Category Archives: Automattic

The company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, Day One, Beeper, and more.

Everyone’s An Owner

Automattic

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard.

On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company to speak to everyone, and our Woo team had ~350 people in person at a meetup in Tulum. I had five minutes to talk, and over the weekend, I had been brainstorming with finance and HR for something nice we could do for everyone who stayed. We couldn’t give them all a six-month bonus, which would have cost ~$126M, but we did take how much we spent on severance for the 159 people, rounded up a bit, and granted everyone at Automattic 200 shares of A12 stock, so about a $12M bonus for the employees.

What’s A12 stock? This is probably the first time you’re hearing about it, we haven’t had a chance to talk about this publicly much before.

Usually, options or common stock in a private company is fairly illiquid, with rare opportunities to sell or lots of restrictions like what Uber had; it’s not an efficient or predictable market. Options are “nice” because they can defer taxes, but you still have to exercise them, and they can go underwater. Also, as a fully distributed company, we have people in 91 countries, so security and tax laws around options make them not worth it in most places outside of the US.

When thinking about a stock plan for Automatticians, we thought, our most sophisticated investors have nice protections like a 1x liquidation preference, what if we gave that to employees, too? So to summarize, A12 is a special class of stock available only to buy if you’re a current Automattician with these characteristics:

  • There are twice-a-year windows to buy. You have to hold for 1 year, but then there are quarterly windows to sell, which is very predictable.
  • Automattic maintains the internal market, and provides a backstop so you can always sell the shares at what you paid for them or more, like a 1x liquidation preference.
  • Current employees can buy, but former employees are eligible for every selling window, there’s no politics like can happen with tender offers. It’s reliable and predictable.
  • Unlike options, A12 stock never expires. Once you own it, you own it.
  • Initially we only allowed $25k/year of A12 to be purchased, but as our business has scaled we now allow up to $1M/yr of A12 stock to be purchased. (Remember, the company has to backstop the purchase price.)
  • A12 is just economic rights, it doesn’t have any voting rights.
  • A12 stock can be transferred to a trust.
  • The price is set by an external firm, just like our 409a. Because that process discounts us so much for being private, it’s a pretty good deal compared to what investors would pay for a share.
  • We’ve mostly moved away from options, which really only work for already wealthy, sophisticated hires. We pay very generous base salary (which banks love, makes it easier to get a mortgage) and then people can make a personal decision whether the characteristics of A12 fits with their financial planning alongside index funds, stocks, and bonds.

We’ve been running this program since 2016. The main downside risk for A12 holders, which isn’t that different from common stock, is that we go out of business and can’t keep our commitments. But that’s true of any stock investment, and we have a pretty solid track record.

We want everyone to have an owner mentality, so we’ve also now started granting 1 share of A12 stock to every new hire.

Our legal team has their hands full right now with the Silver Lake / WP Engine stuff, but we’d like to open source our docs around this so other companies can offer the same thing easily, I’ll see if we can make time for that in the next few weeks.

We also announced something else cool for employees on Monday around our Grand Meetup in 2025, but to know that secret you have to work with us. We are one of the most open companies, but we can’t publish everything! ☺️

Automattic Alignment

Automattic, Design, WordPress

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process.

Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.

I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!

159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.

It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.

However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!

WPE & Trademarks

Automattic, Open Source, Politics, WordPress

I’ve been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play.

In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along. Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over.

We offered WP Engine the option of how to pay their fair share: either pay a direct licensing fee, or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks. WP Engine has refused to do either, and has instead taken to casting aspersions on my attempt to make a fair deal with them.

WordPress is licensed under the GPL; respect for copyright and IP like trademarks is core to the GPL and our conception of what open source means. If WP Engine wants to find another open source project with a more permissive license and no trademarks, they are free to do so; if they want to benefit from the WordPress community, then they need to respect WordPress trademark and IP.

Further reading:

Are Investors Bad?

