#190: Matt Mullenweg on the Characteristics and Practices of Successful Entrepreneurs

Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt https://twitter.com/photomatt) is most associated with a tool that powers more than 25% of the entire Web: WordPress http://www.wordpress.com/. He's also the CEO of Automattic https://automattic.com/, which is a multi-billion dollar, fully distributed startup. Matt loves tea, tequila, and Chicken McNuggets. His first time on the show http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/02/09/matt-mullenweg/ went over so well that you've all been asking for a round two. So in this episode, he answers your most popular questions. Please enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Business https://vimeo.com/tim10. Vimeo Business has all of the prior benefits of Vimeo Pro, including VIP support. Whether you make videos for a living, run your own company, or simply want to amp up your video marketing, Vimeo Business is here to help. It has more than 280 million creators and viewers worldwide and makes it easier to share your videos with a global audience and connect with professional video makers to bring your stories to life. Vimeo Business https://vimeo.com/tim10 allows you to upload up to five terabytes and store your videos in one secure place, add up to 10 team members to your account for easy collaboration, and gather feedback with seamless review tools. You can even add clickable calls to action and capture email addresses directly in the player, which can help you generate leads and drive conversion for whatever you're trying to optimize, such as a newsletter or a sales page. Check out vimeo.com/tim10 to save 10 percent on Vimeo Business https://vimeo.com/tim10. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you for free the exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Matt Mullenweg?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Vimeo, specifically a new offering called Vimeo Business. I've done a lot of collaboration with these guys. Vimeo Business has all of the prior benefits of Vimeo Pro, including VIP support. Whether you make videos for a living, run your own company, like yours truly, or simply want to amp up your video marketing, Video Business is here to help. They have more than 280 million creators and viewers worldwide, and Vimeo Business makes it easier to share your videos with a global audience and connect with professional video makers to bring your stories to life. So if you need assistance, it's there. You can also upload up to five terabytes and store your videos in one secure place. You could add up to 10 team members to your account for easy collaboration and gather feedback with seamless review tools.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  You can add clickable calls to action and, perhaps most interesting to me, capture email addresses directly in the player. This can help you generate leads and drive conversion for whatever you're trying to optimize, say for a newsletter or, in fact, a sales page of some type. Video Business helps you optimize your videos by tracking viewer engagement and drop-off, so you can then modify your approach or creative moving forward and improve it, and it connects to Google Analytics for even more insights. So check it out, go to vimeo.com/tim10 to save 10% on Vimeo Business. That's vimeo.com/tim10.

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. Management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, et cetera. And I'll come back to that

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront,

• 3:13Tim Ferriss?

  as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 4:31Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it's my job to deconstruct world-class performers and tease out the habits, routines, morning meditation practices, favorite books, whatever it might be, that you can use and test in your own life. One of my most popular episodes to date was with Matt Mullenweg, who is best known or thought of as the lead developer of WordPress, which now powers more than 25% of the entire web. He's the CEO of Automattic, which is a multi-billion dollar startup, fully distributed. He loves tea, he loves tequila, he loves Chicken McNuggets.

• 5:15Tim Ferriss?

  He's an incredible guy, very good at using a keyboard layout known as Devorak as well. We had a very, very long conversation. You've all been asking for a round two, so in this episode, he answers your most popular questions, which were upvoted online. And you can say hello to him online on Twitter, @PhotoMatt. That's photo, M-A-T-T. So please enjoy round two with Matt Mullenweg.

• 5:47Matt Mullenweg?

  Alrighty. Hello, hello, everybody. This is Matt Mullenweg, coming back to the amazing Tim Ferriss podcast. It's been, actually, not that long since I was last on here, but lots changed for me and the company. When I was last coming to y'all through that conversation with Tim, filled with much tequila, WordPress was about 23% of the internet. We've gone up to about 26.5%, which I'm really happy about. And my company, Automattic, has changed a lot in the time, too. We were about 300 people when I last spoke to Tim, and we actually, just this week, passed 500. So things have grown a lot.

• 6:31Matt Mullenweg?

  But I am excited to be checking out some of these questions you sent and that Tim and Adam compiled. And so I guess let's go ahead and dive in. Alrighty. Let's start from Steve Rubell. He asked, "What's the hardest part about running a company with a distributed workforce, one that others perhaps don't fully consider when trying the same?"

• 6:57Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, a lot of the how-to and technical sort of logistics, the tactics of running a distributed company, I think are getting better and better. You know, we use Zoom for video conferencing and Slack for chats and P2s on WordPress for, you know, instead of email and Google Apps are really good. So a lot of the basic tools are out there and they're getting better every day. So in terms of being able to communicate certainly with one person, you can do that extremely high fidelity almost instantly from wherever you are in the world with internet connection.

• 7:36Matt Mullenweg?

  I think there's still challenges in terms of getting a group of people on the same page. However, I don't perceive those challenges to be that much different from what people who work in the same office are, have. So they, you know, I talked to friends with startups of a similar size to Automattic, you know, 400 or 500 people. They're typically spread across a couple of floors in a building or a campus and they talk about how, you know, they have to repeat themselves a lot and, and sort of really hone in messages and do town halls and all these sorts of things to get everyone in the company on the same page. So I think that just might be something difficult about groups or scaling organizations, that as soon

• 8:18Matt Mullenweg?

  as it goes above, you know, what can be in one or a couple of people's heads, there's a drift that happens between how different people imagine what a goal is. The thing I found best for that, even though it wasn't your question, is to have some sort of prototypes or mockups or there's an Amazon thing where when they're working, starting a new project, they write the press release for it, you know, the idea, or I would call it write the blog post for it. So write what the announcement will look like when you tell the world about this. So techniques in that, you know, low fidelity mockups can really help make sure everyone's thinking about the same thing when you use the same words, which is surprisingly difficult.

• 9:02Matt Mullenweg?

  But finally, the thing I'll say that is hard about distributed that's not talked about and that I think I uniquely appreciate right now because once a year, the entire company of Automattic comes together. We do, we call it our grand meetup as opposed to the normal meetups, which teams do individually and are usually like five to 10 people. The grand meetup, we bring the whole company and this year it was in Whistler, British Columbia, up in Canada. So we had about 460 people out of the 500 there and it was incredible. It's pretty much like my favorite week of the year.

• 9:42Matt Mullenweg?

  People are so different and everyone's weird in their own ways and unique and has crazy hobbies. And a couple of days before, I actually did overlanding with two colleagues across from Calgary to Whistler. So we were off-road and doing crazy things in Jeeps. And then there's a band where people play together. Everyone gives flash talks, so like little miniature five-minute talks about a topic they're interested in. So the aftermath of that is that I think the thing about being distributed is that it can be a little lonely. Like, I really love my colleagues. I love spending time with them, I love learning about them, I love talking to them. And it's true that in-person is still the best, you know, way to connect with someone.

• 10:27Matt Mullenweg?

  Virtual has gotten better, but there's, you know, so many more senses that are engaged and ways you can read people and you can share a drink or break bread or share food or, you know, when you're in-person that just, we don't have virtual equivalence before yet. And so I think that's one of the hardest things. Assuming you like your colleagues, you miss them and it can be a bit lonely. And so one thing I always encourage, especially when younger folks, you know, maybe straight out of college join Automattic, is to make sure you have a good social life outside of work because sometimes we default to getting that human connection and that engagement from, you know, our colleagues. And that's not a bad thing at all.

• 11:12Matt Mullenweg?

  And I'm a little jealous of folks who go to an office every day with awesome people who get to do that. But when you don't have that, it's important to develop that social network outside of it. And so it's one of the reasons I love hanging with Tim or other friends in San Francisco when I'm there. You know, a lot of my, when I'm in Houston, it's a lot of my friends from high school and family. So making sure you have that social layer to support you and keep you connected with the world. So you don't become a weird hermit.

• 11:42Matt Mullenweg?

  All right, next question. Jeffrey McLeod. Now that you have many hours of travel and work under your belt, what used to be annoying experience, an annoying experience with working on the road that you have adapted to or overcome. Hmm, so travel wise, I would say two of the coolest things you could do as a traveler is, especially if you're US is, is get pre-check. It's a total game changer. And I think this is related. If there's a program called global entry that lets you bypass all the custom lines when you're re-entering the US. And not all the customs lines, all the immigration lines. And just go straight to this machine that scans your fingerprints and you just breeze on through. You feel like you're in the future. It's amazing.

• 12:25Matt Mullenweg?

  So that definitely, whenever I go through the pre-check line or the global entry line, I just feel amazing.

• 12:34Matt Mullenweg?

  Which doesn't make, I don't know if it's totally rational, but it feels really good. The thing that's probably changed the most over the few years is just connectivity. You can have an LTE connection in the US, pretty much everywhere. And when I'm international, I use a Google Fi, which is kind of a cell phone service from Google that works in over a hundred countries. It's 10 bucks a gigabyte. Or if I'm going to be in a country for a longer period of time, sometimes it's cheaper to just buy a local SIM card. But once you have that LTE connection, you don't have to worry about Wi-Fi anymore because you can tether to your computer. You don't have to worry about like, does the coffee shop I'm in offer this? Or does my hotel have, I mean, hotels are the worst for Wi-Fi. The more expensive the hotel, the worse it is too.

• 13:19Matt Mullenweg?

  You could stay in like a Motel 6 and they have like fast and free Wi-Fi. And then I'm in like a Ritz Carlton and they want to charge me 15 or 20 bucks a day for it. And it's so slow. So. Just that mobile connectivity, I think, has changed because any place that I have my backpack and internet connection, I can be fully productive. I can have my keyboards, my mice, my headphones, everything. And I can work just as if I'm at my desk at home and connect with automatians and just do my job. I have to do a CEO. So that is the thing that has definitely helped me the most. I also am constantly updating sort of the kits of what's in my backpack.

• 14:04Matt Mullenweg?

  That is my kind of superhero bag, everything I have. I do a blog post on this once a year. If you just search for Mull and Wake, what's in my bag, you'll see them. And I'm sure Tim can link in the notes as well. So that changes every year. And yeah, check that out. Check out that blog post.

• 14:23Matt Mullenweg?

  Another one from Jeffrey is he says, if you could start from scratch with what you knew now, what part of growth, personal or professional, would you have admitted or asked for more of? I think on the professional end, I just emphasize that hiring and being thoughtful about hiring is the best way to scale an organization. And I feel like that's one of the things that Tim usually has that question, what's your superpower? I don't actually remember what I said last time, but if I were to answer it today, I'd say it's hiring. You know, I've done it now enough and looked at enough resumes and everything that. And we have a process at Automattic, which is tries to remove a lot of the bias from things that,

• 15:08Matt Mullenweg?

  you know, you get the right people around the table and it makes all the difference in the world. What I would tell my younger self to avoid professionally is probably, it sounds a little tricky. So actually, oh, that's one thing I forgot. After the podcast with Tim and before now, Automattic ended up doing another round of funding. We raised about $160 million. Maybe that was before, I don't recall exactly, but.

• 15:36Matt Mullenweg?

  So that funding has really transformed the areas that we're able to move into, the things we're able to work on. And I think I would, I think previous points in Automattic's history, we were capital constrained and that held back our growth, the growth of Automattic, the growth of WordPress a bit. The other thing that I've really been learning a lot that I would tell my younger self is the thing about marketing. I've always been kind of like a, you know, you build it, they will come. And to be honest, for most of my career, that's worked. I'm now starting to appreciate more and more how marketing and getting your message out there in the right way. It wasn't that WordPress didn't do it before. It's that we did a lot of it and didn't really think about it.

• 16:20Matt Mullenweg?

  We kind of lucked our way into it. And I think being systematic and approaching that with as much care as you would, you know, the pixels in a design or how an interface works or how the architecture of the code is, is really crucial to a great product. And it's one of those fundamental tenets and basis of a product that resonates with lots of people. So on the personal life, I probably tell myself to start meditating more. All the basic stuff, meditate, exercise, eat well. Boring stuff, I'm sure you've heard on every single podcast Tim has done. And more, more on the personal side, I would say that

• 17:01Matt Mullenweg?

  learning to be vulnerable and sensitive was something that, especially when I was younger, I was just like, ah, go to the world, show no weakness. Especially, you know, because I was young and I was often operating in, with people who are decades older than me or getting investment. I thought I had to be like invincible or put on this air of invincibility. Of course, no one is invincible. As a leader, and actually through meditation, I've become a lot more empathetic. And you know, part of that isn't just understanding and feeling other people's emotions, but really being willing to show your own weaknesses and emotions and be vulnerable.

• 17:44Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I think it's Brene Brown's book, Daring Greatly, talks about this really well, or Krista Tippett, I'm Becoming Wise, another great book.

• 17:55Matt Mullenweg?

  These things, I'll just leave it at that. Those are some good areas for listeners of the podcast who have maybe done all the stuff from For Our Body and For Our Work Week and are thinking about growing their soul more, it might be some good avenues to investigate. James Klamut asked, "What's the most important skill set for an entrepreneur to develop? And what characteristics do you look for when recruiting new employees?" There's another question that I think is a little related to this. Theo Harris Di Marhos says, "What are some skills you look for in non-technical people?" So I'm going to tie that into the recruiting question.

• 18:38Matt Mullenweg?

