When Inc Magazine reached out to have David H. Freedman (website powered by WordPress) write a feature piece I was excited because though Inc wasn’t a magazine I have read much since I was a teenager, David seemed like a legit journalist who usually writes for better publications like The Atlantic. I opened up to David with a number of vulnerable stories, and allowed the photo shoot in my home in Houston.
Whether it was him or his editors, unfortunately the piece has turned out pretty biased and negative, even to the point of cherry-picking negative photos from the photo shoot they did in my home. It also has a number of basic errors which make me question the fact-checking and editorial integrity of Inc in the first place. Let’s go through it.
Although they have dozens of photos of me smiling, it starts with one where I look pretty morose. At least I got some Sonny Rollins and Audrey Hepburn in the background.
The article starts with a conversation David had with me while we were both in the bathroom, away from his recorder, where he remarked that the bathroom was really nice. I talked about visiting Google in 2004 when I first came to San Francisco and thinking they had cheap toilet paper, and how given that Automattic’s offices are barely used there’s no reason not to spend a few extra bucks on nice soap and toilet paper to give a better experience to employees and visitors. (For those curious, we use Aesop soap and Who Gives A Crap toilet paper, a brand that donates 50% of profits to charity.) I chose these brands because it’s what I use in my home, and I want people in our offices to have the same quality. David spins it thusly:
I ask him who at Automattic, the estimated $710-million company of which Mullenweg is CEO, is responsible for toilet paper and soap quality control?
“Me,” he says, beaming.
Of course, Mullenweg’s control of Automattic extends well beyond the bathroom walls.
Now you know how the rest of the piece is going to go! Factual errors mixed with bias. First, no credible business publication would put Automattic’s valuation at $710 million, our last Series E primary round was at $7.5 billion. That was 2021 and we’d probably trade closer to $5B now with current multiples, but still the article is an order-of-magnitude off.
David asked if there was a person responsible for choosing toiletries: of course not! We have better things to work on. The entire thing took probably 30 seconds of my time, from going to the bathroom in our New York office to sending a Slack message, and I haven’t thought about it since until David commented about our bathrooms being nice, while we were both in the bathroom and I was washing my hands. Okay, back to the article.
And it all began when Mullenweg got very annoyed, very publicly, at a $400 million company called WP Engine.
Once again, Inc is unable to distinguish between revenue and valuation.
On September 25, more than 1.5 million websites around the world suddenly lost the ability to make some routine software updates.
First, WP Engine doesn’t host 1.5 million WordPress sites. This was easily checked on our website WordPressEngineTracker.com, which as best we can tell from crawling the web, looking at domain registrations and public data from BuiltWith and W3Techs, they probably had ~745k sites on September 25th, so the second number in the piece is off by 2x. Second, those sites could still do software updates using WP Engine’s tools or by uploading new versions, it was just the connectivity between WP Engine’s datacenters and WordPress.org’s that was impacted for a few days.
WP Engine had royally pissed off Matt Mullenweg for not contributing enough to the open-source community, in his opinion. Mullenweg claims he had been in negotiations with WP Engine for months to get them to cough up their fair share one way or another, but finally decided the company had dragged its feet for too long, leading him to break off talks and go public with his ire.
No, the negotiations, and what they were doing wrong, was abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. I also think it’s lame how little they’re involved in the software their entire business is built on and their ability to serve customers was dependent on free server resources and bandwidth from WordPress.org, but our negotiations were about trademark use.
Mullenweg controls the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit that oversees WordPress’s open-source software, the website that serves as the gateway to WordPress resources, and the WordPress trademark.
False, false, false. First, I do not control the WordPress Foundation. I am one of three board members, so by definition am not in control. The other two board members could remove me at any time. Second, the Foundation does not oversee the core software, or the WordPress.org website! This is super clear in WPE’s legal filings, in the about pages of the respective websites, by talking to anyone who understands this. Really shoddy journalism.
The nearly 1,700 employees—a number that reflects the more than 150 who have left in the past few months—are scattered officeless across 90 countries.
As you can see on our about page, Automattic has 1,750 employees, not “nearly 1,700.”
