With the world changing so quickly, it’s hard to find alpha, but the best way is by following the brightest thinkers. This CNBC interview with Ray Dalio and Marc Benioff is good, but it’s way better if you go to the livestream about 25 minutes in and see the full discussion without the editing. You hear what these great thinkers actually think, rather than what an editor thought you’d enjoy. A little bit of friction gets you a lot more information.
Category Archives: Asides
WordCamp Asia and Maha Kumbh Mela
It’s been fantastic being in the Philippines for this year’s WordCamp Asia. We have attendees from 71 countries, over 1,800 tickets sold, and contributor day had over 700 people! It’s an interesting contrast to US and EU WordCamps as well in that the audience is definitely a lot younger, and there’s very little interest in “wpdrama” du jour, in fact I’ve had tons of amazing conversations of support and talking about the strength and growth of the community.
Some of the earliest international WordCamps I went to were in Manila and Davao, back in 2008. (I’m going to share some pictures at the start of my talk.) Between that and spending lots of time in Daly City when I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 I have developed a fondness for the cuisine, creativity, family orientation, and warmth of the culture here.
After this I’ll be taking a bit of time off for a trip to the big Hindu religious pilgrimage in India, the Maha Kumbh Mela, which is currently on a 144 cycle. It’s the largest human gathering in the world, with some days measured with tens of millions of people visiting. I’ll be returning to my Photomatt roots as well and bringing my big camera rig, right now a Nikon Z 7II, and two lenses: 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8.
Sun and shadows
In high school when 5% of your class doesn’t like you it’s like 3-5 people.
Running a company of 1,700+ when 5% doesn’t like you, that’s 85 people! That fills a room.
150k followers and 5% don’t like you now you have a small stadium of 7,500 people.
It’s still 5%.
“You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!” There’s a delightful article on an undergraduate discovering an optimization in a very basic computer science principle.
On Logan Bartlett Show
You may not have heard of Logan Bartlett, but he’s one of the most hilarious people on Twitter and does a really interesting podcast. (He had a cool episode with Marc Benioff recently.) We sat down for a discussion on managing through crisis, open source and AI, employee liquidity, future of WordPress, and more. You can watch on YouTube below or listen on Pocket Casts.
My First Million
I had a great chat with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri on their podcast, My First Million.
Boom & Deepseek
What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.
The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.
Very excited to share that we’ve acquired WPAI and the team is joining Automattic. They have some very cool products including CodeWP, AgentWP, and WP.chat.
Age-gating
I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer.
See also: Australia’s Senate bans social media for kids under 16. But there are lots of other less controversial examples, like adult websites, or ordering alcohol online or through an app.
Carmack & Rogan
I guess something has changed with the Joe Rogan / Spotify deal and now all the old episodes are on YouTube again, which means the gems from the archives can now pop up. I was alerted to this conversation between Joe Rogan and John Carmack, and it’s pure gold. I know I’m five years late in watching this, but that makes it even better because it’s so prescient. Joe asks amazing, in-depth questions that reveal deep domain knowledge, and it sparks John Carmack to make observations that are quite wise. No filler. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see both Joe and John being absolutely right. This is one of my favorite podcast episodes ever.
It was a huge pain in the butt, because my mail-in ballot didn’t register properly, but I found a last-minute flight to Houston and this morning walked over to Congregation Emanu El and voted. It is our most sacred duty as a citizen. I encourage every American to vote.
Michael Palmisano on Collier
I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing cover on YouTube, and one of my favorite genres of videos is genius musicians breaking down the incredible musical stuff Jacob is doing. (He even has his own instrument now.) This reaction and breakdown from Michael Palmisano, who is an incredible musician, go through Jacob’s amazing Little Blue video is amazing.
Kindness and Techcrunch Disrupt
Back in June I recorded an episode with Jaclyn Lindsey on the Why Kindness podcast, for their awesome non-profit kindness.org. You can listen to it through Pocket Casts here:
This is kind of funny because I’m obviously in the midst of the big battle with Silver Lake and WP Engine. I am a huge proponent of kindness, but sometimes you have to stand up for what’s right if someone is taking advantage of you.
I’m continuing to do some select press, and will be appearing in a conversation with Techcrunch’s Editor-in-Chief, Connie Loizos, at 10:30AM on Wednesday in San Francisco at their Disrupt conference. It’s an amazing conference! Over 10k people from all over the world, just started today. I’m glad they were able to work me into the schedule, I think it will be a timely conversation. We may even have an announcement to make. 🙂
My Freedom of Speech
WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this is about community or some nonsense, but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights.
The First Amendment is the basis of our democracy. It is inconvenient and important. It’s also short, so I’m going to quote the First Amendment in its entirety:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This means that, with rare exceptions, the government cannot tell you not to say something.
Freedom of Speech is not Freedom of Reach
The First Amendment says I should be able to state facts and my opinions about WP Engine. However, the New York Times is not required or compelled to publish them in their newspaper and distribute them to their subscribers.
WP Engine is free to publish whatever GPL code they want to the world. WordPress.org should not be compelled to distribute it or provide it free hosting.
Quiet For A While
After this post, I will refrain from personally commenting on the WP Engine case until a judge rules on the injunction. I will continue to exercise my First Amendment rights to promote others’ speech. However, I hope others speak up on our battle with WP Engine, and I will boost their speech wherever I can.
Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.
Where is Lee Wittlinger?
Lee controls the board of WP Engine. The board is why WP Engine hasn’t done a trademark deal for their use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
You hide behind lawyers and corporate PR when you’re wrong, not when you’re right.
I’m replying on Twitter, I’m commenting on Reddit and Hacker News, I’m dropping into livestreams with ThePrimeagen and WPMinute. I’m talking to journalists whenever they reach out, and I’m happy to go on any large credible podcast or show to discuss these issues.
Lee could do the same. Why isn’t he?
Lee is a managing director of a $102B private equity firm, he is probably richer than me. (Though I doubt he gives back as much.)
“Because their lawyers are telling him not to.” Why do you think their lawyers are telling them not to?
Open invite: Lee, let’s debate this publicly. Propose a neutral venue and moderator.
Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud the way he runs his business.
On WP Engine
I wrote a bit more on Lee Wittlinger / Silver Lake and WP Engine over on WordPress.org: WP Engine is not WordPress.