We did an official ten year post and video.
Category Archives: Personal
Ten Years of Automattic
Ten years ago the first official Automattician was Donncha O Caoimh, and he had no idea what he was in for. Neither did I, honestly. And it’s been amazing.
I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.
— The Automattic Creed
When you think about it, Donncha was incredibly brave. WordPress had far less than 1% market share. I hadn’t joined Automattic yet — I was still working for CNET, paying Donncha with my salary, savings, and credit cards. He was leaving a Real Job for a Barely a Job; I hardly knew how to wire money to an international account to pay him. I’d just made a giant screw-up (probably my biggest ever), taking money to have spam advertising on WordPress.org, so I wasn’t the most confidence-inspiring leader.
It also seemed like the decks were stacked against us. We were going to try and build an open source business model different from what we had seen before, a hybrid of a downloadable open source project combined with a web service that ran the exact same software. Up to that point companies built on open source projects had usually suffocated the communities that spawned them.
Sign me up, right? But we had one important thing going for us: at our cores, we shared a deep belief that open source could transform any industry it touched and that web publishing needed to be democratized. We’d been hackers-in-arms together coding on WordPress, and knew we could take that and build on it.
I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
– The Automattic Creed
Within that first year we were joined by Andy, Ryan, Toni, and Mark, and together we began building a business which looks remarkably similar to what Automattic does today. (We’re all still at Automattic, by the way.)
We just want to make the web a better place. We’re proud to contribute to what I consider the best open source project in the world, WordPress. We bring it to as wide an audience as possible through hosting it on WordPress.com, and providing services for the ones we don’t host with tools like Jetpack. Through it all, we have fun and experiment with side projects that have become crucial to the ways we work — P2, Cloudup, Simplenote, and dozens more that we tried, failed, learned something from, and tried again.
Our work is far from finished, and I hope there are hundreds of failures we learn from over the next 20 years. One of the things that makes me happiest is that I get to wake up every morning and work on the hard problem of making the web a better and more open place, and I do it alongside close to 400 talented people at Automattic and thousands in the broader community. For me this is a life’s work. The first decade is merely the first chapter of what I hope to be a very long book, which will eventually tell the story of a movement and a company that are at the core of this crazy thing we call “the web.”
I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day.
— The Automattic Creed
Some find it strange that someone in this day and age would have the same job for a decade. The truth is, it’s not the same job: it’s always evolving. At times it’s been comfortable, at times it’s been extraordinarily challenging. I’ve needed to change how I work. Automattic has changed. The structure of the company is designed to accommodate growth, and we’re constantly experimenting with how we work and relate to one another.
Half the time I feel like we’re making it up as we go along — I’ve never managed a distributed company of 400 people before. But the important things stay the same: the desire for impact and my love for the people I work with. They embody the Automattic creed:
I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.
Thank you, Donncha, for believing in me all those years ago and pioneering the way for a company that would come to impact a lot of the world. Thank you Andy, Ryan, Toni, and Mark. Thank you to every Automattician that’s made the same leap. We’re building something that gives people all over the world a voice and that people can trust to be thriving a century from now, and that’s huge.
There’s a lot more to do, and I can’t wait to see what a “20 Years of Automattic” post says. I’m a lucky guy.
Update: Donncha has a post talking about starting at Automattic.
2025 Update: You no longer have to wait to see the 20 Years of Automattic post. 🙂
The Internet has removed scarcity, meaning business models based on controlling distribution are no longer viable. Instead, the key to success is controlling access to the best customers — and that means being the best.
Read all of Ben Thompson’s Funnel Framework.
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
This story of Adrian Chen in Russian definitely turns weird at the end.
Someone asked me the other day who my favorite rappers were, here they are in no particular order:
Pre-2000: Big Pun, Jay Z, Nas, Ludacris, Method Man.
Post-2000: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye, Childish Gambino, J Cole, Drake.
Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
― Douglas Adams
In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.
The New York Times answers Why Do We Experience Awe?
Andrew Bosworth, one of the early engineers and leaders at Facebook tells the story about how he almost got fired in the early days despite being a top engineer. “If I was a good engineer, why would it be hard to work with me? Of course that question was the very foundation of my problem.”
Talent is leaving Silicon Valley because of high real estate costs. Today, the median price for a home just exceeded $1 million.
Why one in four Silicon Valley homebuyers wants to leave. Yep.
The John Biggs article on Why I’m Still Wearing My Apple Watch almost perfectly describes how I’m feeling about the watch right now. It is a very personal device, I’ve gotten attached to the little fellow, and I should probably start selling all my mechanical watches.
Undercover UberX
Emily Guendelsberger went undercover as an UberX driver in Philadelphia and wrote about the experience, particularly the economics of it. It’s a pretty fascinating and gripping longread, both in its content and it’s just well-written.
Mr. Zinsser was a prolific author, editor and teacher, but it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply.
The New York Times obituary of William Zinsser is touching and fascinating. Clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand, and Zinnsser’s work On Writing Well did more than any other to help me hone my mind.
Sometimes, you just want 2 chocolate chip cookies. This happens to me all of the time. I want a super indulgent, rich and buttery chocolate chip cookie, but don’t want to make the whole 36 of them which I’d inevitably inhale over about the same amount of hours.
Ever wondered a good recipe to make just 2 chocolate chip cookies? Now you know.
As promised a few weeks ago, a new installment of the Wired Silk Road story is out and I wanted to share it, The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall. This one is actually a lot more normal, with some surprisingly simple breaks leading to the downfall of Ross, but there’s an interesting twist at the end.
Wearable gadgets portend vast health, research and privacy consequences, the Washington Post takes on the quantified self. I’m in the medium end of this, I track pretty much everything that’s easy, but no blood / hormone tests yet.
Tad Friend has a great New Yorker profile of Marc Andreessen, one of my favorite people to debate and talk to (though it happens all too rarely). Check out Pmarca Says if you want to catch up on some of his recent thinking from tweetstorms.
The Verge: Slot machines perfected addictive gaming. Now, tech wants their tricks. Includes information from one of my favorite authors Nir Eyal, who also spoke at WordCamp San Francisco a few years ago.
Sam Altman of YCombinator wrote a great post on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, The days are long but the decades are short. There’s a lot of subtlety and nuance in each point, so even if you’ve read it already it’s worth another pass.
This Untold Story of Silk Road is pretty amazing writing, a gripping story regardless of the genre (non-fiction, in this case). I can’t wait for the next chapter to come out on May 14. Also when reading about Ross, it’s interesting to keep in mind Vanity Jones who was in many ways the brains behind the operation, and also undiscovered.
After writing two books on the science of climate change, I decided I could no longer continue taking a pro-science position on global warming and an anti-science position on G.M.O.s.
Mark Lynas writes How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food, particularly how GMOs impact the places where crops are needed the most. If you’re looking for a catch-up check out this link collection on ma.tt last year.