Matt Mullenweg on the future of open source and why he’s taking a stand

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open source platform powering a staggering 43% of the internet. He also serves as CEO of Automattic—the parent company of brands like WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr—which is worth over $7 billion, with over 1,700 employees across 90 countries. In this episode, he discusses some of the most controversial topics surrounding WordPress, Automattic, and the broader open source community. What you’ll learn: • Matt’s response to public criticism • Why products like Meta’s Llama are “fake open source” • How his team is turning around Tumblr after acquiring it for just $3 million (after Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion) • Why he mortgaged his home to fund San Francisco’s iconic Bay Lights project • Matt’s philosophy: “Don’t just build a product; build a movement” • Why open source matters: “If the Founding Fathers were around today, they’d be open source advocates” — Brought to you by: • WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • Loom—The easiest screen recorder you’ll ever use: http://loom.com/lenny Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-creator-of-wordpress-opens-up-matt-mullenweg Where to find Matt Mullenweg: • X: https://x.com/photomatt • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/ • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/photomatt/ • Website: https://ma.tt/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Matt Mullenweg (05:10) Matt’s career journey (11:15) Bay Lights project and philanthropy (17:28) How Matt got involved with open source (23:25) Why products like Meta’s Llama are “fake open source” (27:14) The future of open source and how to get involved (35:25) Building a successful online community (39:12) The WP Engine controversy (50:24) Facing criticism and controversy (55:29) Addressing community concerns (01:08:29) Forking Advanced Custom Fields (01:11:15) The role of social media and public perception (01:16:43) Acquiring and reviving Tumblr (01:24:25) Automattic’s acquisition strategy (01:28:51) Final thoughts and future plans Referenced: • WordPress: https://wordpress.com/ • Automattic: https://automattic.com/ • CNET: https://www.cnet.com/ • Akismet: https://akismet.com/wordpress/ • Jetpack: https://jetpack.com/ • Toni Schneider on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonischneider/ • WooCommerce: https://woocommerce.com/ • Beeper: https://www.beeper.com/ • Day One: https://dayoneapp.com/ • Simplenote: https://simplenote.com/ • Pocket Casts: https://pocketcasts.com/ • Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org/ • Audrey Capital: https://audrey.co/ • Stripe: https://stripe.com/ • SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/ • Calm: https://www.calm.com/ • August: https://august.com/ • Daylight Computer: https://daylightcomputer.com/ • Keys Jazz Bistro: https://keysjazzbistro.com/ • Joomla: https://www.joomla.org/ • Drupal: https://new.drupal.org/ • Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ • Wix: https://www.wix.com/ • Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/ • Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ • Gravatar: https://gravatar.com/ • The Bay Lights: https://illuminate.org/projects/thebaylights/ • The Bay Lights 360: https://illuminate.org/the-bay-lights-360/ • Ben Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-davis-sf/ • Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts: https://www.houstonisd.org/hspva • Jack Dorsey: We’re Losing our Free Will to Algorithms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_8NganZSFI • Marc Andreessen: https://a16z.com/author/marc-andreessen/ • Bill Gurley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/ • An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-x-built-the-best-fact-checking-system-on-the-internet • Llama: https://www.llama.com/ • WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking: https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/ • As Wall Street Chases Profits, Fire Departments Have Paid the Price: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/us/fire-engines-shortage-private-equity.html • WordCamp Asia: https://asia.wordcamp.org/2025/ ... References continued at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-creator-of-wordpress-opens-up-matt-mullenweg Recommended book: • Maintenance: Of Everything (in progress): https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/addenda/page/introduction Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you're really open in open source, sometimes you have to stand up to bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Put your hands together for Matt Mullenweg.

• 0:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Matt Mullenweg has been making some questionable moves recently. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days. 20-plus years of good sentiment burned in days. You were like 100% beloved hero of open source and internet. And now you're like in this, a lot of people don't like you.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  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 1% of the world thought I was terrible. And now I feel like it's up to like 4% or 5%.

• 0:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  People that don't know what the hell's going on, well, it's just like the high level ORE, what's going on.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  There's a company called WP Engine. By 2018, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. You know, since 2019, WP Engine has kind of changed a bit. They started using the trademark. They're offering something called WordPress. They refer to it as like a bastardized, hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand.

• 0:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy?

• 0:58Speaker 00

  A lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know, get out of bed.

• 1:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Matt Mullenweg. Matt is the co-creator of WordPress, which powers 40% of websites on the internet today, including whitehouse.gov. He's also the CEO of Automattic, which has valued at over $7 billion and owns products like wordpress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, 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 incepted 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

• 1:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 Automattic. 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'snewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Matt Mullenweg.

• 2:23Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:07Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Cassiopho, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, joining me for this very short conversation.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter.

• 3:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Sure. So we started Vanta in 2018, focused on founders, helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC 2 or ISO 2701. Today, we currently help over 9,000 companies, including some startup household names like Atlassian, Ramp, and LengChain, start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance, centralizing GRC, and accelerating security reviews.

• 4:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is awesome. I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources and nobody wants to spend time doing this.

• 4:39Speaker 03

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• 4:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  We appreciate you for doing that. And you have a special discount for listeners. They can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/leni. That's V A N T A dot com slash leni for $1,000 off Vanta. Thanks for that, Christina.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 5:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Thanks. It's a, you know, big fan, a long time listener, so happy to be on.

• 5:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm a long time 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, it's almost good that we waited a little bit to talk. So we're going to get into a lot of that stuff. But I want to start with just, 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.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  So first, when I was 19, I co-founded an open source project called WordPress with Mike Little. And we started this blogging software, then became sort of a full site thing, and then became like a platform that really tons of stuff is built on. And now it's kind of 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, things I would say, don't even look like a website, which is kind of wild to me. But that's kind of the beauty of open source. People do things with it you don't expect. Ended up dropping out of college, moving to San Francisco, and then worked at CNET for a year as product manager, actually. That's how they are.

• 6:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to talk about that and go on.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  And then, you know, 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 pitched it to CNET. They didn't want to do it. So I was like, okay, I gotta do this. So I left and started a company called Automatic. The idea was to create

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Essentially like complement the core WordPress software with some commercial services, things that run in the cloud, like Kismet AntiSpam, which is our machine learning, I guess you call it AI now, but like anti-spam system. Or Jetpack, which is like iCloud for WordPress, you know, does the backups and the real-time sync and everything like that. So that was 19 years ago.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  So that's now grown to be, you know, over 1,700 people in actually 90 countries. So we've actually been fully distributed and remote and asynchronous from the start, which I think is one of our superpowers. I actually wasn't the CEO in the beginning, but in 2014, so I guess 11 years ago, I became CEO. The original CEO was, well, I guess I was in the very beginning, but then I hired Toni Schneider to be CEO, probably four or five months in.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  And yeah, so that is a very full-time thing. And Automattic does a lot of products. There's WordPress.com, WooCommerce, which is open source Shopify, which is now over half of our revenue. And then we have some really cool apps, so like Beeper, Day1, SimpleNote, Pocket Casts. We're trying to fill up your home screens with open web, open source things that are very privacy and user-centric. So that, you know, running our company is definitely like the full-time job.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  I still run WordPress.org and the WordPress projects. I'm the lead developer there and so sort of manage all those releases and the community and the, you know, the directories and all the sort of things we do on WordPress.org. There's this cool thing called Openverse. We took over Creative Commons, which is like a way you can find sort of open licensed images and audio and video. So basically, if you notice the throughput through all these things, it's open source. On like the nights and weekends or like side, a few hours a week, I do some angel investing. So I've done over 100 angel investments through an entity called Audrey Capital, which is sort of the, if anything's in the sort of WordPress space, I invest in it through Automattic. But if anything's like a little more further afield.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Do through Audrey Capital and have done some really exciting investments there. Everything from sort of name brands like Stripe and SpaceX, but also like it was in the seat of Calm or a lot of home automation stuff like Ring, August, SmartThings. 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 love San Francisco. So I have a co-owner of a cool grungy jazz club in North Beach called Keys with Simon Roat. And so if you Wednesday, Thursday night, you want to see some awesome live jazz, check out Keys.

