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Matt Mullenweg

Founder & CEO, Automattic · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@photomatt ↗LinkedIn ↗ma.tt ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open-source content management system. He is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr.

25statements → 17claims → 9claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 4.12/5average certainty → 1.64/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 33said about them ↓

6 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 7 not checkable as stated how the 17 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 14 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 17 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 9 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Matt argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Automattic uses zero internal email, relying entirely on internal blogging
“We have no email. We communicate via blogging and yeah, it's very global.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 9:18 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Automattic ran on $11 million in outside capital from 2005 to 2014
“So between 2005 and I think 2014, all of automatic was done with about eleven million in outside capital.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 18:56 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
67% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.7

redirected or did not address 3 of 40 assessed questions (8%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

280 words/min while actually speaking · 29.4 um and uh per 1k words · 5.2 false starts per 1k · 29.4% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 8,887 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Matt Mullenweg said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Mullenweg: Tumblr was mismanaged by Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon
“It had been mismanaged, I think under Yahoo and AWOL and Verizon, and we felt like we could turn it around.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 15:59 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Automattic uses zero internal email, relying entirely on internal blogging
“We have no email. We communicate via blogging and yeah, it's very global.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 9:18 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: All Automattic business units besides Tumblr are very profitable
“Now, fortunately at our business, all the other businesses are doing very well and very profitable.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 16:50 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: WooCommerce will likely equal all other Automattic businesses combined
“WooCommerce is our e-commerce platform, which, you know, today can be Probably will be as large of all, as all of our other businesses combined.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 20:04 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: Open source is the future of humanity
“Open source is the future of humanity and it's important that we create more of it.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 26:02 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mullenweg: Teams should assign someone to explicitly challenge and attack ideas
“I love the idea as well as, you know, having someone on the team whose job it is even to like attack the ideas and to really force them to defend themselves.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 41:14 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Mullenweg: Defaulting to trust is worth the occasional 'optimism tax'
“I personally am very default trusting. And that also means that sometimes you pay what I call an optimism tax. My friend John Sten came up with that, and basically saying that, you know, if you default to being optimistic and trusting, sometimes people will ta…”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 7:13 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Automattic's internal blog acts as an organizational blockchain of decisions
“The system's called P two, the letter P is in pool and then the number two. What's cool about this is it becomes like a organizational blockchain, like a history of basically every decision we've made in the company for the past dozen years or so, including ev…”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 14:09 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Mullenweg: 60% of Tumblr users are under 25 and majority female
“60% of Tumblr's users are under the age of 25. They're majority female. They're, you know, primarily mobile.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 17:31 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
WooCommerce processed $31 billion in GMV in 2021
“It did thirty one billion and a GMV sold last year.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 20:12 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mullenweg: Rotate top existing talent into acquired companies to integrate culture
“So one of the best things we can do when we buy something is take some of the best people at automatic, the best engineers, the best designers, et cetera, and we rotate them in to the acquired business. And that builds a lot of bridges, you know, it's kind of …”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 21:20 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mullenweg: Employee benefits ratchet; removing unused perks still causes outrage
“Benefits ratchet, meaning that people appreciate when you add them, but they're very unhappy when you remove them, even if it wasn't something they were using.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 28:06 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Mullenweg: Automattic received a $200M acquisition offer in 2008
“In 2008, the company was only about 20 people, just about two years old, and we got an offer to sell for a two hundred million which, you know, I owned a majority of the company.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 29:09 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Mullenweg: Automattic investors provided $10M primary and secondary liquidity in 2008
“What the investors did is they said, okay, let's take that two hundred million, make it a new valuation. We'll invest money in that and we'll put, you know, ten million to the company and then we'll allow you and Tony and other employees to like take a little …”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 29:37 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: The web will become weirder and offer users more control
“So my hope in 20, twice having it over the next five years is that the web is a lot more creative, a lot weirder that people have a lot more control over it versus just being another profile on Twitter or Facebook and more fun.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 58:31 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Mullenweg: Early Google survey showed WordPress on 0.8% of websites
“And shortly after that, maybe a year or two after that, we started to see WordPress show up in like whole internet numbers. And I remember the first time Google did a survey and they found this weird header in HTTP responses that they were like, we're not sure…”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 3:49 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Mullenweg: Automattic has been fully distributed since 2005 across 97 countries
“So we've always been totally distributed from the beginning since 2005. So I have colleagues in 97 countries.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 9:23 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Matt Mullenweg took over day-to-day CEO duties at Tumblr in February 2022
“In February, I took over as the CEO of Tumblr. I've been running that personally day to day since then.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 11:01 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Automattic ran on $11 million in outside capital from 2005 to 2014
“So between 2005 and I think 2014, all of automatic was done with about eleven million in outside capital.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 18:56 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Automattic raised $160 million in all-primary capital for Series C in 2014
“We ended up doing our series C, which we raised, you know, we went from eleven million dollars to raising one hundred and sixty million. It was all primary capital.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 19:50 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Automattic gives employees up to $250 monthly for coworking spaces
“We do give them an allowance of two, of up to 250 dollars per person per month to go to a coworking space or to go to a coffee shop”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 27:05 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: Automated site migration under 15 seconds drove WordPress.com growth
“And we got it down to where most of them take now under 15 seconds. And that feature's been working really well, and it actually drove, like many years of enhanced growth for WordPress.com.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 39:27 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Mullenweg: Two-thirds of Tumblr was in a New York office at acquisition
“It was actually a big challenge when we bought Tumblr because they did have, you know, pretty large office presence. About two thirds of the company was in an office in New York.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 21:02 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Matt Mullenweg flew over 500,000 air miles in 2019
“In 2019, I think I did over 500,000 air miles.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 47:44 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Show 1statements(1 left)

The other half of the tape: Matt Mullenweg's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 9 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 16Tony Schneider 5Ed Cooke 4Guillermo Rauch 3Joost de Valk 2Tony Conrad 1Hiten Shah 1

Statements about Matt Mullenweg, by other people (1)

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schneider: Automattic selected only 3-4 monthly priorities from 30+ potential tasks
“Matt and I always kept a running list of all the things we wanted to work on, or maybe should be working on at some point, and Usually had like dirty or 40 things on it, probably even more because there's a lot of growth and a lot of ideas everywhere. And then…”
Tony Schneider Mar 16, 2020 ▶ 12:25 20VC: True Ventures' Toni Schneider on How Being CEO @ Automattic (Wordpress) Made Him A Better Investor, The Biggest Lessons from Automattic on Running Successful Remote Teams and The Right Way For Investors To Show Founders They Have Their Support (Note

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0081152201520162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions
012201520162017201820192020202120222023episodes it came up in
004182201520162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 5 mentions in 1 episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC # Jul 11, 2022 40m
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