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Matt Mullenweg

Founder & CEO, Automattic · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@photomatt ↗LinkedIn ↗ma.tt ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

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

Assertion Supported
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.”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 13:53 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

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 →

Disclosure
Automattic rejected a $200M acquisition offer when it had 25 employees
“We had an offer at that time to sell the company for about two hundred million, and it was absolutely the right answer not to do it. But I was very close to, and it was partially because I was like, okay, that'll resolve these people issues. I won't have to de…”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 1:02:51 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Disclosure
Automattic intentionally stayed under 50 employees years too long
“And so I really kept us sub 50, probably two or three years longer than we should have been. And so that meant that we got really spread thin and we under invested in things like customer service. Because I was trying to keep the company really small, because …”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 1:03:40 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Insight
Asking what team members need for success empowers them
“It's like, is there anything I can do to help you? Versus What do you need for this to be a success? One is like putting the power with me to help you, and the other is putting the power with you to define what you need, and then I can support that, but ultima…”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 1:06:29 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Each incremental site on WordPress.com costs Automattic one cent per year
“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.”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 1:19:56 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Insight
Mullenweg: Open source is a hack getting competitors to collaborate
“Open source is a hack that gets competitors to work together.”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 1:21:35 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Assertion Supported
Mullenweg: WordPress powers 38% of top 10 million sites
“I think we're 38% of the top ten million websites, which is more than 10 times the number two.”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 2:26 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Disclosure
Mullenweg: Automattic is migrating Tumblr's backend to WordPress
“And then Tumblr, which actually was an acquisition we did last year, which is a, you know, one of our blogging competitors. We were able to acquire it, and we're redoing it, switching it to actually be powered by WordPress on the back end.”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 14:06 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: Automattic has an annual regretted employee churn of 3% to 4%
“So our regretted churn is something like four percent per year, three percent, three and a half percent.”
Matt Mullenweg Jan 5, 2021 ▶ 57:17 #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
#100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key Jan 5, 2021 1h 1m
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