Automattic, Open Source, WordPress

Some people have been interpreting my comments around private equity and investors as saying they’re all bad and you should never accept investment or trust a company that does… I don’t agree with that at all. Investors are amazing, they’re the fuel of entrepreneurship and capitalism and responsible for most of what we enjoy today. I can look in the eye of another founder and wholeheartedly recommend Automattic’s investors—True Ventures, Addition, Tiger Global, Salesforce, GIC, ICONIQ, LVMH/Aglaé, Akkadian, Wellington, Sweetwater, Alta Park, Schonfield, Chris Sacca…—and say they’ve upheld open source values and allowed us to nourish the open source ecosystem and flourish as a business. (They’re not an investor, but there are new folks like OSS Capital which are totally open source aligned.)

So investors, even “private equity” ones can be okay, but just like with anything, there are good ones and bad ones, so it is worthwhile to look into their track record. After an investor joins a company, what happens next? Do they change away from an Open Source license? Does the community flourish or wither on the vine as a result of their actions? It can be complex because you can have, as we do in WordPress, some companies contributing and some companies just taking. Some investors, like ours, are minority investors, which means they don’t control the company. Some buy a majority share in companies and control them, and that’s where who ultimately owns things matters the most.

Can they change? Of course. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. I think everyone should be afforded that grace. But it can’t just be in words, it has to be in action.

I may make my keynote tomorrow a deep dive presentation into some specific examples of this going poorly, because I think it’s highly relevant to WordPress’ survival. Tune in! There will be a livestream here.

People Wanted

Automattic, Books, WordPress

There’s an apocryphal story about Ernest Shackleton putting an ad in the newspaper that read:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

If you’ve read the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, you know how that went. Pretty legendary. One of my most treasured possessions is actually a copy of Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic book signed by every member of the shore party and Shackleton.

You may have heard the news that we’re going to migrate Tumblr onto WordPress. Automattic has put up a similar page calling for talented engineers of any gender who want to join the voyage.

Jim Simons RIP

Automattic, Scaling, Video

As I wrote the other day, don’t constrain your mentors by their availability. Today, I’d like to highlight someone I consider a mentor, who I’ve never met, and now that he’s passed away, I never will, Jim Simons.

I’m mildly obsessed with the culture and results of Renaissance Technologies, Jane Street, Jump Trading, and Two Sigma because I’d like to create the tech and infrastructure version of that at Automattic. Jim Simons reminds me of my Dad, who also never quit smoking and was super-smart. Finally, I love finding obscure YouTube videos with few views but full of great stuff.

In December, 2010, Jim Simons gave a lecture at MIT called Mathmetics, Common Sense, and Good Luck: My Life and Careers. The entire thing, including the introductions, is worth watching, but I’ll call out 

  1. Do something new. (This ties well with Kevin Kelly’s “Don’t be the best. Be the only”.)
  2. Collaborate with the best people you possibly can.
  3. Be guided by beauty.
  4. Don’t give up. 
  5. Hope for some good luck.

I want to pull out point three, and transcribe directly what he said because it’s quite profound:

Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think, well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that? But it is. What’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Doing it right. Getting the right kind of people and approaching the problem and doing it right and if you feel like you feel like you’re the first one to do it right and I think we were, that’s a terrific feeling and it’s a beautiful thing to do something right. It’s also a beautiful thing to solve a math problem create some mathematics that people hadn’t thought of before, so “Be guided by beauty” is not such a bad principle.

If there’s something I’d add, it’s that there is an art to imitation, copying the masters to further your own work. In jazz, we’d transcribe solos from great musicians, note for note, and try to recreate them perfectly, not because that was what we were going to do when we got on stage, but because that understanding and foundation gave us the mastery to take that work and build on top of it. I think this is also true in open source, which often starts by recreating something that exists in the proprietary world but then goes far beyond.

While Renaissance has its Medallion Fund, Automattic has its A12 stock program, which only employees can access. Both programs share the same idea, and if we’re lucky, A12 will create a ton of wealth over time—I love that a third of RenTech’s employees are registered as having assets of over 5M.

