The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Commercial spin-outs usually damage their underlying open-source projects
“The history of most companies coming out of open source projects is that the open source project really suffers.”
Mullenweg predicts 99% of crypto token issuances will go to zero
“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.”
Gutenberg lets anyone build New York Times-style rich layouts for free
“What New York Times spent probably tens of thousands of dollars to do a few years ago will be able to enable anyone with WordPress and Gutenberg to do just kind of out of the box.”
Public market quarterly reporting prevents companies from making 10-year strategic bets
“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…”
Co-CEO arrangements create conflict; companies require a clear hierarchy
“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…”
Mullenweg models Automattic's WordPress strategy on Google's Android and Pixel ecosystem
“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…”
Cryptocurrency is disconnected from fundamentals, acting primarily as a commodity
“I think that right now we're in some ways a little bit disconnected from the fundamentals because it's become essentially like a new commodity, been a flight to safety, a hedge against, you know, inflation and central banks printing money.”
Mullenweg has sold the vast majority of his crypto holdings
“I sold the vast majority of what I have and over the years, and I'll just keep a bit just for fun to keep an eye on it.”
Subscription revenue accounts for 98% to 99% of Automattic's business
“So we are, you know, vast, vast majority, 98, 99% subscription business.”
Automattic received a $200M buyout offer in 2008 with just 25 employees
“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…”
Automattic raised at a $200M valuation to provide secondary liquidity
“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…”
Automattic has surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue
“I think the thing that we're saying publicly is that we're into the nine figures.”
WP Engine needs 450 employees for a vastly smaller customer base
“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.”
Changing the editor is the most controversial task in WordPress history
“Changing the editor, since that's really in many ways the heart of WordPress, Is by far the most controversial thing you can do, and the hardest, because lots of people are very used to how WordPress has worked for the past 14 years, and there's lots of opinio…”
Mullenweg joined GitLab's board of directors
“You know, I'll go super underground and talk about a company I just joined the board of. Which is GitLab.”
Automattic has raised $200M in primary and $150M in secondary capital
“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.”
WordPress was an early major platform to accept Bitcoin at $12
“And WordPress, I think, was one of the first large Internet services to add support for accepting Bitcoin for our services. At the time, Bitcoin was about 12 dollars”
Automattic coordinates 650 remote employees across 62 countries
“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.”
Automattic operates with zero internal email using a custom blogging tool
“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…”