• 9:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, okay. You said too much, I get it now. Jazz club I was not aware of. I gotta check this out. It's called Keys?

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, Keys Jazz Bistro. It's over on Broadway, in Columbus, kind of right around there.

• 9:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. That was new to me. Going back to Automattic, I think people don't get the scale of this thing. So just to mirror back, if you think and even add to what you've said, 1,700 people work there, 90 different countries. Also, you didn't share this stat, something like 43% of the internet websites are built on WordPress, run on WordPress.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when we started, a lot of websites were built on custom CMSs and there's a law of fragmentation in the space. But now WordPress has grown to be over 40% of all websites in the world, which is 10x the number two, which right now is Shopify.

• 10:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  Right, they're like at 4%. I was looking at that list.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  They're around 4%.

• 10:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's unreal.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  It used to be open source was the top three. Unfortunately, Jubla and Drupal have fallen behind. And so now it's like Shopify, Wix, Spray Space are the top ones. But WordPress is still, you know, because we have this flywheel of open source community, its movements, it kind of has this, like any open source, like Linux or Apache or Wikipedia, it has some positive flywheel effects when it takes off.

• 10:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome, okay. And then there's a few other things you didn't 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.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Sorry, I forgot to mention that.

• 10:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  We're gonna get into that, yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, running a social network is definitely the hardest thing I've ever attempted. I thought we knew what we were doing because WordPress ran so much of the web, we dealt with, I thought every content moderation thing you could ever deal with, but social networks are a whole nother. Whole other ballgame.

• 11:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, a couple more fun facts before we get into some other stuff I want to chat about. Fun fact number one is you're 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 Bay Lights project and I'm sure you love it. For people that don't know what this is about, what is this project and how how have you been involved? Why, why, why have you been instrumental in to make you this a thing?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Bay Lights, you know, there's two famous bridges 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, it's one of the busiest bridges in the country. And it's really beautiful from a like engineering point of view. And so kind of a vision between Ben Davis and artist Leo Villarreal, who's an amazing light artist, actually, I just started Burning Man, was to put, gosh, I forget the number, I think 18,000 LEDs on the side of the bridge, like on all the cables, and create this really beautiful, gentle, kind of like algorithmic light piece, light art piece.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  And the, yeah, Ben Davis was was dating an artist friend of mine and we were over and having drinks on my patio. 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. And 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 was like, yeah, it's almost like the the social network thing where like a million is cool, but a billion would be really cool. He was like, you know, that would be cool, but what if we put the whole side of it? And so that I was like, oh, cool. And sort of made an angel investment in that that thing. They hadn't raised anything or had, I don't even think an entity at that point. I was like, you know, to get you started, I forget what it was, 100 or 150K.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  So I gave him that first bid. And then it kind of blossoms into a thing. And then sort of fast forward, remember there's that 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 donated the last million, million and a half to to finish out that project. The Baylights were online for 10 years. The technology degraded and so like the environment's very harsh. So actually, we just completed a fundraise and are reinstalling the Baylights. They're calling it Baylights 360. So now it'll be both sides of the bridge. It'll be visible from also Oakland and the Treasure Island because the first version, the city was very worried about the like drivers seeing the lights and it might distract them.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  So we had to angle them that you could only see it from San Francisco, which was a compromise we didn't love, you know, because like, yeah, we love the East Bay and everything else like that, too. So new version is coming online, hopefully later this year in the fall. And and also that that turned into a nonprofit called Illuminate, which I'm on the board of, run by Ben Davis, who I mentioned previously, that does cool public art stuff around the city. So they're responsible for the, you know, the Grace Lights, all the JFK Boulevard stuff, where that's been has the murals and like 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 SFMOMA, the Opera, et cetera, that have

• 14:31Speaker 00

  huge budgets, like 100 million a year. And Illuminate for, you know, literally one tenth of that has created something that millions of people can enjoy, you know? And I like to think that anyone along their barcadero, you know, you might be going through a tough time. Obviously, we have people who are struggling with 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, you know, the fundamentals at the bottom of those highly created needs. And then you also have to work on the things that like raise your soul a little bit, so art. So I like that barbell approach to philanthropy.

• 15:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Elon has a great quote along those lines. You can't just work on solving problems all day. You need something inspiring to think about and to work towards. 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 come up with the idea itself. I know that you did the mortgage your house to make it possible.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  I can't take any credit for the idea. I was exposed to, I had an adjacent idea and they had a way cooler one with a real artist and everything like that. I was just happy to be here. It's like being an angel investor, you know, like you, you can support the entrepreneurs, the people who actually really do it.

• 15:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, okay. And the other funny thing you said is about, they were 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 rearview mirror and the mirror, turning around to like, kind of, and that's, it feels more dangerous, the lights shining in my face.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  You know, they call it impossible works of art. There were like 13 agencies that had to sign off. They were worried the lights were distracting birds or seals or environmental reviews. It was really a, a lot of like, public bureaucrats and everyone had to like, to make that happen. There is like 20 places where someone could have said no and it never would have happened. So it's very inspiring to see the city come together. And also like, San Francisco, I feel like is entering a new chapter right now, like going from like, the doom loop to the boom loop.

• 16:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  I'm a big believer in the city. So much innovation has come here from like food, you know, like the burrito, fortune cookies, all these sorts of things are from San Francisco to like, obviously all the tech innovation that we're all familiar with. It's kind of the city of the future. And I don't know what it is in the water, you know, from like the 60s till now, like cultural innovations, things that happened and influenced the whole world, Burning Man, you know, Grateful Dead, et cetera, like that all starts in San Francisco. So it's exciting to be here.

• 17:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  SF is so back, as they say on Twitter. Okay, someone very close to you told me that you're 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.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Oh, man, that would be fun. I've dreamed about being able to do a Q and A in rhyme, but I don't think I'm that talented yet.

• 17:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  Just, I'm planting the seed. Okay, so I want to get into the, all the drama that you're swirling in right now, but I want to 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 in 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 community within the open source community. What was kind of the, the origin story of you becoming obsessed in, I don't know, open source field?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  I was a broke kid in Houston, Texas. And my passions were jazz, you know? Houston has actually amazing music programs in the public schools. And so I was very fortunate to go to some of the best sort of arts programs, including my high school called the High School for Performing Visual Arts, where Beyonce went, Robert Glasper, a lot of like amazing folks went there. And so music was a big part of my life. And, and actually economics. So I had this fun teacher, Scott Roman, who created, participated in our school in the Federal Reserve Challenge, which was run by, you know, the Federal Reserve that sets the interest rates

• 18:39Speaker 00

  and, you know, backs the national banking system and everything like that. Has this competition for high school students. It ended up being the first academic competition this art school ever won. And yeah, first year, we kind of didn't get that far. Our second year, we went all the way to nationals. So I got to meet Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke was our judge. It went to DC, so that was very, very exciting. And so, you know, being exposed to like, also having a great liberal arts education, you know, the ideas of, you know, Frederick Hayek, Agnes Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Thucydides, you know, all these sorts of things. That philosophy really influenced me. And you combine that with that, you know, music lessons were expensive, so we couldn't really afford them. So I would barter and trade.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  I build websites for local musicians in exchange for lessons. And so these websites, I would start to put software on, like forums or, you know, like different things. And that kind of exposed me to open source. So, you know, my father was also a, you know, engineer. He worked for oil companies and things, but his world was all Microsoft, it was all proprietary. And I was kind of grew up in, you know, early days of the internet. So it was slash dots and, you know, Jeffrey Zeldman talking about web standards and all these things like are are really kind of the social milieu and zeitgeist that I grew up in. So I, you know, combining all this philosophy I studied, I felt that like open source was actually the most important idea of our generation.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  So if, like, if the founding fathers were around today, I think they would be open source advocates. If you think about it, as more and more of our lives are influenced and actually controlled by the software we use. If we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software, we're not truly free. So, you know, WordPress is under a license called the GPL, which has four freedoms. 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 services, you could do whatever you want with it. The 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, the freedom to change it is the third freedom.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  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 called, what's called a viral open source license, as opposed to MIT license, which some of the others that aren't. So, um, yeah, I just kind of decided that this was what I was going to devote my life to. And so that became getting involved with some early open source projects. WordPress was actually a fork of a abandoned open source project called B2. So the codebase actually started with something that was already out there. And I was a user and contributor to, kind of volunteer on the forums and contribute to code. And then when it was abandoned, and myself and Mike sort of were one of like four or five different forks that started

• 21:30Speaker 00

  that kind of picked it up and tried to continue it for, for our own use and then later for a larger community.