  So important skills for an entrepreneur to develop, resilience, a balance where you can maintain your health, both mental and physical, while working really, really, really, really hard. And exactly why I just talked about empathy. And actually, just yesterday, I saw an amazing presentation from Julia Hartz, who is the CEO of Eventbrite, where she really spoke about this as a lesson that she's learned over the past few years, where being vulnerable and showing empathy is one of the things that's helped her most as a CEO, which is so counterintuitive. So I'd say those skills are very important. Also, just the basics, if you're an entrepreneur, learn about term sheets, learn about preferences,

• 19:21Matt Mullenweg?

  learn about all the mechanics of your business, know enough accounting that you can talk to your accountant, know enough development that you can talk to your developers, know enough marketing, you can talk to your marketers. You have to know at least a bit about really every part of your business, because that'll allow you to hire and recruit people that really understand it. I mean, of course, you want them to understand it way, way better than you, but by having even just a common vocabulary that you can converse with that person in, you'll be able to operate with them at a much higher level than if you were just a complete novice in their given area of expertise. And by the way, you can also have them teach you. It's an amazing way to grow these skills.

• 20:03Matt Mullenweg?

  I rely on our ops team at Automattic very, very heavily. That's one of the things we've been really lucky about, is everything with HR and finance and legal and everything, they're just super top-notch, and I both learn a ton from them and don't have to worry about that, which has been amazing. So the characteristics you look for in recruiting new employees and the what do you look for in non-technical people question?

• 20:32Matt Mullenweg?

  Really here, there's a saying, there's a basketball guy and he was like, you know, you can't coach tall. So four of the qualities I look for are the things that you can't really teach. And that's work ethic, taste, integrity, and curiosity. If you think about all of those, if someone has those four things, work ethic, taste, integrity, and curiosity, I believe that you can learn pretty much anything in the world. If you look at any experts, this is something that I think is good to remember. Like, if you look at Elon Musk on space rockets, or Tim on health and fitness, and all the things Tim's an expert on, or any of these

• 21:15Matt Mullenweg?

  different areas, like, remember that at one point, that person knew nothing about it? Well, all born, we all learn. And so I really do truly believe that you can become an expert in any field if you put in the hours and the work and the practice and everything. So if someone has those four things, I know that they will be able to rise to whatever the job and role requires of them. And of course, we look for experience and such in order to shortcut that process a little bit. But I also know that for every person I hire at Automattic, what we're doing today and what they're hired for is likely not going

• 21:58Matt Mullenweg?

  to be what we're doing five or 10, and certainly not 20 or 30 years from now. And when we hire, I do it with the expectation that someone's going to be at the company for decades to come. It's not just a short stint. It's something that's really a long-term relationship. It's like getting married. And so you, I think about not just where they are today, but how will they adapt when the company changes and when the world changes and when we're all, you know, in the singularity. So those sort of intrinsic and tough to teach things become more and more important. All right, next question. This comes from Rock M. Fard.

• 22:41Matt Mullenweg?

  If WordPress is the platform of writing and Shopify is of commerce, are there other similar platforms you think are worth developing? That's a good question.

• 22:52Matt Mullenweg?

  There are a few areas that I think are sort of like fundamentals for interaction on the web, that there aren't great open source tools for yet, or in some cases, good tools in general. One area that's getting a ton of investment now, that even though there aren't perfect open source things, I think we're in a pretty good place, is just messaging. So between Slack and the Facebook, Facebook's making the Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, messaging built into platforms like Instagram and all this, I feel like that's, the communication side of things is being pretty well invested in.

• 23:33Matt Mullenweg?

  But then when you think about how communication happens online, there's still so much to do there. So for example, we actually have something we're reviving a little bit called Blicky, which is a combination of a blog and a wiki. And basically the idea that wikis are pretty cool, but you lose when you have everyone being able to edit everything. You lose some of the elements of moderation or curation that make many websites great. So a Blicky is essentially something in between, that it's a moderated wiki, so anyone can edit it, but the edits go through a moderation queue, much like the comments on WordPress go through a moderation queue, that can be accepted or denied.

• 24:12Matt Mullenweg?

  So you can get kind of the best of both worlds of community participation and, you know, sort of the curation and editorial direction that comes from great websites and blogs. So I think wikis are an area that needs some innovation. Forums as well. Forums are so much fun, and I learned a lot of what I've done and had lots of great conversations on forums. I know Tim has as well, I know, like, it's kind of one of these things that is, forums aren't really sexy, so no one talks about them or looks at them. We have a product called BB Press there, that we use for the support forums on wordpress.org, wordpress.com, and it's used by some other folks.

• 24:55Matt Mullenweg?

  That's definitely an area I'd like to invest more into, and that platform, I think that needs to be better platforms for. And then you mentioned commerce and Shopify. Shopify is an incredible tool. Commerce is actually an area we've moved into. We did an acquisition of a platform called Woocommerce, which is built on top of WordPress. And I think that commerce, in many ways, where commerce, where blogging was in 2007, 2008, where there's some great hosted tools and there's some great open source tools like Woocommerce. But if you want to use Woocommerce, you probably need to be a little more tech savvy or have a developer. And we're entering the area, much like where WordPress was in 2008,

• 25:40Matt Mullenweg?

  where we're starting to make it so anyone can use the software. So you get kind of the best of the ease of use of one of the platforms, but the flexibility of having complete control over your domain, the code, everything. You can customize it. I think that's a winning combination. And I hope that over the next couple of years, Woocommerce can live up to its fantastic competitors in the marketplace, including Shopify, Equid, BigCommerce, etc. So finally, I'd say that, you said we're the platform of writing, and I'm very flattered there. But still with blogging and especially with comments, I think that there's so, so, so much more to do.

• 26:22Matt Mullenweg?

  So you just got me really excited to get back to work. So I almost want to stop the podcast and go talk to some teams around WordPress and Automattic. So that's a good question. It got me pretty... You know, the toughest thing that I deal with day to day is a lot of the stuff I just talked about, outside of Woo, which we're making huge investments in, are ideas we had sometimes even five or 10 years ago, that because of opportunities with our main business lines, which are WordPress, Jetpack and Woocommerce, are so huge that it's tough. We have to focus in on them. And there were years, and maybe this goes back to something I would tell my earlier self professionally.

• 27:06Matt Mullenweg?

