The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/3ff32b30109dc47e

If you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Put your hands together for Matt Mullenwick. Matt Mullenwig has been making some questionable moves recently. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days. Twenty plus years of good sentiment burned.
In days. You were like a hundred percent beloved hero of open source and internet, and now you're like in this a lot of people don't like you. If you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress, it's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. Previously like one percent.
Um
The world thought I was terrible. And now I feel like it's up to like four or five percent. People that don't know what the hell's going on. Well it's just like the high level over here, what's going on. There's a company called WPNG. By 2018, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. You know, since 2019, WPN has kind of changed a bit. They started using the trademark. They're offering something called WordPress.
Yeah, refer to it as like a
A bastardized hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand. Why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy? A lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know, get out of bed.

Today my guest is Matt Mollenweg.
Matt is the co creator of WordPress, which powers forty percent of websites on the internet today.
Including Whitehouse.gov
He's also the CEO of Automatic, which is valued at over seven billion dollars, and owns products like WordPress.com.
Tumblr.
Woo Commerce, Gravitars, and Pocket Casts.
There is a lot of drama these days around Matt and WordPress and within the open source community.
So I thought I'd have Matt on to address many of the criticisms head on that he hasn't addressed in other places.
And also just get the full story and what's going on.
We also chat about what accepted him to spend over half his life at this point on open source and creating WordPress.
Also why products like Llama are what he calls fake open source, and his perspective on AI and open source. Also how AI is actually trained on open source code and what that means for the future.
and his approach for deciding what companies to acquire within automatic.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion and Superhuman and Perplexity Pro.
And linear and granola.
Check it out at Lenny's newsletter dot com.
With that, I bring you Matt Mollenweg.
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Thank you.
Mm.
Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks. It's uh you know, big fan, uh long time listener, so happy to be on.
I'm a longtime fan. I've been wanting to get you on this podcast for so long.
And this is such an interesting time to be chatting with you. You're good there's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days, so it's a really interesting
Uh it's it's almost good that we waited a little bit to talk. So we're gonna get into a lot of that stuff.
But I wanna start with just uh what is it that you do, Matt? What are all the things you're involved in? Give people a sense of just
The things you're working on.
So first, uh when I was nineteen, I co founded uh open source project called WordPress.
Uh with Mike Little.
And um we uh
Started just blogging software, then became
uh sort of a full site thing and then became like a a platform.
Uh really tons of stuff is built on.
And now it's kinda transitioning into like this cool WASM can be embedded anywhere, run locally, or make mobile apps. It's
Like really interesting seeing WordPress used as an engine for powering like
I would say.
Don't even look like a website.
Which is a
Kinda wild to me. But that's kinda the beauty of open source. People do things with it you don't expect.
End up dropping out of college, moving to San Francisco, and then um worked at Cnet for a year.
As Project Manager, actually.
Yeah. I wanna talk about that and but go on.
And then um yeah, had this vision where
You know, instead of like downloading the software and setting up a database and everything, we could make like a SaaS version of WordPress.
I should have seen it. They didn't want to do it. So I was like, Okay, I gotta do this. So I left and started a company uh called Automatic.
The idea was to create um
Essentially like complement the core WordPress software with some commercial services.
Things that run in the cloud.
Like uh Akisman anti spam, which is our sort of machine learning AI I guess you call it AI now, but like anti spam system. Or um or Jetpack, which is like iCloud for WordPress. You know, it does the back ups in the real time sync and everything like that. So
That was nineteen years ago. So uh that's now grown to be um
You know, over seventeen hundred people.
And actually ninety countries. So we've actually been fully distributed and remote and asynchronous from the start.
I think is one of our superpowers.
I actually wasn't the CEO in the beginning, but uh in twenty fourteen. So I guess eleven years ago I became CEO.
Uh the original CEO was uh
Well, I guess that wasn't the very beginning, but then I hired Tony Schneider to be CO.
Probably four or five months in.
And um yeah, so that is a very full time thing. An automatic does a lot of products. That's WordPress dot com.
WooCommerce, which is open source Shopify, which is now our half our our revenue.
Then we have some really cool apps. So like beeper
Uh day one
Simple though.
Pocket casts.
Uh or trying to fill up your home screen with open web, open source things that uh are very privacy and user centric.
So that, you know, running that company is is definitely like a full time job.
Um
I still run WordPress.org and the WordPress project, so I'm the lead developer there. And so sort of manage all those
Releases and the community and the
Yeah, the directories and all the sort of things we do on WordPress.org.
This cool thing called open verse we took over from Creative Commons, which is like a
a way you can find sort of open licensed uh images and audio and video.
So basically
Uh if you notice the throughput through all these things, it's open source.
On like
The nights and weekends are like side. A few hours a week I do some angel investing. So I've done over a hundred angel investments through uh an entity called Audrey Capital.
Just sort of that.
If anything's in the
sort of WordPress space I invest in it through automatic.
But if anything's like a little more further afield, um
Do through Artru Capital and I've done uh
Some really exciting investments there, everything from
sort of name brands like Stripe and SpaceX, but also like uh
It was in the seat of calm or a lot of home automation stuff like ring, August, Smart.
Things um
Yeah, just check out Audrey.co. It's got some
Fun stuff in there.
Daylight computer, which is one I'm very excited about right now.
And I guess finally I I I love San Francisco. So uh
Yeah, did it have a
Uh.
Co owner of a
Cool grungy jazz club at North Beach called Keys.
Uh Simon Row.
And uh so if you
Yeah, Wednesday through Saturday night. You want to see some awesome live chats, uh check out Keys.
Wow. Okay. You studied too much, I get it now.
Uh
Uh jazz club I was not aware of. I I I gotta check this out. It's called Keys.
Yeah, key's Jazz D struck.
Yeah, over on um Broadway.
Amazing. That was new. That was new to me. Going back to automatic, I think people don't get the scale of this thing. So just to mirror back a few things and even add to what you've said.
Seventeen hundred people work there, ninety different countries.
Um
Also
You didn't share this stat so something like forty three percent of the internet of internet websites are
Built on WordPress, run on WordPress.
Yeah, so
When we started, a lot of websites were built on custom CMSs and there's a lot of fragmentation in the space.
But now WordPress has grown to be, yeah, over forty percent of all websites in the world.
Which is ten X to number two, which right now is Shopify. Right. They're like at four percent. I was I was looking at that list. They're around four percent. Yeah.
It used to be open source was the top three, uh unfortunately like Jumbling and Drupal.
Jubla and Drupal have fallen behind.
And so now it's uh like uh
Shopify with Square Space.
are are the top ones. But WordPress is still, you know.
Because we have this flywheel of open source community, it's movements.
Um
Yeah, they kind of uh
Has this yeah.
Like any open source like Linux or Apache or Wikipedia. Yeah.
has some positive flywheel effects when it takes off.
Awesome. Okay. And then there's a few other things you need to mention. I want to get to this later, but I'll just mention now. You guys own Tumblr, you bought Tumblr, which I don't think a lot of people necessarily know. Sorry, I forgot to mention. We're going to get into that. Yeah. Yeah. Running a social network is definitely the hardest thing I've ever attempted. I thought we knew what we were doing.
Because you know, WordPress.
Yeah, ran so much the web we don't.
I thought every content moderation thing you could ever deal with, but social networks are a whole other
Uh