• 21:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  It feels like a lot of people are coming around to exactly your worldview. And say, I was just watching a video of Jack Dorsey talking about how we're just controlled by algorithms. And we don't know what's how, we don't know how they work. And we don't, we're not in control of our lives. Have you seen that video?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  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 Marc Andreessen or Bill Gurley, you know, be huge advocates for open source. I actually remember one of my early meetings with Andreessen or with Marc Andreessen. I didn't realize at the time, I thought it was the, Toni Schneider and I were sort of fundraising. And Mark really like grilled us. He's like, how can you build a business on open source? 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.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Like, how are you going to build something that can change the internet with, you know, people all around the world? And, and just had this long, like hour long debate. And I was like, we walked out of that, it's like, wow, that was the worst meeting ever. They just hate everything we're doing. And then, you know, the next day they're like, hey, we're interested. I was like, what happened? I didn't realize that he had kind of this like idea where like he wanted to attack the ideas and see how we defended it. To sort of was how they, hey, battle tested things. I guess kind of like a Microsoft culture or whatever, where you're like, really like grill the idea. I just wasn't familiar with that. But it's so cool now that some of these folks that I've learned so much from are such good advocates for open source.

• 23:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. I was just, I just had the community notes team on the podcast. And that's an amazing example of community of, 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 of areas here. One is you wrote this really interesting post where you talk about how Meta talks about Lama as an open source project, but it's, you called it a false, false prophet. What is, what is it about Lama that isn't open source? What are people missing when they see Lama and they're like, oh, Meta's amazing, open sourcing everything?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  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 if you're above a certain threshold of monthly active users, I forget what it is, like it's big, it's like 750 million, so it's pretty high, you need a license from them. And so that does not give you the freedom to use the software for any purpose, right? If at some point you have to ask for permission, you know, you're kind of at the whims of this company who you might be aligned with or you might be an enemy with, you know? And also, how do you define that? So for example, like on WordPress, like our products don't have 750 million registered

• 24:35Speaker 00

  users, but we reach billions of people per month in terms of visitors. So is that, you know, is that defined? So there's just ambiguity there. So I still think what they've done is amazing and I like that they're releasing it. I was very confused for why they exist on calling it open source because they actually, Meta has been a huge open source contributor, React, you know, they've had 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.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  So I think they're, I think it might be like a re regulatory thing because clearly they understand this is an open source. So when I wrote the blog post, I was just kind of confused and thought like, oh, maybe if I like, you know, get this message out there, they'll change. 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, actually many, many years ago, I think it was React that they were doing something with the licensing or like a patent restriction on. And the WordPress community actually got Meta to change that and reverse something they were doing to lock it down. So, um, yeah. I consider my role as an open source advocate to actually be my primary thing.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  You know, and it's very much my life mission. You know, I hope to work on WordPress the rest of my life, but also like just open source and journal. So I also like, you know, support Drupal and Joomla, like anything else that's open source. Like I'm going to 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 would love that every sort of 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.

• 26:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  And also, Phil, it's important to you to, I don't know, open source washing, like avoid people using the term when it's not true. And it's interesting in this case that 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?

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that there's a, and there's actually like an open source. You know, OSI, there's like a formal definition for like what's make it, what makes an open source license. And there's actually many dozens of open source licenses. And it's sort of public domain licenses and other things. So it's also their stance that this is not an open source license.

• 27:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Something else that 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 these models were trained on was open source code, because that's all they have access to. They don't have like Windows code, they don't have Shopify code. And what a cool, I don't know, another success story slash, I don't know. I guess, how do you feel about that? All these AI models are trained on code you wrote in open source community.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  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. You know, I also like to think about, you know, I have some window where my creative output is useful to society.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  And if you fast forward like 50 or 100 years, I do believe that the utility for proprietary software eventually approaches zero. So like when we're sending people to Mars, the operating system of the rockets and the devices and everything like that is not going to be built on the Windows NT kernel. As amazing feat of engineering that like that proprietary kernel is, it's going to be built on an open source kernel, you know, Linux or BSD or something like that. And so like if you want to be be part of something that sort of becomes the fabric of humanity's foundation, like things that allows a Cambrian explosion of things built on top of it, a renaissance of ideas, you want to be involved with open source.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  And so I really hope that more and more people, I'm a little bit of evangelist here, you know, I'm a missionary where I really want to encourage more and more people to consider at least making part of their time, even if just a few hours a week, you know, contributing to open source, because it could be part of something that has a huge impact. And it's fun, especially if you're like a younger developer, designer, or PM or whatever, like you can't walk up to Facebook and change their homepage, or say, I'd like to change this 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, you know, gosh,

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Bitcoin, or, you know, there's all these things are open source, Chromium, Firefox, like, and you could actually change, you know, a feature or project management things, or change a design or improve it. And that's, I think, really, really special. And so the thrill for me of like knowing that code I wrote is now executing, you know, millions of times per second in millions of servers around the world, that kind of thrill, that high is like, kind of, when I first had my first open source contribution, like such a thrill, and I've been sort of chasing that and enjoying that ever since.

• 29:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Say someone wants to actually do this, where do they go? What do they, how do they do this? Do they just like pick a project, go to wordpress.org and like, here's how you contribute? What's like a next step there?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, pick a project that you use or like, I mean, that's obviously a nice one. For WordPress, we have this, it's called make.wordpress.org. Now, 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 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, they're so whatever you feel like your your talent in the world is either that you have or that you want to cultivate. You know, there's so many people, I mean, I learned how to code

• 30:42Speaker 00

  while building WordPress. Basically, I didn't have as too much formal training there. So it's a great way to to level your skills as well and work with some of the best developers and others in the world.

• 30:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  This also made me think about AI agents are coming around, Devin and all these AI driven coding agents. You have a prediction at when most of the code contributed to the open source projects will be Devin and AI agent such type projects?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  I think Google talked about 25% of their code or characters committed are now sort of AI assisted.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  And they're probably on the bleeding edge. I don't know how much of WordPress's code right now is AI assisted or or something like that.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  But I think over the next five years, it definitely approaches maybe a majority. And I'm actually very, very excited. So, you know, one of the big challenges that we have as a very open platform is we have this open plugin and theme architecture. So the 60,000 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 Core anymore. You know, we haven't had a remote exploited.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  I think five years, six years, something. But in the plugins, it can be somewhat more frequent. And so one thing I'm very, very excited about the next year or two is actually more automated scanning. Because obviously, that code base is so many tens of millions, maybe over 100 million lines of code at this point. It's impossible for humans to review that. So we kind of rely on developers to review that and manage. And of course, we have like bug bounties and everything. 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, you see people building apps and stuff. And it's just sort of custom generated code.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  But I think the next generation of these models or for the next layer there is because, as everyone knows, like just writing the code is just one part of it. It's maintaining it. That really becomes the life cycle of it. And Stuart Brand's new book is all about maintenance, right? Which I'm very excited about. He's publishing, I think with Stripe. And it's actually kind of open source. He's open sourcing the book. So you can see it being written online. But anyway, to go back, 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 pass key support

• 33:33Speaker 00

  or whatever 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.

• 33:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love this book on maintenance. There's a, my sister's partner 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, now I have to like maintain this thing. They keep a nice, nice jacket. Like everything is maintenance. Everything in your life is just maintenance. And I wonder if that's what the book's about.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Well, that's why I think technical debt 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 to can see in the interface or how their products integrate with themselves or things. And I think about that a lot in our own company. We definitely have some products, always the little bears coming on because you 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 Gravestar right now, I'm actually really proud of it. Like, it's, I think, a really great user experience, very slick. But there's like parts of, well, I always say I'm the unhappiest WordPress user in the world. So it's like parts of WordPress and WordPress.com that I'm a little embarrassed and ashamed of.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Like, 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 we need to get around to. And it's our big focus for us this year is actually kind of going back to basics, back to core, and improving, you know, all of those kind of nooks and crannies of 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 21 years that maybe is not as relevant today or doesn't need to be there.

• 35:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  That sounds like excellent work for your, for this AI agent of the future that's coming soon. There's one other area I want to 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.

• 35:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm curious just what lessons you've learned about what it takes to build a successful community, online especially.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  This is probably influenced by economics and jazz, right? So, and economics is all about systems thinking, right? And what are the incentive structures of how you set something up? And then jazz is all about collaboration.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Alright, so if there's something unique I have for your audience, I would say it's, don't just build a product, build a movement. And to send that we've been successful, I think it's that we give people something to believe in, you know, a philosophy, a worldview, even silly things like, you know, we had this tagline in the footer of the WordPress.org when we started, it's still there, it says "code is poetry." You've got this idea that we're not just writing code, like we're trying to create something that can have elements, we name every WordPress release after a jazz musician, you know, for the past 60 releases or so. So those sorts of things, bringing like a little art and soul and some fun into it as well, it doesn't have to be serious all the time.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  I think, you know, they can give something to believe in and work on and aim towards that's more than just a paycheck or more than just, you know, the utility, the base utility of the software. So it's not just the software, it's also like, how are the meetups? You know, 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 do a lot of Q and A. So like, you know, what are the things you're doing around the software that's allowing people to get involved, that's inviting contributions, that's allowing people to build on top of it? I've studied platforms quite a bit, like Microsoft and others. And so our whole ecosystem of plugins and themes is part of what's made WordPress so

• 37:31Speaker 00

  successful and the mode that we have. The core features of a CMS, you can kind of write with a few developers in a few weeks or something, like it's kind of not, you know, it's basically correct operations. But to replicate those 60,000 plugins and themes, gosh, no one's done it. It's a huge mode. 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 is true platform, it's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether it was the Facebook platform, putting that in air quotes, or the Shopify platform, companies build on it and then they get the rug pulled out

• 38:13Speaker 00

  from under them because they're too successful. And then the sort of thing you're building on decides, oh, we want that money or we want that growth. And they sort of change the API or remove your access. There's so many examples of this, especially on, I think, Facebook and Shopify and others where people got too successful and all of a sudden they knock on the door and say, oh, that's a mighty nice app you have there. We'd love to offer you some warrants where we own a bunch of your company or we're gonna shut it off. Those sorts of things. 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, if they're gonna build a business on top of something else, if you build on open source, you have that

• 38:54Speaker 00

  guarantee. Even if I grew devil horns and became evil and automatically decided to know, whatever, 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 really important.

• 39:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  What a segue to all of this drama that's swirling around you these days. I think a lot of people do feel like there's devil horns that have appeared. And so I'm excited to dig into this stuff. I find that every time you go on a podcast these days, if we don't get into this, everyone's just like, why is Matt not answering these questions? Let's get into the hard stuff. So I'm gonna ask you some hard questions. 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. What's just like the high level, what's going on?

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so to set it, you can get WordPress from wordpress.com, but also you can get WordPress from dozens of other hosts. The biggest in the world are like GoDaddy, Hosting Jer, Newfold. It's not the biggest, but it is in the top 10 or something. It has about 700,000 WordPress installs. There's a company called WP Engine. In 2019, WP Engine started as like very WordPress oriented and they contributed a lot to the community and everything like that. They're very respectful about distinguishing themselves from core. So people really realized it wasn't officially associated and everything. But 2019, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  And anyone who follows business, when private equity buys something, there's some good ones, but there's also many, many stories about how they can really hollow things out, really optimize their profits, become user hostile. 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 rolled up by a private equity firm. And they've been raising prices and their supply constraint and things like that. So there's literally like a shortage in fire trucks right now because of private equity. And of course, if you look at healthcare or other things like this, so many examples of where private equity can really, I think, be one of the darker parts of capitalism.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  So since 2019, WP Engine has changed a bit. And they really stopped contributing to core and they started using the trademark

• 41:23Speaker 00

  in a way that was very confusing in the marketplace. And particularly in the past year, year and a half or so, we just gained a lot, I get a lot of support for requests for WP Engine. And when we do surveys, we'd find that 20, 30, 40% of people thought they were officially associated because of how they were presenting, using our logo and presenting the brand and everything like that was very confusing to people. And as you know, if you don't protect your trademark, 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 change to every single poster page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  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 an undo is so critical. Now, obviously, you have to store these revisions, so it takes up more database space. Now, it's trivial, it's megabytes. So on modern databases, it's not that big a deal. But to save money, they actually turned this off. So they broke the undo feature in WordPress to essentially save money. And so you have this thing where they're offering something called WordPress. It's kind of, I think I refer to it as like a bastardized, hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand. And then there'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.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  So it's came to a head. So past 18 months, they've also, you know, we kind of contacted them and say, hey, you need a trademark license or something like if you're gonna use this or or change how you're doing things. And, you know, kind of tried to negotiate something and had many different term sheets over the months, offer and different things. And 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 like five to seven years. So they were kind of five years into this. They tried to shop it around and sell it. They weren't able to find a buyer. They said, well, they don't have any IP. And it feels like they're using your trademark, so they're gonna have trouble with you. They don't have a license and things like that. So

• 43:36Speaker 00

  while they were negotiating with us, it appears they were also like preparing this lawsuit against us. So again, I've been very fortunate in my business career that

• 43:47Speaker 00

  you know, we've invested in dozens of companies. We've acquired lots of things like

• 43:54Speaker 00

  by and large, 99% of the time,

• 43:58Speaker 00

  people I've dealt with in business have been ethical, straightforward, honest. I haven't really faced any like bold faced lying or duplicitous behavior. Very, very rarely, you know, people who just, you know, say one thing and do another or

• 44:13Speaker 00

  fraudulent in their behavior. But I think that was happening here. And so so just wasn't preparatory. I was thinking I was a little naive and kind of didn't realize what was going on for a while. So it came to a head and at WorkCamp US in September, I was like, okay, well, she's still not gonna like even agree to negotiate. You know,

• 44:35Speaker 00

  I'm going to give this presentation about how I think both private equity has messed up a lot of open source projects in the past and how in particular, Wbingen has done some very bad or evil things and And they were like, okay, go for it. So I did the presentation. I think it was on a Thursday or Friday. Kind of spicy. People are like, oh, can't believe you did that. And then on Monday, they launched this with Quinn Emanuel, which is kind of the baddest nastiest law firm. It's like who Elon uses when he sues people. Launched this big multimillion dollar lawsuit against both me personally and WordPress style work. So like the WordPress community and Automattic.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  And also, you know, they're spending millions of dollars a month on both lawyers and PR. So they're they're doing, you know, if you read, oh, gosh, who's the celebrity that they were recently talking about this, like the dark PR stuff, where they're like boosting things on social networks?

