Automattic

“And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. That's why more and more companies and people are choosing if they're gonna build a business on top of something else, if you build on an open source, you have that guarantee. Even if you…”

“98% of all the core developers have stayed and contributed and are working on the next version and are supportive”

“And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of, ah, 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 commerc…”

“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, you know, have a role similar to mine, and really sort of, ah, try to be a steward.”

“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, Instag…”

“Automatic ended up buying it for a de minimis amount. I think it's been reported. We bought it for like three million dollars.”

“Actually we're in the process right now of migrating the half a billion Tumblr sites to WordPress. Probably one of the largest data migrations.”

“Still not still not profitable, so we're still subsidizing it from the rest of Automatic's businesses”

“Tumblr, I think we ended up ultimately replacing like, 85, 90% of the team as well.”

“Automatic makes about half a billion dollars a year now, and WooCommerce is a majority of that.”

“You know, I have these life missions to democratize publishing and commerce. We added a new one last year, which is messaging. So it's in beta mode right now, but relaunching in a few months is a product called Beeper, which takes all your Telegram, Instagram …”

“Another interesting thing is we actually pay the same salaries globally. So whether you're in California or Italy or Nigeria or wherever, we pay global salaries.”

“I think you just gotta pick a big mission. We started in In 2003 to democratize publishing. And so that was broad enough that we've been able to stay at that and it's banded and it's evolved over time, of course, like what it means to publish has evolved over …”

“One thing that we launched last year was a 100 year plan. Yeah. So you could subscribe to a hundred year hosting plan.”

“Tumblr is not running on WordPress yet, but it will. So we're going to switch Tumblr to be powered by WordPress.”

“We went into commerce with WooCommerce. Let's democratize commerce. And we have now an open source Shopify, which is our, now our largest business. It's a growing like a weed.”

“The WordPress ecosystem, I would estimate to be about ten billion dollars per year.”

“The rest is that help the host. So they cannot preference part of the rules. They can't reference WordPress.com over any other host in the world. WordPress.com gets access to all the same code APIs, everything that everyone else does.”

“And so to be honest, the code was not good. And so like the first couple of times we looked at it, we decided not to buy it because the code was so bad. But at some point, like we're like, they've really figured out something with the users. That's resonating.…”

“I tell all my shareholders, like, if you ever want to sell a share, I'm your man. I don't know what the price is, but I don't want to lock them up.”

“Automatic is a very closely held stock. It's basically our employees and a few dozen of the most sophisticated investors in the world.”

“Our culture suffered. Like we were not as productive during COVID. People thought, oh, this must be, I had other CEOs. This must be great. You just, you're, you must be running at full speed. I'm like, no, I hired 1200 people the past year that have, the past …”

“Almost everyone in leadership gets a person. So Anna who runs people, we have Christine, who's the chief people officer from Duolingo. Moody Glasgow was the CMO of Zapier and Glassdoor. He does marketing. There's a guy named Colin Gardner. He does revenue. So …”

“They were really interested in the real time technologies for collaboration so that you could go to WordPress and like edit posts, what later became the foundation of their block based editor for WordPress five.”

“We ended up selling the company before even we opened it up to the public.”

“At WordPress they had invested Millions and millions and millions of dollars in becoming proficient at hosting one application, WordPress.com. But any incremental new app, new product, new feature was very, very tedious.”

“We have no email. We communicate via blogging and yeah, it's very global.”

“So we've always been totally distributed from the beginning since 2005. So I have colleagues in 97 countries.”

“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…”

“Now, fortunately at our business, all the other businesses are doing very well and very profitable.”

“So between 2005 and I think 2014, all of automatic was done with about eleven million in outside capital.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“So Automatic is the company, yes. And we would love to, yeah, we think we have a better product than them.”

“Myself and the co-founder had never met in person. He was in the UK. I was in Houston, Texas, where I am today.”

“Like I'm a big believer in in-person and physical space. A big part of automatic culture is actually meetups where we would bring either the whole company or teams together a few times a year. But it just felt like the best, most talent in the world was not in…”

“So something we didn't do when we started, but we switched in like, was paying the same salaries regardless of geography, right? It's the same work. It's the same job. You're creating the same value for the company and the and the customers. So you should make…”

“You know, we're 2000 people now. We hired 700 last year, by the way, so you can scale this quite a bit.”

“I think for teams, it's good to be in a range. I'm actually okay with a range of up to seven or eight hours, so like Europe and US is okay, because you can still overlap for an hour to a day, and that's usually plenty. If you need a lot more, you're probably h…”

“I incorporated Automatic on a website like LegalZoom, like one of these, like you press a few buttons and it becomes a C Corp. So I incorporated the company, and yeah, just started to pay the first few people. You know, not a lot, like a thousand bucks a month…”

“The first commercial product I created Was called a kismet, named by my sister.”

“Part of the idea was that WordPress would always be free, and that's maybe the razor, but perhaps we could figure out some razor blades we could sell, some add-on services that would be really most useful to people who are using it more seriously, and then bus…”

“And then these tickets started to sell on eBay. So people would get the free ticket, and then they would start to list it or sell it, and tickets were starting to sell for like, 9000 dollars, 120 dollars on eBay. And we were like, huh, maybe people will pay fo…”

“Because we were only 15, 20 people at the time. I still owned well over half the company. And so this idea that the for-profit company that we'd been building for about two years was gonna be, had this offer. A very serious offer turned a million dollars was r…”

“And when I really thought about it, what I would most want to do. I would want to code every day. I'd want to travel the world and meet WordPress users all over the world. I'd want to make software that people used and do it with people I enjoyed working with.…”

“So what they did was they took the two hundred million dollars, and they said, okay, that'll be the valuation of the company. We'll do a new round of investment, but instead of putting in one million dollars, we're going to put in ten million dollars into the …”

“Usually what happens is when the company joins, we acquire them, they say, oh, we really need their office. We say, okay, we'll pay the rent, we'll keep it going, we'll keep the lease going. But then once they start to learn our way of working, fewer and fewer…”

“What we often go to bat for and fight for, including with this company called Wix, is what they did was they took our code, and then the code they derived from it, so the modifications they met, were, they said were proprietary and secret to Wix. And so what w…”

“When Wix did that, they had way more money than us. So a legal battle would have taken years, and even possibly bankrupted automatic, depending on how long it went.”

“I have colleagues in 93 countries.”

“We had a colleague get arrested in Belarus because he was blogging and speaking out against the dictatorship there and things.”

“And we never banned talking about politics. We did ban talking about some of it anonymously. So we said, some of these things, if you want to talk about this, that's fine, but do it under your own name.”

“Companies like Stripe, SpaceX they've gone to a hundred billion plus valuations as private companies, so you don't need to go public anymore.”

“I personally don't like that because it seems to take what makes open source successful and essentially, you know, create the incentives against it, right? Because if you play that out 1020 years from now, your very best features are going to go into the paid …”