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:
It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew Ross Sorkin, but this one with Jeff Bezos was particularly good.
I guess something has changed with the Joe Rogan / Spotify deal and now all the old episodes are on YouTube again, which means the gems from the archives can now pop up. I was alerted to this conversation between Joe Rogan and John Carmack, and it’s pure gold. I know I’m five years late in watching this, but that makes it even better because it’s so prescient. Joe asks amazing, in-depth questions that reveal deep domain knowledge, and it sparks John Carmack to make observations that are quite wise. No filler. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see both Joe and John being absolutely right. This is one of my favorite podcast episodes ever.
I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing cover on YouTube, and one of my favorite genres of videos is genius musicians breaking down the incredible musical stuff Jacob is doing. (He even has his own instrument now.) This reaction and breakdown from Michael Palmisano, who is an incredible musician, go through Jacob’s amazing Little Blue video is amazing.
I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier today after a colleague pinged me that he was talking about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation.
Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists live?
I had a huge nostalgia blast today with this video from Lazy Game Reviews showing and setting up a Timex Datalink watch, which was a “smart” watch that would show data that you transmitted to it by holding it in front of your CRT monitor and it flashing a bunch of lines.
It’s hard to describe how much my Ironman Triathlon Datalink watch was my entire world when I was a little kid, I was totally obsessed with it. I filled up every bit of its memory with numbers and notes. And the Indiglo!
I’m always trying out new things. First, something fun: my friend Jesse gifted me a very cool Gameboy-like device called the Anbernic RG35XX, at ~$46. It has almost every game you remember, like if you got all the cartridges at Toys R Us or checked them out at Blockbuster. Having something without Wi-Fi, notifications, etc., is nice to relax. Very fun. I’m also keeping my eye on Palmer Luckey’s new ModRetro.
Second, I give to you the Sol E-reader, $399, basically glasses with a Kindle built-in, and a remote you hold in your hand for turning pages. The website is slick, even the packaging and design was nice, but the product is not. Do not buy this. It’s really not pleasant to use. The resolution was so low and the typography so bad it felt like reading on a TI-89 calculator.
Third, I’ve been really enjoying the DC-1 Daylight Computer, $729, which is like if a Kindle mixed with an iPad in the best possible way. This feels like an actually new platform, in that I find myself imagining new ways and places (like outdoors) I’d want to spend time with it. It runs Android, so you can have any app on it, even code on it. This video gives a good sense of the device and its founder Anjan Katta:
I could see Daylight being fantastic for kids as well; it just feels less “toxic” than the hyper-display world in which smartphones have us trapped. Audrey invested back in 2022 and it’s awesome to see how this turned out, it’s so rare that hardware makes it to this stage. I’ve shifted a lot of my nighttime consumption and play over to the Daylight; it’s so fun to play chess or read an article. It has surpassed the Kindle as my favorite reading device. And it looks good everywhere:
I used the Daylight a lot on the recent Sydney to Hamilton Island ~1,000 mile transport I did with the Drumfire crew and my friend Herman/John, which was part of my “learning to sail” goal for this year.
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.
I was late to discover Tom Scott, it was only after he did his goodbye video that I came across him, but he is a Youtube treasure with an archive of a ton of good stuff. Here’s one where he ties together scraping, APIs, Web 2.0, privacy, Cliffs of Dover, and some philosophy. So beautiful.
I know I share a lot of Jacob Collier content, but this one is particularly interesting because you can see him learning things in real-time, exploring an instrument that is not his native tongue but he’s already world-class in. It’s so interesting to me the polymath musician friends I have who can play so many instruments how they bring the technique and language across their learning, and this video illustrates it well.
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.
I returned on the podcast with my good friend Tim Ferriss, by my count the sixth time we’ve recorded together, but the very first time we did it in video! Tim asked me to bring five things I’m excited about, five things I’ve changed my mind on in the past few years, and five things that are absurd or ridiculous but I still do, and that ended up being a pretty fun anchor for a two-and-a-half hour conversation, which you can watch here:
Or listen to on Pocket Casts or any podcast player, thanks to open standards:
I ended up having more than five things for each list, especially the excited one, but tried to edit it down. This was a very vulnerable and personal conversation for me, which I think was possible because we’ve known each other so long at this point and Tim made it really easy and fun to open up. We discuss everything from open source to kids to my upcoming sabbatical.
I was really impressed with the warmth of the WordPress community in Madrid, Spain for State of the Word this year. The in-person crowd had a ton of energy, and we had tens of thousands stream it live on platforms like Facebook and Youtube. If you missed it, and want to hear about all the fun stuff that happened in WordPress in 2023 and what’s coming for the future, here’s the video:
When I was at Silicon Slopes Summit in Salt Lake City I got a chance to talk to folks from Nasdaq about my latest thoughts on the WordPress project, open source, and distributed work.
Jamie Marsland has this great YouTube video where he rebuilds TechCrunch.com just using core blocks in WordPress 6.3 in 30 minutes. Worth checking out!