He also lists these points as creating alignment for a great organization:

  1. Great people.
  2. Great infrastructure.
  3. Open environment.
  4. Try to get everyone compensated based on the overall performance.

That last point is the hardest. Dan Pink’s book Drive has a great overview of how it’s very difficult to align extrinsic incentive models. This post is a birthday gift to Tim.

Sabbatical Wrap

Audrey, Automattic, Personal

Today is my first day post-sabbatical, getting back in the swing of things with Automattic. W.org, all the things. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning process to be infinitely valuable, the sabbatical itself to be interesting experentially, and I’m curious to see what the post-sabbatical effects are. I have that nervous excitement like it’s the first day of school, which I haven’t felt in years. What should I wear? Who will sit with me at lunch?

I could now give a much better talk about the value of sabbaticals, having finally done one myself vs observing the hundreds that have taken place at Automattic. Like having a kid, it’s something you can understand intellectually but the direct experience is profound in ways that are hard to articulate.

There’s so much to catch up on and it’s kind of delightful to check in on progress of things after a few months rather than day-to-day like I normally do. If I had one bit of advice it would be to not get a big surgery (I had a sinus one) or plan for other major health things during a sabbatical, that should be on a different track if you can help it.

At the beginning I allowed myself two goals around sailing and chess. Sailing I decided to postpone to take advantage of a peak opportunity in July, but chess has been a fun incorporation into my daily habits and also incredibly humbling playing with folks who have been at it longer. The thing I didn’t plan for that became actually really important to me was getting back to the saxophone, not even trying to perform but the ritual and zen of long tones and practice is incredibly grounding in a way I didn’t know I was missing.

A few bullet point highlights:

  • Rowed to Alcatraz.
  • Got Covid the 4th time.
  • Went to Super Bowl.
  • Spent time at my alma mata University of Houston.
  • Toured the modern cathedrals of datacenters.
  • Did a ton of health scans, blood tests, doctor meetings.
  • Got my DEXA body fat down to 17.9%.
  • Skied Big Sky and Yellowstone Club.
  • Went to friend’s 40ths and 50ths.
  • Got a major sinus surgery.
  • Hosted an epic eclipse party from a plane with 100+ flash talks.
  • Studied Qigong and yoga.
  • Spent time in Houston, San Francisco, Big Sky, Austin, Orlando, Tokyo, Taipei, Amsterdam, Paris, and Mallorca.
  • Cleaned up a ton of personal projects.
  • Read a ton.
  • Swam in the ocean.
  • Played saxophone at 40k feet.
  • Equine therapy.
  • A lot of progress on renovation projects in Houston and San Francisco.
  • Hiked many places, walking in general more than normal.
  • Tweaked my back. :/
  • Couple of podcasts and interviews, a few meetings.
  • Binged Three Body Problem.
  • Did a lot of solo time and introspection.

Also, there was actually a lot of Automattic stuff happening most notably the acquisition of Beeper! I wasn’t able to unplug as much as I hoped, but I did definitely reverse my normal priorities. One thing I really missed was that I had very high hopes to see a lot of people, but a lot of stuff came up so outside of the events it was probably smaller social circle than I normally have.

It does make me think about apophatic theology or how Nassim Taleb talks about via negativa. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s nice to try the opposite for a while, just to see what happens.

Beeper & Texts

Automattic, Marketing, Open Source, Personal

It’s such a delight when a plan comes together and unfolds, especially when it’s something you’ve been working on for many years. Today the announcement went out that we’re combining the best technology from Beeper and Texts to create a great private, secure, and open source messaging client for people to have control of their communications. We’re going to use the Beeper brand, because it’s fun. This is not unlike how browsers have evolved, where solid tech and encryption on top of an open ecosystem has created untold value for humanity. Eric Migicovsky has written well about the plan going forward.

A lot of people are asking about iMessage on Android… I have zero interest in fighting with Apple, I think instead it’s best to focus on messaging networks that want more engagement from power-user clients. This is an area I’m excited to work on when I return from my sabbatical next month.

