Strong open. Have you ever been the CEO?
I was for a few months, but Toni Schneider, who's the CEO of Automattic, joined very, very early on.
It's probably good it was short term because I didn't know how to pay taxes or bills.
Yeah, probably good. Probably good. So, you mentioned—
I assume you have people do that for you. Otherwise, it's bad that you're saying this on stage. This is live—
So, you mentioned Toni is CEO of Automattic. I mean, let's first and foremost talk about your bizarre company structure. I mean, so you have—
Yeah. So, you have WordPress.com, WordPress.org. Some stuff is free, some stuff is not free. It's Automattic, it's I mean—
Do we need a whiteboard to go through this? Explain to us how this all works and why on earth you set it up this way. I'm a customer. I've used WordPress for years professionally and I still don't understand it.
Well, here's how I'll break it down. So there's WordPress, which is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to publish on the web. Comes in two flavors: .com, which is completely hassle-free, you can start using it in a minute and have a beautiful blog; and .org, which is like if you're a coder, if you like customizing things, if you want complete control, you can do whatever you like with it. And after I started WordPress, a few years later I started Automattic to do the commercial things, sort of take advantage of the commercial opportunities around WordPress.
Why not do that all as one entity?
Historical quirk. So WordPress started before any of this. So WordPress is an open-source project, a thing you can modify and change however you like. Yeah, started I guess in 2003.
And there was no money or investors. I was in Houston, Texas.
Mhm. And you were like 19.
I was 19 at the time. And it was really just a project for passion like many open-source projects start.
What was it you were passionate about? Because are you a writer?
Well, not like you're a writer, but—
Well, I probably I'm not even going to go there.
I'm trying to say something self-deprecating and like then I thought, well, people are here because they read the blog. That probably isn't good. So, we'll just move right by that. But were you as a writer looking for an easier way to publish? Did it come more from the code aspect? Was it the community aspect? What was it about blogging you're so passionate about?
It was kind of strange. So, I came into it on the side. First, I was building websites for musicians in Houston because I was really into jazz and I went to a special high school for arts and everything. And in exchange for lessons, I built computers or websites. Both of them were just as ugly. Then I got a digital camera, a little Sony digital camera with my like $200 in profit from a year of work, and started taking tons of photos. Like the idea that you could take unlimited photos and it wouldn't cost anything really blew my mind, and I uploaded the photos. I went to DC, won an economics competition to—
How do you win an economics competition?
We don't need to go there.
Was it like an essay on economics or did you have to—is it like The Apprentice? There was like an arena—
There was actually something called—there was an arena at the end, yeah. It's called the Federal Reserve Challenge or Fed Challenge for short. Has anyone heard of this before?
One person. No, two. Two. Wow. Two nerds in the audience.
Two future leaders of society in the audience.
And basically you would do a mock FOMC meeting. The FOMC is the Federal Open Market Committee, which determines the interest rates.
And you're already glazing over. I should stop there.
So, you do a mock FOMC meeting and there was a Houston competition, a Texas competition, then we went all the way to nationals and met Alan Greenspan. Ben Bernanke was actually one of the judges.
Wow. Did they like your work? They like the way you ran the FOMC meeting.
Well, you actually act. So, you're different characters in the FOMC meeting.
What were you? How do we get into this? Oh my goodness. There. This is going deep. What were you?
I was not Alan Greenspan. Who was I? I think I was not Bob McTeer. He was the cool one.
Yeah. Bob McTeer was the Texas region Federal Bank president, and he would like write sort of cowboy poetry about interest rates and stuff. It was kind of—
I think I might have been the president from Boston.
I see. Let's get back to WordPress.
Obviously, that was not the case.
So, you went to DC. You decided not to stick with the Fed.
I took a ton of pictures, and the captions on the pictures got longer and longer, and eventually I thought I should start a blog.
And I sort of looked around at all the blogs I was reading because I was really into blogs at the time, like Anil Dash, Kottke, this guy called CamWorld, Dave Winer, and most of them used Movable Type. So I started using this Perl thing called Movable Type. It really frustrated me because it was difficult to set up. So I switched to this other software called b2.
And b2 was a great experience because it was PHP and MySQL, so it was really easy to use and set up for the time.
And then two, it was the first open-source project that I got involved in because I didn't really know what I was doing. So, I got stuck and I went on the forums. I said, "Hey, I'm stuck." And someone helped me. And then I came back the next day. I'm like, "I broke it." And then someone helped me. And then the third day I went back, I was like, "Oh, someone else is broken, you know, to fix it because I had the same problem." And I got involved with forums—
Mhm. And then you decided to make your own version.
Well, the first thing was actually also kind of wonky. It was around typography.
So, I guess you've always written in the digital age, but at the time to get an apostrophe—
Yeah. I was at BusinessWeek.
Oh, cool. Yeah. So, you know, there's prime, which is a straight up and down, and then there's apostrophe, which is curly, right? So to do the apostrophe in HTML, you have to write `’` and then your final letter of the construction, which is kind of a buzzkill when you're writing. So I wrote this set of regular expressions and software essentially to do that automatically. It was called Texturize. The tagline was, "So good it'll make your quotes curl."
