Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Mullenweg: Competing for SF Talent Was Fishing in a Small Pond

Matt Mullenweg · How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic · Mar 24, 2022 · at 36:45

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, explains the strategic advantage of building a fully remote company compared to competing locally against tech giants.

0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like I'm a big believer in in-person and physical space. A big part of automatic culture is actually meetups where we would bring either the whole company or teams together a few times a year. But it just felt like the best, most talent in the world was not in San Francisco, regardless of all the smart people was meeting. It felt like a very small pond to fish in. So we were trying to compete with the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Like we had to fish in the ocean, not the same pond they were fishing in.”

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

Disclosure
Mullenweg: Automattic pays identical salaries regardless of employee geography
“So something we didn't do when we started, but we switched in like, was paying the same salaries regardless of geography, right? It's the same work. It's the same job. You're creating the same value for the company and the and the customers. So you should make…”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 24, 2022 ▶ 49:57 How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
Opinion
Mullenweg: Marc and Ben's public writing disrupted the VC model for a16z
“What would Andreessen Horowitz be without Mark's seminal essays and Ben's amazing books and essays, you know, like Their writing is part of how they disrupted the VC model and became Andres and Horowitz, which now we take for granted.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 24, 2022 ▶ 45:46 How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
Insight
Mullenweg: Team time zone differences should not exceed seven to eight hours
“I think for teams, it's good to be in a range. I'm actually okay with a range of up to seven or eight hours, so like Europe and US is okay, because you can still overlap for an hour to a day, and that's usually plenty. If you need a lot more, you're probably h…”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 24, 2022 ▶ 54:23 How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: 55% of Tumblr users are under 24 and 85% on mobile
“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.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 24, 2022 ▶ 56:16 How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
Disclosure
Mullenweg: I Personally Took Over as Tumblr CEO in February 2022
“And actually, you know, some news as of February first, I'm running it personally. So I'm day to day running Tumblr as CEO working on the product, working on the design, working on the tech, working on everything.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 24, 2022 ▶ 56:45 How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
Assertion Supported
Mullenweg: WordPress co-founders had never met in person when starting project
“Myself and the co-founder had never met in person. He was in the UK. I was in Houston, Texas, where I am today.”
Matt Mullenweg Mar 24, 2022 ▶ 34:17 How to Engineer Serendipity | Matt Mullenweg, Automattic
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 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.