On the Reddit IPO

Automattic, Open Source, WordPress

I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite allies of financial institutions. Wow!

I’m sure this was not easy to do so Reddit users should understand that at this very important juncture in the company’s history it has gone above and beyond to include you. I’m mostly a lurker on Reddit so my 958 karma doesn’t qualify so I’ll get access with the rest of the normal folks.

If I ever IPO something from Automattic, it will include the same for people who have contributed to WordPress. And every supporting open-source project underneath it. (It’s turtles all the way down.)

My only fear is that code contributions are structured in a way that is easily legible, so is anything that happens on w.org, but we may miss including people who have contributed to the growth of WordPress in non-legible ways.

Thoughts on Tech Employment

AI, Audrey, Automattic, Books, Facebook, Ideas

The Washington Post writes The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? This article has some good data, but I think misses the point with sub-heads like “Shine has come off the tech industry.” Really? How is that reflected in their stock prices?

I think a few things are happening.

First, tech companies are typically best at adopting new technology, which leads to productivity gains.

AI may be an obvious example of this, though for all its hype it hasn’t had a huge impact on most companies yet. I agree with Sam Altman when he says there may someday be a billion-dollar company run by one person who is able to highly leverage future AI agents to automate most traditional roles at a company. That said, I think there are advantages to teams including allowing people to go on vacation or take time off, and provide business continuity and succession, so literally one-person is probably an exaggeration. We don’t need AI to see very small teams being valued highly: Instagram had only 13 employees when it sold for a billion dollars to Facebook, in 2012!

Some of this productivity gains just come from adoption of existing tools like Google Workspace or Office 365, issue trackers and version control with tools like Gitlab, Github, or Jira. At Automattic we don’t use email to work or communicate internally, it’s all Slack and P2. We also leverage our distributed nature to effectively have teams around the world coordinating several shifts of product work per day, and 24/7 coverage for things like systems and customer support without the need for “graveyard shifts.”

The way tech companies operate, the pace and culture, would be unrecognizable to people at many more traditional companies.

At tech companies some roles are highly leveraged, like systems, engineering, and design, and everything else in the company really exists to support these. These leveraged roles can create enormous amounts of value, and that’s why it’s not unusual to hear of machine learning engineers working on ads at Google with salaries in the seven figures. (There’s been a weird accounting thing where companies put a lot of their compensation into equity, but I think that’s going away as investors are learning to better account for dilution and employees appreciate the fungibility of cash.)

Creators are also highly leveraged, which is why Joe Rogan can sign a new $250M deal with Spotify (which smartly puts him back on Youtube) after laying off 1,500 people in December. Some people like Hagen Terschüren try to tie this together and say you should avoid Spotify for it, but there’s nothing wrong with a business becoming more efficient to serve its customers, it’s the whole point of capitalism. Capitalism is, as Nicholas Stern says (via Marc), the best way to take care of people we don’t know. There’s no honor in keeping people employed inefficiently, it’s better for them to find someplace in the market where their talents will be better leveraged for society and themselves.

There was a bubble in hiring because tech had so much money it tried to throw people at problems. But the unlock in technology can come from a single person, a single insight. It’s the mythical man-month. Tech-first companies are going to become leaner and more leveraged. Fewer people are going to create more value for society, in ways that will follow power laws and I think we should investigate things like Universal Basic Income to provide for all living beings. Technological progress creates abundance, where we have more than what we need.

At Automattic last year we did not do layoffs, but allowed performance management and natural attrition (voluntary regrettable was 2.9%, non-regrettable 6.8% for us in 2023) to allow our size to shrink down more naturally, on average two people left for every person we hired last year, from a peak of about 2,064 to 1,936 today.

I just replied to an email from 2018. I am tragically, comically, behind on email. Because Automattic doesn’t use email, we use P2, it’s never been a priority for me. But I have been sloppy, careless, and derelict in my duty of answering emails. Apologies to you all. You’re going to get some weird, very late replies.