That's amazing. Do you still have t-shirts that say that? Because I'm going to make you some if not.
That would be good. So, I wrote this and the guy who led the b2 project saw it and was like—he was into typography as well and photography—and he said, "This is awesome. I would like to incorporate this code."
And so he put the code in the main release, which I had no idea how to do. So it all went in there and then the next version had this code, and I just had this total utter high knowing that literally dozens of websites around the world were running code I had written.
Mhm. And then you were hooked.
I was hooked. I've been doing open source ever since.
So open source is interesting. I was at BusinessWeek covering software when Linux finally became a really big business and there was the whole wave of companies trying to basically replicate the whole software stack with open source. A lot of them didn't turn into big businesses, and I guess the question I always had with open source: it's obviously very consumer friendly, there's this passion around it which is great. There are reasons that it's this huge movement that has displaced a lot of the traditional software. But does open source simply kind of Robin Hood the old revenues that you had from companies like IBM and Oracle, or can you actually build a billion-dollar open-source company? I mean, MySQL sold for that, but a lot of people thought that it wasn't necessarily worth it.
And Red Hat just reached that valuation or that revenue. I think they're the first billion-dollar revenue company. But traditionally you said it's consumer friendly, and that's not how I would actually characterize open source. Typically open source has been good at like server behind-the-scenes stuff, under the hood.
Well, I guess I just mean because I think of it as paired with the Software as a Service revolution. And it was that thing of you don't—I mean I guess by consumer I mean the businesses running it because anything other than on-premise software which doesn't work. You have to pay consultants millions of dollars and you never rip out because it's so painful. I mean, I think in that world it was consumer friendly.
Yeah. And it really started from the operating system up. It started a little mini revolution, and really WordPress existing was predicated on MySQL, PHP, Apache, this entire stack—the LAMP stack, if you will—being really easy.
And so that's why I never even thought about WordPress not being open source, because we were built on the shoulders of giants. It seemed just right to sort of pay it forward to whoever might come next.
I think because you have such a commitment to open source, a lot of people don't think of WordPress really as a business. They think of it the same way we think of Craigslist, same way we think of Mozilla. You know, there's a handful of these companies in Silicon Valley that power huge amounts of things, but really aren't explicitly for-profit companies, or they're part of something, or intentionally, in the case of Craigslist, don't maximize revenues the way they could. Do you think it's fair to put you guys in that camp?
I think that anytime there's a new business or something that seems awesome but you don't know how it works behind the scenes, people wonder how it makes money. So, in John Battelle's book on Google, apparently the Google guys for years were going around where people were like, "How do you do this? How do you provide such a great product? What are you doing?" Even when they started doing the ads, because people didn't really think of the ads as something that would make money. And we're very much the same way. So, I guess more Google than Craigslist hopefully. But I think you can build a huge business on open source because really all open source is is a bill of rights. It says, here are certain freedoms and rights you have with regards to the software. Even though you run WordPress, I can't take it away from you. I can't control how you use it. I can't control what you say. You have complete freedom with regards to how you use the software. And I think as more and more of our lives start to go through that software, those freedoms become even more important.
Mhm. Recently, you were quoted as saying—someone asked about the death of blogging, which is probably a question that you get a lot. I think I get it a lot. And you said that—and I'm paraphrasing a bit here—to say blogging is dead is to say creativity and self-expression are dead. Why? Blogging is a medium. It's not the thing. What makes blogging different than any other medium for creativity and self-expression that's come before? Is it something fundamentally more special?
I think the beautiful thing about blogs is that they're the engine of the independent web.
Right. In a lot of ways WordPress and blogs are kind of like the dark matter of the web. There's hundreds of millions of domains out there. What are they running? Facebook is one domain. Google is one domain. Twitter is one domain. The rest of the web is a beautiful place. It's independent. You have complete freedom. You can do whatever you like. You have, if you're running open-source software, the rights I talked about earlier. And I think blogs have always been beautiful because they've been personal. They afford a lot of flexibility, and they're often on people's own domains, so they can do whatever they like with them. So that's why you see the cool stuff always happen on blogs first, the new formats sort of pioneered and everything like that.
Mhm. But are blogs—and I say this as someone who started a blog—there is a level at which the early idea of everyone will have a blog seems to be a little anachronistic now. A lot of those people who set up blogs on day one, they were like, "Everyone's going to read my thoughts." They went on and they realized writing every day is a big grind, and if you don't write every day, you don't have much of an audience, and just getting out there and being able to publish didn't necessarily mean you had a big audience. So a lot of the people who were those early bloggers now just tweet. I mean, even someone like Robert Scoble, who made his name blogging and was a great blogger, really just got more into social media. And if that's Robert Scoble, I think a lot of other people are that way, too. And meanwhile, the blogs like me are really—TechCrunch and AllThingsD have really turned more into big media companies, micro-publishers, if you will. So you have micro-blogs and you have micro-publishers. So who's a blog anymore? Who's blogging?
I think actually Scoble is a great example to make the opposite point, where we all know he's on every single thing that starts—
He's probably here. If you say his name three times, he appears. So let's call him Mr. S from now on.
Mr. S. But his blog has been the one constant over the past—he's probably been doing a decade now. His blog is the thing that he's always kept. It's been his digital home, his place on the web. And I think that it's true, I don't think everyone will be a blogger.
Did you think so in the early days?
No, I never thought so, because not everyone has a passion to share something. Not everyone enjoys writing or photography or video, whatever it is that they're sharing. Not everyone's a creator. But I do think that more people are becoming creators and writers and photographers and videographers every single day. The technology to afford that, just like I got giddy from that first digital camera, has gone a hundredfold from then. And things like Twitter, Facebook, I think are whetting people's appetites for something more.
So you think that Twitter doesn't cannibalize blogs, it makes more people into bloggers.
Every single blogging system has been growing or accelerating since Twitter started.
So I mean the pie is also enlarging. And the other thing we see is that social networks provide great distribution for blogs.
So even like a Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, any of those, you put your blog post, you syndicate it out there, and now there's an audience.
Which is nice. Not everyone wants an audience, but it's nice to know that someone's reading your stuff.
But who writes something on a blog and doesn't want an audience?
Lots of personal bloggers, lots of—
Why would you publish it on the web?
Well, there's an audience and there's an audience, right? You want an audience. I hope I get an audience or my investors are not going to be happy. But a lot of people, it's just a way to share. It's an easy way to have a home on the web or something they can link to in their Twitter profile or something they can show that just is their thoughts and doesn't have any grand ambitions. It's about their life. My matt.wordpress blog is like literally everything I eat.
There's actually more people who follow that than I would think. But really that's like for my mom, my friends, my trainer to see how fat I'm going to be when I come back.
I don't think you're very fat at all. Starting a company and having a baby got you beat.
I gained 30 pounds in starting Automattic.
Did you? That makes me feel better. I simply just didn't lose it from the baby.
I got really homesick when I moved to San Francisco, and an early colleague of mine, Bray Abrahamson, we were both from Texas and so we just started going to this place in San Francisco called Memphis Minnie's. If you guys ever want—
Because I'm from Memphis and there's nothing Memphisy about Memphis Minnie's. They're just co-opting our name and they're not even making our style of barbecue. This is a major hot button for me. So, I went in there once and they had different sauces on the table, and they had the Kansas City sauce, and they had—Tom was looking at me like, "Oh, good God, she's talking about Memphis barbecue again. This is going to go on all day." So, I'll make it quick. So, there was Kansas City, there was Texas style, and Carolina style. And I said, "Where's your Memphis sauce?" And they said, "We don't have any." I said, "Your name is Minnie's. You don't have any Memphis style sauce?" And they said, "No, because our pork is Memphis style. It's chopped and heavy on cinnamon." That is in no way Memphis style pork. It is all pulled pork and there's not a stick of cinnamon to be found.
Huh. I actually just got back from the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest.
Did you? Are you a barbecuer as well? You're the man of a million hobbies. You're a jazz player, you're a photographer, in your spare time you reenact Alan Greenspan meetings.
Well, so I think we could have a barbecue-off. WordPress might be the only technology company that sponsors a team at the World Championship of Barbecue. I've walked around the whole thing. There's 500 teams, so there might be another one, but it's where it's like AutoZone, Hooters, WordPress.
Maybe PandoDaily will if we ever make money.
Because it is a really good time. I guess you grew up in Memphis. Memphis in May, went to the barbecue festival a lot of times.
Nice. It's kind of awesome. You sit on the Mississippi, drink beers, and eat meat. And people build these structures. Our booth was actually really awesome this year, two stories. I tell people it's like a Burning Man for meat.
That's a great way to put it. And it's Memphis, so it's like very hot and sweaty and you're near this like gross river. I love the grit of Memphis. I'm a huge pro-Memphis person, but Memphis is right in the tri-state area of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. So everyone from the rural Delta piles in to just eat their weight in barbecue once a year.
I totally forgot your phone there. We'll get you there next year.
Yeah, let's totally do it. That would be great. Everyone will be like, "What is PandoDaily?" and I'll be like, "Just eat this barbecue and shut up. Go read it."
We got a lot of people come up actually. It was kind of neat. We always stock the booth with a bunch of pins and stickers and everything, and they're cleared out at the end of every festival.
So, you're saying people took free stuff? That is shocking.
Yeah. Well, I'm sure it's because they're all bloggers. I'm sure it's because they're all bloggers. So now I'm all excited thinking about barbecue.
By the way, I have a very small stash of special edition WordPress stickers and tattoos if anyone wants them afterwards.
You know, I have a surprise as well for people afterwards. I was going to say this, but now you're making me look bad. For you brave souls who braved the rain and came to our first event, we had special PandoMonthly New York t-shirts printed up for you.
Our WordPress developer actually designed them.
Yes. She'll be very excited you name-dropped her. She loves you. Let's talk about this cult that you have.
What'd you call it? Wavy-haired dev?
