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.
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:
Push and pull changes as a team by connecting a local Studio site to a shared WordPress.com site.
Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with one click.
Studio is an excellent tool to have in your development arsenal, and you can download it for free, explore the docs, and become a contributor on GitHub.
It’s a busy speaking season! I just spoke at the Intelligent Change summit, and will be at SaaStock in Austin on May 14, SXSW London, on June 4, Brilliant Minds in Stockholm, and WordCamp EU in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7.
I’m on my first United flight with Starlink, and wow! I ran a fast.com test and got 110 mbps down and 38 mbps up, which is insane. 28ms ping times. While flying! When you think of all of the engineering and technology coming together to let me blog this it’s really incredible.
Update 2025-09-16: United actually responded to my tweet about this. 😂
Entertainment at 35,000 feet has never been better (or faster)! ?
The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day.
Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we got to chat about the hero’s journey of entrepreneurship, my earliest “Hot Nacho” WordPress scandal and the context of current battles, 996 work, jazz clubs in San Francisco, and more. Kleiner never invested in Automattic (I don’t think we ever pitched) but I have always had huge respect for John Doerr, Brook Byers, Bing Gordon, Mary Meeker, Ilya Fushman, and Mamoon Hamid, so many of the people at KPCB. You can watch on YouTube or listen in Pocket Casts.
One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it.
Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions.
I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance (which became TikTok), Alibaba, Uber, DoorDash, Zoom, DJI (which changed the drone industry and argubly modern warfare), and many more I’m probably not even aware of.
When I first met Jeremy in 2014, I was amazed that a late-stage financial investor could understand Open Source so well, and he immediately grokked what Automattic was doing in a way that I think has little parallel in the world. (Today, it reminds me of Joseph Jacks at OSS Capital.) Deven Perekh of Insight Partners led Automattic’s 1.16B valuation Series C round, making us one of only forty “unicorns” (private companies valued over a billion dollars) at the time, and one of the reasons they beat out others as the lead of the round was that GIC/Jeremy was a LP of Insight so they could directly co-invest. GIC is so intensely private I couldn’t even mention them in the announcement at the time even though they were the catalyst for the round. Since then, Jeremy has become a close friend and advisor, and he even took me to my first Grateful Dead concert.
Eleven years later, this is his first podcast! Jeremy shares incredible alpha around China, AI and its adoption in the enterprise, how asset allocation is evolving, and at the end, a beautiful tie together of the Grateful Dead and Open Source.
Just last night I was re-watching Annie Hall to remember and honor Diane Keaton, and now the news that D’Angelo had passed. I’m writing this listening to Voodoo, one of the great albums of all time. That CD in my beater car in Houston was on constant rotation, the richness of the tracks— it’s an album you have to listen to in its entirety, it takes you on a journey, the way the tracks blend in to each other. Not ideal for the atomized world of songs being stand-alone.
D’Angelo was obviously a star, but one amazing thing about his bands is he brought so many people with him, so many amazing jazz musicians, including Roy Hargrove, Robert Glasper (HSPVA!), Chris Dave (HSPVA!), Kenny Garrett, Pino Palladino, Questlove… May his memory be a blessing.
WooCommerce 10.3 is out, just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with some nice improvements to the checkout experience, tracking cost of goods sold, and a new beta MCP server, “This new feature enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible client to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through a standardized protocol, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted store management and development workflows.” You can also help out in testing WordPress 6.9, which comes out on December 2nd.
If I’m slow on anything right now, I apologize. I’ve got some flu/Covid thing, so I’m operating at reduced capacity.
Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. This is partially our fault, as the article notes, because the UI for some of these settings is quite poor. We’re working on it! If you can tolerate a bit of UI clunkiness, there’s significant value to be gained from Jetpack right now. For everyone else, we’ll make it much more intuitive soon.
I just got off stage from the great dev/ai/nyc event with John Borthwick, we had a wide-ranging discussion that we’ll post online soon. We had hundreds of people in the room and hundreds on the waitlist… the energy in NYC is electric!
Fred Vogelstein writes on Crazy Stupid Tech: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? “To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then. We can both say unequivocally that the conversations we are having now about the future of AI feel exactly like the conversations we had about the future of the internet in 1999. “