Okay. Uh
Couple more fun facts before we get into some other stuff I wanna chat about.
Fun fact number one is
You were super involved in the Bay Lights project.
I didn't know this.
For people that don't know what the Bay Light if you're in San Francisco, you definitely know what the Baylight project and I'm sure you love it.
Uh
For people that don't know what this is about, what is this project and how
How have you been well? Why why how why have you been instrumental into making this a a thing?
Baylights uh
Yeah, there's two famous bridges and um
in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, which is kind of the iconic one. There's actually the Bay Bridge, which is the workhorse of San Francisco. It has like the most of the busiest bridges in the country.
And it's really beautiful from a like an engineering point of view. Um
And so kind of a
A vision between Ben Davis and an artist Leo Villarreal, who's an amazing light artist. Actually got to start a burning man.
Uh was the puts.
Gosh, I forget the number. I think eighteen thousand L E Ds.
On the side of the bridge, like on all the cables.
And um
create this really beautiful, gentle
Kind of like uh
Algorithmic.
uh light piece, light art piece.
And um
The uh
Yeah, Ben Davis was was dating an artist friend of mine and we were over and having drinks on my patio and we were looking at the Bay Bridge. And I had this kind of thing where like there's some lights at the top of the Bay Bridge.
I was like, Oh, wouldn't it be cool if those lights were like Christmas lights and they could do patterns or something? You know, it's the lights to keep planes from hitting it.
And I was like, Oh, you could like program that.
He's like, Yeah.
It's almost like that.
the social network thing where like
A million's cool, but a billion would be really cool. He's like, you know, that would be cool, but what if we put
the whole side of it. And uh so that uh I was like
Oh cool. And um sort of made an angel investment.
And that um
That thing.
raised anything or had there was I don't even think an entity at that point.
I was like, you know, to get you started.
Yeah, but it was a hundred or hundred fifty K. So I gave him that first bit.
And then it kinda.
Blossoms into a thing.
And then uh sort of fast forward, remember the exact timeline, but they were kind of at a
The final bit of fundraise and they
They weren't able to close that last bit.
And I actually mortgaged my condos and uh donated the last uh million million and a half.
to uh to finish out that project.
The Baylights were online for ten years.
Uh the technology
Degraded. And so like the the environment's very harsh.
So actually we just completed a fundraise and are reinstalling the bay lights.
They're calling it Baylight three sixty. So now it'll be both sides of the bridge.
It'll be visible from also Oakland and the Treasure Island,'cause the first version the city was very worried about the like drivers seeing the lights and it might distract'em. So we had an angle though, that you could only see it from San Francisco.
Let's uh
Was a compromise we didn't love, you know,'cause like yeah, we love the East Bay and everything else like that too. So new version is uh coming online.
Uh hopefully later this year in the fall.
And um
And also that that turned into a nonprofit called Illuminate jump on the board of.
uh run by Ben Davis, who I mentioned previously, that does cool public art stuff around the city. So they're responsible for the
Yeah, the grace lights. Um
All the J F K Boulevard stuff where that's been has the murals and like the the beer garden and all the chairs, that's all illuminate.
So they do fun
Their their thing is radical public art. So the thing is it's like art that needs to be free and accessible.
And I think that's so important for San Francisco. Like we have great institutions, you know, the SF Mama, the opera, et cetera.
That have huge budgets, like a hundred million a year.
And illuminate for no
Literally one tenth of that.
Yeah, it's created something that millions of people can enjoy.
You know.
And I like to think that uh
Anyone along their marcadero?
You know?
You might be going through a tough time. Obviously we have
People who
struggle like mental health and homelessness and everything like that. But like maybe seeing a little bit of art can help
Raise your soul a little bit.
And that's how I think about philanthropy as well, like
You need to work on the base issues.
Yeah, the fundamentals.
at the bottom of those highly great needs.
And then you also have to work on the things that like
Yeah.
Raise your soul a little bit.
So arts.
So I I like that barbell approach to philanthropy.
Elon has a great quote along those lines, you can't just work on solving problems all day.
Need something inspiring.
To think about and to work towards.
I l first of all, thank you for doing this. It's like if you live in SF, you're like, this makes the city better, just having this around. I didn't realize you were involved in like helping
I know that you did the
Mortgage your house to make it possible. I can't take any credit for the idea.
an adjacent idea and they had a way cooler one with a real artist and everything like that. So I was I was just happy to be a it's like being an angel investor, you know, like you you can support the entrepreneurs and the people who uh actually really do it.
Yeah. Okay. And the other funny thing you said is about they were d worried about the angle of the lights distracting people. What's funny is when I drove drive across the bridge, you can only see it.
when you're driving towards San Francisco looking backwards. So I'm like looking in my rear view mirror or the mirror turning around to look at'em and that's it feels more dangerous than the lights.
Shining in my face.
Yeah, they'd call it impossible works of art. There were like thirteen agencies that had to sign off. They were worried the lights were distracting birds or seals or environmental reviews.
It was really uh
Yeah.
A lot of
Like public bureaucrats and everyone had a like to make that happen.
There is like twenty places where someone could have said no and it never would happen. So it's very inspiring to see the CD come together.
And also like is San Francisco, I feel like is entering a new chapter right now.
Like going from like the doom loop to the boop. No. Um I'm a big believer in the city. So much innovation has come here from like food.
Yeah, like
The burrito fortune cookies, all these sorts of things are from San Francisco. So like obviously all the tech innovation that we're all familiar with. Uh it's kinda the city of the future.
Yeah, I don't know what it is in the water.
You know, from like the sixties till now. Like
Cultural innovations, things that happen and influence the whole world. Bernie Man
Yeah, Grateful Dead, et cetera, like that all
Starts in San Francisco.
So it's exciting to be here.
S episode back, as they say on Twitter.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Someone very close to you told me that you're uh an excellent rapper.
I'm not gonna ask you to rap.
But if you ever want to answer any questions in Rap Form, feel free.
Ha

Oh man, that that would be fun. I've uh I've I've dreamed about being able to do a Q and A and Rhyme, but uh I don't think I'm that talented yet. Just the seed. I'm planting the seed.
Okay. So uh I wanna get into the
the all the drama that you're in swirled in right now, but I wanna first lay the foundation of how you got into this and where this all came from.
So let's talk about just the origin story of you and open source.
You've been
More than half your life you've been working on open source, you've been working on WordPress specifically. WordPress is such a
core uh community within the open source community.
What's kinda the the original
story of you becoming obsessed in I don't know, open source build.
I was a broke kid in Houston, Texas.
And um
My passions were
Uh jazz.
You know?
Uh
Eason has actually amazing
uh music programs in the public schools.
And so I was very fortunate to to go to some of the best
several arts programs, including my high school, called the High School for the Performing Visual Arts.
Where um Beyonce went, Robert Glasper, a lot of like amazing folks went there.
And um
So
Uh, music was a big part of my life.
And uh and actually economics.
So I had this fun teacher, Scott Roman, who
Um created
Participate in our school in the Fed Federal Reserve Challenge.
Which was uh run by
Yeah that
The Federal Reserve that sets the interest rates and you know, back to the national banking system and everything like that.
has this competition for high school students. Um it ended up being the first academic competition this art school ever won.
And um
Yeah, first year we kind of
Didn't get that far our second year, we went all the way to national. So I got to meet Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke was our judge.
Um
Yeah, went to D C so that was uh
Very very exciting.
And so
You'll be exposed to like
Also having great liberal arts education. You know, the ideas of
You know, Frederick Hayek, Agnes Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, um, Thucydides, you know, all these sorts of things.
That philosophy really influenced me.
And um
You combine that with that, you know, music lessons were expensive, so we couldn't really afford'em. So I I would barter.
and trade, I build websites for local musicians in exchange for lessons.
And
So these websites I I would start to put software on like forums or you know, like different things.
And that kind of s supposed me to open source.
So
Yeah, my father was also a
Yeah.
uh engineer. He worked for oil companies and things, but his world was all Microsoft. It was all proprietary.
And I was kinda grew up in
early days of the internet. So it was uh
Slashdots and you know, Jeffrey Zelman talk about web standards and all these things like our
Or really kind of the
The social malu and Zeitgeist that I grew up in.
So I um
You know, combining all this philosophy I studied, uh thought
Felt that like um
Open source was actually the most important idea of our generation.
So if like if the founding fathers were around today, I think they would be open source advocates.
Uh if you think about it, it's more and more of a life's are
Influenced and actually controlled by the software we use.
Um
If we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software
We're we're not truly free.
Sound.
You know.
Uh
The WordPress is under a license called a GPL.
Which has four freedoms.
Uh the freedom to use the software for any purpose. So you can use it for anything.
Whether I agree with you or not, the terms of service is you can do whatever you want with it.
Uh.
Freedom to see how the software works, you know, open up the hood.
See how it works.
See every line of code.
You can audit it. You can
Freedom to change it is the third freedom.
And then finally the freedom to redistribute those changes. So you can share them.
And the GPL has a fun little hack where if you share them, you have to provide those same freedoms to who you share it with.
So it's c what's called a viral.
Open source license.
As opposed to the MIT license or some of the others that aren't.
So um
Yeah, just kinda decided that this was what I was gonna devote my life to.
And uh
So that became getting involved with some early open source projects. WordPress was actually a fork.
Of the
A banded open source project called B Two.
So the code base actually started with something that was already out there that I was a a user and contributor to kind of volunteer on the forums and contributed code.
And then when it was abandoned, um
And myself a mic, sort of.
uh or one of like four or five different forks that started that kinda picked it up and
Tried to continue it for.
For uh for our own use and then later for a larger community.
It feels like a lot of people are coming around to exactly your world view.
And
See, I was just watching uh video of Jack Dorsey talking about how we're just controlled by algorithms. So we don't know what's how
We don't know how they work.
How d and we don't we're not in control of our lives.
Have you seen that video?
No, but I actually love that also some people who
Maybe made their
made their first billion or whatever from proprietary software.
Then come back. And it's so cool to see folks like
Mark Andreessen or Bill Gurley, you know, be huge advocates for open source.
Yeah. Actually I remember one of my early meetings with uh
Uh and Jason Oritz and Mark and Jason.
Yeah.
I didn't realize that at that. I thought it was the war.
Tony Schneider and I were sort of fundraising.
And
Oh.
Mark really like girl does. He's like How can you build a business on open source?
Uh how can you be like remote and distributed?
Like look around Silicon Valley.
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, every every great company has had an office. Like how are you gonna build something that can change the internet?
With
People all around the world and
And just had this long, like hour long debate and I was like
We walked out of that, I was like, Wow.
That was the worst meeting ever. They just hate everything we're doing.
And then um the next day they were like, Hey, we're interested.
I was like, what happened? I d I didn't realise that he had kinda this like
idea where like you want to attack the ideas and see how we defended it.
So sort of uh
was how they hey battle test things. I guess
Kinda like a Microsoft culture or whatever, where you like really like uh grill the idea.
I just wasn't
familiar with that. But um
It's so cool now that
Some of these folks um that I've learned so much from are are such bad advocates for open source.
Yeah, it's so interesting. I was just I just had the community notes team on the podcast.
And uh that's an amazing example of community of sort of open source meta is adopting it.
From Twitter slash X.
Speaking of open source, one of the interesting, maybe most common ways people hear about open source these days is is AI.
And AI models.
And there's a couple areas here. One is you wrote this really interesting uh post.
Where you talk about how meta
Talks about
Llama is an open source project, but it's it you called it a false
False prophets.
Uh
What is what is it about Lama that isn't open source? What are people missing when they see op Llama and they're like, Oh, Meta's amazing, open sourcing everything.
Llama you can obviously download and run locally and all these sorts of things, right? You don't have to use their SaaS service.
However, there's a clause.
In it that says
You're above a certain threshold of monthly active users.
Yeah what it is like.
It's big, it's like seven hundred fifty million, so it's pretty high.
Uh
You you need a license from them.
And so
that does not give you the freedom to use a software for any purpose, right? If at some point you have to ask for permission.
Yeah, you're
Kind of at the whims of this company.
um who you might
be aligned with or you might
Be an enemy with.
Yeah.
And also how do you define that?
So for example
Like our WordPress, like our products don't have
Seven hundred and fifty million like that.
Registered users.
But we reach billions of people per month.
terms of visitors. So is that a
You know, is that
To find. So it there's just ambiguity there.
So
I I still think what they've done is amazing and I like that they're releasing it.
Um
I was very confused for why they
insist on calling it open source because they
Actually Meta's been a huge open source contributor. React uh
Yeah, they've been incredible improvements to the PHP engine.
Which we benefit from a lot. So like
They're actually a big open source contributor, I think Mark Zuckerberg.
really understands and loves open source too.
My best guess now. I don't have any inside information here, but there's
I think they're calling it open source because there's some European regulation.
about open source versus proprietary AI models. So I think they're
I think it might be like a rare regulatory thing because clearly they understand this is an open source.
So
When I wrote the blog post I was just kinda confused and thought like how
Maybe if I like
you know, get this message out there, they'll change and uh
And then when they didn't, I was like, Oh, there must be something else going on. I think it might be this regulatory thing.
We were actually a big part of um
Actually many, many years ago.
I think it was React that they were
doing something with a licensing or like a patent restriction on.
And uh the WordPress community actually got Meta to change that.
And reverse uh
Something they were doing to lock it down.
So um
Yeah. Uh
Yeah.
I I consider
my role as an open source advocate to actually be my my
Primary thing.
You know?
And uh it's it's very much my my life mission.
Yeah, I helped to work on WordPress the rest of my life.
But also like just open source and journal. So I also like
Yeah, support.
Drupal and and Joomla, like anything else that's open source, like I I'm I'm gonna be a supporter of because I think when people choose that versus proprietary software.
We're increasing the freedom and liberty in the world.
And so I I would love that every sort of
Uh like it's incumbent on us that
Make open source.
To make a better user experience, to make a better product so that people choose it. And then you know, the world becomes more free. Not less free.
And also feels it's important to you to
Uh, I don't know, why open source washing like avoid people
Using the term when it's not true.
And
It's interesting in this case the like the thing that makes it not truly open source is the limit. There's a limit where you can no longer use it the way you want. Is that the issue?
Yeah.
Um so that there's a and it's actually like a open source
Um
You know, OSI there's like a formal definition for like what's make a what makes an open source license. And there's actually many dozens of open source licenses. And um public domain licenses and other things.
Um so
Uh
It's also their stance that this is not an open source license.
Something else that uh I think is really interesting when it comes to AI and open source, you wrote about this and it blew my mind. Such a good point.
That
the code that
Th

