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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a dream come true being here in Tokyo for State of the Word 2024. We’re going to be in an amazing venue that looks over the city. Most of WordPress and Automattic’s senior leadership is here, and we’ll also have several hundred folks from the local community and press.
We’ve gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really “of the space” so we’re doing a few extra things this year. My presentation will include Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura, but also part of it will be in Japanese and presented by Junko Fukui Nukaga. We’ll have piano performances by Aiko Takei. After the presentation and Q&A we’ll do a panel in Japanese with Mieko Kawakami (one of the top novelists in Japan, on par with Haruki Murakami), Craig Mod, Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi.
For those who can attend in person, we’ll have a reception afterward with some unique gifts including posters from a local Kanji artist and nice sweater to keep everyone warm this winter.
If you’d like to livestream at home, you can do so on Youtube here:
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Francisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University of Houston student to co-founding WordPress and leading Automattic. I was surprised they put me on the cover of the physical edition! I wish my Dad were still around to see it.
The piece explores my commitment to open-source, my vision for democratizing online publishing, and the values of creativity and adaptability that have shaped my path. It’s an honor to reflect on these experiences with my alma mater.
At Automattic, we believe that Open Source is more than a license—it’s a philosophy that drives innovation and makes publishing accessible to all, and we want to support fellow open source communities. Our team is at DrupalCon to share some of the tools we’ve built, including Akismet (check out the Drupal extension here), The Atavist Magazine, Beeper, Day One, Longreads, and Pocket Casts. These products, much like the web itself, thrive on connection and collaboration. (Basically all our non-WP stuff.)
I’ve loved hearing about how people are engaging with our booth—whether exploring our tools, grabbing a local snack, or taking a moment to recharge. For those of you at the event, I encourage you to swing by the Automattic booth, meet our team, and share your thoughts. Together, we can continue to create an open web that’s full of possibilities.
As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammarly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded everywhere. I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and use it every day, but I think we’re doing too much in the cloud right now and there is so much compute and potential at the edge, and I’m excited to drive that forward with projects like Harper, Gutenberg, and Playground.
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.
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.
A few bullets to his core points:
The headline “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is not fair.
Automattic did not work on a deal with WP Engine for 18+ months because of the GPL, or them using “WP” in their name, it was because of their abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. Trademarks must be protected, as evidenced by Rails trademark policy.
Our C&D is about public trademark abuse; theirs is about censorship, and doxxes private messages. They have since filed a kitchen sink lawsuit that embroils all of WordPress.org.
Updating ACF to Secure Custom Fields in our directory was to provide users of our plugin directory the best, safest, most secure code. It included a security update that still has not been merged by the ACF team.
We will merge any improvements ACF makes to their GPL code going forward and will also include enhanced functionality in the coming days to provide a secure and free drop-in replacement for ACF. If WP Engine didn’t want this to happen, they should not have published their code under the GPL or distributed it through WordPress.org’s directory.
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
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! ☺️
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Collaborate with the best people you possibly can.
Be guided by beauty.
Don’t give up.
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:
Great people.
Great infrastructure.
Open environment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