• 45:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  And

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Like Lively, yeah, yeah. So all that stuff is happening. So there's, and I warned, you know, people, I think in the presentation, I said, hey, there's going to be a smear campaign against me. Internally, in the company, I was like, hey, they're gonna dig up everything that's ever happens. Anything bad anyone's ever said to me is kind of like all of a sudden become like a news item. And and that has happened. It's been true. So right now, there is a portion of the internet that does think I have devil horns and everything. Fortunately, this is not my first rodeo. I know a lot of people think like, oh, that was nice for 20 years and then got mean. But you know, one thing, 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. Otherwise, people could

• 46:20Speaker 00

  take advantage of it in a way that ultimately can destroy everything you've created. So this is probably the fourth time the internet has decided I'm the main character or really evil. And the previous ones, we don't remember anymore. It's Hot Nacho or the Easter massacre of themes, or like these other things that that aren't even on my Wikipedia page anymore. But

• 46:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Those are your incidents. Those weren't like historical battles.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  These are things that, yeah, I was involved in.

• 46:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's cool names, at least.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Including some things I had screwed up, like Hot Nacho was definitely screwed up on my end very early in the WordPress side, but.

• 46:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, okay, I'm not going to follow those threads, but those are great names. This episode is brought to you by Loom. Loom lets you record your screen, your camera, and your voice to share video messages easily. Record a Loom and send it out with just a link to gather feedback, add context, or share an update. So now you can delete that novel-length email that you were writing. Instead, you can record your screen and share your message faster. Loom can help you have fewer meetings and make the meetings that you do have much more productive. Meetings start with everyone on the same page and end early. Problem solved, time saved. We know that everyone isn't a one-take wonder when it comes to recording videos, so Loom comes with easy editing and AI features to help you record once

• 47:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  and get back to the work that counts. Save time, align your team, stay connected, and get more done with Loom, now part of Atlassian, the makers of Jira. Try Loom for free today at loom.com/lenny. That's L-O-O-M dot com slash Lenny. So you mentioned this talk you gave at WordCamp, and you said at the beginning of the talk, like, I'm... Oh, no, afterwards, you're like, "I was really nervous to give this talk." And obviously, you can see why. Just like, what finally convinced you this was time? Was it just to go, as you described, scorched-earth nuclear? Was it like, WordCamp is coming up, and this is the moment to go public with this? Was there something else that kind of crossed the line?

• 48:23Speaker 00

  It was a unique opportunity, because we were essentially saying that, "Hey, WP Engine isn't going to be allowed to sponsor WordCamps anymore. They're not going to be like a..." Because we had, again, up to that point, really done everything to bring them in and have them be part of the community. So I really had to also explain to our community, like, "Hey, why we're going to be excluding this company." That a lot of people saw us as doing good. If you go to WP Engine's website, they have whole pages about how much they contribute, give back, and how they, you know, they do kind of greenwash or open-source-wash a lot of what they do. So all their marketing branding was around this positive stuff. And so I was like, hey, we need to just explain this case. But yeah, again, my defaults and how we've worked with, by the way, every other company in the WordPress

• 49:08Speaker 00

  space, many of which are much, much larger and make sometimes billions more in revenue than WP Engine, is collaborative. 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? That's how things get resolved and that's my default. I'm a lover, not a fighter.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  And that's why this thing doesn't happen very often. You know, I like to say that, yes, if I was, if WordPress community or whatever was doing this like every year, every couple of months, yeah, you should worry about it. But it kind of happens like every like 10 years.

• 49:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  So if I could mirror back the issues that you ran into, and I want to go through this a little bit more. The problems you had with WP 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 in WordPress, official. They weren't contributing to the project. They were just making basically a bunch of money and not doing the work to off this company they bought and they're just kind of 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.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  That's a great summary. Yeah.

• 50:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  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 if I had to guess, it'd be like damaging the legacy potentially of this thing you've worked on for most of your lives. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's just taking advantage of the community. Just like, what's the thing that you think is the root of this? Just like, ah, it just, this needs to stop.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  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, at one point, the executive, you know, we were talking about her joining Automattic and running WordPress.org and, you know, kind of think when she thought the WordPress engine was going to sell, she was thinking about what was next. So, yeah, a lot of this stuff was, I think that duplicitous behavior also kind of forced us to an edge more than even those other things that you mentioned. There's lots of companies that don't contribute back and it's not as big a deal or so. But yeah, the legal issue was definitely the trademark thing. So, what pushed it to the edge?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  I think, I think just the magnitude of the issue. Maybe they would refer to themselves as WordPress Engine and client meetings and other things. They were very cavalier about how they would imply their association with the project.

• 51:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Obviously, 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? And I want to go through some of those things, but just 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?

• 52:17Speaker 00

  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 introduced something like Gutenberg, you know, people hated it. Actually, when we introduced a visual editor, people hated it.

• 52:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  You've had.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  These are huge controversies in the WordPress history. And when, you know, there actually hasn't been a fork for WordPress around all this latest stuff, but there was when we introduced Gutenberg. It's one called ClassicPress, where people actually forged the software.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  So how I would describe it is previously like one percent. Of, you know, the world thought I was terrible. And now I feel like it's up to like four or 5%. So it's still like not the majority. But as you know, something negative, you feel seven times more than something positive. And when people are angry with you, they're more likely to like, it's kind of like restaurant reviews or whatever. They're more likely to leave a bad review than a good review. And, you know, the people who, you know, WordPress, you know, 98% of all the core developers have stayed and contributed and are working on the next version and are supportive and all these sorts of things.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  And 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 can be very frustrating because people don't engage in good faith. They don't really change their mind when new facts are introduced. And so you kind of, 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, 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 and it'd immediately get like 40 downloads. I'm like, hey, this is an article about me and I'm adding a fact to the thing. Like, why is it getting downvoted? This is very relevant to the discussion, but it's literally hidden.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  So like, when you see that thread, you'd have to click like three or four times to see the comment I had left. And so it can really kind of change the perception. And then when you read these things, I think it's just very human nature, even very folks very close to me, like, if you read a thread and it's all like super negative, it's hard to, to not be influenced by that because we're social creatures. 100%. Now, the good news is I've had lots of, you know, sort of like credibility weighted, you know, the support from, you know, people like Marc Benioff or, you know, other open source leaders or the core people in WordPress, you know, Matthias, Mary Hubbard, all the

• 54:54Speaker 00

  core committers, the international community, actually, like, just in Japan, like, they don't care about this stuff. And 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 in WordPress. So I feel like that's been a good balance as well for me. Because there are days where I'm like, gosh, am I an idiot?

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Or, you know, it could be really down, like reading all these things. So that is, is part of what allows me to balance and get back to that sort of positive optimistic space that I think you need to be in to, to do a great software and great work.

• 55:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, the internet can be brutal.

• 55:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let me go through a couple of specific things that people pointed out because I think 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 of things here. One is there's just like a frustration in the community around the instability that this has just caused in the WordPress community. I'll read you a couple of quotes. "Real people are receiving fewer projects 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 is had on the community?

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this is until this gets resolved, which by the way, I hope it is soon. You know, I think it's, there's no business reason for this to continue. Like I really hope that they, you know, come to a settlement or something. We're ready, they could end this tomorrow if they wanted to. Wvengine could. So, um, we can't, we're just defending right now. So, you know, it's really incumbent on them. All of our competitors, by the way, are like, great. You know, WordPress, the king on the hill, all of a sudden we can use this. And so there's also not just from a Wvengine, 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've seen white papers, I've seen all sorts of things where people talk about this.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  We're actually in the next couple of days, going to publish something really cool on the WordPress at our blog though, that shows like, if you actually look at the numbers, like the activity, number of commits, plugin updates, downloads, installs of WordPress since September 20th when this all started, it's quite healthy. And so I'm not saying that there isn't, you know, examples of where someone lost a project or something like that. I'm sure it's happened. You know, it's, the internet's big. WordPress has, you know, so many millions of users and developers and everything that you're going to get someone samples. But by the numbers, uh, things are 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.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  And so a little bit of drama, I think, oh, I wouldn't do this all the time, but a little bit can be a good thing.

• 57:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so another, one of the most common frustrations I've seen on the internet, people complaining is around the trademark. I don't know all the details, but my understanding is there's kind of a, you moved the trademark to be owned by the foundation and Automattic had 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 with WMP Engine. Is there anything you can share there that'll make people feel and see your side of the story?

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is totally fair because it's complicated. But people are saying like, this has been private. This has all been very public and documented on the internet from the beginning. So WordPress.org has always been me personally. And I think because it's, you know, part of the reason we started there is .com was not available. So we started, so like, that's why we started on the .org and things like that. But I think people also assume .org means nonprofit or something. And that's sometimes true, but it's not always. It's not a requirement of the .org domain. Then when I founded Automattic and when we did register the trademark, that actually was registered under Automattic.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  So it used to be for the first, you know, five years of the project or whatever, that Automattic just owned everything outright. And again, I had investors and a board and that was under control of that. Now, as Automattic became more successful, I was able to consolidate some voting rights and other things and at least later advocate. Also, remember I was like 21 when all this was happening. So I 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, you know, I want to actually take this out of the company and create a nonprofit. And so we ended up, yeah, creating a nonprofit.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Now, the rules around 501(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 nonprofit.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  But we were able to have sort of 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, you know, running workshops in 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 investors and everyone at Automattic to sort of actually put the trademark under the foundation. Now, the compromise there was that, you know, Automattic at this point is running wordpress.com.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  So to continue running that, which at the time had already tens of millions of users and everything, it needed a commercial license. And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  I had a license to run wordpress.org, you know, because obviously I need that. And then Automattic would retain the commercial license and the ability to sub-license that. So to sell that to others. So this is kind of the grand compromise and create this tripartite structure. You know, I was very inspired by the three branches of government. So the sort of power in each of those that I think sort of checks and balances each side of it, which is on purpose.

• 1:01:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, okay, I get why it's complicated. I get why people would be confused. This makes me think about OpenAI had a really strange structure and that got them in a lot of trouble. And it feels like when you're 21, 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 that .org be run by a community? Why not just like give that up to someone else and not just you? Thoughts there?

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the frame of that question is is kind of interesting because it implies like I'm the only person making WordPress, which is obviously not true. If you look at the daily commits and activity and everything, it is run by the community. So it's it's hundreds of volunteers every day that are actually doing the day to day work and making the day to day decisions and everything that's happening. So there has been a radical delegation. However, there's ultimately a hierarchy and I'm kind of the CEO, so I'm like the final, final decision maker. And so I think what people advocate for around this governance point of view is like, okay, well, install a board on top of you

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  that, you know, 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 a vision of a leader? Or, you know, something that 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, Dynamic web apps or DHTML or JavaScript wasn't really a thing.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  And then like the social web and then iPhones and then all this 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 that's been because sometimes we've had to make very unpopular decisions. Like Gutenberg is a huge part of why WordPress is relevant today. And it's actually an open source project we do. It's the Block Editor. It's actually bigger than WordPress, you know, because it's not just used on WordPress. It's 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 really open source framework. But anyway, if we had voted for whether we should do that or not, everyone would have voted against it, or the majority would have.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  It was really a few core people of us in the community, you know, Matthias, myself, other core contributors, Ella, Andrew Oz, that said like, hey, no, this is the future. And it's going to take 10 years to do. And it's going to be a long bet. It's going to suck for the first three or four years. And so everyone's going to hate it in the beginning. But then later, you know, with iteration, we've had, I think, now 200 releases of Gutenberg. We do sort of a very strict every two weeks release schedule since it started. It's going to get pretty good. And 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 going to be collaboration. So all the like the real time co-editing, 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.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  We can use WebRTC and other cool technologies. So, I mean, anyway, I'm going sidelining, but I think that, you know, that sort of more... And if you look at a lot of great companies, like, you know, there's a board or whatever, but like ultimately there's an executive. And, you know, some of the most iconic companies of our generations are ones where the executive has, you know, retains some majority of voting control or other things like that, which I've been able to with Automattic and with WordPress. And, you know, I definitely think about succession planning and everything like that. But if for when I'm gone, I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can have a role similar to mine and really sort

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  of try to be a steward. And... There ultimately is a check and balance on that because, again, the community could leave. They could fork the software, people could change. And so, you know, 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 and that you ultimately are accountable to the folks who are contributing and your users and everything like that. So I do feel like 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 Yostak crew and things like, these are folks who actually aren't like, don't have commit status, they haven't contributed WordPress over the years

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  and server or normal hierarchy of, you know, the meritocracy of how you get like, you know, the ability to commit code or things like that. They're like, hey, I want to be, I want to lead a release. And so that, I mean, that's cool, dude, but like, there's a process. We have different people lead releases over the years, but like, you know, they kind of work their way up to it.

• 1:06:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  This makes so much sense to me. It's one of the themes of the podcast, just the power of a singular visionary and leader founder mode, as we've all heard as trending these days.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  You made famous, yes.

• 1:06:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  I wouldn't say that. It was, yeah, Ryan shared it, but then Paul Graham coined it afterwards and then I renamed the title of that episode Founder Mode.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:06:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Kind of if I zoom out, what I'm sensing here is there's like people that have this ideal of wow, something like this should run, but they've never actually worked at a place like where nonprofit board runs it, runs a thing and have 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?

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  And one of the things I think we've tried to demonstrate with WordPress is actually there's kind of like a open source side and a nonprofit 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 over 100 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, nonprofit, open source working in concert, I think, is a really interesting model that we're starting to see a lot more companies do. It's actually very exciting to me that some of the things that were controversial when we started,

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  like open source or distributed work are now the default for so many exciting new startups. And this whole ecosystems of like really, really cool, like open source, like tal.com for open source calendar. There's so much cool stuff out there that 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, everything to, to open source, which is very neat.

• 1:08:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  I anticipate a block goes one day. I told you so, guys. Open source, remote work. Imagine there's a few more things there.

• 1:08:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's one other thing I want to address. I haven't seen you talk about this. It comes up a bunch. It's around, this is like very in the weeds, but I think it's really important to people. And there's something that, something here for a lot of people. The way you guys forked advanced custom fields. So I think what happened here is you guys forked an existing plugin, I think somebody else's plugin, and then kind of push people to this plugin versus the original plugin. What can you share there?

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is very complex, but so wordpress.org has kind of like an app store.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  You know, after WP Engine started suing us, you know, creating millions of dollars of legal fees and things, we blocked their access to wordpress.org. So this plugin they had, advanced custom fields, wasn't able to be updated. At the same time, a number of security issues were found in it, including some we reported. And so there had to be an update to it.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  So we're like, okay, we'll, we'll ship the update for you, essentially. And then we're like, okay, I think we need to call it something different, right? Because it actually isn't theirs anymore. And they still offer advanced custom fields on their own and people can download it from them. So we made secure custom deals.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Which is originally under the same directory listing. So again, because we want all the users to get the security updates. This is controversial. And actually, they actually got a preliminary injunction. So the judge said reverse this. So this has all been reversed, by the way. There now is a separate fork under a separate listing of Secure Custom Fields, which actually we have, you know, a team on it, developers, designers, and we're creating, just like WordPress is a fork. We've actually forked this. Actually, WooCommerce was a fork to a lot of things of forks. So we forked it and now have a new name, new everything that we're doing. A lot of product innovation and like proving it. So there's a separate project now and separate directory listing for Secure Custom Fields. So that's kind of fast forward to today.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  They now have access to wordpress.org again. They have updated the plugin. Everything's kind of back to how it was before. And there's this separate thing called Secure Custom Fields that the WordPress project is officially supporting.

• 1:10:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  So I'm hearing essentially you block WP Engine as a part of this. We're just going to simplify WordPress, reduce confusion. There are being bad actors in the space. So we're going to 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 the one that exists. There's a problem with it. So we're going to make that dependence, like release a version that you can actually use and fix the security issues.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  That was the intention. I think that there was a lot of perceptions around it that were different. But yeah, that was the goal.