I heard a funnier description of you. We were at Tony Conrad's surprise birthday party and your hair was like extra—I don't know if you use hot rollers, but it was extra voluminous that day. And you were wearing a sweatshirt with elbow patches and Dick Costolo said, "When did Matt Mullenweg start teaching poetry at Brown?" So wavy-haired dev is my version. But let's talk about this cult, because Om told me that the two of you went to India and people were like throwing underwear at you on stage.
I think they were throwing underwear at Om. It might have missed him and hit me, but—
He ducked. When did that start, the underwear?
Really in the jazz days. No. That was probably a WordCamp. So there's this cool thing: WordCamp started about 5 years ago. I was actually sort of around at the founding of BarCamp with Tantek and Chris Messina and all those guys. And it was later that year I thought, "Well, we could replicate this model for WordPress." So originally we called it WordCamp, with about two or three weeks' notice put together a conference in San Francisco that I think five or six hundred people registered for. And we had some Memphis Minnie's barbecue—I mean Minnie's barbecue.
Fucking Minnie's barbecue, that's what I call it.
And it ended up being a really great event. And so I thought, well, what if we can open source the events as well? A good example might be how TEDx does it these days. They started to replicate all over the world. Now there's actually more than one a week, and they're just community-run, community-led events. Typically 20 bucks and you get a t-shirt. It's a great deal actually, like this. You get a t-shirt, beer, food, open bar, and a day of cool WordPress information. And they're very community-oriented events.
But what do you think inspires the passion around these events?
I think that creative people love creating. At the end of the day, I always love going to them. I mean, for a while, I think it was 2010, I went to like 30 of them, like a ridiculous amount. I loved it because, well, a, you get to be a rockstar for a day or two, which is kind of fun, but b, you meet the most eclectic set of people: all ages, all passions. You meet people who like quilt Elvis blankets and you meet people who do tech blogs, and you don't know who's weirder.
Elvis blankets, again Memphis.
Nice. But it's a lot of fun. I'm a big believer in that if you think someone's boring, it's actually you, because everyone has something interesting about them, something beautiful about them. You just have to figure out what that is, that thing that they're really, really, really passionate about.
Was there a moment early on when you were traveling, when you were doing these, where you kind of were blown away? Was there someone you met, a story you heard, something where you thought, "Fuck, like I've kind of built something amazing here"?
Probably the first tipping point was internationalization. Someone translated WordPress into Japanese, but at the time we had no translation framework, which means they opened up and went through line by line tens of thousands of lines of code and changed it to Japanese. And this just blew me away. It was one of the most beautiful things I'd seen because Japanese is such a beautiful script, and it was almost like a bizarro world version of WordPress. It was like the framework, the buttons I had made and we had built together, Japanese in the middle of it. That was pretty cool. That's when I started thinking that WordPress could possibly be bigger than just blogging software for my site. The first international WordCamp was in Argentina.
And that was very exciting. I got Texas Spanish, so I can speak—in Argentina they speak slower, so I was able to understand it. Why Argentina? I have no idea. South America actually embraces open source to the degree that the US is still catching up to.
How? Tell me more about that.
Brazil, amazing. Amazing. I went to a Linux conference there that had like 6,000 people at it, and my session had like 20 people. And then there was like a Linux kernel hacker who like filled four auditoriums. It was crazy. People were really into Linux and open source there.
Do you have any cultural explanation of why?
I think there was lack of legacy proprietary businesses not really paying attention to them. Governments that—well, and also there's the cost issue as well. A lot of the businesses there make a lot less money and they're sort of growing. But b, I think it's just that the history of computing was very—Bill Gates wrote the famous letter "Don't pirate my software"—very much driven in a proprietary way. Open source didn't really start breaking out until the '90s. And that's around the same time that technology started hitting Brazil and Argentina and Indonesia and some of these places that just seem to embrace it to a degree which I hope we catch up to at least.
I want to talk a little bit about how much you travel. I mean, you tend to have a much healthier work-life balance than most entrepreneurs, certainly than I do. In addition to all of your—
Glad I give that appearance.
Well, but you travel a lot, right?
I was on the road 245 days last year.
And so, what does that mean? What are you doing when you go to places?
So, here's another way that we're weird. Automattic is totally distributed. We're about to pass 120 people. I want to say we're across 90 cities.
So literally work for me is seeing people all over the world. You need to go where the people are if you're going to lead a company. And the teams get together and do meetups in different places. I've been to meetups in Athens, in Seaside, Florida, Sayulita, Mexico, Hawaii.
I love Sayulita. Sayulita is amazing, right?
It's one of my favorite places. That was my team's meetup, was in Sayulita. And so the teams work distributed, which is I think easy to do, but you miss something when you're distributed. And that's that sort of intense brainstorming and also the rapport: how's their sense of humor? How do they laugh? When you read what they write, can you hear their tone of voice so you don't take it in the wrong way? And for that, the meetups have been amazing. So that's a lot of it, that and WordCamps.
So why build a company that way?
Why not build a company that way?
Because you just said you lose all these things by being a distributed team. You have to physically go places, which most people would say is a productivity loss.