  Some early years of Automattic, we deluded ourselves. We spread ourselves too thin. And so we really had to say no to a lot. And that's how I understand, you know, that famous Steve Jobs or Johnny Ive's line, like, you know, a great product is saying no to a thousand things. I used to think that was like a thousand buttons and you say no to 999 of them. I think now it resonates me more saying that, you know, in addition to these things we're focused on, there's like 999 other things I would love to be working on, like areas I'd love to like tackle. And it's really saying no, not to even just a feature of the product, but to working on other products entirely. It's one of the things that makes me excited about scaling automatic from 500 people today to 5,000 in the future,

• 27:51Matt Mullenweg?

  is that we can do our core areas really, really well and make sure that those continue to be the best in the world, but also expand the breadth of what we work on. So, all right, next question. This is from, I'm gonna say Jaco Timmanen? Timmanen? And I apologize for everyone's names. I'm doing my best to pronounce them. And, uh, and send me a tweet or something afterwards if I could do it better. Says, and this actually relates to the saying no to 999 things. What has been the most important default setting in you that you've been, that you've later questioned and removed? By default setting, I mean a value or behavior

• 28:33Matt Mullenweg?

  that's been hardwired by parents, environment, education, or society? You know, I think it's almost just more than a specific default setting.

• 28:48Matt Mullenweg?

  Which I probably have some things I do differently. Like I typed the Dvorak layout instead of the Qwerty layout. Or, you know, just, uh, living distributed versus living in a home or being in one place or building companies in a different way. It's just the fact that you're constantly looking at default settings. So I'd say, Jaco, by this question, you're probably thinking about it the right way. Because my default settings and what, you know, the way I grew up in society and everything like that is gonna be different from yours. And so the things that need to change will be different. And our situations are different. So what you should think about is just asking yourself that question.

• 29:28Matt Mullenweg?

  At various intervals. And this is why I love kind of the Christmas, New Year's time, because it forces you to take a step back and kind of look from the 10,000 feet view. But I try to do this.

• 29:41Matt Mullenweg?

  It's actually something that happens a lot when I'm trying to meditate and I can't quiet my mind and I'm thinking of lots of things. Sometimes I'll just take a pause and be like, "Okay, I'm just gonna not meditate, but also not do anything, not look at my phone, not do anything, have a piece of paper and just try to see everything that's caught up in my mind. And how do I, where do I think that's going? How do I think it's, uh, sort of unwind my mind in terms of what's stuck in there? And what are the things I'm thinking about?" And that often leads me to take that step back from the day to day and look at things from a broader sense. Is my life heading in the right direction? Are my relationships in the right place?

• 30:21Matt Mullenweg?

  Where are the people that I love and care about, but maybe haven't spoken to in a few weeks or a few months, or maybe even all year? So those sort of steps back, I think, cause you to look at your own operating system. And actually, something I think that meditation is great for that is like, almost like an interrupt. I read a cool book called, I think it's called Search Within Yourself. And it was, it's a fellow at Google that started a, I think it's even called Search Within Yourself Meditation and Mindfulness Program. I believe his name was Jade Ming-Tang. And he talks about, he's kind of an engineering background and also a Googler.

• 31:04Matt Mullenweg?

  So the book is, I think, pretty cool for leaders of companies because it talks about the business benefits of mindfulness. And from an engineering point of view, how mindfulness and meditation is almost kind of like a background process that runs. And then whenever, you know, your operating system throws up a interrupt, like a reaction or emotion to things, it can kind of catch that. And so before you immediately react and do the thing that would be sort of your first intuition or reaction to an emotion or a thought, it says, "Hey, wait a second." And that's essentially the muscle you're developing when you meditate. And when I started thinking of it that way, I was like, "Wow, okay."

• 31:48Matt Mullenweg?

  So just like I might do a plank or pushups or something, like, "I need to work this muscle every day if I can." And, um...

• 31:57Matt Mullenweg?

  I think it's impossible to do that and not think about your default settings, or go back to the first principles of why you do things, the reason why you got into what you do in the first place. Are you truly happy? These are tough questions, but ones that you can honestly, with the distraction of day-to-day life and our phones and our blogs and our social media, it is so easy to just be lost minute to minute and be busy all day and not really bring yourself closer to the mountain that you want to climb.

• 32:37Matt Mullenweg?

  I would say if you are listening right now, maybe even pause and just take 10 minutes, whether you're driving in the car or whatever you're doing, just pause the podcast and like do nothing, have zero inputs, and just think about that, you know? Alright, I guess we're back now. Next question is from Matthew Arnold. Hard work in and of itself does not seem to guarantee success. That's true. There are plenty of truly hard-working entrepreneurs whose businesses will fail. To what other factors besides hard work do you attribute your massive success in business? Luck? Good mentors? Timing?

• 33:16Matt Mullenweg?

  Alright, Matthew, which is an awesome name. Thank you for that question. I think, you know, it's definitely all... It's funny that when people call me successful, I don't think of myself as that way. And I think part of that, even though I know objectively by many measures, I have been and I've been extraordinarily fortunate and lucky and everything. But part of it's because I fail so often. So I don't think that, you know, yes, if 10 businesses were started today, none of them would fail. By the way, including if I did them. So it's just, it's not how many times you fall, it's how many times you get back up is really key.

• 34:00Matt Mullenweg?

  And people talk about resilience and all these things. So that is true. And even like, think of business icons and like the greatest companies of our time.

• 34:12Matt Mullenweg?

  Facebook has products that fails all the time. They launched Poke, like a Snapchat ripoff. You know, Amazon, which I am a huge admirer of Jeff Bezos. Do you remember the Kindle phone? That was just like last year. That was a huge failure, and not just a huge failure, like one that they must have spent the better part of a billion dollars on. So, like, we don't stop failing. It's just you want to hopefully design your systems to assume failure and have some backup plans, a Plan B, a Plan C, a Plan D, all the way to a Plan Z, so that you'll be able to get up and fight another day. And just that, um, just whatever that drives you to do it.

• 34:55Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I think having a higher motivation beyond the extrinsic things which might be, come from success. So something more than money, something more than material goods that motivates you is really key. And, um, yeah, so that's, that's kind of the thing that I would attribute it to. That, uh, especially in business press, we just see when people hit the home runs. We don't see all their at-bats. And very rarely do we even know about all the at-bats they've had. So just remember that, no matter how bad a day you think you're having, there's probably someone you admire who's probably also having a bad day right this second. And, uh, and you're not alone.

• 35:42Matt Mullenweg?

  Next up, Julian Bosley. You have 30 minutes before the end of the world, and you find yourself in a very well-started bar next to an amazingly very delicatessen. What choice of food and drink did you enjoy? I liked this question a lot because, um, well, I love food and drink. I'm actually on a quest right now to go to all the top 50 restaurants in the world. This list is published, I think, by Pellegrino or sponsored by Pellegrino. And, um, I've been to nine of the top 10, and I think about 40, 45% of the top 50, so I'm a...

• 36:21Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I think, well, these experiences from these chefs, it's like a whole out of the world thing, but I love food and drink. Now, usually when I'm drinking, part of why I like this question is, you know, there's 30 minutes before the end of the world. And generally, when I engage in libations, I try to stick to the same alcohol all night. This is just something I've learned from like trial and error, mostly error, is that when I mix, when I mix different types of alcohols, I feel kind of terrible. I heard a saying once that drinking is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. That's true to an extent, especially if you mix. But if I stay with one, you know, if I stay with a great Casa

• 37:05Matt Mullenweg?

  Dragonis all night, or wine all night, or whiskey all night, I say those are my three favorites. Of course, to a reasonable degree, if too much of anything is bad for you, I'm typically pretty okay the next day. But the truth is, is that I love all sorts of different drinks. And there's great drinks made from gin and rum and other things, great cocktails, that I would love to have, but I typically avoid because I'm like, oh, I don't want to drink gin all night. So, for the drinking part of things, I would basically have like a bunch of everything at the bar, and just enjoy it, preferably in some great

• 37:44Matt Mullenweg?

  cocktails. In terms of a wine, I would, you know, have a great, I actually love California wines, there's some great old California wines, like an Alpha Omega, or just some of the classics. And for basically the last thing, I'm going to assume this delicatessen has a foie gras. And I know this is so bougie, I can't believe I'm saying this, but like, there's an experience that when like foie gras melts on your tongue, and then you wash it down with like a great Sartre, like a Chateau de Kim, just the best one that the bar has. It is a party in your mouth. Like, it's almost impossible to describe the sensation of what goes on there with those two, those two tastes interacting. So that would be

• 38:29Matt Mullenweg?

  like 29 minutes and 45 seconds, the thing I would, I would have. And then otherwise, from the delicatessen, I'd probably just go for a good, a couple of good sandwiches. You know, definitely like, like eggs and cheese and bacon on a croissant is a go-to that always gives me joy. And then it's funny, and we're coming up on Thanksgiving. And every Thanksgiving, I'm like, man, turkey is so good. Why don't I eat more turkey? And especially you know those day after turkey sandwiches where you have like the pulled turkey, like the dark meat, then you can get some like mayonnaise, cranberry and horseradish and just like kind of mix up the sandwich a lot. Pickles, lots of pickles, uh, maybe something like,

• 39:11Matt Mullenweg?

  I even like try to mix in like some sauerkraut or some kimchi, like something fermented in there. That would probably be like my, my go-to, super good deli sandwich. So, uh, Julian, thank you because this question was super fun for me to think about because I really went a lot of different directions. So, uh, some mixed cocktails, some good wine, and then ending it out with a great saute turn.

• 39:39Matt Mullenweg?

  All right, next question. They've got Alexander Francesco Newman. Matt, what are your thoughts on artificial intelligence web developer designers tools such as the grid or Wix ADI? WordPress use some sort of AI developer or designer feature in the future, um, or just an AI? Um, this is kind of funny. Uh, you know, I don't like to talk bad about competitors, so I won't mention any specifically, but I do think that right now there's kind of a, almost like a completely Vascus marketing hype cycle around AI

• 40:19Matt Mullenweg?

  that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence at all. So people are just slapping AI on everything, like maybe before they slapped like cloud on stuff or, um, that just isn't AI at all. So I think it's really just marketing. And nothing I've seen in the marketplace so far is much more than vaporware and a good demo. So I do think that essentially what they come down as kind of wizards, it's not that much different from like what a Clippy would do and like Microsoft Word in the 90s. So I think there's much better approaches to that sort of problem. Now, embedded in that is, do I think that there's changes we can make to WordPress that would make it easier for folks to get going or get started?

• 41:04Matt Mullenweg?

  Or, you know, the thing I think about, which is really our biggest challenge and the thing I work on every day, which is how do you connect, bridge that gap between what someone imagines and what they're able to create? So absolutely, that's what we work on every day. Big parts of Automattic work on how do we make it easier and more intuitive to have that effortless flow as you're building things. And that is at the core of what we do. In terms of AI and sort of that impacting the business, I think that we're still a

• 41:42Matt Mullenweg?

  few or many years away from that being more useful than a well-designed traditional interface. And actually, a really great essay about this, we'll find the link for the show notes, but essentially, there's a fellow who looked at all the chatbots, which are sort of an area of AI right now, that for Messenger, for Telegram, there's these bots, and you can say, "Hey, I want a pizza." They're like, "What kind of pizza do you want?" You're like, "Hmm, how about some pepperoni?" Or maybe it's smart, so it says, "Hey, you usually get pepperoni. Do you want some pepperoni?" You're like, "Yeah, let me have some pepperoni." But, "Oh darn, it's not my cheat day, so deliver it on Saturday instead."

• 42:25Matt Mullenweg?

  And you know, you sort of have like this conversational interface that sometimes people call AI with this product or service that you consume or buy or interact with. And basically, what this essay does is it compares that model to what a lot of folks in the US are trying to copy, which is the success of platforms like WeChat in China. It shows how, these days, WeChat actually, it's not that you're purely chatting with someone and asking them, which sounds to me like, you know, the inconvenience of calling a restaurant to get a reservation versus using like a reserve or an open table to just click a few buttons and get one.

• 43:07Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, that WeChat really embeds these interfaces, and he talks about the number of taps it takes to, you know, chat with a bot to get something versus the taps, I think he maybe even uses the pizza example, to order a pizza in China on WeChat through this mega conversational platform.

• 43:28Matt Mullenweg?

  I think that that's one of the areas where, you know, like a great interface can still surpass a chat. One thing that we're doing, so I'll give you all kind of a preview of something we're working on for wordpress.com, is we actually are working on a new chat interface. So we provide for paying customers live chat support. And, you know, it's a great experience. You're connected with a real-life human being and they will help you through whatever you're having trouble with. So it's basically like, you know, it's real intelligence. It's much better than artificial intelligence. They can help you with anything. And there's some disadvantages to this, though, in terms of, you know, it's difficult to scale

• 44:12Matt Mullenweg?

  in terms of we're hiring people as fast as we can. We're very happy with happiness engineers automatic, but we want to create tools that enable them to just reach more people. So we're working on this new chat system. And the two big things it changes are, one, it abstracts out who you're talking to. Because right now, and by the way, I do live chat support sometimes, too. So if you're chatting and you have maybe three or four chats going on simultaneously, you're helping people, it's a little bit difficult, both to wrap those up, like, let's say you want to go to lunch, but even things like using the restroom. You know, you don't want to leave the people you're chatting with hanging because they're waiting for you.

• 44:53Matt Mullenweg?

  So by abstracting it out, so you're basically be chatting with like, you know, an agent or cartoon character, whatever it is that we decide, instead of a specific person, we can allow transferring of chats between people way easier behind the scenes. So, you know, you could have an "I'm going to the bathroom" button, or, you know, "My, uh, my dog just, you know, started chewing on the couch" button. And the chats could be transferred to someone that gets all the transcripts and everything and could just pick it up instantly and keep the chat going invisibly to the person they're chatting with. But two is we're looking at, and this is an area I like way more than artificial intelligence, which is machine learning. So we now have all of the chats.