• 1:11:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, okay, great. So maybe just the last question. We talked about just like, a lot of people see you with devil horns these days. They think you're doing a lot of, you're doing bad things and they don't like the approach you're taking. You talked about there's this WP 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 are like comments always so negative? And we talked a bit about it, but anything more there?

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  I don't know if I can say why.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  I do think one thing I've learned is that a lot of these things we've 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, 240 characters. Or, you know, the, the, some mediums do not lend themselves well to discussing this. And so I tried, you know, but I'm, you know, participating less on like Reddit or Twitter and trying to do more long form things like this where you can actually have the context and things can't be taken out of context. Also, I think there's something where, you know, social networks sometimes are tuned to promote outrage. And it was very interesting. We ran a sentiment analysis recently. We were kind of like looking at different social networks, analyzing other comments.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  And, and we found actually that the negative, you know, the sort of devil horn fraction on like, what was it like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram was like 8%. It's actually pretty small. On Reddit, it was like bigger, I forget that exact number, but on Twitter it was 52%. You're like, whoa, 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 it can promote kind of the, the most controversial things. And I think that's not a novel perception. Like there's a lot of discussion around how social media might be creating more fragmentation in society. 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

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  not designed to provide nuance or balance, or even promote truth necessarily, you know, misinformation can get spread far more than, you know, what's the saying, like a lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know,

• 1:13:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Get out of bed.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  Get out of bed. Yeah. There's been a lot of that. So there's actually been a lot of misinformation, untrue things that like go viral and then the correction, you know, the untrue thing gets like 700,000 views and the correction gets like 20,000 views. So there's been some of that happening. And, you know, when, when mainstream media has covered this, it's actually been a lot better. So there's been some actually really good articles and, you know, some business publications and other things that that sort of look at a more nuanced and balanced view. And I think the podcast has been pretty good. But definitely on Twitter, like I think you can get a, a version of all of this that that is both, I think, not entirely true and also like pretty more negative.

• 1:14:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. I imagine people are gonna be like, Lenny, you didn't ask him this thing. Here's the thing he said that I want to learn more about. I'm sure I missed some stuff. But from an outsider's perspective, this all makes sense. There's a company like, I'm not, I don't think PE 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 I'm sure 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 dishonest with working with you. And there's just, there's a stalling technique.

• 1:15:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  And so makes sense to me why you just have to stand up and fight back. And it's hard, it's hard to do that. Is there anything else along this thread before we move on to a different topic? Anything else you want to share before we close out this chapter?

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Well, if people have more questions, they can come to WordCamp Asia. I do, I'm gonna do an open Q and A there. We do town halls in the WordPress Auto WordPress community. There's a Slack people can get on and ask questions. So like, there is kind of like a lot of open ways to engage. And I'm definitely happy to do that. I'm probably not gonna do it on Twitter as much, but like, oh, yeah, well, there's longer form opportunities to have a discussion here, particularly if it's more like real time like this. I'm very happy to. And that's why, if you look at it, there's actually a big difference. WbEngine has not done any podcasts and no press. They don't respond to journalists. They don't talk about this. And I've done the opposite, where 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?

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  And it's like, well, but we have community. And also, I feel like we're in the right. So when you're in the wrong, you probably say, only have the lawyers talk. When you're in the right, like, you know, I think you should be out there and tell the story.

• 1:16:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  I remember at the end of your work camp 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. You'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?

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  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 that is something.

• 1:16:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  You're like, hello.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  I've had hundreds and hundreds of these town halls and QAs, and I really enjoy it because you never know what's going to come up.

• 1:16:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about all the companies that you're bought and have, or will buy in the future. It's kind of like you're building a little Berkshire Hathaway. And I think you've described it that way. It's kind of what it's feeling like. And Tumblr is really interesting. I didn't, like, until I started prepping for this, I didn't even know you guys own Tumblr. I haven't heard this story. What's just, why did you guys buy Tumblr? What is going on with Tumblr? It was like a big deal back in the day. What is, where's the current state of Tumblr? What is the story there?

• 1:17:10Speaker 00

  Oh, Tumblr's so interesting. I mean, you know, at the time, I think it was one of our best competitors. And 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, like even 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, what was it, like tweet image? Or like, you have to like link out to other things to post an image to Twitter? It wasn't native functionality. 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 to support video. So they did a lot of, I think, product innovation under the leadership of David Karp, who's like a really amazing entrepreneur and product leader.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  Funny story, both David and I were at CNET at the same time. They had hired both of us.

• 1:17:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  What an alumni group. Whoa. Good CNET.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  They could have kept both of us probably, but anyway, the Tumblr then, I forget the year, but they sold, I think the same time that Instagram did for a similar amount, 1.1 billion dollars. To you or to someone else? Instagram bought by Facebook. Right, right, Tumblr. And Tumblr bought by Yahoo. Oh, wow. Who was at the time, 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, Marissa Mayer, who was, or Mayer, who was one of the like, the big early people at Google, I think part of creating the API program and everything like that, was the CEO of Yahoo. This was,

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  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 really good trajectory. At Yahoo, I think things became more challenged. So again, this is a little bit of history, but Yahoo 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 Marissa Mayer 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 from what I can understand, the team was actually held back a lot from

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  things they wanted to launch or ways they wanted to iterate. Then Yahoo merges with AOL,

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  which is another kind of early internet thing. That goes for like a little while. So again, the Tumblr's just kind of stuck underneath this stuff. Tumbling along. Tumbling along. And then that gets bought by Verizon.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  So fast forward to 2019, you know, Verizon wants to get rid of Tumblr.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  And so they're they're they're kind of put it up for sale and had a number of bidders. Automatic ended up buying it for a de minimis amount. I think it's been reported. We bought it for like $3 million.

• 1:20:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  What a deal. 3 million.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  So but obviously that represented a lot of value destruction over the years. Tumblr had had some tough times and they actually were banned from the App Store at one point for not moderating things well enough and having, you know, kind of maybe a little too much porn. Obviously Twitter read it had porn, but like they might have, they maybe were a little too out there with it and we're doing a good job filtering it and and keeping away from App Store reviewers or whatever. And so Verizon, to their credit, though, there were people bidding more. Actually, I think a porn company was bidding on Tumblr that would have paid a lot more money. They really were looking for an acquirer that they felt like would be a good steward. And from my point of view, I had such incredible respect for Tumblr as a product and the community.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  You know, still, despite all of this sort of stuff that had happened. I think at that point still was like, you know,

• 1:21:10Speaker 00

  I forget the exact number, but like call it 15, 20 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 25. And actually had a huge, I think it was like 25 or 30% LGBT plus. And so, you know, I think a very unique place on the internet where people could have a social network where they could be anonymous. They could put on different identities. They could, you know, be someplace their parents weren't like Facebook or Instagram, like really still could take a special spot. So we ended up buying it. Now, people are like, oh, you bought it for $3 million, but we bought it sort of.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Taking on all liabilities, including, I think they were under investigation by the FTC, there were lawsuits, there was all this sort of stuff. So we, it was free like a puppy, not free like a...

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  Not like beer. Yeah, and a pretty big team, I think 185 people. It was, you know, we're taking a lot of burners, burning a ton of cash. And yeah, that was 2019. And so it's been, I think, a humbling experience, you know, running a social network. And it was very, very different from all the other products that we've done. And I think there's some incredible things about Tumblr and that I'm still very excited about. So we're like WordPress has primarily like a desktop and web user base. Tumblr is obviously like 85% app-based, has a younger demographic. And so part of the vision that now we're executing on is actually we wanted to create a path for people using Tumblr to actually being powered by WordPress on the backend.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  So Tumblr users could unlock themes, customization, plugins, et cetera. Actually, we're in the process right now of migrating the half a billion Tumblr sites to WordPress. Probably one of the largest data migrations. That makes sense. That's happened in a while. So we're, we're kind of trying to do this in a way that's invisible to users on the frontend. So changing at the backend while maintaining the APIs and the interface and everything. So it's, it's a, it's a fun engineering project. I kind of posted this like kind of call to arms. Got a, got a lot of fun people applying for Automattic and we hired a lot of great folks around this sort of like audacious project, this big carry audacious goal. And so that's where it's at now.