Oh man. I would say going into an office every day is a productivity loss. Most offices are fairly soul-crushing environments. And I think part of the reason is that goes back to political science: you have a finite amount of space and you have just sort of all the things that happen when human beings are in the same space. And in the Valley in particular, there's this weird sort of martyr complex where people want to get up, stay up all night, drink, sleep under the desk, this programmer thing. We know there's research that says your brain is worse on no sleep reaction time-wise than it is when you're drunk. Like we know that you don't perform well, you're not creative in these situations. But there's still that pressure: if someone's staying later, you notice and you want to stay later. Or even just the fact of how someone is dressed or how they look or how they talk, what kind of accent they have. As human beings we're hardwired to take all these things in and make judgments on them because that's how we survived, that's how we grew as social animals. But they actually have very little to do with being effective in an organization, which is smart and get stuff done, to paraphrase Joel Spolsky.
So when you abstract that all out and everyone can work from their own castle, they can wear pants or not, they can do whatever they like.
It's just all about the output. It's just all about the results. You don't care about input. And input is great. If we were hiring for like a sales job, I'd want someone who could have a beer and comb their hair and talk. But for any other role—
I love the high bar that you have for a sales guy: comb hair, talk, drink beer. I think if Pando goes sideways—really. I mean, this is a weirdly tiny beer, but I think it's still—
Can I get one of those, by the way?
Yeah. Can someone get Matt a beer? Because you said no one's ever had a beer before. No guest has ever had a beer before. New ground.
Yeah, I think it's a new New York tradition. But it's all about the results. It's all about what people do, and I think that's a way healthier way. And then the advantage—why build a company this way? And I'm almost hesitant to say it because there's a huge geographic arbitrage that we have right now. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, they're hiring people within a few cities in the world and they're cutting out 99% of the eligible people in the world. And so just by selection bias, just like Bill Joy's thing: there's more smart people outside of your company than inside your company, there are more smart people outside of New York, San Francisco, Austin than there are inside of them. And if you're only going to hire people who are in those places or going to go to those places, yes, there's a huge concentration of talent, but there's also an over-demand of talent as well. So our creative director, who's designed things that over half a billion people see every single month, lives in a town of 20,000 in Alabama like a king, like a boss. And that's beautiful.
Do you still pay people Valley salaries? Do you do this to cut down on costs at all?
I don't think there's really a cost saving because once you fly everyone around the world a few times a year, put them up in Sayulita for a week, do that sort of thing—
I increasingly want to be your salesman.
I think the cost comes out about the same as if you had an office or had everyone in an office. But I think the flexibility afforded is huge. The type of people you get is a caliber as good or better than anyone I've met in these typical Valley companies. And it also affords people incredible opportunities. We had a fellow who joined and about a month or two into working he decided on, I think, two days' notice to go on a Southeast Asia trip. And he ended up going through Vietnam and Thailand and all these places, I want to say for like a month or two. I didn't really care or notice. All that mattered was he had Wi-Fi occasionally and he was able to do everything that he said he was going to do and contribute to Automattic as a whole. And that's me as well. People think because I travel all the time I don't work. The curse is not that you can work from anywhere; it's that you work from everywhere. So every airport, sometimes in Ubers, every, any place I am, doing something.
Do you prefer when you travel to go to like very dodgy places and really rough it? I always have a saying: if I'm not in some level of pain, I'm not really in an emerging market. That's what I love. I mean, I live in the Mission in San Francisco, I grew up in Memphis, I like edgy, gritty places. Do you like that, or do you like the five-star resort pampering?
Typically what we do for Automattic is sometimes we'll do resorts, but like in the off-season. So, we actually got a great deal two years ago. Once a year we bring the whole company together. Usually it's teams of sort of five to seven people that get together, but once a year we bring the whole company together. Last year we did it in Budapest, which is really cool, but the year before that we did it in Seaside, Florida, which is cool. It's where they filmed The Truman Show. It's an actual town that looks like—
He's going to love this. He makes more Truman Show references than Jim Carrey.
Oh, cool. So, we were there and we went there in like November or something, kind of a weird, empty time for it. So, we got this great deal. We rented like eight or nine houses, everyone had these beautiful seaside—and then that oil spill happened in the Texas Gulf. Tragic event, but we ended up getting like a 30% discount because everyone was like, "Can't go to Florida. We're going to all die of toxic stuff." And it ended up like it's actually quite economical. You can go to some of these places.
I'm glad the oil worked for you.
I'm from Houston, so use more gas.
Right, you're a fan of oil. You have a place in New York now.
Why are you splitting your time? How does that work?
Yeah, I've actually been using New York as a home base, for as much as that means I'm here, but I've been doing like laundry here and it's been pretty cool.
When did you make that move and why did you decide to?
You guys know it's one of the greatest cities on earth. I was just playing to the crowd. I love it here, I really, really do. And I love San Francisco, I love Houston. I mean, these are sort of my three loves. I live sort of a tri-coastal life. But New York for me, there's an energy, a buzz, and also candidly the jazz and the music and the art here, it's just at a whole other level. Particularly jazz. It's kind of what San Francisco and the Valley is to tech: you get the highest caliber people in the world. You can walk in like any random restaurant here and just in the corner there could be some of the most amazing musicians you've heard in your life, and I love that. And a lot of the weird high school I went to, a lot of the guys who went there who didn't fall into a bad technology crowd like I did, who made it in music, are now in New York. So it's folks like—actually Beyoncé went to my high school.