• 45:34Matt Mullenweg?

  I mean, at this point, probably close to a million interactions we've done, or way more than a million. Emails, chats, everything. So we can apply, and, you know, I'm going to say a buzzword, deep learning, which I'm going to say is not totally hype because there's been some amazing open-source tools released by Google like TensorFlow and like... A lot of the technology is actually pretty useful here to learn from those and essentially augment the happiness engineers, the people doing support by when we get something that looks a lot like what we've seen before, we can suggest essentially like a pre reply, like an answer for them that saves them having to type out or do everything. And then they

• 46:18Matt Mullenweg?

  can customize that or use that to augment their ability to chat with folks. So this has been a pretty cool project in the area where I think AI could actually have a real impact versus just being marketing hype. Hemed Fadifar asked, if you hadn't accomplished what you've accomplished and started over with nothing, what would the next six months of your life look like?

• 46:41Matt Mullenweg?

  This is a pretty tricky question because there's a lot of ways to think about it. I think the first way I thought about it was, well, if I just lost all of my, like I lost everything, like I had to declare bankruptcy and had no assets or anything. The, I mean, the obvious thing, I have lots of friends and family. So that would be, that's sort of my safety net. So I would, you know, probably maybe move back in home and start to rebuild from there. But that's probably not how you intended it. And hopefully, like unless the question is, if you don't have friends and family that you think would take you in if you were having a hard time, develop some deeper relationships. You never know what's going to happen. And by the way, that means that you will take them in if they're

• 47:24Matt Mullenweg?

  having a hard, hard time. It's totally reciprocal. So then there's a version of this question I've seen before where like, what if you knew everything you know, but you're, you're homeless one day and you know, so you lose everything and you don't have any friends or family you can sort of fall back on. So you're kind of alone in the world, but you have all your knowledge. What would you do?

• 47:46Matt Mullenweg?

  My answer there, again, and this also assumes, you know, the privilege of being in the United States and things like that is I would probably go to the external version of friends and family, which is maybe a church or YMCA or one of the nonprofits that tries to help out people with nothing and sort of use that as a home base to then develop.

• 48:11Matt Mullenweg?

  The other version of this that I thought of was, well, what if, you know, instead of all that, you have your house, you have like, you don't need to worry about surviving, but you are starting something brand new.

• 48:26Matt Mullenweg?

  So, the thing I would do first here, so I know everything I know now, I would use my craft, you know, engineering or music, essentially get a job. So, I think I would probably look for the most interesting company

• 48:41Matt Mullenweg?

  I could get access to and just do my best to be hired there, you know? Create a really great application, really craft, learn a lot about their business and go into the interviews, knowing a lot about it, try to stand out. If they say no, you know, keep trying to be hired and really put the, just to try to get around a great group and have a a great job where I know I'll learn and can start to save and develop the net for which I could do something more entrepreneurial in the future if I wanted to, which I think is what you're getting at with the question. So, I get this job, there's a saying when I was a musician is like, you know, you never want to be the best musician in the band. Ideally, you're the worst musician in the band because that means you're learning from every single person around you.

• 49:26Matt Mullenweg?

  So, I would try to find a company or a group or someplace where I could be the worst musician in the band, where just every single person was so much better than me. I still made the cut to make it in, but then I would just be learning from everyone around me every day. If I was just trying to start something new and it couldn't be related to anything I was done before, so it couldn't be content management or e-commerce or, you know, any of the areas that WordPress kind of plays in. I think what I would try to do is like figure out the zeitgeist. So, you know, I'd buy a copy of The New Yorker and New York Magazine and The Economist and Wired and Fast Company and I just read them cover to cover, maybe for a month or two, maybe get some back issues,

• 50:07Matt Mullenweg?

  and try to figure out what area is in that, like, the good part of the hype cycle. So, something like VR or AI is probably in the bad part of the hype cycle where the expectations people have for it are so out of line and like, we're just early, too early in terms of the impact that the technology can have. So, I tried to look for an area that is no longer Maybe I would go back like three or four years on those magazines and look for something that was hot then, but no one's talking about now. That's probably where the biggest opportunities are. So the thing that everyone was excited about five, six, seven years ago, it got a ton of

• 50:50Matt Mullenweg?

  overinvestment and company stuff started and failed. And now it's at that point in the cycle where the real stuff is happening. Like kinda the carpetbaggers and the folks who are just in it for money have all like come and gone. And it's just the people who really wanna make a difference in the world are still there and working. In some ways, I think content management is in this area right now, where a lot of the hype was four, five, six years ago. But now, we're actually reaching scale and having an impact on hundreds of millions of people's lives. And that's where the big opportunity is. There might be, you know, outside of the web, areas like CRISPR or gene editing. Some of the bio stuff, I think, is getting pretty interesting.

• 51:32Matt Mullenweg?

  We're approaching times when, you know, the devices, cellphones are probably, some mobile stuff is probably in this area right now, where, you know, we have more than a billion mobile devices. No one's really thinking, "Ah, I'm gonna start an app." But that kind of is one of the most interesting startups. When WordPress started, the biggest criticism was that there are too many blogging systems and the world didn't need another one. So that was, that would be what I would try to find, is like, what is the, what do people say the world doesn't need another one of? Because there's plenty of it. And try it out. Carlos Real. Where do you see the future of the internet in terms of user behaviors? Given that 20 years ago, people started to use and visit websites. Now, most people just use their phones.

• 52:16Matt Mullenweg?

  And when VR becomes useful, it's likely we'll all live on a VR platform and the phone will fall like the desktop.

• 52:23Matt Mullenweg?

  Hmm. So my hope is that phones don't fall like the desktop because even in a world where the VR is super amazing and we'll all be plugged into the matrix, I still really hope that, you know, I can go on a hike with Tim or like get out in the world and see some of the beautiful things all around us in nature and in cities and in, you know, instruments live and concerts and things like that. So when I'm mobile, something like a phone hopefully will be on me and I hope that's still there. So in terms of the internets, I think the behavior that's changing the most is still just this mega trend that we're still riding

• 53:05Matt Mullenweg?

  where, you know, there's six billion people still coming online. So everything that we think is amazing and huge and big now is going to, you know, six X or more likely 10 or 100 X where it is in terms of user interaction, in terms of posts per day, in terms of number of people tweeting, like all of this is going to be so, so, so, so much bigger than even the already amazing levels it has reached. And as people become more comfortable being native online, like the same cycles that people listening to this podcast might remember about 15 years ago where like you were nervous to put your credit card online or things like that. You know, folks coming online for the first

• 53:49Matt Mullenweg?

