Automattic Grand Meetup 2014

Asides

Although Automattic is a fully distributed company with most people working from home in 197 cities around the world, we think it’s really important to meet in person as well and we bring the entire company together once a year. This year we went to Park City, Utah, and were blessed with amazing weather all week. We were right at the base of a mountain so there were beautiful trails for hikes and runs and gorgeous views no matter what direction you looked.

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There were all sorts of activities people did throughout the week from paintball to skydiving to a Magic: The Gathering tournament (I played for the first time in about 15 years) and morning running classes every day at 7 am. I went to a Crossfit class with about 15 colleagues. My body is sore but my heart is happy.

Myself and Joe

I’m really grateful that I get to work with the people I do, and on the problems that we work on together. It’s far from easy, in fact each year brings new challenges and I make mistakes as often as not, but it is worthwhile and incredibly fulfilling. A few hours ago I gave a closing toast and teared up looking around the room. So many folks that give their passion and dedicate themselves to jobs both large and small, visible and unseen, to help make the web a better place. A web that we want to live in. Here’s a vignette from when we were taking our annual family photo, it’s a goofy and crazy group of incredibly unique individuals that I hope to know and make things with for many decades to come.

Merchbar is an iPhone app that makes it easy to buy merchandise from your favorite artists. It also was the first investment I made through my Angellist Syndicate, and I’m excited for the team on its launch. (Although it’s good to remember that launching is a halfway point — you should expect to spend at least as much time as you did leading up to launch to get to something you’re happy with. Something I’m thinking about a lot in Automattic these days.)

Every second, somewhere in the world four babies and two WordPress blogs are born.

That great line comes from Shane Snow’s profile of myself, Automattic, and WordPress called “How Matt’s Machine Works.” If you’re interested in the latest on how Automattic works as seen from the eye of a journalist with a background in product and technology, check it out.

A few comments: Since it came out my colleagues have been making fun of me for “trolling.” 🙂 The term “benevolent dictator for life” goes back to at least 1995 and is common in open source communities. Our lounge in SF is now much nicer than the one pictured. We mostly use Slack instead of Skype. I would say my management style has changed quite a bit since when Scott was at the company. The end of the article nails it in that as Automattic has scaled, to 272 at latest count, it’s really the over 40 leads who keep things running as smoothly as they do, and many people in similar roles on the .org side.

Even with the above, the article is probably the best look at the things I’m involved with every day since 2009’s The Way I Work, so kudos to Shane and definitely check it out.

Ants Are Amazing

Asides

[A]ll of California’s Argentine ants belong to only four colonies. The largest, euphemistically named the Very Large Colony, contains hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of ants, and extends from the Mexican border to San Francisco. In the largest battles ever recorded, millions of ants die each month along this colony’s border with its rivals in San Diego County.

That’s from this article by Mark W Moffett that describes his book Adventures Among Ants.

In 2010 Wired took a cool look at Looting, Cannibalism and Death Blows: The ‘Shock and Awe’ of Ant Warfare.

Finally as a 2013 update, there’s a new boss in town, the Asian needle ant which is literally eating Argentine ants for lunch:

All ants essentially hibernate when wintertime hits, but the Asian needle ants “wake up before other ant species wake up,” Spicer-Rice explained.

This head start allows them to build nests, find sources of food, and start reproducing before the other ants get going.

Amazing ant photo by JĂĄnos Csongor Kerekes and CC-licensed.

Somebody once told me, “Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.” What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

— Steve Jobs

WordPress 4.0, code-named Benny, is now available. The response so far has been great, over 200k downloads in just a few hours. Today we celebrate, watch the counter, and tomorrow go back to work on 4.1. 🙂 For those following along at home, the 3.x series of WordPress was downloaded 300 million times.