In person, Mullenweg comes off as surprisingly chill when we meet on October 22, given all the angry online noise and employee turmoil surrounding the WP Engine beef for the past three weeks. He is a young-looking, animated 40 with a near-constant grin, and his neat beard and shawl-collar cardigan sweater contribute to his laid-back air.
I’m quoting this just to show they would occasionally say something nice before twisting the knife or going back into inaccuracies. A “near-constant grin” they couldn’t capture in photos.
Two days later, a comment popped up under the post from a U.K. coder named Mike Little: Would he like some help?
Three obsessive days later, Mullenweg released the results and followed a friend’s advice to name it WordPress— only after checking to make sure the domain names WordPress.com and WordPress.org were available. This domain ownership would prove critical.
It’s true that Mike Little commented a few days after my blog post in January 2003, but WordPress’ first release wasn’t until May 27th, 2003. Not “three obsessive days later.” This fact could have been easily verified by digging deep into obscure sources like the Wikipedia entry for WordPress.
Though there are different versions of open-source licenses, the general idea is that anyone can freely download and use the software, and anyone can modify it as they see fit, and then release it as their own version. But the original developer of the fork retains the trademark rights. And when it comes to WordPress, the rights belong to Mullenweg.
I’m not sure where to start… The WordPress trademark doesn’t belong to Mullenweg, it belongs to the WordPress Foundation. David has clearly not been able to figure things out at this point. But again, this is easily checked by looking at the WordPress trademark on the USPTO site.
A 2020 study commissioned by WP Engine calculated the value of all business driven by WordPress to be $600 billion, and growing rapidly. No one gets a bigger piece of that pie than Automattic.
Okay, now after saying Automattic is worth $710M and WP Engine is worth $400M, you’re now breathlessly quoting WPE’s PR slop claiming the WP ecosystem is $600B (it’s not, probably closer to $10-15B/yr) and then immediately pivot into saying that Automattic gets the biggest piece of that pie, something clearly not true based on our revenue versus everyone else in the ecosystem.
Mullenweg had another complaint: WP Engine was violating Automattic’s trademark rights over the WordPress name, based on the fact that WP Engine freely used the abbreviation “WP,” and that “WordPress” appeared throughout their website.
I’m quoting this just to point out how bad the quality control is at Inc Magazine: the link for “another complaint” doesn’t work, it has the code <a href="http://@photomatt">another complaint</a>. They can’t even make sure all the links work in their published articles! I presume this was trying to refer to a tweet of mine, but no one reading the article will be able to know what it was. I would like to know, because our trademark complaint had nothing to do with “WP”, it was about the use of “WordPress” and “WooCommerce.”
Inc Magazine already runs on WordPress, though they use a needlessly complex and expensive custom front-end instead of just serving the site natively. Maybe in their next re-architecture they can take the money they save by getting rid of their lame headless implementation and put it towards fact-checkers and better editors.
Whenever Mullenweg is accused of being too controlling, he often points out he turned over control of WordPress software to a non-profit called the WordPress Foundation. He created the Foundation in 2010, and did indeed assign it all WordPress rights.
I have never said that, and it’s not even factually accurate or possible for me to assign all WordPress rights.
But few people who have looked at the Foundation take its independence seriously. Mullenweg is chairman of its three-person board. Little is known about the other two members, and their names don’t appear anywhere on the Foundation’s website.
The names of the other directors do appear on the Foundation website, for example in this October 17 blog post that says “WordPress Foundation Directors: Mark Ghosh, Matt Mullenweg, and Chele Chiavacci Farley.”
Now the article includes a picture of me at the computer, and out of the hundreds they have with my eyes open, they for some reason chose this one where my eyes were closed.
Like most theme vendors in the early years of that small sub-industry, it sold its themes under a proprietary—that is, non-open-source—license. But in 2008, Mullenweg cleaned house of all theme vendors who refused to switch to an open-source license. Only Thesis held out.
In response, Mullenweg offered to pay Thesis users to switch. He also reportedly paid $100,000 to acquire the domain name “Thesis.com” from a third party and had the name direct to an Automattic blog about theme design.
Themes in WordPress are linked and integrated in a way that the GPL license applies to the PHP code, so if you publish and distribute a WordPress theme the PHP needs to be GPL. There has only been one person to dispute this, Chris Pearson from Thesis, no lawyer or the thousands of successful themes since then have tried to violate the GPL license. Chris is a clown, and the only source for saying that 100k was paid for the Thesis.com domain, I will say now that the domain was bought for a small fraction of that. Again, no fact checking or citing sources.
Thesis eventually gave in. But many in the WordPress community were put off by what they saw as Mullenweg’s vindictive, bullying behavior, and some eventually even left WordPress for other publishing platforms because of it.
It’s funny to talk about the last big controversy in WordPress world being in 2010, I think it actually speaks to our stability. Since 2010, when “some eventually even left WordPress”, the platform has grown market share from under 10% to 43%. I think in a few years we’ll look back at WP Engine as inconsequential as Thesis, and Heather Brunner as credible as Chris Pearson.
Some are leaving WordPress entirely. Cernak of Northstar Digital Design has already decided to abandon WordPress (and WP Engine) for a much smaller, rival website-development platform called WebFlow. “I can’t depend on WordPress if Matt is going to make changes based on whatever he happens to want at the time,” he says.
Wow, they found one person leaving WordPress for Webflow. Is that cherry-picked, or a trend? Again, you can go to third parties like W3Techs to see the relative market share, and see that we’ve gained share since September and Webflow has been flat. Northstar Digital Design “is a creative agency specializing in digital marketing, blockchain technology, web development & design” with 5 followers on X/Twitter. Their website lists no clients or portfolio. It’s unclear how many sites they are responsible for. But this Cernak character is quoted like he’s some authority or representative of a trend. Maybe he’s more credible on blockchain technology.
When I ask Mullenweg if he is feeling traumatized by the pervasive criticism, he tells me about the time he was playing in a Little League game when his teammates saw, through his thin white pants, that his underwear had cartoon characters on them. “They started laughing. That was traumatic for me. But now it’s a funny story,” he recalls. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.”
Whether or not anything about the current crisis ever seems funny to him, he insists it will all end up as a beneficial experience. “The best things come out of adversity and clashes,” he says. “We’re going to come out of it way stronger.”
This is a true story, I was very open and vulnerable with the journalist.
In a prepared statement emailed to Inc., a WP Engine spokesperson said that “we are encouraged by and supportive of the ideas we see being shared by leaders within WordPress and adjacent open-source platforms to reimagine how key elements of the WordPress ecosystem are governed and funded….” It is a clear plug for pushing Mullenweg out of his BDFLship.
Oh finally, WP Engine talks to the press after months of avoiding interviews and conferences. This is a great statement given WP Engine can barely fund and govern itself, much less the broader WordPress ecosystem, and I doubt the broader WordPress hosting ecosystem would prefer Silver Lake and WP Engine holding the reins of WordPress.
There’s more slop in the article but I’m not going to go through everything. I know a lot of entrepreneurs follow me and I don’t want your takeaway to be “don’t talk to journalists” or “don’t engage with mainstream media.” When Inc reached out I thought back to when I was a teenager reading Inc and Fast Company, and how those magazines were inspiring to me, I didn’t think as much about their decline in editorial quality and relevance. I read David’s other pieces and thought he had some great insight, but this is a good example of where a decent journalist can’t overcome a crappy editor and quality control. I probably wouldn’t be excited to work with Inc Magazine again while Mike Hofman is in charge as editor-in-chief, he’s clearly overseeing a declining brand. But I will continue to engage with other media, and blog, and tweet, and tell my story directly.
If you’d like to see how much editorial bias can shape a story, I will say that Inc just published a great profile, with flattering photos, of my good friend Stacy Brown-Philpot. When an editor wants to make you look good, they can! If they decide they want to drag you, they can too. Everything in my interactions with David and Inc made it seem this would be a positive piece, so be careful. I’ll also contrast it with the excellent cover article University of Houston published a few days ago.
We’ll see if Inc Magazine has any journalistic integrity by their updates to the article.