Really? Did you guys date?
Well, that wasn't a no. I would love to date Beyoncé, but no, I think we were different years. She was there a little before me. But there was this guy Robert Glasper, who's a pianist, and he's now blown-up recording artist, amazing musician. Just did a CD called Black Radio with Mos Def and Talib—he's killing it. And I can hang out with him when I'm in New York, and I can see his shows, and that's so energizing. I've always found the most inspiration, like whenever I'm stuck on a hard problem for WordPress or there's something we can't figure out, the thing that takes my mind off it the most is just going to a live performance. Jazz is probably the worst because I get really into it, but like opera, I take a notebook every time. I will come out with like five pages of ideas. It's not that I'm bored, I love it. But I just sort of get into like a weird state of enjoying the music, but also being kind of half asleep. And so when you do that free association like when you're first waking up in the morning or you're about to fall asleep, and so I come home to like this completely—my handwriting is normally legible, but it's particularly legible when it's dark at the opera and I'm trying to write without anyone noticing. But really great stuff.
Mhm. That's interesting. The thing I think is really fascinating about this—no, I think it genuinely is. Where do you get your best ideas? Where do you get your creative inspiration? You know, I think this is so cliché, but the shower. I mean, don't you guys get great ideas in the shower? To me, I don't know what it is, maybe it's a similar kind of thing, but—
It's space. It's all about space. You're doing something and you're thinking, but you're not thinking. And the problem is that my phone's been buzzing. I guess you guys are tweeting me: @photomatt, #PandoMonthly. I'm about to pass 40,000. I need some more followers. Oh, awesome. Thank you. Cheers.
Cheers. Thank you for doing this.
No problem. We're like giants. We constantly have this device in our—does your phone ever buzz and you don't look at it for whatever reason and you get a little awkward, like a little twitchy?
Mhm. I see people looking at their phones right now.
No, I can control it mostly, but constantly distracting us. Our minds are constantly occupied, and I've been really preoccupied and fascinated with this idea of: is Silicon Valley destroying the world? Well, is what we do actually like morally destitute? Because we create these things that are incredibly engaging, and yes, they connect people, and yes, they democratize publishing, and yes, they do some amazing things, but they also distract us constantly. And we've got the notifications. WordPress is about to launch notifications, like it's dropping today.
or tomorrow, and I've been having like this moral dilemma. It's such a good feature, like you moderate your comments from it. It's like really slick. But at the same time, like, we're now going to be pinging people when they should be having a conversation with a loved one or they should be thinking about something. And that's why showers and the opera and everything work, because they force you to have a little bit of space. And space is where all that special things, all that special special thoughts, free associations, real ideas, the things that you could spend the rest of your life doing are going to come from. They're not going to come when you're in that loop going Gmail, Facebook, Techmeme, Twitter, you know, just going between. You can do that all day.
So, well, what I think is so fascinating about what you're describing about New York in particular and this and wanting distraction essentially, this is what Mayor Bloomberg argues makes New York such a great tech town, is that you have a world-class opera, you know, you have symphony, you have the arts, you have great museums, and people want to live in the city and they want to be well-rounded people. And so, he's argued that all of these great amenities of the city are really what bring more talent here. Now, I know a ton of people in Silicon Valley who've said that's absolutely ridiculous. And I've heard over and over again people say, particularly, you know, younger younger guys starting companies, more than one time I heard they've moved from LA or New York because there's no women in Silicon Valley, and so they don't get distracted and they can totally focus on work. So there seems to be like two really different sides to this argument. He's like, "Yeah, no women."
Is that why there's no startups in New York?
So, I mean, it's interesting that I think of you as a Silicon Valley person, but you're much more of that New York mindset.
Well, I'm a San Francisco person. Let's get it straight.
There's a huge difference.
Tell us about the difference between Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
You know it. I would say Silicon Valley has some beautiful centers of innovation, but you visit them and they're kind of like strip malls and campuses. I mean, there's a few beautiful, like Stanford's beautiful, but mostly it's kind of a culturally a desert in many ways. San Francisco has a lot of the great things about New York.
I was actually thinking about this because some entrepreneurs were asking me, they were like, "We're starting a company. We can live any place in the world. We've drank your Kool-Aid. What should we do?" And I think actually for founders, being in one of the tech hubs is important because the connections, the funding, the meeting people, all of that is really important. For the rest of the company, it's not.
So for the rest of the company, where should you be? Like if they ask,
And I went through like the list of all the US cities, and I think it's either New Orleans or Portland, with New Orleans probably being a better bet. I mean, New York has all these amazing things. It's also freaking expensive.
It's tough to live here, and especially if you're bootstrapping. You don't need to be spending a couple of grand a month on rent that could be going towards another developer or designer or AdWords or anything else in the world. But New Orleans is wide open. Like you get some of the great art things of New York, including some of the great jazz. And I'm biased towards jazz, but
But it's a small city. And post-Katrina, it's like totally coming back. And it's nice. They have beignets as well.