Was
open source code because that's all they have access to. They're they don't have like Windows code. They don't have
Shopify code.
And uh what a cool
Uh, I don't know, another success story slash, I don't know, I guess how do you feel about that? That all these AI models are trained on code you wrote and
But in the open source community.
That's beautiful. It's one of the safest things to train on, right? Because the license of open source, like very explicitly allows that.
Yeah, I also like to think about
You know, I have some window where my creative output is useful to society.
And if you fast forward like fifty or a hundred years.
I do believe that the utility
proprietary software eventually approaches zero.
So
Like when we're sending people to Mars.
the operating system of the
Rockets and the
Yeah, devices and everything like that.
It's not going to be built on the Windows N T kernel.
as amazing feat of engineering that like that proprietary kernel is.
And be built on an open source kernel.
you know, Linux or BSD or something like that.
And so
Like if you wanna be be part of something.
that sort of becomes the fabric of humanity's foundation, like things that
Yeah.
allows a Cambrian explosion of things built on top of it, a renaissance of ideas.
You want to be involved with open source.
And so I I really hope that more and more people
I'm a little bit of an evangelist here, you know? I'm a mission missionary where I I really want to encourage more and more people to consider
At least making part of their time. You have just a few hours a week, you know, contributing to open source because
be part of something that
It's a huge impact.
And it's fun, especially if you're like a younger developer or designer or

Like um
You can't walk up to Facebook and change their home page.
Or say I'd like to change his feature.
But you could come to an open source project.
You know, some of which have
You know, hundreds of millions of users. You could go to
WordPress or
Yeah.
Uh
Cash.
Bitcoin or you know, th all these things are open source. Uh
uh Chromium, Firefox, like and you could actually
Change.
you know, feature or or project management things or or change the design or improve it. And that's
I think really, really special. And uh
sort of the thrill for me of of like knowing
That code I wrote is now executing
Yeah, millions of times per second in millions of servers around the world. That kinda thrill.
That high is like kinda.
when I first had my first open source contribution.
Like such a throne and I've been
Sort of chasing that and enjoying that ever since.
Say someone wants to actually do this, uh, where do they go? Where do the how do they do this? Do they just like pick
project, go to WordPress.org and like here's how you contribute. What's like a next step there?
Yeah. Pick a project that you use or like.
I mean that's obviously a nice one.
Um for WordPress we have this uh
It's called make. WordPress.org.
Yeah, it's where we make WordPress.
And there's, you know, different groups. There's accessibility, there's
Design, there's the core code, there's
There's plugins, there's all sorts of ways. So, yeah.
Really, whatever your talent is, there's people who translate, there's people who do support, there's people who write documentation.
There is people who organize events.
You know, the so whatever you feel like you're
Your talent for the world is.
either that you have or that you want to cultivate.
You know.
There's so many p I mean, I learned how to code while building WordPress. Basically I didn't have as
Too formal training there.
So uh it's a great way to to up to level your skills as well.
And work with some of the best.
Developers and
Others in the world.
This also made me think about AI agents are coming out on Devon and all these AI driven bot uh
coding agents, uh
Your prediction at when most of the code
contributed to the open source projects will be
Devon and AI agent such type projects.
I think Google talked about twenty five percent of their code.
Or characters.
Committed are are now sort of AI assisted.
Um
And they're probably on the bleeding edge.
Um I don't know how much of WordPress's
code right now is AI assisted or or something like that.
Um
But I think over the next five years.
It definitely approaches
Maybe a majority.
And um
Actually very, very excited, so
It wasn't
big challenges that we have as a very open platform is we have this
open plugin and theme architecture.
So the sixty thousand plugins and themes.
And the way WordPress works is these plugins themes can modify every single part of the code. So you can really customize everything.
However, many of these plugins and themes don't have the same sort of robust
security and review process that core has. So that's where
When you hear about security issues with WordPress it's
Very rarely in court anymore.
Yeah, we haven't had a
Remote exploited.
I've got like I think five years, six years or something.
But in the plugins it it can be
Somewhat more frequent.
And so one thing I'm very, very excited about, um
the next year or two is actually more automated scanning.
'Cause obviously that code base is
Is so many
Tens of millions, maybe over a hundred million lines of code at this point.
It's impossible for humans to review that.
So we we kind of
Rely on developers to to
review that and manage. And of course we have like bug bounties and everything to that. So when things get reported, we fix it quickly. But I can't wait for more automated scanning there.
And I think that could vastly upgrade the security of open source.
The other thing that's really exciting is like right now
Yeah, you see people building apps and stuff and it's just sort of custom generated code.
Um
But I think the next generation of these models or sort of the next layer there is because
Yeah.
As everyone knows, like just
Writing the code is is just one part of it. It's maintaining it.
That really becomes the the life cycle.
Of it.
It's to a brand's new book is all about maintenance, right? Which I'm very excited about.
Yeah.
He's publishing I think with uh with Strike. And it's actually kind of open source. He's open sourcing the book. So it's you can see it being written online.
But anyway, to go back.
Uh.
I think that if
And they're starting to do that is when the open source models you say like hey
Build me a website.
It actually installs WordPress.
And then builds on top of that and then customizes on top of that.
Then you get for free.
That core engine that's always being
audited and updated and getting, you know, pass key support or whatever the the new things are sort of continuously.
And then your custom stuff can be on top of that.
which I think is actually a lot more powerful than sort of building something proprietary or custom from the ground up.
I love this book on sub uh maintenance. There's a
My sister's partner had this has this quote that I've always come back to.
Life is maintenance.
You basically like everything you acquire and deal with, like you get a generator for your house, you have to maintain that forever now. You get like
You know, this backpack, okay, and I get to like maintain this thing, maybe keep a nice, nice jacket. Like everything is maintenance. Everything in your life just maintenance.
I wonder if that's what the book's about.
Well that's why I think technically.
Is one of the most interesting concepts.
You know, there's so many companies.
as well that maybe have like big market caps.
But I feel like they might have billions or tens of billions of dollars of technical debt.
You can kinda see on the interface or how their products integrate with themselves or things.
And I think about that a lot in our own company.
Yeah, we definitely have some products.
Always the little bears coming on because you have have like such great product people and like we have some variable quality around some of our things right now.
Like if you check out Gravitar right now, I'm actually really proud of it.
I guess I think a really great user experience, very slick.
Um
But it's like parts of
Well, I always say I'm the unhappiest WordPress user in the world. So those type parts of WordPress or WordPress.com that I'm a little embarrassed and ashamed of. Like we we kind of have to
We have a really large surface area that we cover with relatively few people.
And so there's some parts we haven't looked at in a little while that uh we need to get around to.
And it's our big focus for us this year is actually kinda going back to basics, back to core and um improving
You know, all those kind of
Nooks and crannies of the the user experience.
And also ruthlessly editing and cutting as much as possible.
Because we've just launched a lot of stuff over the past.
twenty one years that uh that maybe is is not as relevant today or doesn't need to be there.
That sounds like excellent work for your for this AI agent of of the future.
That's coming soon.
There's one other area I wanna mine.
And that's community. Community building.
building this ecosystem that you've created around WordPress.
It might be
The most one of the most successful, biggest
Communities on the internet.
uh
I'm curious just what lessons you've learned about what it takes to build
A successful community.
Online especially.
Yeah, this is probably influenced by economics and jazz, right?
So
And economics is all about systems thinking, right? And and what are the incentive structures.
Of how you set something up.
And um
And then jazz it's all about collaboration.
Right?
So
If there's something unique I have for your audience, I would say it's uh
Don't just build a product, build a movement.
And to the send that we've been successful, I think it's that
Yeah, we give people something to believe in.
Yeah, philosophy or worldview.
Um
Even silly things like you know.
We had this tagline.
And the footer of the
WordPress.org when we started, it's still there. It says code is poetry.
Okay, this idea that we're not just writing code, like we're trying to create something.
That
Can have uh elements. We name every WordPress release after a jazz musician.
you know, for the past sixty releases or so.
Uh so those sorts of things bring like a little art and soul.
And some fun into it as well. It doesn't have to be serious all the time.
Um
I think
Yeah.
Began.
Give something to believe in and work on and and aim towards that's uh
More than just a paycheck or more than just, you know, the utility, the base utility of the software.
Um
So
It's not just
The software.