Samattical

Automattic, Events, New York, Open Source, Personal, Travel, Video, WordPress.com

Today is the day! The first day of my sabbatical. What an experience it has been. On Thursday I delivered my very first Ignite talk on the subject! Here it is.

The Ignite format is a tricky one as a speaker! I will do better next time. My friend Connie has delivered seven Ignite talks now and I thought hers and Adam Savage’s were the highlights of the ones I saw. (I didn’t see everything because I was popping in and out.)

Preparing for this sabbatical has been the most fun I’ve had working at Automattic, ever. It brought so much clarity to things, we’ve been able to resolve in hours things that have lingered for months, including two acquisitions, several hires, big strategies, and more.

After this talk I caught a redeye to NYC to meet with the WordPress.com leadership team and hand off my leadership there to Daniel Bachhuber.

It is a beautiful symmetry that the first-ever sabbatical taken at Automattic was by its CEO at the time, Toni Schneider, which gave me the opportunity to step in and try on being a CEO, and it’s an incredible gift that Toni is returning to be CEO of Automattic while I’m out for the months of February, March, and April.

What am I going to do with all this free time? Blog a ton. So follow along if you want to see this journey. I’m going to try to open source all the things. 😇

Update: I ended up extending this to May 15 since it got a late start.

Automattic’s Big Re-Org

Automattic, WordPress

Considering I am going on sabbatical in 83 hours and passing the CEO torch to Toni Schneider until I return in May, it seemed like a perfect time to do a giant re-org! Just kidding. But we did introduce a concept into Automattic that I think will provide a lot of clarity for the teams within Automattic, and hopefully for the broader WordPress ecosystem that works and partners with us.

The frame is there’s a game, each person gets a card: Be the Host, Help the Host, or Neutral.

You cannot change cards during the course of your day or week. If you do not feel aligned with your card, you need to change divisions within Automattic.

If you’re Be the Host, you are hyper-competitive. You are trying to make the case to a customer for why they should host with you and not consider anyone else. This is what everyone assumes all of Automattic is, but it’s actually just one sub-division, which is a minority of our revenue.

For Help the Hosts, your word is ecosystem. You plant the seeds of open source software that grow everywhere. Every WordPress is precious to you, wherever it grew up. You want every host to be as successful as possible, because the real threat is from the Big Proprietary folks outside, who steal all your good ideas and don’t let you touch them again. You want to get to know every WordPress in the world, however it grew up, and help it out by selling it attachments.

Neutral treats everyone equally, either because they don’t care (Day One, Pocket Casts, et cetera don’t have a horse in this race) or because they are a support function like finance or HR.

Whenever you meet or talk to an Automattician you can ask what their card is.

Also, WordPress.com is going to orient itself more towards developers, and have an experience that feels similar to WordPress hosted other places, less Calypso more wp-admin.

The big tension this surfaced was Woo Express, going forward that team is switching under WP.com, and Woo.com will recommend a variety of hosts (like W.org) to get started with Woo. Now people can meet with Paul Maiorana, who leads Woo, or James Grierson, who leads Jetpack, and know they have Help the Hosts cards as their teleological goal.

New York!

You tear me apart. The greatest city in the world. (San Francisco has its allure.) I am so drawn to the impeccability excellence of uptown. Just at a baby shower at 111 West 57th… wow! You have never seen a better building, everything is executed to the highest degree par none.

Yet, I’m so drawn to downtown. The jazz. The creativity, the spark, the drive.

Automattic’s office at 166 Crosby feels like a creative center. We’ve built something pretty cool there to inspire and delight people in space.

Sonos Tip

Audrey, Automattic, Education

If you’re obsessed with Sonos like I am, a nice MacOS utility is the Menu Bar Controller. Hat tip to Mike Tatum, who happened to be the gentleman who convinced my parents it was okay for me to drop out of college and move to San Francisco to take a job at CNET. Mike’s now at Sonos and in October arranged for some top execs at Automattic to go to Santa Barbara to meet with their peers at Sonos, and Patrick Spence and I did a joint CEO town hall that was broadcast to both of our companies. It was I think fascinating for both sides because of a shared passion for craft, design, culture, and execution, but our companies are in no way competitive, so it allowed for a lot of transparency. I learned a ton, and I think that kind of sharing is what increases the mimetic evolutionary speed of companies.

