More Tiger Secondary

Automattic, WordPress.com

It’s only been a few months since May when Tiger Global led a round purchasing about $50M of Automattic stock from existing shareholders, but they are back and have led a $75M purchase of Automattic stock, this time entirely from our early investor Polaris. (There were a few individuals in the first round, and ICONIQ joined investing in this round.)

Read also: Evelyn Rusli in the Wall Street Journal “Tiger Global Ups Investment in Creator of WordPress.com”.

Until now Polaris had been Automattic’s largest investor, and second largest shareholder. Mike Hirshland wrote the biggest checks in our 2006 and 2008 rounds (the only primary capital Automattic has raised) and served on our board until 2011 when he left the firm and we were lucky to be joined by Dave Barrett. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of spending time and getting great feedback from a number of people associated with the firm including Ryan Spoon, Bob Metcalfe, Steve Arnold, and Alan Spoon. Although they’ll no longer be on the board Polaris will continue to be a major shareholder, retaining about a third of their stake. Now that Automattic has been locked in as a win for their portfolio I hope they’ll continue to be involved for many years to come.

I’m glad to be even more fully aligned with Tiger. I think it says a lot to their excitement in the company that just a few months after joining the family and learning more about the company they significantly increased their stake, and at a significant bump in valuation. Their deep resources, market experience, and long-term outlook make them an ideal partner for the next phase of Automattic and the continued growth of the WordPress ecosystem. What we’re building will take time and it won’t be easy, but things worth doing seldom are.

This news comes in a fun week generally: Scott Berkun’s book about Automattic is out today and getting rave reviews, WordPress.com just passed Yahoo in the US Quantcast rankings (and that doesn’t include custom mapped domains), we’re relaunching Simplenote for iOS 7 and Mac after the Android update last week, WordPress is on the cusp of cracking 20% of websites, we just announced a partnership with Eventbrite, and this Wednesday I’ll be on stage at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there, and if you’d like to join in on the mission of democratizing publishing Automattic is hiring.

Burning Man 2013

Essays, Gallery

I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2013. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. It is probably the most visually stimulating place on the planet for the week it goes on, but I resisted the temptation to take too many photos and just tried to take it all in. I was mostly successful, here are some snaps I couldn’t resist taken over the course of a few days.

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I’m really excited about the launch of WordPress.com Connect. Yes Facebook et al offer similar APIs and have more users, but there are two key differences. First is Automattic is not an advertising-driven company, so our priorities around users are different than ones who are. Second is that these APIs are the basis for interacting with any element of an entire website hosted on WP.com or not, meaning themes, widgets, posts, content, CSS… any company that does something that ultimately ends up on a website should be looking at the APIs on developer.wordpress.com and pushing us where there isn’t one yet.

Business Insider has a fun article on Automattic’s Awesome Remote Work Culture. Includes some quotes from me about how we work, including “Rather than being anti-office, we’re more location agnostic” and the top five meetup locations so far (Lisbon, Portugal; Kauai; San Francisco; Amsterdam; Tybee Island, Georgia).

3.6 and State of the Word

WordPress

3.6 has been released and has a groovy video to go with it:

It’s been a busy week, WordCamp San Francisco 2013 went off without a hitch. Here’s the State of the Word presentation, which covered quite a bit of material and talks about the plans for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8:

And here’s the question and answer session:

There was a pretty good summary of the presentation in infographic form. A bit more about this next week, and some more announcements in store as well.

Jay Z + Me

Gallery, Personal, WordPress

I think it was Dustin Curtis who said something along the lines of “you can learn a lot about someone by their bucket list,” and he had posted his publicly recently. (Posting it is a great idea by the way, people will help you with it.) I began to think about mine, which was a little strange because I’ve been trying to move away from desiring things or experiences and just be more grateful in the present, but immediately a few music ones came to mind: have WordPress name-checked in a major hip-hop song, be in a rap video, and perform with one of my favorite artists (somehow).

It was less than a week later I got an email from a friend who was helping organize a hush-hush event where Jay-Z would sing his song Picasso Baby over and over 6 hours while interacting with various artists and an audience as a performance piece, and there might even be an opportunity to be one of the people he interacted with. My jaw dropped.

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