Twenty-twelve was an exciting year for Automattic. We added 48 new Automatticians and it’s been delightful to see the effect the new folks have had on the company. We made over 40,000 commits to our various repositories, about half of those on WP.com alone. Contained in those commits are countless improvements to the experience for WP.com, but I’m just as proud of the things we removed and streamlined: the WP.com homepage has been drastically simplified, and a completely revamped reader is launching this week. Engagement started rising again after being flat in 2011. Support responses that used to take days now take hours or less. We added 75M uniques to our our network. There is a demo WordPress app on every iPhone and iPad in every Apple store I’ve visited in the US. (If you contribute to WordPress, show it to your friends next time you’re in a store and say “I help make this!”) We did two acquisitions, one announced, one not yet. It looks like we’ll grow the team by at least another 60 people this year. There’s so much more already done that hasn’t been announced yet or that’s coming that I’m bursting to share, but the surprise is at least half the fun. Stay tuned. 🙂
Category Archives: Automattic
Le Web Interview
Last week in Paris I had a twenty minute chat with Om that covered WordPress, Automattic, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and the freedom of the web.
Automattic, Forbes, and the Future of Work
There’s a great article in Forbes today that covers some of the early days of WordPress through Automattic as a business today. I recommend everyone check it out! I wanted to respond to one bit about Automattic’s global nature though, which is actually timely because next week the entirety of Automattic is going to San Diego:
As a legacy of its open-source roots its 120 employees are spread across 26 countries and six continents. Although most work alone at home, each team–usually made up of five or six people–has a generous budget to travel. “All of the money we save on office space, we blow on travel costs,” Mullenweg laughs. Groups have gathered in Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand. Once a year everyone meets for a week at an accessible destination with a solid Internet connection. A distributed workforce means Automattic can hire talent from around the world–without having to offer the perks and pay of Google, Facebook and Apple.
I’d like to counter the last sentence, which implies this is something we do as a cost saving scheme: being distributed is not a legacy, it’s a conscious choice. The people at Automattic are truly world-class — I invest in and advise a number of startups, and spending time in New York and the San Francisco Bay area I would put the caliber of people inside of Automattic on par or higher than anyone I’ve met from Google, Facebook, Apple, or any of the traditional tech giants.
How do we do it? Automattic offers a benefit above and beyond what they ever could: We give people the perk and the luxury of being part of an internet-changing company from anywhere in the world. This mirrors the meritocracy that makes Open Source great and treats people on the quality of their ideas and their work whether they’re in San Francisco or Argentina. (Or if they started in San Francisco and moved to Argentina.)
Even when big companies try to adopt this (sometimes under the lovely moniker “telecommute,” which reminds me of “horseless carriage”) people still face cultural resistance from their managers and teams, or find themselves as a second-tier citizen versus those in headquarters. The same often happens in “remote offices.” For it to really work it has to be part of the DNA of the company from day one. You have to be really committed to keep the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.
I really believe this is the future of work, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Automatticians in San Francisco
A wrap party for Automatticians after the WCSF dev day. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.
One of the cornerstones of Automattic’s web-scale infrastructure is a project out of Russia we started using in 2008 called Nginx. Don’t let the sparse website fool you, Nginx (pronounced engine-ex) has been taking high-end websites by storm, and is used on 24% of the top thousand websites (a good chunk of them WordPress). I was very proud of our team helping sponsor and debug SPDY support in the latest release. Hopefully this accelerates the adoption of technology like SPDY that improves the user experience of the web.
Women 2.0: Stop Sabotaging Your Own Success: A Manifesto, by Automattic’s own Sara Rosso.
Remember my resolution to “Launch secret new thing, code abbreviation JP”? There was even a WP Candy thread guessing what it was. Well it’s live, and you can click here to read all about Jetpack. Check it out, every WordPress deserves a Jetpack. 🙂
New VaultPress Security Scanning
New VaultPress security scanning, scans all your core files to make sure they’re kosher.
5-minute Private Collaboration Site
FoodPress and Nokia
Two fun launches today: FoodPress is a new collection of the best WordPress food writing in the world, right now from .com only. Don’t visit if you’re hungry. 🙂 Second, we’ve launched the WordPress mobile app for Nokia and it’s in their Ovi store. Update: And a bonus, check out the slick new design on Akismet that just launched.
John Medina in SF Tomorrow
John Medina, the author of one of my favorite books Brain Rules, is going to be at Automattic’s office tomorrow (Tuesday the 2nd) at 5 PM to have some after-work drinks and give a short talk. We’ve reserved some seats for the SF WordPress community to come by, and we even have free copies of his books for the first 30 people to show up. RSVP is required, so register here. Hope to see a few of you guys there!
A New Home for the WordPress Trademark
As I write this, I’m on my way to Seaside, Florida to see 60+ Automatticians at our yearly meetup. More than sixty… that number astounds me! Automattic has grown so far beyond what I originally imagined and every day I’m amazed by my colleagues and the things they create. Today we’re growing in another way: Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.
This is a really big deal.
I want to recognize and applaud the courage and foresight of Automattic’s board, investors, and legal counsel who made this possible: Mike Hirshland, Phil Black, Tony Conrad, Toni Schneider, Gunderson Dettmer. I’d also like to thank Matt Bartus of Dorsey & Whitney for their counsel on the Foundation side. The WordPress brand has grown immeasurably in the past 5 years and it’s not often you see a for-profit company donate one of their most valuable core assets and give up control. However, I know in my heart that this is the right thing for the entire WordPress community, and they followed me on that. It wasn’t easy, but things worth doing seldom are.
When Automattic registered the WordPress trademark back in 2006, we were a small startup of a few people: a business founded largely to enable us to work on WordPress full-time instead of hacking around our day jobs. A lot has changed since then — somehow along the way we ended up with an audience of a quarter billion people — but a lot has stayed the same. We’re still a group of people in love with WordPress and free/open source software and we’re lucky to have figured out a way to contribute to the world and flourish as a business while doing it.
Automattic might not always be under my influence, so from the beginning I envisioned a structure where for-profit, non-profit, and not-just-for-profit could coexist and balance each other out. It’s important for me to know that WordPress will be protected and that the brand will continue to be a beacon of open source freedom regardless of whether any company is as benevolent as Automattic has been thus far. It’s important to me to know that we’ve done the right thing. Hopefully, it’s important to you, too, and you’ll continue your support of WordPress, the WordPress Foundation, and Automattic’s products and services. We couldn’t do it without you!
Dan Ariely at Automattic
Dan Ariely came to speak at the Automattic office, and passed out prophylactics.
Automatticians in SF
Just a few vignettes, snapped by Sheri.
WCSF 2010 Pre-party
Hanging around apartment with some Automatticians.
First Core Meetup
Four pictures from the last day of the first core WordPress meetup in Orlando, Florida.
Published on CNN
Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published. I’m pretty excited about this and I also hope it drives a new audience to the blogs I mentioned, though to be fair if you’re not fascinated by how technology is changing society my picks might not be interesting. It’s a short piece in a “top ten” format, but I put a lot of thought into curating the picks.
I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)
I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.
As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)
After the Deadline now Open Source
After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.
Automattic in Quebec
Some of the Automattic team gets a tour of a rainy Quebec.
Automattic Aquires AtD
Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.