Atoms are hard! I think I’ll stick mostly to bits.

Podcast with Texts founder Kishan and Techcrunch

Kishan Bagaria and I had chance to catch up with Alex Willhelm on the Techcrunch Equity podcast, it’s a bit of a time travel since we recorded this on November 28th and there has been a ton of activity in the messaging space including the whole Beeper Mini launch and smackdown from Apple. However it’s worth listening to get to know Kishan and hear some of Automattic’s broader, long-term strategy in this space.

To give our current take with regards to iMessage: Right now we run on desktop only, basically automating Apple’s first-party app. This obviously won’t work on iOS or Android. With every network we support we want to have a good, non-adversarial relationship that puts the user first, with the utmost standards for privacy and security, and understanding the principles and values each network is trying to uphold. We’re watching this space unfold very closely, and trying to help where we can. Check out the episode here:

Sunbird Security Isn’t Nothing

Apple, Audrey, Automattic

This might get lost in the OpenAI earthquake happening, but it’s important so I wanted to post about it. (And gosh! A Starship launch, which is amazing. We live in interesting times.) On Tuesday, Nothing, who makes the cleanest and most interesting Android phones (and whose earbuds sound great), announced via my favorite tech video channel, MKBHD, that the phones would support iMessage on Android, so you can be a blue bubble with your friends. This got a lot of pickup!

It got a little buried, though, because on Thursday Apple said it was going to support the RCS standard, which Google and others had been lobbying hard for. However, it’s doing the bare minimum: RCS isn’t actually encrypted, and Apple’s not doing the Google proprietary thing to encrypt it, and so non-Apple people still get green bubbles. (More on that later.)

iMessage on Android (and Windows!) is on the roadmap for Texts, the all-in-one messaging platform Automattic acquired last month. The Texts team is obsessed with security, and that’s part of why the platform is desktop-only right now—to keep everything 100% client-side and fully encrypted in a way that could never be accessed by the team, or have any compromise in the middle, they’ve been taking their time to get the engineering right on the mobile versions. So they poked around the Sunbird app that Nothing partnered with, and it wasn’t pretty. Here’s Texts founder Kishan Bagaria:

The BlueBubbles thing might be a mistake, but seeing the unencrypted data on the wire definitely wasn’t. Sunbird replied and doubled down on Twitter, citing some ISO standard and claiming it was “encrypted.”

Okay! Now you’re caught up to Friday. Texts says Sunbird isn’t secure, Sunbird says it is. He said, she said, right? Not quite—there are receipts. This blog post lays out even more than Kishan tweeted originally and shares code so you can confirm this yourself. tl; dr: Sunbird puts all your iMessages and attachments into Firebase.

What should you take away from this?

Nothing (the company) still makes amazing hardware that you should absolutely check out and use. It’s my favorite Android experience. I think the company got bamboozled by Sunbird, and unfortunately this went mainstream on MKBHD.

Sunbird appears either not to understand security or to lie about it, and probably misled Nothing. I would recommend double-checking what that team claims in the future.

Who should we actually be upset with?

Apple.

You shouldn’t need to jump through all these hoops to have a blue bubble on iMessage. Design can create great things; it can also harm. Apple’s design decisions to “magically” upgrade SMS or texts or RCS into iMessage, which is better and more secure, creates a green-bubble ghetto that’s also a terrible user experience for anyone not on an Apple-made device.

I’ve heard stories of teenagers being ostracized because they couldn’t afford an iPhone, of group chats rejecting people who turn the chat from blue to green. I know that sounds petty, but do you remember middle school? It’s about status, and Apple knows that. Everything they make bleeds status and signaling. They’re the best in the world at it, and I should know—I’m typing this post from a M3 Max black MacBook with 128GB of RAM. But while status signaling with amazing hardware and design touches is harmless, in software and social settings in can be harmful.

