want us to answer it on the podcast. Email us. Podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. We'll answer your questions on a future episode. Go to shop.wop.com, grab the new pride band. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L, to get a $60 credit on W-WIP accessories. And that's a wrap for this week. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast.

healthy and stay in the green.