The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“So I believe that open source comes to dominate any market that enters over time. And the key word is over time because sometimes it takes many decades.”

“There is a version of AI that the web gets filled with spam and, you know, everything. I think that will happen and it doesn't matter because ultimately what we're looking for is that discernment, that quality.”

“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 …”

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

“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”

“And I believe we have the ability to create a national monopoly of 80, 85% of the world's websites running on open source.”

“One, I think there's a lot of, 99% of those are going to go to zero. There's a, but there's also some in there that'll be category changing and change the world.”

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

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

“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.”

“Open source is the future of humanity and it's important that we create more of it.”

“And so they invented a lot of, like, what we call CMS, or content management systems, because they were the first to really have hundreds of authors and thousands and thousands of posts and be publishing every day.”

“Then Google came in, and of course, they were pretty mad that this code had outsmarted their search engine. So they actually removed WordPress from Google.”

“The other thing was about a quarter or a third of our usage at the time was in China. And China decided that the Great Firewall would block WordPress.com.”

“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 New York Times spent probably tens of thousands of dollars to do a few years ago will be able to enable anyone with WordPress and Gutenberg to do just kind of out of the box.”

“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 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…”

“60% of Tumblr's users are under the age of 25. They're majority female. They're, you know, primarily mobile.”

“It did thirty one billion and a GMV sold last year.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is majority. So 55% under 24 and under. So it's a young blogging network, which is neat. It's different than WordPress's demographics. It's primarily mobile. 85% of mobile. It's still doing tens of thousands of signups per day.”

“And so that's what Mike and I ended up doing, was we took the code from B two cafe log, kind of this abandoned code, and we did what an open source is called, we forked it, F-O-R-K. And start, use that as the base to start creating something new.”

“Every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word Matt, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, Photomat.net, et cetera, is the number one site…”

“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 it's now, 10 years later, it still has over five nines of accuracy for blocking spam and keeping and allowing good stuff through.”

“WooCommerce, which is, I think, one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms in the world. It's essentially e-commerce built on top of WordPress, so you get the best of both. And that's doing well over twenty billion of GMV now and growing really quickly.”

“So we were able to take 25, thirty million a year of cost out of Tumblr, just by kind of bringing it over to our systems, which brought them a lot closer to being breakeven.”

“We ended up reducing that to about 800. So we went from 6000 servers to 800 and part of that was, you know, doing a lot of engineering work to bring things on to sort of what we've learned with best practices and being super duper frugal with everything we bui…”

“And then that became WordPress.com, which allows us to host hundreds of millions of sites on the same code base, same databases, in a super scalable way where each incremental site only costs us like a penny per year.”

“It was 2008, so it was about two years into automatic, two and a half years. Nathan Latka: And it was a two hundred million dollar offer? Matt Mullenweg: It was of that magnitude, yeah. Matt Mullenweg: And the company at the time was also Matt Mullenweg: Reall…”

“So we were able to do a round at like a two hundred million valuation. Matt Mullenweg: and that was New York Times actually joined that and it was largely our existing investors. Matt Mullenweg: So all of our existing investors kind of re-upped and we did do a…”

“WP Engine at this point is 450 people. You know, that's, Automatic's only six 50. So just serving their customer base, which is much smaller than ours takes almost the same number of people.”

“I think we're right now around like 42% 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…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“One of the bloggers named Christine thought of this name WordPress, and she called me. She was like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. There's this name, and the .org is available. You should go for it. And I just fell in love with it. So that's how we chose the…”

“When he came back, he had seen that, like, oh, all these things blossomed out of this thing. And so he looked at all the different forks and very graciously sort of crowned WordPress the official continuation of B-II.”

“I had gone to CNET and said, hey, WordPress is cool, but it's really complicated to set up. If we can make it easy, you just click a few buttons and you get a WordPress, I think that'd be really popular. Let's do that. And that was my pitch to CNET. And I even…”

“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…”

“Google had done this survey, published a survey of the internet. It was kind of like a statistical analysis of all the websites that were in the Google index and the code they used. And there was this part of the report that said, yeah, and then on .8% of webs…”