Regardless of how it started, today the green bubble indicates cheaper, lower-status, less secure. Apple’s half-hearted support of RCS just continues this. Sunbird (and others) shouldn’t need to jump through so many hoops around this stuff by reverse engineering. Apple should open up iMessage APIs so it can be natively supported just like every other 100M+ messaging platform is: Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, et al. Teens who can’t afford or don’t want an iPhone should be able to have an app that lets them connect with their friends as peers, securely and with all the features that are easy to support in messaging.

Tim Cook, Apple, we love you. Trillion-dollar company, and lots of room still to grow. Allowing iMessage/FaceTime to interoperate (like it used to!) might take .01% off your growth rate, but it’s the right thing for humanity. Yes, I know Google is shady too, and they’re locked in this smartphone death match with you. But take person-to-person communication out of the struggle, make it a DMZ, and be content to compete in all the other areas you’re currently crushing: design, silicon, Continuity, security, privacy, customer experience, retail stores, spatial audio, the list goes on.

I have no idea how to get in touch with YouTubers, but Marques, if you see this, I’m happy to chat about the future of technology, open source, freedom, and privacy.

Update: As I was writing this, the Nothing Chats app has been pulled from the Play store.

Update 2: From my colleague Batuhan:

Texts Joins Automattic

Automattic

Texts is a fun application (desktop only for now) that brings all of your messages into one inbox. It currently supports iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, X/Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord DMs, with more on the way soon. It runs entirely on the desktop so it’s super fast and secure. It’s founded and led by Kishan Bagaria, a really unique entrepreneur and technical talent, and has a slate of amazing investors including Lachy Groom, Guillermo Rauch (former Automattician!), Sahil Lavingia, and many others—and I’m excited to announce that it’s now part of Automattic!

This was announced today on the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway (my part starts 48:50 in), and also covered in The Verge, TechCrunch, MacStories, and a few others.

Today is also my 18th anniversary at Automattic! So, an exciting day all around.

Using an all-in-one messaging app is a real game-changer for productivity and keeping up with things. Texts is a paid app, with discounted student pricing, and I think a lot of people will find value in it. It’s quickly become one of the top three apps I spend time using.

This is obviously a tricky area to navigate, as in the past the networks have blocked third-party clients, but I think with the current anti-trust and regulatory environments this is actually something the big networks will appreciate: it maintains the same security as their clients, opens them up in a way consumers will love and is very user-centric, and because we’re committed to supporting all their features it can actually increase engagement and usage of their platforms.

We’re still working out everything for mobile, so if you’re looking for the all-in-one experience on iOS or Android in the meantime, I recommend checking out Beeper. It really is great to have everything together.

If you’re a reverse engineer hacker that is interested in working with a super-small elite team in this space with the fun of a startup and the air cover of Automattic, get in touch with Kishan on Twitter DM or email (kb at texts). Here’s a fun video for Texts. 😄

Cost of Spam

Automattic

Twitter/X is testing charging users $1/year with the idea that will keep out bots and spam. It’s an appealing idea, and charging definitely does introduce a “proof of work” that wasn’t there before, but the history of the web shows this is not really a big deterrent. Domains cost money, usually a lot more than a dollar a year, and millions are used for spam or nefarious purposes. The spammers obviously thought their benefit would be more than the cost of the domain, or they use stolen credit cards and identities. Charging may cause a short-term drop in bots while the bad guys update their scripts, but the value of manipulating X/Twitter is so high I imagine there is already millions of dollars being spent on it.

Long term to keep a platform healthy you really have to take a nuanced look at behavior and content, like Automattic does with Akismet, and have a fairly sophisticated trust and safety operation with great engineers. T&S is really important, not an enemy of progress, which would have been my chief edit to the otherwise exciting The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen. (If you missed Marc’s Why AI Will Save the World, that’s also an excellent read with dozens of references you can go down a rabbit hole with.)