Great Mental Models book cover

Farnam Street’s Great Mental Models, Presented by Automattic

Automattic, Future of Work, Ideas, WordPress,

I’ve been a fan of Shane Parrish and his indispensable Farnam Street for many years now. Shane is a fascinating person — he’s a former cybersecurity expert for the Canadian intelligence agency and occasional blogger who turned his website into a full-time career. Oh and fs.blog is on WordPress, too. 😎

His book, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts, has been tremendously valuable to me in my work. So valuable, in fact, that Automattic is now sponsoring the next printing of the hardcover edition. You can pre-order it here, then learn more about the mental models outlined in it.

testing new system

Essays, Personal

Yes, I suppose it was just a matter of time before my egotist tendencies combined with my inherit geekiness to create some sort of blog. I’ve had an unhealthy amount of fun setting this up :). This will be a nexus where I talk about and comment on things that interest me, like music, technology, politics, etc. etc. Has anyone noticed that when I’m sick I get a ton of work done?

Editor’s note, Sept 2012: This was the first blog entry I made on a Movable Type-powered blog that used to live on matt.mullenweg.com. From what I can tell from the archives, I switched to B2 (a predecessor to WordPress) about four months later.

Five Publications I’d Love on WordPress

Automattic, WordPress

When WordPress started in 2003, I never dreamed it would power over 40% of websites, nine times the number two CMS, but I wrote on a notecard a list of five publications I admired and respected so much I wanted them to run on WP someday. In the interest of sharing your dreams to help them come true, here they are:

  1. Atlantic
  2. Economist
  3. New Yorker
  4. New York Times
  5. Wall Street Journal

And one bonus: Houston Chronicle. (Gotta root for the hometown.)

There has been uneven progress toward this over the years; we’ve gotten some of the NYT and all of the New Yorker at one point, only to have them revert under new CTOs. Also, there have been some unexpected huge wins, like when Vox Media retired its proprietary CMS Chorus and brought over amazing publications like The Verge and New York Magazine. For any projects related to these publications, including trials or micro-sites, I’d be happy to provide my feedback on architecture, design, and opportunities, and contribute Automattic and VIP resources wherever they could be helpful.

I believe the most crucial aspect to get right for these customers is real-time co-editing, which is on the Gutenberg roadmap and shipping soon. If I were writing this list today I might choose some different targets.

Business as Usual in The Information

Automattic, New York, WordPress

The Information wrote Business as Usual — Remotely, which includes “85% of its 900 employees working from their homes” Hashicorp, which just raised $175M at a $5.1B valuation today. (I have to get them on Distributed.) Here’s my part:

A survey of American workers by the polling firm Gallup found that in 2016 43% of employees worked remotely at least some of the time, up from 39% in 2012. Of those remote workers, almost a third spent 80% or more of their time working remotely in 2016, compared to 24% in 2012. In computer-related professions, 57% did some remote work in 2016, according to Gallup. 

That includes tech companies like Automattic, which makes WordPress and other software products and has been almost entirely remote since it was founded in 2005. At one point, it opened a large office in San Francisco for employees who preferred a more traditional work environment, but it got rid of that space in 2016 because of how little people used it.  

“We had this 15,000-square-foot place with only five people coming into it,” said Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, which acquired Tumblr last year. 

Now Automattic rents only one small co-working space in a WeWork suite in New York  and uses another small office in San Francisco exclusively for board meetings. It manages its remote workforce using Slack and Zoom and gives new employees $2,000 so they can purchase home office equipment. 

Employees can also get up to $250 per month for access to a co-working space or for daily coffees at a local coffee shop. But Mullenweg says only about 300 of the company’s 1,200 employees chose to work somewhere other than a home office.

“I hope there can be a silver lining to this crisis, which we all hope is over as soon as possible, that enables people to reexamine how they work and how they interact with things and improve it,” said Mullenweg. “I’m happy to spread the gospel wherever possible for distributed work. I think it’s better for companies, employees, the environment and the world. There are very few downsides.” 

The Information is a worthwhile subscription if you’re in the tech business.

Rolling Jubilee is a non-profit that takes donations to buy distressed debt for pennies on the dollar, and then abolishes it. Donate $100 and they can take $2,000 off someone’s back. Seems like an amazing random act of kindness, you’ll never know who you helped.