CNET

“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…”

“Yeah, and they were moving faster, because the software was faster. They were writing more personally, so it was more interesting and fun to read, often in first person. They didn't know it at the time, but CNET was kind of being out-competed.”

“And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there…”

“And it's true, the software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways, but it was better in a way that mattered, which was like speed and ease of use.”

“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.”