Automattic

“So we were able to do a round at like a two hundred million valuation. Matt Mullenweg: and that was New York Times actually joined that and it was largely our existing investors. Matt Mullenweg: So all of our existing investors kind of re-upped and we did do a…”

“Think of it kind of like Google with Android. Like, they'll make their Pixel phones, so we'll make some versions of WordPress that we think are the best in the world. But very key to our strategy is also working with every other manufacturer out there and ever…”

“So we are, you know, vast, vast majority, 98, 99% subscription business.”

“One, I think there's a lot of, 99% of those are going to go to zero. There's a, but there's also some in there that'll be category changing and change the world.”

“It was 2008, so it was about two years into automatic, two and a half years. Nathan Latka: And it was a two hundred million dollar offer? Matt Mullenweg: It was of that magnitude, yeah. Matt Mullenweg: And the company at the time was also Matt Mullenweg: Reall…”

“WP Engine at this point is 450 people. You know, that's, Automatic's only six 50. So just serving their customer base, which is much smaller than ours takes almost the same number of people.”

“And while they have access to, you know, the public capital markets, which is great. Matt Mullenweg: there, I think lost, you lose a little bit of your ability except for very few companies to make really long-term strategic bets. Matt Mullenweg: And we believ…”

“I think total at this point, I've raised around, Matt Mullenweg: Let's say around 200 in primary and about another 150 in secondary. Nathan Latka: Okay. Matt Mullenweg: So somewhere around three 50 total.”

“So we use this thing we built called P two. You can look it up P two theme.com and it's basically like an internet blogging tool. So you can use it to share things with your colleagues. We use that instead of email. So there's basically no email inside of auto…”

“I think the thing that we're saying publicly is that we're into the nine figures.”

“The history of most companies coming out of open source projects is that the open source project really suffers.”

“And we want to open source and release a lot of the tools that we use to be one of the larger, totally distributed companies in the world, you know, coordinate across time zones, across, you know, 650 people in, like, 62 countries.”

“I had seen co-CEO and other kind of arrangements and that seemed to create a lot of conflict. So I wanted everyone in the company to be clear. There was like, there was a clear hierarchy and Tony was at the very top. So he had the final say on everything. Whic…”

“The, there's a fundamental Philosophy difference at Joomla to not go the automatic or Acquia route if we look at Drupal.”

“I don't think he can afford us, first of all.”

“So Automatic is the company, yes. And we would love to, yeah, we think we have a better product than them.”