The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Automattic uses zero internal email, relying entirely on internal blogging
“We have no email. We communicate via blogging and yeah, it's very global.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
WooCommerce processed $31 billion in GMV in 2021
“It did thirty one billion and a GMV sold last year.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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 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.”
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.”
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.”
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”
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.”
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.”
Mullenweg: WordPress originated from forking the abandoned b2/cafelog software
“I started using some software called B-II Cafe Log, actually from a developer out of Corsica, France, and you know, started volunteering on the farms, forums, helping other people out, contributing code, and then what happened was that software actually was ab…”