Beignets are delicious, aren't they? And what about Portland?
San Francisco snobs call Portland the poor man's San Francisco. Literally, it's the place young people go to retire. No, I love Portland.
So when you were 19, you're in Houston. You started this thing you had no idea at the time was going to become what it is today.
At what point did you move to San Francisco and what pulled you out there?
So, it's kind of interesting. I went out to San Francisco. I had had a life quest at the time to be number one on Google for the word Matt. And I said if I ever accomplished this, I would go out on top, like I would shut down everything like Jordan,
"Hi, everyone." And so when that happened, I took down my website and I took a screenshot of the thing. I made business cards that just said, "Go to Google, type in Matt, press 'I'm feeling lucky.'" And I went to San Francisco to visit my friend Dante. He was just leaving Microsoft at the time, and I believe going to Technorati, you know, early blog company. If any of those old-school people,
I forgot about Technorati.
And it was kind of a weird trip. Like I didn't cross the Golden Gate. I still haven't ridden a cable car. Like I didn't visit Alcatraz. But I went to Google, Yahoo, CNET. I visited like all the tech companies I did, and I just fell in love because I felt like I had found my tribe.
In Houston, I was like part of the meetups. I was part of the Palm Users Group, Linux Users Group, Wireless Users Group, like all the 50 people in Houston who were really into the stuff. We all had like the same meetings we'd all go to. And that was cool. But in San Francisco, it's a whole city. And you step off the plane, there's free air conditioning, it's Wi-Fi everywhere. It literally felt like paradise. So I caught the bug. I went back to Houston with every intention of returning to school, but I started getting calls from some of these companies I had visited, and the most interesting was actually CNET.
Because as a media company versus a technology company like a Google or Yahoo,
They were technology companies at the time. Mhm.
They had no interest in the intellectual property rights to WordPress or open source things I did. So they actually gave me a fantastic deal where they would pay me to move out a salary that would be like what I would hope to make once I graduated and allowed me to carve out, I think 20% of my time and retain all the IP to anything I did that was open source.
I was like, "Wow, done." And so I dropped out.
And yet CNET was not really a pioneer of blogging.
That's funny. So ZDNet had blogs, Download.com. They were early WordPress users and they actually had some fantastic people there. Mike Tatum was the guy who brought me.
I love Mike Tatum. I was about to bring him up, actually.
Shelby Bonnie was there. They bought UrbanBaby, which had John Maloney and David Karp around the same time. They bought Consumating, which had Ben Brown.
Remember, I'm in like with you.
Yes. So, it was like the predecessor to that. This awesome sort of social network dating fun site. You could be on it even if you had a girlfriend kind of thing.
And it's called Consummating. I don't
I'm still creeped out by it, I'll be honest.
Ben Brown, it was one of the things at the time like Upcoming or Delicious or Flickr. This is all the same cohort of things that were happening kind of in the post-crash time when all the finance people left and all the creative people were still there. These were the things that were created. Sometimes they had weird names, but it was a lot of fun, and they were all at CNET, and I really enjoyed my time there, actually.
So there really was this whole CNET mafia that a lot of this grew out of.
Well, so I'm fascinated with the concept of Silicon Valley mafias because, and I've actually like studied this a great deal, it tends to be the biggest and most successful companies that win a wave don't actually yield a mafia, which is like, you know, a tight collection of people. I mean, there's people who go work with each other or whatever, go to other jobs. Of course, no one stays at a company forever, but in terms of like an explosion of talent that helps fund each other and work with each other and has all these connections that gives rise to something way bigger than the initial company, like what you've seen with PayPal, what we've seen very early with Facebook, what you saw with Fairchild back in the early days. I mean, Fairchild was the definitive mafia, but HP wasn't, you know, as much. And it was partially because HP was so nice to work for and it was so friendly and happy. It was like there's something about the chaos, and I think in the case of PayPal, something about that frustrated sense of ambition of
"We didn't quite do what we were supposed to do," that drives all these people to go do the thing. So, I'm curious with CNET. I mean, CNET wasn't TechCrunch. CNET was this weird middle child.
It wasn't Gizmodo or Engadget. That was what was killing them at the time,
And I pitched blogs up and down. CNET, one of the cool things they had was like every cool domain name in the world, including com.com, which I think they paid like eight figures for. So you could do anything like online.com, profile.com, I mean, literally anything. And so my theory was I wanted to create a hosted WordPress service where anyone, because at the time to run WordPress you had to like set up a database, download it, upload it, all these things, I just wanted to create something where you press a button, have a WordPress. And I pitched it, and CNET had there was an anti-blog backlash at the time happening where they thought blogs were dead,
and they weren't the future. And actually, if you look at it at the time when Automattic launched, we were actually competing with Microsoft, had MSN Spaces; AOL, which was cool at the time, had
AOL 360 or AOL Journals; Yahoo, which was cool at the time, had 360; Google had Blogger. Every single internet giant had a blogging system, but none of them called it blogging except for Google because they're also scared of the word blog.