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  I've sort of ran it personally for a few years while we're doing turnarounds. And, but it's a great team there. And, but still, it's, I've still challenged, you know, still not, still not profitable. So we're still subsidizing it from the rest of Automattic's businesses. Fortunately, the rest of our businesses have done really well, so we were able to do that. But I definitely want to get to a place where it's sustainable. And one of the things we're also experimenting with is can Tumblr have not just an advertising-driven model? Because 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, et 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.

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  Or you promote a Book Conference project or something where it's like not a third-party ad ecosystem, which I think has a lot of like weird code and malware and lots of stuff I, I don't love.

• 1:24:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, sounds like a lot you took on with this acquisition. And I love that 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 going to buy a bunch of companies, make them better, make them awesome, save money and then just keep building this holding company sort of thing. You guys are doing that and it's working well. What do you look for? How do you decide a company is right for Automattic? What are kind of the factors that are like, we should buy this? We can turn this around and turn that into a big success?

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  I don't know if I would do another turnaround like Tumblr again, or at least not for many, many years. It's definitely a different thing. The vast majority of things we acquire, it's simply something that's done well and we want to accelerate it. Or sometimes, you know, acqua 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. You know, Tumblr, I think we ended up ultimately replacing like 85, 90% of the team as well. So that's just very different. And yeah, so I do think there are different ways of doing it. But if you look at our other acquisitions like Day1, it's that are like founders still here. Many years later, we're accelerating, like, you know, the stuff like that.

• 1:25:41Speaker 00

  We brought it to Android or we brought it to web. But that it's more of like taking something good and making it better. And probably our best example there is Woocommerce, you know, which was have a small company, I think 35, 40 people based out of South Africa and has obviously grown to, you know,

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  again, I said, you know, Automattic makes about half a billion dollars a year now. And Woocommerce is a majority of that.

• 1:26:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Speaking of that, actually, you haven't shared the revenue number. I know it's public, just like give people a sense of Automattic's revenue. Can you just show those numbers? Cause I think it all might blow people's minds.

• 1:26:15Speaker 00

  I think we say publicly, it's about a half a billion dollars in sort of ARR revenue right now.

• 1:26:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Incredible. Okay, I'm gonna, I have a question for you. It's kind of a hot seat question. As you talked, I wonder, I feel like people are thinking this. So you've been talking about PE companies being often bad. You're buying Tumblr. You've talked about laying off a bunch of people, turning it all around. How is that different from a PE company, Matt?

• 1:26:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I agree with you that like PE, just because it's private equity doesn't mean it's bad. And also, I say something people say is like, hey, wait, don't you have private equity investors as well at Automattic?

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  And we do. Now, they own usually a small percentage, like sometimes under 1%, and they don't have control of the company. So I think there's a distinction. Is it a minority investment or a control investment? And with WP Engine, Silver Lake controls the company. Now, 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, you know, our business or things that are founded or 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 in WP Engine, it's very difficult to cancel your accounts.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  Because there, there, actually, I think as of today, 45,000 sites have left. So they're, I think, down to like 600. Yeah. Well, because their customers have realized like, hey, this isn't WordPress, this isn't. Or they're suing the guy who started WordPress. So like, maybe we should not support this commercially. So we have this site, wordpressenginetracker.com, that sort of shows in real time the sites that are leaving. It's kind of an exciting thing to see that number tick up. 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, they're leaving. So I think you have to judge as well, like just look at the track record.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  So one of the things I'm very proud of with Automattic is we are an acquirer of first resorts. And we have founders that have sold to us. Paul Main at Day1 is a great example that didn't need to sell. You know, easily wildly profitable, could have run it themselves 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 ultimately, just have to look at the track record. So I think, you know, don't judge it by what it's called, judge it by the actions over time. And, and I hope to continue building that reputation for a place that's a good steward of communities and software and everything else for many years to come.

• 1:28:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  Matt, we covered so much, everything. I asked you all the hard questions and more. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with? Any last thoughts, comments, insights, stories?

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Yeah, follow me. I'm at Photomat, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T, on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, everything like that. 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. You know, I have 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. It's a product called Beeper, which takes all your Telegram, Instagram DM, Signal, everything, brings it all into one app. And you can do some really cool stuff like that. And especially when you start to imagine search or AI, local AI around that. So very, very excited about that relaunch. So I encourage people to, you can check out

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  the beta now, go to beeper.com/beta to get like that new version. And we're going to relaunch that later in the year. So yeah, very excited about that. It's kind of fun to be working on something that's at the stage where WordPress was in like 2003, 2004. So WordPress is quite mature at this point. Woo Commerce is kind of where WordPress was in like 2010. And then the Beeper stuff, the messaging stuff is where we were in like 2003. So it's one thing that keeps me excited is working at like different stages of this.

• 1:30:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, this feels like a reason to be doing, that your approach to Berkshire Hathaway is just like stay active in early stage stuff and not just optimize established things. So it's beeper.com, by the way, awesome domain name. Photomat, is that, what's the story? Photomat? You're into photography, I imagine, is the story?

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a little bit of a pun. So you know, there's a photo, Photomat is also like P-F-O-T-O-M-A-T-T is a place that you would go to like develop your photos back when you'd have film and develop things. So originally, my username was Saxmat because I played the saxophone.

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  And sometimes people mishear that. And also, like, as, you know, I started, I stopped travel, I started traveling so much because it has been years I do like 400,000 miles of air travel because 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, it became hard to carry my saxophone around. So my 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. Sort of use this gallery software, actually open source gallery software, PHP software, to sort of share all the photos I was taking. And actually now on my website, I think I have over 38,000 photos I posted. And yeah, that's, uh,

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  it's, it's still one of the things I really love. So it's also a username that was available everywhere. And I still do it. So I'm actually going to the Mahakumela, the big, you know, 300 million person gathering at the Ganges River a few weeks and one of just decided to experience that. It happens like every 12 years, but two, I'm just really sad to like, take some time to do photography. And yeah, I really enjoy it.

• 1:31:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  You forgot to mention your website and where your blog, your WordPress site itself, where you blog ma.tt is the domain, which is amazing. I will point people to one of my favorite ritual you have on your blog, which is you share what's in your bag. You talk about how you travel this. And I think every year you're like, here's the gadgets I use most and bring with me everywhere, right?

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  It's my most popular post of the year by far.

• 1:32:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm not surprised. So just, you need Amazon, just buy everything button. Yeah, because basically you're just trying to optimize for the least weight and most utility, right, out of all these gadgets that you're bringing with you on trips.

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually weighing it is something I just started doing this year. So because my bag actually got really heavy, got like 35 pounds or something. And so yeah, some friends were like, hey, why don't we weigh everything and just go through and so now I posted the weights.

• 1:32:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, my God. Okay. Anyway, we'll point people to that. Matt, thank you so much for doing this. This is awesome.

• 1:32:50Speaker 00

  Lenny, thank you so much, and I really appreciate the ability to discuss these things in a longer form, and also just your audience. And so, oh, I guess the 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 to a lot of my colleagues. And so if you're someone who loves this kind of stuff, I think there's a big opportunity at Automattic to have an impact on these things.

• 1:33:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  What roles are you hiring for most, and where do people find these roles?

• 1:33:15Speaker 00

  Automattic.com, A-U-T-O-M-A-T-T-I-C. There's a work with this page. You can kind of see how we work. We're fully distributed and can manage that forever. 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 Nigeria, or wherever, we pay global salaries. So yeah, a lot of opportunities, and we're hiring for kind of everything. But particularly, like people with great design or product skills is probably one of the areas that you can have the biggest impact at Automattic right now.

• 1:33:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right. If you've made it this far into the podcast, you should definitely apply. Matt, thank you. Thank you for being here. Hi, everyone.

• 1:34:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.