How are the meetups?
Yeah, how are people getting together? What events are you running?
How do people are there forums? How do people contribute? You know, is there office hours or town halls? I I do a lot of QA.
So like, you know, what what are the things you're doing around the software that that's allowing people to get involved, that's inviting contributions.
As long people to build on top of it.
Yeah, study platforms quite a bit, like Microsoft and others.
Yeah, so our whole ecosystem of plugins and beams.
is part of what's made WordPress so successful in the moat that we have.
Yeah, the core features of a CMS.
you kinda write with a few developers in a few weeks or something. Like it's it's kinda not
Yeah, it's basic correct operations.
Um
But to replicate those sixty thousand plugins and themes? Gosh.
No one's done it. It's a huge moment.
And uh
And proprietary services can create platforms, you know, Shopify has the third party ecosystem and things like that.
But it's never a true platform.
And that a true platform.
It's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does.
And so many times whether it was the Facebook
Yeah, platform. I'm putting that in the air quotes.
Or the Shopify platform.
Yeah, companies build on it and then they get the rug pulled out from after them.
'Cause they're too successful. And then they're sort of
thing you're building on decides, Oh, we want that money or we want that growth.
And they sort of uh
Change the API or or remove your access or you know.
There's so many examples of this, especially on like
I think Facebook and Shopify and others were
Like people got too successful and all of a sudden they uh
Knock on the door and say, Oh, that's a mighty nice app you have there.
We uh love to offer you some warrants where we own a whole bunch of your company or we're gonna sh shut it off. Or you know, those sorts of things.
Yeah.
And again.
You don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. That's why more and more companies and people are choosing.
Uh
if they're gonna build a business on top of something else.
If you build on open source, you have that guarantee.
Even if uh
You know, I I grew devil horns and became evil and automatic decided to never you know, whatever. Like
WordPress would still belong just as much to you as it would to me. People can fork the code. They can still own it. They can still build on top of it. So
Those things I think are uh
A really important.
What a segue to all of this drama that's swirling around you these days.
I think a lot of people do th feel like there's devil horns that have appeared.
And so I'm excited to dig into the stuff.
I think I find that every time you go on a podcast these days, if
Wa we don't get into this. Everyone's just like why are Matt not answering these questions?
Let's get into the hard stuff. So I have some I'm gonna ask you some hard questions.
Uh for people that don't
know what the hell's going on. They're like, what are you even talking about? Or just have a sense something is swirling with WordPress and Matt. I don't know what's going on.
Well it's just like the high level O reel, what's going on.
Yeah, so to to set it, um
You can get WordPress from WordPress dot com or you know
Us but also you can get WordPress from dozens of other hosts.
The biggest in the world are like Go Daddy.
Hosting Jared Newfold.
Um
It's not the biggest, but it is in the top ten or something. It has about seven hundred thousand WordPress installs. There's a company called WP Engine.
Um
In twenty nineteen, WP N just started as like very WordPress
oriented and they contributed a lot to the community and everything like that.
They're very respectful about you know distinguishing them.
themselves from core.
So people really realized it wasn't officially associated and everything.
But twenty nineteen they got
bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake.
And you know, anyone who follows
business, you know, when private equity

There's some of the good ones, but there's also many, many stories.
About how they can
really kinda hollow things out, you know, really optimize our profits, become user hostile.
Uh
Actually recently read a story where one of the reasons there was a shortage of fire trucks
These LA fires.
Was that the fire truck manufacturers
have been kinda rolled up by a private equity firm.
And they've been raising prices and like they're supply constraints and things like that. So there's literally like a shortage in fire trucks right now because of private equity.
Of course if you look at healthcare or other things like this so many examples of a private credit.
Equity can really um
I think be one of the darker parts of of capitalism.
So
Yeah, since twenty nineteen.
Uh to be PG.
Kinda changed a bit.
And um
They really stopped contributing.
the core and they started using the trademark.
Yeah.
And a
You know, a way that was very confusing in the marketplace.
And uh you know.
Particularly in the past.
Year, year and a half or so.
Wait, we're just getting a lot I've getting a lot of support.
And you know, when we do surveys we'd find that
you know, twenty, thirty, forty percent of people thought they were officially associated'cause of how they were presenting using our logo and presenting their brand and everything like that was
Very confusing to people. And as you know, if you don't protect your trademark, you you lose it.
And also.
the version of WordPress that they were offering.
actually wasn't our core vision of the functionality of WordPress. So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions.
So a cool part about WordPress, that actually one of my favorite features, is every
uh change to every single post or page is saved forever.
Just like Wikipedia.
So
If you make a mistake, you can always undo it.
And of course, as you know, like building a great product, that sort of user safety of a undo.
It's so critical.
Um
Now obviously you have to store these revisions. So it takes up more database space.
No, it's it's trivial, it's megabytes. So on modern databases it's not that big a deal. But the save money, they actually turned us off.
So they broke the undo feature of WordPress to essentially save money.
And so yeah, this thing where they're offering something called WordPress.
It's kind of
They can refer to it as like a
A bastardized hacked up version of it.
It's diluting our brand. And um
And then it's also people think it's official. So
Even close friends of mine were like, Oh yeah, I signed up for this thing. I thought I was supporting you.
And now.
So it's came to a head. So past eighteen months they've also
we know we kinda contacted them and said, Hey, you need a trademark license or something like if you're gonna
Use this and or or change how you're doing things.
And uh
Yeah.
Kind of.
Try to negotiate something.
And had many.
Different term sheets over the months offered and different things.
And uh they just kept kind of stretching it out.
And I was like, What's going on here?
I think part of what was going on is last year they tried to sell the company. So private equity usually holds things for for like five to seven years.
So they were kind of five years into this. They they tried to shop it around and sell it.
They weren't able to find a buyer.
They don't have any IP.
And it feels like they're
using a trademark. So they're gonna
have trouble with you. They don't have a license or things like that. So
Yeah.
While they were negotiating with us, it appears they were also like preparing this lawsuit against us.
So
Uh
Again, I've been very fortunate in my business career that
Um
Yeah, we've invested in
dozens of companies, we've acquired lots of things. Like
Uh I
By and large, ninety nine percent of the time.
Yeah.
People I've dealt with in business have been ethical, straightforward, honest.
Um I haven't really faced any like bald faced lying or duplicitous behavior.
Yeah.
Very very rarely. You know, people who just, you know, say one thing and do another or or
Uh fraudulent their behavior.
But I think that was happening here.
And so uh so just
Wasn't prepared for it if I was thinking I was a little naive and kind of didn't realize what was going on for a while.
Uh so it came to a head.
And uh at work camp US in September.
I I was like, Okay, well
She's still not gonna
Like even agree to negotiate.
You know?
Um
I'm gonna give this presentation about how
I think but private equity has
Messed up a lot of open source.
uh projects in the past.
And how in particular.
Uh, W Engine has done some very
bad or evil things. And uh
And they were like, Okay, go for it.
So the presentation.
Wow. I think it was on a Thursday.
For Friday.
Kinda spicy. People like oh.
Can't believe he did that.
And uh
And on Monday they lost this
Uh with Quinn Emmanuel.
Which is kinda the baddest, nastiest law firm. It's like who Elon uses when he sues people.
Oh.
Uh launch this
Pink.
Yeah, multi million dollar lawsuit.
Against both me personally.
And WordPress.org, so like the WordPress community, and automatic.
And um
And also, you know, they're spending millions of dollars a month on both
Lawyers and PR.
So they're they're doing
Yeah.
If you're at uh gosh, who's the celebrity that
They were recently talking about this, like the dark PR stuff.
Or they're like boost things like flash networks.
And uh guy.
So all that stuff is is happening. So there's uh and I warned
You know, people I think in the presentation I say, Hey, there's gonna be a smear campaign against me. And internally in the company, I was like, Hey, they're gonna
Dig up everything that's ever happens. Uh
Anything bad anyone's ever said to me is gonna like all of a sudden become like a news item.
And uh
And that has happened. It's been true.
So right now.
Uh there is a portion of the internet that do does think I have devil horns and everything.
Um
Fortunately, this is not my first rodeo.
I I know a lot of people think like oh
That was nice for twenty years and then got mean, but
Yeah, one thing uh if you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up to bully scene. You have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Otherwise people could take advantage of it.