  time are going to have those same nervousness and go through those same, hopefully accelerated learning process of like, you know, what's it like to truly live digitally and live online? So I think that that will be adopted faster. I also hope that payments will be an area we can have a lot of innovation on because the friction of payments, I think, puts us in business models like advertising right now, which aren't the best. You know, how cool would it be that everyone listening to this could give, instead of Tim having advertising or, you know, doing whatever he needs to do, he could, everyone listening to this could just put in a dollar or maybe even not a dollar, maybe put in like two

• 54:31Matt Mullenweg?

  pennies, some sort of micro payments that could support creators all over the world. Like right now, the payment systems that we have just aren't set up for that, but I could imagine something like that being really cool in the future. The thing that I think is gonna have to change user behavior wise is we need to develop more antibodies, more immunity, because the technology is gonna get better and better and better at engaging us. Machine learning, and in the future 20 years from now when we do have something more approaching artificial intelligence, could entertain us perfectly and keep us always connected and engaged with whatever companies want

• 55:13Matt Mullenweg?

  us to be engaged with, you know, because a lot of this will be commercially driven. So that worries me a little bit. It's a little more Brave New World, the 1984, and reminds me of, ah, that great, it's that great intro to, I think, Brave New World. No, no, it's Neil Postman, and I think he wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, and there was an intro, we'll put it in the show notes, that someone made into a comic that was pretty amazing in terms of like, well, 1984 predicted would be our oppressors, like Big Brother, and what actually is our oppressors, which looks more like Brave New World, which is just, we're kind of like the title of the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. We're so

• 55:56Matt Mullenweg?

  caught up in distractions and, and pleasure and entertainment that we might be missing out on the bigger things. So just like it took kind of the world 100 years to develop antibodies to an addictive technology like tobacco and cigarettes, I think that we need to develop antibodies to technology addiction and the addiction of really engaging experiences. Nathan Aaron says, "With all these web development bootcamps opening up, is there future demand for web developers still high or stagnating?" I've actually been really impressed with some of the bootcamps, and especially in contrast to how prepared people coming out of these bootcamps are compared to people coming out of four-year universities or colleges.

• 56:38Matt Mullenweg?

  So I think that universities and colleges need to really up their game and adapt if they're gonna still be something that people think is a good investment.

• 56:49Matt Mullenweg?

  Just a tip for people who are going through or thinking about going through one of those hack camps or things.

• 56:56Matt Mullenweg?

  The thing that I still see, I've actually reviewed, I was looking at the other day. I reviewed 22,000 applications and resumes to Automattic in the past three years. So I look at a lot of these. And all the web development, web bootcamp ones seem to follow a little bit of a template. So see if you can break out of that a little bit. But also, even though you might do projects as part of that, I don't, the thing missing is often just a little more experience. And you say, "Well, I don't have a job yet. How do I get experience?" Open source, contribute to open source, get involved with the open source project. That's something that I think would, because you're competing with folks who maybe have three or four years at Google or Facebook and things like that. And you might be just as good from a development point of view, but you need to get some of that experience in.

• 57:41Matt Mullenweg?

  So the hack, the cool shortcut there is get involved with the open source project or start one. And show sort of real world users, real world collaboration with other people. I don't think I talked about that earlier in the things I look for, but you know, the most brilliant person in the world, the most greatest developer, the greatest anything that can't work with other people is basically not, not ever going to have an impact. And honestly, someone I would let go of Automattic. It doesn't matter how great you are, if you're not going to be able to work within the context of a team.

• 58:19Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, it's not someone who I want to work with personally. So being able to show that in your application, I think is really key.

• 58:29Matt Mullenweg?

  And the growth for web developers, I think, is going to grow hugely, but it'll also become more sophisticated. Even think about, you know, pre, in the 90s, before something like WordPress, you might need to call your web developer every time you want to change your website. Now, tools like WordPress make it easy for you to do that all day long without talking to anyone. So the basics are going to get easier and easier because the software will enable people to do that. So what they need developers for is we're going to become more sophisticated. I talked about earlier that WordPress, you can start and make a great site. If you're going to use WooCommerce, you can definitely get started with it. But maybe to customize it how you want, you need a developer. So that's where the demand for developers is growing.

• 59:13Matt Mullenweg?

  So you need to become more and more sophisticated as the general world becomes more sophisticated. We got Tom Tron Amon, Tron Amon. Considering the heights you've reached, how do you motivate yourself on a daily basis over the course of any projects?

• 59:32Matt Mullenweg?

  You know, I'm actually really lucky. I just got two awards in the past few weeks. One was a Fortune 40 under 40, which I guess is a recognition, not an award. And the other was the Heinz Award, which is, I'm really super honored by. It's kind of like the MacArthur Genius Grant or something. They pick five people per year in different areas. And it comes with a $250,000 grant and it's a huge honor. They're really looking like, I'm even blown away that I was considered for it. And so the win was very humbling. But when these things happen, when this recognition comes in, or like you put it, a height you've reached, this is a new height I've reached.

• 1:00:14Matt Mullenweg?

  If anything, it makes me work harder because I'm like, I don't want to let down the people who chose this, or now expectations are that much higher for what I need to do. Or I just want to, you know, if the world has given me something, I want to give it back 10 times that. So I would say that success can actually be very motivating to, you know, not let the world down in terms of like, it's, you've been lucky. It's blessed you. How do you give it back? How do you pay it forward? And it's not just being more successful. It's also like, literally, how do you give it back? How do you put goodness into the world? How do you give it away?

• 1:00:58Matt Mullenweg?

  That's really, really key to balance and importance. If I have something, I'll just give a little tip. When I have a grind, like I said, I've reviewed 22,000 applications. There's about 600 waiting in the queue right now I need to look at. When there's something that is a long task, I know it's going to take more than a few hours. I need to get through. I often break it up using the Pomodoro technique. Sometimes I do 25 minutes on, five minutes off. Sometimes I actually do a longer version where I do sort of 50 to 55 minutes on and then like 10 minutes off, because I find that I can really stay in the flow for a longer period of time. If I have the right music on and everything like that.

• 1:01:38Matt Mullenweg?

  So that is something I use to get through a grind when maybe I don't have that motivation. Because let's be honest, like no one, including myself, wakes up every morning of every single day being like, "Ah, great." Sometimes you wake up those mornings, maybe you mix your alcohols like I talked about earlier, and you just don't want to do anything. So, but you know, kind of something like a Pomodoro technique or forcing yourself to, you know, stare at the blank page and start typing just gibberish or whatever it is to kind of get the engine started, can just help it on those days when you have no motivation, which happen more frequently than any of us would care to admit. Brian Catbest, "What has been the biggest technical problem you've had to overcome?

• 1:02:23Matt Mullenweg?

