It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic.

I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch.

If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far more interesting is his 2019 essay on Seeking the Productive Life, which includes a setup for hiking outdoors while typing on a laptop.

Stephen was doing the remote CEO thing decades before I imagined Automattic. He spoke at Automattic’s Grand Meetup in 2019 and one of my favorite memories was seeing him at the silent disco after-party. We also did an episode of the Distributed podcast together.

Since he started engaging more deeply earlier this year, I’ve gotten a lot of joy from seeing him interact with teams across the company, asking questions in an incisive, inquisitive way that helps break down problems. We just finished up several hours of a deep dive into our board topics with several hundred Automatticans participating.

Automattic has been blessed with amazing directors over the years. Currently, our board is Susan Decker, General Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and me.