Two things: it sounds kind of weird. Sounds like something, you know, stuck in your drain or like you actually just look at the word on its own, kind of a weird word. But two, the prominent blogs at the time were the political blogs and they were really known for being like, you know, alpha males who take find like something and take down a politician and then we'd all celebrate the blogs took down this politician. And
Tech blogging is nothing like that.
No, it was more like the Instapundit, but that was all there was.
It was like the Instapundits of the world were sort of the prototypical bloggers, and so people just had this negative connotation. They thought it was a political thing.
Mhm. So CNET, you could have given CNET relevance, but they said no.
So then you decided to quit and do it on your own.
Yeah. And actually CNET was supportive. They ended up putting some money, both Shelby and CNET put some money into starting Automattic. But really, I just wanted to be in control of my own destiny.
And I also had a weird like Office Space Milton thing.
When I started at CNET, I had like this actually beautiful corner office. And then someone saw that, a VP saw it, I got transferred. I was on like this interior office, but I still had a window. And then like the group I was in got moved and next thing I know, I'm literally in the basement. No natural light. I'm like, "If they take my red stapler." So I was a little bit unhappy for those reasons as well. But yeah, I hired actually the first guy, Donncha Ó Caoimh in Ireland, Cork County, Ireland, was sort of the first employee of Automattic. I was actually the third, because they asked me to stay on a little while longer to close up some projects, which I did, and then started Automattic.
And the idea behind Automattic was, first, to create someplace I wanted to work,
Which, that's what I did. I found myself without a job. I had a baby.
and then, two, create really the first company that married a really healthy open source ecosystem with a really healthy business.
Mhm. Why do you say first company? Others would say they did that.
Typically, one happens at the expense of the other. Usually, MySQL is a great example. I mean, fantastic outcome, billion dollars, everything. But along the way, as they became more corporate, I feel like they really became at odds with their open source community. So things like they sold a different licensed version of the software. They said GPL is scary, don't use it, buy this commercial license. They required all contributors to sign an assignment, so you had to sign over all your copyright and all your code to MySQL. And at the end of it, the vast majority of the contributors, 95, 98% of the people working on MySQL were employed by the company, which is the death of the community. I mean, it's not really community at that point.
Now, they still did a lot of cool things and we've learned a lot from them, but I wanted to create something where both the open source side and the company could grow in tandem, strengthening each other, because I think that for-profits can do amazing things, nonprofits can do amazing things, but when you have that sort of together, they can do something greater than either could do on their own.
Has that come at the expense of making the business bigger?
I don't think so. Automattic is purely a for-profit entity. It's always made money. It's always grown. It's always been a sustainable business. But I would say the difference is it's never not been focused on the long term. And typically, I mean, people ask like, "Well, how, if there's something between the foundation and the company and they're like this, what do you choose?" The answer is like that never actually happens in practice, because any of the decisions that would be great for WordPress over the next 10, 20, 30 years are also going to be great for a company built on WordPress and the largest contributor of WordPress over the next 10, 20 years. It's just a matter of timelines. And yes, if we were optimizing for, you know, being a $200 or $500 million company already, there'd be a lot more ads on the site and we'd maybe charge every sign up or we do a lot of things I think maybe would have a short-term boost to the revenues. And it's been nice knowing that some of those knobs are there if we ever needed them, but would come at the expense of long-term growth.
Has your board always agreed with you on that?
We've been blessed with actually great investors. Actually, one of the earliest users of WordPress and the guy who introduced me to everyone was Om Malik. And he hooked me up with Toni Schneider, True Ventures, Phil Black, Mike Hirshland, and those sort of became the initial investors, and that was also the board for the first six years of the company. Mike Hirshland left Polaris, so he switched out, but basically the people who I started working with then are the same people I'm working with now. And that's a testament to the fact that we know we're part of something larger than ourselves. And we want to put as much, you know, wood on that fire and create, I think, a company that can be around for decades, but do it in our own way without compromising of the things we believe in and the principles or the things that we've known seem to be true so far.
So, will you be a billion-dollar company?
I don't see any reason why not.
There's yet to be a big company built that's making blogging software. I mean, Six Apart wound up having, you know, folding in Say. They may still have a decent outcome, but certainly not what had hoped. You guys are doing about 40 million a year in revenue. Is that right?
I think that's, yeah, the last thing we put out.
So, that's a lot more revenue than we're doing. I mean, I'm not going to tell you it's not a lot of revenue, but you've been around for a while.
More if you pay, you know, your bill.
I think we actually haven't paid our bill. Is that true? Have we really not paid our bill?
I'm 100% certain you are completely good.
We are? Cuz I don't know. See, like you as a CEO, I didn't actually know how to do those things. I just hired people to do
Which is why I completely understand.
We really haven't paid our bills. Wow, we're done.
That's all right. TechCrunch didn't pay for the first two months either.
You didn't charge TechCrunch.
I thought TechCrunch got VIP for free.
No, no one's ever gotten VIP for free. The closest might be actually Scoble, who was the first ever VIP, I think did not pay. But everyone after that, from Linden Lab on to CNN. Yeah, TechCrunch, no, they didn't pay for a little while.
That's what I'm thinking.
But we were billing them every month.
