Matt Mullenweg
Founder & CEO, Automattic · 1 appearance on the record.
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Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open-source content management system. He is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr.
32statements → 9claims → 2claims resolved → 3.69/5average certainty → 2.22/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 7 assertions · 5 opinions · 11 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Matt argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Mullenweg: WooCommerce is doing well over $20B in GMV
“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.”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Matt Mullenweg on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Matt Mullenweg said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Mullenweg: Open Source Eventually Dominates Every Market It Enters
“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.”
Mullenweg: It is easier to slack off in an office than in distributed work
“I think it's easier to slack off in an office than it is in a distributed environment.”
Fully distributed organizations outperform in-person companies across all metrics
“Level five is where I believe that the organization in a distributed fashion is outperforming at every single level, productivity, quality, employee happiness, everything, any in-person organization. Because you've embraced all the power, all the special featu…”
Mullenweg: Proprietary software is an evolutionary dead end
“And I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end.”
Mullenweg: Successful platforms capture only 5% of ecosystem revenue
“And I kept finding this ratio that's like 20 to one everywhere in successful platforms, not in fake platforms, like it's not on the Facebook platform. Facebook made like 90% of the dollars in that ecosystem, but in others.”
Mullenweg: Open source can power 80% to 85% of the web
“And I believe we have the ability to create a national monopoly of 80, 85% of the world's websites running on open source.”
Mullenweg: Black-Box Algorithms Are Stripping Away Human Agency
“And more and more, as more and more of our lives are influenced, you know, who we date, when we meditate, what we pay attention to, what news we read are essentially these black box algorithms. We are losing our agency and sovereignty over ourselves.”
Mullenweg argues open-core business models incentivize hiding best features behind paywalls
“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 …”
Asynchronous communication empowers introverted employees and outperforms live meetings
“I believe asynchronous interactions can be far richer than synchronous ones. You unlock the power of the introverts in your company. People for whom, in a real-time meeting, they might hang back a little bit or be shy, or they might need to think about things …”
Automattic's internal blog archive is its most valuable asset, exceeding cash reserves
“More than the money in our bank, more than our software, anything is this, ah, sort of now, kind of like a 15 year record of every decision, every design process, everything is in these internal blogs.”
Online interaction can only build 85% to 90% of in-person trust
“As humans, I still think there's something that is Impossible to recreate online, which is that breaking bread, you know, the bottle of wine you and I shared, whatever the equivalent of that is. It just builds trust in a way that you can get pretty close onlin…”
Mullenweg: Distributed work suffers more from overwork than underwork
“The problem we have actually in distributed work, so to get to another downside, is not under work, it's over work.”
Automattic rejected a $500M valuation weeks before securing a $3B valuation
“We turn down an investor who wants to invest in the company at a maximum of five hundred million enterprise value, and like, a week or two later, someone invested a three billion dollar valuation.”
Mullenweg: Incentives and Markets Always Trump Individual Corporate Action
“You know, I believe in, sort of, incentives and environments and markets always trump, you know, anything one individual or company can do.”
Mullenweg: Akismet maintains over 99.999% accuracy in blocking spam
“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.”
Mullenweg: WooCommerce is doing well over $20B in GMV
“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.”
Mullenweg: Automattic cut $25M-$30M in annual costs from Tumblr
“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.”
Mullenweg: Automattic only makes top-down decisions on large capital impacts
“The only places where we'll do something really top-down is if there is a really large capital impact.”
Mullenweg: Automattic cut Tumblr's server fleet from 6,000 to 800
“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…”
Mullenweg: Synchronous communication is inefficient due to its 1:1 time ratio
“I think one downside of synchronous communication is it's kind of one-to-one. So the time that it's taking to communicate the information is also what it takes to consume it, and that's kind of inefficient.”
Mullenweg: Transparent meeting notes shrink meeting sizes and boost effectiveness
“If every meeting is transparent and has really good notes, or a recording, people don't feel the need to be there, and so the meeting can be smaller. Which also means it's more effective, where it's like, you know, not everyone is like, ah, I'm not in this mee…”
Automattic started tracking vacation because employees took too little time off
“We used to not track any vacation, or what we call AFK, away from keyboard time, because we have a completely open policy there, take what you want. But the problem was people weren't taking it, so we started tracking it to encourage people to take it, which i…”
Mullenweg: Automattic barely uses internal email, relying on blogs instead
“Internally, I get almost zero email. So inside the company, we basically don't use email. Maybe like some HR stuff or something you might get via email if it's truly private, but everything else happens on the blogs.”
Mullenweg: Scaling from 20 to 50 people breaks brute-force collaboration
“Going from 20 to 50 people, you lose that ability to brute force the collaboration and getting everyone on the same page, and you really need to start communicating in a way which is, Well understood across the existing people, but also at that point, you're p…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key | Jan 5, 2021 | 1h 1m |