Can destroy
Uh everything you've created.
So
This is probably the fourth time.
The internet has decided on the main character or or
Really evil. And uh
The previous ones we don't remember anymore. It's hot nacho or the Easter Massacre themes or like these other things that
Then
aren't even on my Wikipedia page anymore.
But uh worth of your big deals of time. Those are your incidents. Those weren't like historical battles.
No, these are things that I was involved in.
Including some things I had screwed up. Like Hot Not too was definitely a screw up on my aunt very early on the WordPress side, but
Well, okay, I'm not gonna follow those threads, but those are great names.
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So you mentioned this talk you gave it word camp.
And you said at the beginning of the talk like I'm
Oh no, afterwards you're like I was I was really nervous to give this talk and I now obviously
You can see why.
Just like what
What finally convinced you this was time? Was it just
To go uh as you described, scorched to earth nuclear.
Uh was it like WordCamp was coming up and this is the moment to go public with this? Was there something else that kind of crossed the line?
It was a unique opportunity because we were
Esse same that paid.
W B engine isn't gonna be allowed to sponsor WordCamps anymore.
Yeah.
'Cause we had again, up to that point, really done everything to like bring them in and have to be part of the community.
Um
So I really had to also explain to our community, like, hey, why we're gonna be excluding this company.
That a lot of people saw as as doing good.
If you go to WP Engine website, they have whole pages about how much they contribute and give back and how they, you know.
They they do kinda
Greenwash or open source wash a lot of what they do.
So um all their marketing branding was around this positive stuff.
And so I was like, Hey we we need to just explain this case.
Yeah, again my default
And how we've worked with, by the way, every other company in the WordPress space.
Many of which are much, much larger.
And make
Sometimes billions more in revenue than WP engine.
Um
It's collaborative. And so like if there's a trademark violation, usually
It's not even lawyers get involved. It's just like there's an email. We have a conversation. We do a call. We talk about it.
You know? Um
That that's how things get resolved and and that's that's my uh default. I'm a lover not a fighter.
Um
And that's why this thing
Doesn't happen very often.
Yeah, I like to say that.
Yes, if if I was
uh of WordPress community or whatever was doing this like every year, every couple of months.
Yeah, you should worry about it. But it kinda happens like every like ten years. So
So if I could mirror back the issues that you ran into and I wanna go through this a little bit more.
The sh the ch the problems you had with W A P Engine in this case. One is they were using the trademark.
Both WordPress and WooCommerce.
Without.
license and they're just abusing it, confusing people.
A lot of people thought WP engine was actually automatic and WordPress official.
They weren't contributing to the project, they were just making
Basically a bunch of money and not doing the work.
to uh off this company they bought and they're just kinda hollowing it out, as you described.
And then they're also cutting corners, making the product worse. And that kind of reflects on the whole brand of WordPress.
That's a great summer. Yeah.
Awesome.
I'm curious just like which
Which of those three, or is it something even else that most bothered you about this? Like what's just like this is the thing that's eating me.
And I if I had to guess it'd be like damaging
The legacy potentially of
This thing you've worked on for most of your life.
Maybe it's that. Maybe it's just
Taking advantage of the community.
Uh
Just like what's the thing that you think is the root of this? Just like I it just this needs to stop.
Well I guess the one thing I'd add to your list was
As this was happening, they were
Pretending to good faith negotiate.
And in fact uh
At one point the executive, you know.
We were talking about her
Joining automatic and running WordPress dot org and you know, kind of think when she thought
The V Pinchin was gonna sell. So he was thinking about what was next.
So
Yeah, a lot of the stuff was um
I think that
Duplicate behavior also kind of forced us to an age more than even those other things that you mentioned. There's lots of companies that don't contribute back.
And it's it's not as
Yeah,
Deal or
So
But yeah, the legal issue was definitely the trademark thing.
Um so
Uh push it to the edge. I think I think just
The magnitude.
Have the issue.
Yeah, they would
refer to themselves as WordPress engine and client meetings and other things they were very cavalier about.
how uh they would imply their association with the with the project.
Obviously, yeah, as you can tell on socials, a lot of people are just really upset and a lot of people blame you. There's just
Like like I said, every time you're on a podcast or on Twitter, people are just like Matt
What about this? Why this sucks. Why are you doing this?
I wanna go through some of those things, but just
Uh not many people go through like
Like I think you were like a hundred percent beloved hero of open source and internet.
And now you're like in this a lot of people don't like you.
Just as a human, just what is that? How do you how do you work through that? How do you deal with that? What's that been like?
You know, if you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress
It's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. And like when we introduce something like Gutenberg, you know people hated it.
Yeah.
Actually when we introduced a visual editor, people hated it. These are huge controversies in in the WordPress history.
And
You know.
There actually hasn't been a fork or WordPress around all this latest stuff, but there was when we introduced Gutenberg. It's one called Classic Press.
where people actually forked the software.
Um
So
How I would describe it is previously like one percent.
Um
Yeah, the world thought I was terrible.
And now I feel like it's up to like four or five percent.
So it's still a like not
The majority.
But as you know
Something negative you feel seven times more than something positive?
And
Um
And when people are
angry with you, they're more likely to like
It's kinda like restaurant reviews or whatever. They're more likely to leave a bad review than a good review.
And you know, the people who
Yeah, WordPress
Yeah.
Ninety eight percent of all the core developers.
have stayed and contribute and are working on the next version and are supportive and all these sorts of things.
And uh part of the reason these folks are so good is like they don't spend all their time on Twitter or Reddit arguing with folks.
And also the arguments could be
very frustrating'cause people don't engage in good faith. They don't really change their mind when new facts are
Right.
Uh introduced and so
You kinda
I've done my best actually because I, you know, from the open source side, I'm really used to engaging with things.
And I think that's been one thing I've learned from this is like uh
In some forums, like
It doesn't matter how you engage.
And especially if you have like
You know, bots or other things running there. Like I'd leave comments on Reddit.
It immediately get like forty down votes.
I'm like, hey.
This is an article about me and um
adding a factor to the thing. Like why is it getting downvoted? This is very relevant to the discussion, but it's literally hidden. So like when you see that thread,
You have to click like three or four times to see the comedy left.
And so it can really kinda change the uh
Perception.
And then when you read these things.
Um
I think just very human nature, even very folks very close to me, like
You read a thread and it's all like super negative.
It's hard to uh
To not be influenced by that'cause we're social creatures.
So one hundred percent.
The good news is I've had lots of
Yeah.
Credibility weighted.
Oh
Yeah, the support from yeah.
People like Mark Bioff or
you know, other open source leaders or the core people in WordPress, you know, Matias, Mary Hubbard.
Uh all the core committers.
International community actually, like
It was just a Japan.
Like they don't care about this stuff. So
These are actually if you look by like number of commits and lines of code and everything like that, the folks who actually
Are most crucial.
And WordPress. So
feel like that's been a good balance as well for me.
'Cause there are days where I'm like, gosh.
Am I an idiot?
Or you know, it could be really down like reading all these things.
So that is is part of what uh allows me to balance to get back to that sort of positive
optimistic space that I think you need to be in too.
To do uh great software, great work.
Yeah. The internet can be brutal.
Yeah.
Let me go through a couple of specific things that people point out'cause I think
Uh, you've been on a lot of podcasts and people haven't asked you these questions and I think a lot of people are just like, but
Matt, what about this? This is really bad.
So let me just ask you a couple things here.
One is there's just like a frustration in the community around the instability.
that this is just caused in the WordPress community. I'll read you a couple quotes.
Real people are receiving fewer projects than the WordPress on WordPress because C suite are seeing WordPress as unstable because of this feud.
And I work at enterprise and we're very concerned about the stability of this platform and our projects.
Just thoughts on that and the impact that has had on the community.
Yeah, I think this is until this gets resolved.
Which by the way, I hope it is soon.
Yeah, I I think it's
There's no business reason for this continu to continue. Like I really hope that they
You'll come to a settlement or something. We're we're ready. They could end this tomorrow if they wanted to.
That'd be V engine could.
So um
We can't. We're just defending right now. So yeah, it's really
And coming on them.
Um all of our competitors, by the way, are like great
Yeah.
WordPress, the the king on the hill.
All of a sudden we could use this.
And so there's also
Not just from
I W engine, but also from all the competitors to WordPress.
And all the people who would love to capture server users or market share.
You know, they're they're really leaning into this. So
I I've seen white papers, I've seen all sorts of things where people talk about this.
Actually in the next couple days.
gonna publish something really cool on the WordPress out our blog though. That shows like
You actually look at the numbers, like the activity, number of commits, plug and updates, downloads.
Installs a WordPress.
Since September twentieth when this all started.
It's quite healthy. And so
Not saying that there isn't.
And examples of where someone lost a project or something like that. I'm sure it's happened.
Yeah, it's the internet's big. WordPress has
Yeah, so many millions of users and developers and everything that you're gonna get some examples.
But by the numbers.
Uh
Things actually.
Quite healthy.
And um
In some ways it's not that there's no press is bad press.
It's raised the awareness of WordPress quite a bit. So people who haven't talked about WordPress in years are now like oh
Let's talk about it.
And so a little bit of drama.
I think
Oh, I I wouldn't do this all the time, but a little bit can be a good thing.
Okay. So another one of the m uh most common frustr I've seen on the internet people complaining is the is around the trademark.
I don't know.
All the details, but my understanding is there's kind of a
You move the trademark to be owned by the the foundation.
And automatic had
Is exclusive rights to use the trademark.
And I think people are like, Oh, was it I thought it was the foundation owned it, but maybe Matt still owns it.
And then you're trying to monetize it.
through this agreement WMP engine.
Is there anything you can share there that'll make people feel and see your side of the story?
Yeah, this is totally fair because it's complicated. Um
Uh but people are saying like
This has been private. This has all been very public and documented on the internet. I am from the beginning.
So um
WordPress dot org is always been me personally.
And I think because it's
Ah.
Yeah, part of the reason we started there is
Dot com was not available. So
So like that's why we started on the dot org and things like that. But I think people also assume dot org means nonprofit.
Something.
And uh
That's sometimes true, but it it's not always. It's not a requirement of the dot org domain.
Then when I found it automatic and when we did register the trademark.
That actually was registered under automatic.
So it used to be for the first
You have five years of the project to work over that.
Automatically owned everything outright.
Um
And
Again, I had investors in a board and and that was uh
Yeah.
Under control of that.
Now as Automatic became more successful, I was able to consolidate some voting rights and other things.
And at least the later advocate. Also, remember I was like twenty-one when all this was happening. So it was not like
Maybe the most savvy about legal stuff or didn't always have the best advice.
So later as I learned more, I was like oh
Yeah.
I wanna actually take this out of the company.
And create a non profit.
And um so we ended up
Yeah, creating a nonprofit.
Now the rules around five hundred one three C nonprofits around the IRS are actually very strict.
So that's also something as people
assume is like, Oh, doesn't the nonprofit run the software?
And we applied for that originally and it was denied by the IRS.
So we actually weren't able to put WordPress.org.
Or
The software itself under the non profit.
Yeah.
But we were able to just have sort of an educational purview. So what was eventually approved was sort of like running the meetups and other things for WordPress doing educational stuff.
We sponsor a lot of like learn to code or
Uh yeah.
running workshops and other
Countries we have this cool thing called Do Action where we'll do like
You know, a weekend where we take a bunch of
nonprofits and build websites for them and you know stuff like that.
So the nonprofit does a lot of exciting things there.
And then also negotiated with the sort of
Uh investors and everyone and automatic.
To sort of
Actually
Put the trademark under the foundation.
Now
The compromise there was that
you know, automatic at this point is running WordPress.com.
So to continue running that, which at the time I've had
Already tens of millions of users and everything.
It needed a commercial license.
And so kind of the compromise is is that
The
Foundation would
Kind of.
Uh on the trademark.
And license it out for non commercial purposes.
Um
I had a a license to run WordPress.org.
Yeah,'cause obviously I need that.
And then automatic would retain the commercial license.
And the ability to sub license that
Sell that to others.
So this is kinda the grand compromise.
and uh create this tripartite structure. Yeah, I was very inspired by the three branches of government.
So
power in each of those that I think sort of checks and balances.
Um
It's happening, which is is on purpose.
Wow, okay. I get why it's complicated. I get why people would be confused.
This makes me think about
Open AI had a really strange structure and I got him in a lot of trouble and it feels like
When you're twenty one you're like, Oh, this makes a lot of sense. What a great concept we've come up here and then
All this complexity just adds to a lot of confusion around what's going on.
So thank you for addressing that.
Another there's a kind of a related question I've seen a couple of times is just why don't you let the dot org be
Run by a community, why not just like give that up to someone else and not just you?
Uh, thoughts there.
Yeah, and the the frame of that question is is kinda interesting because it implies like I'm the only person making WordPress.
Watch.
It's obviously not true.
You look at the daily commits and activity and everything.
Um
It is run by the community.
So it's it's hundreds of volunteers every day.
that are are actually doing the day to day work and making the day to decisions and everything.
So
There has been a r r
uh radical delegation.
However, there's ultimately a hierarchy.
And I'm kinda the the CEO, so I'm like a final, final decision maker.
And so I think what people advocate for around this government is

