I joined in for the James Altucher podcast in an episode that covered a lot of ground. One clarification was the point of the story about my Dad not making much at his old job was that companies should be thoughtful about compensation especially for the people who stay with them the longest, not that loyalty is a myth or something to be avoided. It just needs to be two-way.
Category Archives: Interview
I went back for a Round 2 answering follow-up questions from Tim’s readers on the Tim Ferriss podcast. About an hour long and covered a wide range of topics. One of these days I need to start podcasting more directly. In the meantime, please give it a listen! Already some great tweets and responses have started to come in.
Ben Casnocha is an interesting and innovative character in his own right, and it’s worth reading his essay slash short book on the years he spent as the right hand man of Reid Hoffman.
Interview in El Pais
If you speak Spanish, or know someone who does, check out this video and article that was on the El Pais homepage earlier today.
I joined an episode of the Dorm Room Tycoon podcast, which you can check out here.
Si vous parlez français, vous pourriez profiter de cette interview avec moi sur Journal Du Net.
Interview, and Complementing Slack
I had a conversation with Tony Conrad at the StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week, following a dizzyingly talented line-up of Chamath Palihapitiya and Steve Jurvetson.
Techcrunch has a good write-up with a number of the relevant quotes from the event. The only thing I’d like to respond to, because it wasn’t a direct quote, is the headline “Move Over Slack? Automattic Mulls Commercializing Its Own Internal Messaging Product.”
The first problem is the headline missed the obvious alliteration of “Mullenweg Mulls,” 😀but more importantly… Slack has become a really key tool for both Automattic and WordPress.org and anything we do with the evolution of P2 (some of which we already have running internally) will be complementary to Slack, not competitive with it.
I was on VentureBeat’s podcast with Dylan Tweeney, talking a bit about how WordPress came to be and geeking out on some of the tech behind our approach.
Trevor Noah, the new host of the Daily Show, was on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee show, and it was quite interesting. I really love this show, even when it’s slow you get some fun thoughts. I would embed the video but that doesn’t seem possible.
When Kara Goldin started putting fruit in her water 10 years ago, she had no idea that she had stumbled upon a business idea that would eventually lead to the creation of a new category in the beverage industry, grow to a 40 million dollar company, and help her lose over 25 pounds in the process.
Cool interview with Kara Goldin, the founder of Hint Water, which I drink 3-4 of a day and is also an Audrey company.
I want to take a step backward. Who remembers the last email they sent yesterday? No one. Or the last text message. Emperor Hadrian used to say, “The daily business, the daily life, the daily chores, kills the human being.“ I’m not interested in daily chores. We have now swapped information for knowledge, which is not the same thing. I do not want to know. I’m not online. I don’t even have a computer.
Om has an incredible interview with Brunello Cucinelli on Pi.co, which I’d recommend for everyone but especially people interested in design or entrepreneurship.
Speaking of color masculinity, here’s Kanye on creativity, society, and color from his 2008 FADER interview:
I feel like all the words are in you, you’re just blocking yourself, you’re blocking your creativity. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you. So many people try to put their personality on someone else.
SPIEGEL: One of the reasons Snowden didn’t approach the New York Times was that the paper had refused to publish the initial research about the NSA’s bulk collection in 2004. The story was only published almost a year later. Was it a mistake to have held back on that reporting?
This interview with Chief New York Times Editor Dean Baquet is remarkable both for its frank, direct questions and its frank, direct answers. I got to meet with Dean a few months ago and it really struck me how excellent he and the other editorial and product folks inside of the NYT are.
I like to use the analogy of building bridges. If I have no principles, and I build thousands of bridges without any actual science, lots of them will fall down, and great disasters will occur.
Similarly here, if people use data and inferences they can make with the data without any concern about error bars, about heterogeneity, about noisy data, about the sampling pattern, about all the kinds of things that you have to be serious about if you’re an engineer and a statistician—then you will make lots of predictions, and there’s a good chance that you will occasionally solve some real interesting problems. But you will occasionally have some disastrously bad decisions. And you won’t know the difference a priori. You will just produce these outputs and hope for the best.
Today I learned there’s another Michael Jordan that is as awesome in machine learning as #23 is at basketball. IEEE’s article Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts is worth a read and a re-read.
It’s also worth noting that Professor Jordan did an AMA on Reddit, and actually disagreed with the title and characterization of the IEEE interview and wrote a follow-up and response on a WordPress-powered blog.
Sarah Gooding of the WordPress inside baseball blog WP Tavern has an interview with me she titled Matt Mullenweg on Ensuring the Future of WordPress.
Extended Interview with Forbes
J. J. Colao, who covered Automattic for Forbes Magazine in 2012 and has a long history and experience with WordPress and Automattic, sat down with me for close to three hours in March and somehow managed to distill it down to just a few thousand words of interview. (“13,500 words down to 2,800.”) I’m sheepish to link it because there are a lot of “I” statements and some nuance lost in the distillation, but JJ asks great questions and we cover a lot of ground that anyone who follows Automattic or the WordPress ecosystem I think will find interesting. You can check it out here.
The other week in my hometown of Houston, Texas I ended up on stage in a joint conversation with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. The video of our chat is now on WordPress.tv, and worth checking out particularly if you’re curious about the early history of both projects. We’re more alike than different, and Dries is someone I respect a lot.
On WordPress 3.2 with WebProNews
Abby Johnson from WebProNews posted an interview about the philosophy and thinking behind the WordPress 3.2 release, and we also recorded the video below:
Bloomberg TV Interview
At SxSW last month I was interviewed by Cris Valerio from Bloomberg TV. The interview aired recently and you check it out below: