Every 6 Minutes

Design, WordPress.com

I’m at a dinner tonight and they have these old magazines on the table, including some old copies of WIRED, which, if you can imagine, as a kid in Houston in the 90s, was a portal to the amazing world of the internet and technology. I flipped through, and there is an entire web hosting classifieds section! Hiway Technologies wants you to know that every 6 minutes, someone hosts with Hiway.

Every six minutes, so they were doing 240 signups a day. 100,000 sites! Last month WordPress.com created a new site about every 3 seconds. Hiway was founded by Scott Adams, same name but not the Dilbert guy or the game designer, who apparently played football in Florida and the company “was sold in 1999 for $352 million. Adams was 35.”

There was also this guy, who has a website, but do you?

Post-Earthquake Tea Grit

Automattic, Press, Travel, Video, WordPress

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.

Battery Scan

Personal, Tech

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.

In addition to providing amazing graphics of these scans, they also gather some valuable data. Their Lumafield Battery Quality Report does a deep dive into lithium ion battery manufacturing, showing the wild differences between different brands.

I love this stuff, whether you call it QA, evals, testing, or whatever, it reminds me of Ray Dalio’s Principle to embrace reality and deal with it.

Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel

AI, Automattic, Friends, Open Source, Tech

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.

Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money!

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.

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. “

Find My Update

Personal

The best part about blogging is the comments, and after I posted “I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room.” Michael Wender and David Artiss jumped in that it’s already there!

Apple support says if you touch and hold it will flash the light! Now I haven’t been able to get this to work yet, perhaps because when I did, I got a notice that Precision Finding, which uses ultra-wideband (UWB) frequencies to help you find your phone or Airtag, which is magical, isn’t available in all regions. I’m currently stranded in St. Martin because of airspace issues with Venezuela, and apparently, this is one of the countries, like Indonesia, where UWB doesn’t work.

Update: Hours later, the press-and-hold thing now flashes the light, so it must have been a heisenbug.

Small Hit

Apple, Humor, Review

The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites:

Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Goodness! I would love to have a hit someday as the small as the ones Apple has had under Cook. Apple Watch sells more than the entire Swiss watch industry. Airpods are the most popular headphones in the world. Their market cap is bigger than the GDP of all but four countries in the world.