Okay, well install a board on top of you.
That's
Uh
Ultimately makes decisions for the product or you know things like that.
And there are other open source projects that have this structure.
None of them have been successful as WordPress.
So you know, I think your audience in particular, like
Is great software ever created by committee.
Or does it more often reflect
Um
A vision of a leader.
Or
Yeah.
can allow us to and I think particularly, you know
WordPress not just remaining relevant, but actually accelerating growth over
Huge technological shifts.
Over the past two decades.
You know, when we started there was like
Yeah, dynamic web apps or D HTML or JavaScript wasn't really a thing. And
And then
social web and then iphones and then the all the sort of stuff that's changed over time.
And we've surfed a lot of these technological changes, which is very, very hard to do. Like most products do not remain relevant.
over multiple generational changes like that.
And um and that's been because
Sometimes we've had to make very unpopular decisions.
Like of Gutenberg is is a huge part of why WordPress is relevant today.
That's actually an open source project we do. It's the block editor.
It's actually bigger than WordPress.
Yeah,'cause it's not just used on WordPress.
Used on every WordPress site, but also.
Like Tumblr.
other people I would actually love if Squarespace or Wix adopted Gutenberg. It's meant to be like a a really open source
Framework.
But anyway.
If we had voted

Everyone would have voted against it, or the majority would have.
It was really uh a few core people of us in the community, you know, Matias, myself, other core contributors
L
And you are that said, like, hey, now this is the future.
And it's gonna take ten years to do.
And it's gonna be a long bet. It's gonna suck for the first three or four years.
And so everyone's gonna hate it in the beginning.
Uh but then later.
Yeah, with
Iteration. We've had I think now two hundred releases of Gutenberg.
Uh we do sort of a very strict every two weeks release schedule.
Since it started.
Um
It's gonna get pretty good.
And it's it's at that point now. It's actually getting pretty darn good.
And the next phase of it, actually, I'm so excited about it's gonna be collaboration. So all the like the real time co-editing that like Google Docs and Notion has is coming out to this open source thing.
And with the technological changes we're actually able to do it peer to peer.
So we don't need a centralized server, we can use web RT C and other cool technologies. So I mean
I'm I'm going sidelining, but
I think that um
Yeah.
That sort of more
And if you look at a lot of great companies like
Yeah. There's a board or whatever, but like ultimately like there's an executive.
And you know, some of the most iconic companies of our generations.

The executive has, you know, retained some majority of voting control or other things like that. Which I've been able to do with automatic.
And with WordPress.
And um
You know, I definitely think about succession planning and everything like that.
But
Uh
If or when I'm gone.
I I don't want to pass it to a committee.
I wanna pass it to someone else who can have a role similar to mine.
And really sort of uh
Try to be a steward.
And
There are ultimate layers of check and balance on that because again
The community could leave. They could fork the software.
People could change and so
You know.
Uh you're in charge, quote unquote.
But you're also
At surface.
So it's a lot more being like a mayor than a CEO.
Uh and that you you ultimately are accountable.
So
The folks who are contributing and new users and everything like that. So
I do feel like uh
There is a balance there.
Some of this as well is that there's some people who aren't part of leadership who feel like they should be.
So if you look at like the Yoast of Crew and things like these are folks who actually aren't like don't have commit status, they haven't contributed to WordPress over the years and sort of our normal hierarchy of
Yeah, the meritocracy of how you get like
Yeah, the ability to commit code or things like that. And they're like, Hey, I wanna be I wanna lead a release and so that
Yeah, it's cool, dude, but like
There's a there's a process.
We have different people leave releases over the years, but like yeah, they they kinda work their way up to it.
This makes so much sense to me. That's one of the themes of the podcast, just the power
of a singular visionary and leader founder moat as we've all heard as a

Uh.
Uh it was sh yeah, Brian shared it, but then uh Paulgram coined it afterwards and then I renamed the title of that episode Founder Mode to
Oh, really actively.
Kinda if I zoom out what I'm sensing here is there's like people that have this vision uh
ideal of how something like this should run.
Uh but they've never actually worked at a place w like an where nonprofit board runs it.
runs a thing and I've seen what that actually looks like.
And so I think there's like a big disconnect between the ideal in theory and like what how does great stuff get built?
And one of the things I think we've tried to demonstrate
Uh with WordPress. It's actually
It's kind of like a
Open source side and a non profit side and a for profit.
Working in concert.
So
And one of the things people don't necessarily appreciate as much about why WordPress has been so successful.
is because of automatic.
And things like a Kismet doing anti spam or WordPress.com.
Having a free version of WordPress.
that has introduced, you know, over a hundred million people to the software.
in a way that you could just sign up for free. You don't have to pay for hosting or download it yourself or things like that.
So that kind of for profit, non profit
open source working in concert, I think is um
A really interesting model that we're starting to see.
A lot more companies do.
It's actually very exciting to me that um some of the things that
were controversial when we started like open source or distributed work.
Or now the default.
For so many exciting new startups and this whole
ecosystems of like really, really cool like
open source like Cal dot com for open source Calendar. There's so much cool stuff out there. I thought uh
Actually
You know, there's a whole generation of like younger entrepreneurs that I find very, very inspiring. Because they're also bringing like modern design and web development and everything to
To open source, which is very neat.
I I anticipate a blog post one day. I told you so, guys.
Open source. Remote work.
Imagine there's a few more things there.