  And how did you end up solving it?" Uh, this is an interesting one because as I thought about it, all the technical problems that I've faced in my career in terms of like a really difficult bit of code or an upgrade path or, you know, bringing in WYSIWYG to WordPress or any of these sort of things are fundamentally tractable, meaning that you can, like, you can essentially chip away at it enough that they're solvable or you get the right people involved or whatever it is that, um, there's certainly been fun ones, like I think back to, there's a great presentation by WordPress contributor Andrew Nason. He talks about when we added emoji support into WordPress,

• 1:03:08Matt Mullenweg?

  it was actually kind of a behind the scenes, uh, essentially way for, we had found a really key security problem in our underlying database, which was MySQL, that affected not just us, but like everyone out there. And the way that we dealt with multi byte characters, so. This is kind of technical, but like, normal ASCII text is represented by a single byte, and Unicode, which is the system which allows representing every language in the world, and also things like emoji, are multi byte, so they might be two or four bytes long. And there was just a really obscure bug that allowed you to essentially do some

• 1:03:48Matt Mullenweg?

  security exploits by changing how multiple byte characters were translated. Anyway, it was honestly a ton of fun, really cool. But because the vulnerability was so widespread, including not just WordPress, is we wanted to give people a chance to upgrade before then. So what we framed as emoji support was actually this Unicode fix essentially. Which was funny, because we had a lot of criticism. People were like, "Why are you putting emojis in when there's bigger things to work on?" Little did they know. So if you're a super geek and into it, if anything I just said made sense or seemed interesting, check out Nathan's presentation there, you'll enjoy it. But when I think of biggest problems, it's always the people. I talked about WYSIWYG earlier.

• 1:04:32Matt Mullenweg?

  When we brought in the WYSIWYG editing to WordPress, which now seems like a very non-controversial feature. At the time, it was very controversial. And the people's side of it was way more difficult than navigating the technical side. The fact that I studied political science in college, I think, has been way more useful to me than if I had done computer science. Because fundamentally, anything, and it's applicable not just to technology, but anything, is about people working together. And so, learning how to manage, learning how to communicate, all of those skills are the things to kind of go to some earlier questions like, "What would you take with you?" Or "What would you tell your earlier self?" Or if you're doing something else.

• 1:05:16Matt Mullenweg?

  By the way, that's a skill which I think I'm going to use the rest of my life, and continue to grow and develop the rest of my life. It's not any language I know today, or any field knowledge expertise, or domain expertise. It's just that working with other human beings, and becoming better at it, which is a thing I probably, especially as CEO, I think about and try to work on every day, is kind of the fun part, right? Because if you think about it, most all fun activities involve at least one other person. So if you can interact better with other humans, life gets better.

• 1:05:55Matt Mullenweg?

  And the final question as we end up about one hour into this from Cesari Roki. What is your evening routine, parentheses, if you have one? This is a cool one, and I like Cesari that you put in the if you have one because this is where I'll just be open and honest and vulnerable. I'd like to say that I have a cool evening routine. The reality is that for whatever reason, the way that I currently work right now and live is that like I kind of go until a gas tank is empty. And whether that's working, whether that's with friends or whatever.

• 1:06:34Matt Mullenweg?

  And then I, within a short period of time, run out of gas and I just fall asleep. Like I've been very fortunate that I've never had trouble sleeping and my head hits the pillows and you know, people have dated, etc. They laugh at this. They're like, literally your head hit the pillow, 20 seconds later, you were asleep, maybe snoring, I don't know. And it's like, it's like, what just happened? Like you were talking just seconds ago. This literally happened last night. I had four or five friends over. The conversation was going great. I didn't want to stop them. So I said, hey, keep going. But yesterday I had to wake up at like 4 a.m. to catch another flight and get some work in and some meetings and things.

• 1:07:17Matt Mullenweg?

  So I was just done, even though it was only 10 or 11. And so I said, hey, you know, keep going. I've got a piece out. If it had been a big party, I would have done the Irish goodbye where you just kind of like leave without talking to anyone. There were just four of us, so I said, hey, keep going. And I fell asleep, they were still having a great time, and I kind of hit the, hit the end of the road. So that's my evening routine is passing out. So I don't know if that's super useful, but I have thought a lot about morning routine. And this is the latest iteration, which I think I've talked about before, but this is latest. I still use a coach.me, which is the app where you can check things off every day. It's like a daily to-do list. And the things I try to do every single morning are...

• 1:08:02Matt Mullenweg?

  I try to do reading in the morning, at least thirty minutes of reading, because I find that's the time of the day where I kind of have the most engaged. After that is I take my vitamins and pills. So that's Elysium, which is, well, you can just Google it. I take some of the Nutrobox ones, so like Rise and Cato, and then just some other stuff, whatever Tim has me taking at that time. So like some Ubiquinol, Ginseng, whatever it is. Kind of, honestly, I didn't used to care about this stuff as much. Now that I'm in my thirties, I figure, hey, it can't hurt, might help, and I'll do whatever Tim's saying most recently. Try to do a little bit of exercise.

• 1:08:47Matt Mullenweg?

  So that's up, right now it's plank. I do a plank first, then I do squats, I do pushups, then I do some sun salutations to kind of stretch things out. Again, I'm not super into yoga, but I do a few sun salutations every single day. It's amazing.

• 1:09:03Matt Mullenweg?

  Finally, I meditate for at least ten minutes. I use an app for that called Calm, C A L M. And then, yeah, when I, then I look at my computer. I try to do a blog post at least four or five days out of the week. So essentially, you could translate this into writing. That, I would say, is my perfect morning. Now, how many mornings do I hit all, what is that, three, six, eight of those things? Not all of them. Fewer than I would care to admit, but to me, that has been the current recipe for a thing that just works the best. So on that note, I will leave all of the amazing Tim podcast listeners. You all are a super cool group.

• 1:09:44Matt Mullenweg?

  I'm excited and honored, and thank you to Tim for allowing me to connect with you all again. And I can't wait to see the comments and tweets and everything that come out of this. So I'm happy to engage with you all. Again, I'm Matt Mullinwick. My Twitter is @Photomat, P H O T O M A dot T T. You can see me blogging at matt.blog or at M A dot T T.

• 1:10:08Matt Mullenweg?

  And I'm on Facebook as well.

• 1:10:13Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why?

• 1:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is Marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with,

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to.

• 1:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of.

• 1:13:51Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:14:36Tim Ferriss?

  You can add clickable calls to action and perhaps most interesting to me, capture email addresses directly in the player. This can help you generate leads and drive conversion for whatever you are trying to optimize, say for a newsletter or in fact, a sales page of some type. Video business helps you optimize your videos by tracking viewer engagement and drop off so you can then modify your approach or creative moving forward and improve it and it connects to Google Analytics for even more insights. So check it out. Go to vimeo.com/tim10 to save 10% on Vimeo Business. That's vimeo.com/tim10.