Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Resold WordPress invites on eBay revealed monetization potential to founders

Matt Mullenweg · WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg · Mar 21, 2022 · at 48:55

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and WordPress, describes how an invite system implemented to manage server demand uncovered consumer willingness to pay.

0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 for the site. So that really kind of opened up our mind, those people selling the gold tickets opened up our mind for the business opportunity of it.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Matt Mullenweg

Assertion Partly supported
Mullenweg: Wix violated copyright by making derived WordPress code proprietary
“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…”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 21, 2022 ▶ 1:02:32 WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
Assertion Supported
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“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…”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 21, 2022 ▶ 39:30 WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CNET pioneered modern content management systems with hundreds of daily authors
“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.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 21, 2022 ▶ 25:08 WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
Disclosure
Mullenweg joined CNET because it allowed him to retain code IP
“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…”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 21, 2022 ▶ 26:12 WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
Opinion
Mullenweg: Employee job-hopping is the fault of companies, not workers
“I think that the people joke about, or they criticize that people jump between companies. There's no loyalty anymore. But I think that's the fault of the company, not of the people. It's that they're not treating people like they want them around for 20 years.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 21, 2022 ▶ 28:46 WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
Insight
Early WordPress beat enterprise CMS software purely on speed and ease
“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.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 21, 2022 ▶ 35:49 WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 800 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.