There's one other thing I wanna address. Uh I haven't seen you talk about this. It comes up a bunch.
Uh it's around this is like varying the weeds, but I think it's really important to people and there's something that uh something here for a lot of people. Um
The way you guys forked advanced custom fields.
Uh so I think what happened here is you guys forked an existing plugin, I think somebody else's plug in.
And then kind of
push people to this plugin versus the original plugin.
Um
What can you share there?
Yeah, this is very complex, but
So
WordPress.org has kind of like an app store.
I know.
Yeah, after WP engine started
Suing us. You know, creating millions of dollars of legal fees and things.
Uh we blocked their access.
To WordPress.org.
Um so this plugin they had advanced custom fields.
Uh, wasn't able to be updated.
At the same time a a number of security issues were found in it.
Yeah, including some we've reported.
And so there had to be an update to it.
Yeah.
So we're like okay.
We'll we'll ship.
Update for you.
Essentially.
And they're on.
We're like, Okay.
I think we need to call it something different, right?'Cause it actually isn't.
There is anymore.
And they still offer advanced custom fields on their own and people can download it from them, et cetera.
Um
So we we made secure custom fields.
Uh, which was originally under
The same directory listing.
So again,'cause we want all the users of it to get to get the security updates.
Uh
This is controversial.
And actually
That
they actually got a preliminary injection. So the judge said reverse this. So this has all been reversed, by the way.
There now is a separate fork under separate listing of secure custom fields, which actually we have uh
You know.
uh team on it, developers, designers, and we're creating
Just like WordPress is a fork, we've we've actually forked this.
Actually, WooCommerce was a fork. A lot of things have forks. So we fork it and now have a new name, new everything that we're
doing a lot of product innovation and and like proving it.
So
There's a separate project now.
that uh in separate directory listing for secure custom fit. So that's kind of
Fast forward to today.
Uh they now have access to WordPress.org again.
They have updated the plug in. Everything's kinda back to how it was before.
And um
And it's a separate thing called Secure Custom Fields. That's
Uh the WordPress project is officially supporting.
So I'm hearing essentially you
block W A P engine as a part of this
We're just gonna simplify WordPress, reduce confusion.
There are being bad actors in the space, so we're gonna
block them and in that block there's like a dependency where people couldn't do a thing that they needed to do.
So you're like and that's and as the one that exists, there's a problem with it. So we're gonna
Uh
make that dependents like release a version that you can actually use and fix the security issues.
That was the intention. I I think that there was a lot of perceptions around it that were different. But yeah, that was that was the goal. Okay.
Great.
So maybe just a last question. We talked about just like a lot of people
See you with devil horns.
these days they think you've you're doing a lot of you're doing bad things and they don't like
Uh
The approach you're taking.
You talked about there's this
W P engine spending a lot of money on PR.
And hiring this agency. I guess is there anything else that
Like why do you think so many people are
Looking at you as the bad guy.
Is it mostly that you think? Just like where do you think it's coming from? Why is why are like comments always so negative?
And we talked a bit about it, but anything more there?
I don't know if I can say why.
Uh
I do think one thing I've learned is that
A lot of these things we talked about are nuanced.
So
One essentially thing I've learned in this process.
Is that it's hard to explain this stuff.
In you know, two hundred and forty characters.
Or uh
Yeah that
Yeah.
Some mediums do not lend themselves well to discussing this.
And so I tried.
You know.
But I I'm you know, participating less than like
Reddit or Twitter.
And trying to do more formal things like this.
We can actually have the context and things can't be taken out of context.
Also I think there's something where
Yeah, social networks sometimes are tuned to promote outrage.
And it was very interesting. We we ran a sentiment analysis recently.
We're kinda like looking at different social networks, analysing other comments and
And we found actually that the negative
You know the the sort of devil horn.
Fraction.
On like uh
What was it like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram? It was like eight percent.
Uh it's actually pretty small.
I read it, it was like
Bigger, I forget the exact number.
But on Twitter it was fifty two percent.
Like, well.
What's going on there. And so there's something in the algorithm. And again, we can't see how the algorithm works or what the incentives are, but I it can promote kind of the
The most controversial things.
And uh I think that's not a novel
Perception. Like there's a lot of discussion around how social media might be
create a more fragmentation in society and
And I think this is just an example of that where
when you have networks, when people are getting the majority of their information from social networks.
And those networks are not designed to provide nuance or balance or even promote truth necessarily.
Um you know misinformation can get spread far more than um
You know, what's the saying like a lie, it's around the world.
Seven times before truth has time. So you know. Get out of bed.
Yeah. Yeah.
There's been a lot of that. So there's actually been a lot of misinformation on untrue things that like go viral.
And then the correction, you know.
The the Untrue thing gets like seven hundred thousand views and the correction gets like twenty thousand views. So
Um there's been some of that happening. And uh
Yeah, one
When mainstream media has covered this, um it's actually been a lot better.
So there's been some actually really good articles and in uh
uh you know, some business publications and other things that that sort of look at a a more nuanced and balanced view. And I think the podcast have been pretty good.
Uh but uh
Definitely on Twitter, like I think.
Y you can get a a version of all this that that is uh
Both I think not entirely true and also like
Pretty more negative.
Yeah.
Uh I imagine people are gonna be like, Land, you didn't ask him this thing, here's the thing he said that he sh
That I wanna learn more about. I'm sure I missed some stuff.
But from an outsider's perspective
Uh this all make sense. There's a company like
I'm not I don't think P companies are bad innately, but their job is
buy a company and make it run more efficiently.
And then
Oftentimes sell it for more.
So it makes sense that they buy a company.
Make it more efficient, cut some corners, don't put a lot of effort into making it awesome.
Even though there's awesome people working in there trying really hard to make it great.
And
Like basically what I'm feeling is you just
They got to a point where this is hurting
The ecosystem they're feeling really
uh dishonest with working with you and there's just there's there's just a stalling
Uh technique.
And so
Make sen makes sense to me why you just have to stand up and fight back and
And it's hard. It's hard to do that.
Is there anything else?
Along the thread, before we move on to a different topic, anything else you want to share before we close out this chapter?
Well if people have more questions, they can come to WordCamp Agent. I do gonna do open Q and A there.
Yeah.
We do town halls in the WordPress outdoor community.
There's a Slack people can get on and ask questions. So like there there is kind of like a a lot of open ways to engage
And now.
I'm definitely happy to do that. Uh
I'm probably not gonna do it on Twitter as much, but like oh yeah, when there's longer form opportunities to to have a discussion here.
Uh, particularly if it's more like real time like this.
Yeah.
I'm very happy to. And that's why
If you look at it, there's actually a big difference. Um p engine
Has not done any podcasts.
And no press. They don't respond to journalists. They don't talk about this.
Um and I've done the opposite, where I'm I'm really trying to be out there and engage.
And everyone's like, Why don't you just let the lawyers do the talking? And it's like, Well
But we have community. And also I I feel like we're on the right. So
When you're in when you're in the wrong, you probably say only at the lawyer's talk. And when you're in the right, like
Yeah, I think you should be out there and and tell the story.
I remember at the end of your WordCamp talk, you were like, Any questions after this big controversial talk? And I'm curious how it felt like every all the questions initially were nothing to do with this.
It's what it felt like. They're just like oh they already had these questions, they didn't even know what you said, maybe.
And I bet you were just like Wait, does anyone
Did anyone hear what I just said? Did it feel like that?
Well also like
That's really like a WordPress community event. So it's a lot of the core developers and things. So like
They have WordPress questions. So uh that is something uh I've now done hundreds and hundreds of these town halls and QAs and uh I really enjoy it because you never know what's gonna come up. Yeah.
Okay.
I wanna talk about all the companies that you're
bought and have are will buy in the future.
Uh it's kind of like you're building a little Bercher Hathaway. I think you've described it that way. It's kinda what it's feeling like.
And uh Tumblr is really interesting. I didn't like until I started prepping for this, I didn't even know you guys owned Tumblr.
Mm.
I haven't heard the story. What's just well, why did you guys buy Tumblr? What is going on with Tumblr, right? It was like a big deal.
Back in the day, what is what is the current state of Tumblr?
What is the story there?
Oh, Tumpa's so interesting. I mean
Yeah, at the time.
It I think it was one of our best competitors.
Yeah, they created this really amazing sort of hybrid of like blogging and social networking.
And if you kind of zoom back.
A lot of things that are now standard on other social networks.
Given the ability to embed an image with a post.
Again, was not supported.
originally on Twitter and other things. Remember they used to have like
Was it like tweet image or like you have to like link to out to other things?
To post an image to Twitter.
Um it wasn't native functionality and and
Tumblr had like these multiple post types. You could post like a chat, an image. You know, they were I think one of the first support video.
Uh it'll
I think product innovation under the leadership of uh David Carp.
It's like a really amazing uh
Entrepreneur and product leader.
Funny story. Both David and I were
Where at Cnet at the same time.
They'd hired both. Whoa.
They could have kept both of us probably, but uh
Anyway.
Yeah.
Tumblr then I forget the year, but they sold, I think the same time that
Instagram date for a similar amount.
One point one billion dollars.
To you or to someone else?
Instagram bot by
Facebook. Right, right. Tumblr.
And tell her about by Yahoo.
Oh wow.
Again, Yahoo.
We don't think about it now, but I feel a little old, but like the time Yahoo was like
One of the internet giants.
And had recently
Versa Meyer, who was um our mayor.
Who was one of the
The big
Really people it.
Google, I think part of creating the API program and everything like that.
Uh was the CEO of
Yeah, this was
I think one of her first big acquisitions.
Now subsequently
Obviously we know how Instagram went. I think you know people were like, I can't believe you bought this for a billion dollars and obviously now it's worth hundreds of billions. So that's had a a really good
uh trajectory.
Um
Uh yeah.
I think things became more challenged. So again, this is a little bit of history, but
Yeah, who then had like this thing where
They owned part of Alibaba, which then became like more valuable than the rest of the company. They had activist investors.
I think they had some CEO switches. I think Rissa Meyer like leaves or gets fired at some point.
You know, there's all this like turnover
And I think Tumblr really languished.
Under that their ownership.
And um from what I can understand, the team was actually held back a lot from things they wanted to launch or or ways they wanted to iterate.
Tanyahoo
Mergers with AOL.
Wow.
Which is another kind of early internet thing.
Uh that goes for like a little while. So again
Then Tumblr's just kinda stuck underneath the tumbling along.
Tumbling along.
And then that gets bought by Verizon.
Okay.
So fast forward to
Twenty nineteen.
Yeah.
Verizon wants to get rid of Tumzart.
So they're they're they're kinda put that for sale.
And had a number of bidders.
Um
Automatic
Uh ended up buying it.
Uh for a de minimis amount. I think it's been reported we bought it for like three million dollars. What a deal. Three million.
So but obviously that represent a lot of uh
By destruction over the years. Tumblr had some tough times. Yeah, they actually were banned from the app store.
At one point for
Um not moderating things well enough and having
Yeah kind of.
Maybe a little too much porn.
Obviously Twitter might have more, but like they might have a maybe.
We're a little too out there with it.
And we're doing a good job filtering it and uh
And keeping away from uh
App store reviewers or whatever.
And um
So Verizon to their credit though, there are people bidding more
Actually I think a porn company was bidding on Tumblr.
uh that would pay to lot more money.
They really were looking for an acquirer that they felt like would be a good steward.
And uh
From my point of view, I had such incredible respect for Tumblr as a product and the community.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Still, despite all of this sort of stuff that had happened.
Uh
I think that point still was like
Yeah.
Oh.
Get the exact number.
But I call it fifteen, twenty million monthly active users.
So really sort of
active core.
And one of the things that's so fascinating is over half of that user base was under the age of twenty five.
And actually had a huge I think it was like uh twenty five or thirty percent L G T.
Uh plus
And um
So
Yeah, I think a very unique place on the internet where people could uh have a social network where they could be anonymous, they could put on different identities, they could
It'll be someplace their parents weren't, like Facebook or Instagram, though like really
Sto
Create a special spot. So
Uh we need to buy him.
Yeah.
Now, people like you bought it for three million dollars, but we bought it sort of
Taking on all liabilities.
Clearing I think they were under investigation by the FTC, there were lawsuits, there's all this sort of stuff. So we we it was free like a puppy. Not free like a
Yeah, like beer.
Yeah, and a pretty big team, I think a hundred and eighty five people. It was you know, we were taking a lot of burners, burning a ton of cash. Um
And yeah, that was twenty nineteen.
And so
It's been I think a humbling experience, you know, running a social network.
Um
It was very, very different from all the other products that we've done. And I think
Uh there's some incredible things about Tumblr and that
I'm still very excited about so we're like WordPress.
has primarily like a
Uh desktop and web user based. Tumblr is obviously like eighty five percent app based.
Um as a younger demographic.
And so part of the vision that now we're we're excavating on is actually we wanted to create a path.
for people using Tumblr to actually being powered by WordPress on the back end.
So template users could unlock themes, customization, plugins, et cetera.
Actually we're the process right now of migrating.
The half a billion Tumblr sites.
Probably one of the largest.
Data migrations.
That's happened in a while.
Uh so we're
We're kinda trying to do this in a way that's invisible to users on the front end, so changing at the back end well.
maintaining the APIs and the interface and everything. So it's
It's a it's a fun engineering project. I kinda posted this like kinda call to arms
Got it.
Got a lot of t fun people applying for automatic and we hired a lot of great folks.
Around
Like
Audacious project, this big hairy audacious goal.
And um
That's where it's at now.
Uh
I I've
Sort of ran it personally for a few years while we're doing
Turn them out?
And um
But there's a great team there.
And uh
But still it's I still challenge, you know, still not um still not profitable. So we're still subsidizing it from the rest of automatics businesses.
Fortunately the rest of our business have done really well, so we were able to do that.
Uh, but I definitely want to get it to a place where it's sustainable. And one of the things we're also experimenting with.
is can Templar have not just an advertising driven model.
I think ultimately the incentives of advertising social networks
can lead to the kind of dynamics that you see.
on the more negative side of like
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.
Cetera.
And so really trying to create a subscription model.
Or a sort of like first party
user driven advertising where like you promote your blog post or something like that.
Um
Or you promote a boot conference project or something where it's like not a third party ad ecosystem, which I think has a lot of like
Word code and malware and lots of stuff I
I don't love.
Wow.
Sounds like a a lot a lot you took on with this acquisition.
Uh
And I love the choice. You said you ran it initially.
So this is a good segue to maybe my last question.
I'm curious where this goes. Just how do you
Well let me zoom out. There's a lot of people these days that are
excited about roll up businesses. I'm gonna buy a bunch of companies, make'em better.
Make'em awesome.
save money and then just keep building this holding company sort of thing. You guys are doing that and we're it's working well.
Uh what do you look for? How do you decide a company's right for automatic? What are kind of the
the factors that are like we should buy this, we can turn this around and turn it into a big success.
I don't know if I would do another turnaround like Tumblr.
Again, or at least not for many, many years.
Yeah, it it's definitely a different thing.
The vast majority of things we acquire
Um it's typically something that's done well.
And we want to accelerate it.
Or sometimes, you know, aqua hires where like we're plugging it into one of our existing projects or we're taking the team and putting them on something we're already doing.
So it's a really talented team.
Um you know Tumblr I think we ended up
Ultimately replacing like
Eighty five, ninety percent of the team as well.
So that that's just very diff different.
And um
Yeah, so I I do think there are you know different ways of doing it. But if you look at our other acquisitions like day one, et cetera, like
Founders still here, many years later, we're we're accelerating. Like yeah, the stuff like that. We brought it to Android, we're bring it to brought it to web, like
But that it's more of like taking something good and making it better.
And uh probably our best example there is is WooCommerce, you know, which was
Have a small
Company
Think thirty five, forty people based out of South Africa.
And it's obviously grown to you know.
Yeah.
Can I say
It automatically makes
About half a billion dollars a year now and WooCommerce is
Majority of that.
Speaking of that actually, you haven't shared the revenue number. I know it's public, just like give people a sense of automatics.
Revenue. Can you just share those numbers'cause I think it'll might blow people's minds.
I think we say publicly, uh it's about a half a billion dollars in sort of ARR revenue right now. Incredible.
Okay, I'm gonna I have a question for you. It's kind of a hot seat question as you talked. Uh I'm under I feel like people are thinking this.
Uh so you've been talking about PE companies.
Mm being often bad.
You're buying Tumblr.
You talked about laying off a bunch of people turning it all round.
How's that different from a Peeb company, Matt?
Yeah, and and I agree with you that like
P E just'cause it's private equity doesn't mean it's bad.
Also I say.
Something people say is like, Hey, wait, don't you have private equity investors as well at Automatic?
Oh.
And uh we do.
Now they
Oh usually a small percentage.
Uh like
Sometimes I've been one percent, and they don't have control of the company.
So I think there's a distinguish. Is it a minority investment or a control investment?
And with WP engine, Silver Lake controls the company.
Uh and when they control the company.
I think there's a spectrum of actions.
You know, obviously being more efficient is great.
And we should all strive for that.
And I think every business does, whether it's private equity or
Yeah, or business or things that are founder controlled. You always want to be more efficient.
Now there's some spectrum there where you over optimize.
Or you could have dark patterns.
You know, right now on WP Engine, it's very difficult to cancel your accounts.
Oh.
'Cause they're they're actually I think as of today forty five thousand
Uh sites have left.
So they're I think it's a
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, because their customers have realized like, hey, this isn't WordPress. This isn't yeah. Or they're suing the guy who started WordPress. So like maybe we should uh
Not support this commercially.
So um
We have the site WordPress Engine Tracker dot com. That sort of shows in real time the sites that are leaving.
It's kind of an exciting thing to see.
That number kick up.
Um
Actually maybe a good example as well. Like even though there's a lot of negativity, if you actually look at like how people are voting with their wallets.
Oh.
They're leaving.
So
I think you have to judge as well, like just look at the track record.
So
One of the things I'm very proud of with Automatic is we are an acquirer of first resort.
And we have founders that have sold to us.
Uh
Paul Maine at Day One is a great example of it. Didn't need to sell.
Yeah.
Could you easily
Wildly profitable, could have run it himself for a long, long time.
But people choose to join because they feel like we'll be good stewards of it in the future. And otherwise we just have to look at the track record.
Yeah.
So I think, yeah.
Don't judge it by what it's called. Judge it by the actions over time. And um
And I I hope to continue building that reputation for a place that's uh a good steward of of
communities and software and everything else for communities to come.
Matt, we covered so much. Everything. I asked you all the hard questions and more.
Before we wrap up, is there anything else that's not true?
You wanna leave listeners with any last thoughts, comments, insights?
Stories. Wow.
Yeah, follow me. I'm at Photomat, P H O T O M A T T um.
Dumbler, Twitter, Instagram, everything like that.
Yeah.
I post a lot about other stuff. I post a lot about AI and open source and other things. Some WordPress things in there as well.
Yeah.
I these life missions to democratize publishing and commerce. We added a new one last year, which is messaging.
So
It's in beta mode right now, but relaunching in a few months as a product called Beeper.

Telegram.
Instagram DM signal everything brings it all into one app.
Yeah, you could do some really cool stuff like that.
Yeah.
Especially when you start to imagine search.
Or AI, local AI around that. So
Uh very, very excited about that relaunch. So I encourage people to uh you can check out the beta now, go to beeper.com slash beta to get like that.
New version?
Uh and we're gonna relaunch that later in the year. So uh
Yeah, very excited about that. It's it's kinda fun to be
working on something that's at the stage where WordPress was in like two thousand three, two thousand four.
So yeah, WordPress quite mature at this point.
Uh, WooCommerce is kinda where WordPress was in like two thousand ten.
And then yeah, the beeper stuff, the messaging stuff is where uh we were in like two thousand three. So it's uh
One thing that keeps me inside is working at like different stages of this.
Yeah, this feels like a reason to be doing
Yeah.
approach to Berkshire Hathaway is just like stay active in early stage stuff and not just optimize
Established.
Things. Uh
So it's beeper.com, by the way, awesome domain name.
Uh
Photomat, is that what's the story of Photomat? Are you I uh you're into photography, I imagine, is the story.
Yeah, it's a little bit of a pun, so you know, there's a
A photo is a photomat is also like P
F O T O M A T T is a is a place that you would go to like develop your photos back when you would have film and develop things.
Uh.
So originally my my username was Sax Mat'cause I played the Saxphone.

Uh
Yeah, sometimes people must hear that.
And also like as you know, I started I stopped travel I was started travelling so much'cause uh
Yeah, there's been years I do like four hundred thousand miles of air travel'cause I go around the world to like
go to WordPress events and meet the community and you know, as a distributed company, we do lots of meetups.
And so it was

uh method of artistic expression became photography.
And that's actually kind of how WordPress started was actually originally a site where I could share my photos, you know, before Flickr, before Facebook and everything like that.
Yeah. Sort of.
Use this gallery software, actually open source gallery software, PHP software.
to sort of share all the photos. And actually now on my website, I think I have over thirty eight thousand photos I posted.
And um
Yeah, that's uh
But it's it's still one of the things I really love. So it's uh also a username that was available everywhere.
And um
I still do it. So I'm I'm actually going to the
Maha Kumela, the big three hundred million person gathering at the Ganges River.
A few weeks and uh
One, I'm just excited to experience that. It happens like every twelve years, but two, I'm just really sad to like
Take some time to do photography.
Uh uh
Yeah, I I really enjoy it.
You forgot to mention your website and uh where your blog the WordPress site itself where you blog M A.t.
Is the domain, which is amazing.
Uh I will point people to one of my my favorite
Uh
Ritual you have?
on your blog, which is uh you share what's in your bag.
You talk about how you travel all this
And I think every year you're like, here's the gadgets I use most and bring with me everywhere, right?
It's my most popular post of the year, by the way.
Uh yeah,'cause basically you're just
Trying to optimize for the least
weight and most utility, right, out of all these gadgets that you're making with the end trips.
Yeah, actually weighing it is something I just started doing this year. So
Because my bag actually got really heavy. Got like thirty five pounds or something. And so uh
Yeah, so friends were like, Hey, why don't we weigh everything and just go through it and then we'll posting the weights. Yeah. Oh my god. Okay. Anyway, we'll point you on that.
Matt.
Thank you so much for doing this. This is awesome.
Lenny, thank you so much. And I really appreciate you know the ability to discuss these things in a longer forum.
And also just your audience.
And so
Oh, I guess final thing I'll say is we're hiring a ton.
So you have one of the most incredible audiences in the world. I recommend your podcast and newsletter.
A lot of my colleagues and so
Um if you're someone who loves this kind of stuff, I think there's a big opportunity in automatic to uh
to have an impact on these things.
What roles are you hiring for most and where do people find these roles?
Automatic.com.
A A U T O
T. T. I C.
Uh there's a work with us page. You can kinda see how we work. We're fully distributed and can be into that.
Forever. Yeah, we sort of started that.
Another interesting thing is we actually pay the same salaries globally.
So
Whether you're in California.
Or Italy or
Niteria or wherever we pay the
Global salaries. So
Oh.
So yeah, a lot of opportunities and um
We're hiring for kinda everything.
So I would say that but particularly like people with great design or product skills.
Um
is probably one of the areas that uh you can have the biggest impact at automatic right now. All right. If you've made it this far into the podcast, you should definitely apply.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for being here.
Hi everyone.
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