August 25, 2022 • 29 mins
Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress, the open-source software that powers more than 40% of all the websites in the world.
He's also the founder of a for-profit company called Automattic.
Matt's problem is this: How do you build a multibillion-dollar company on top of software that your competitors can use for free?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Maybe the most valuable thing that corporations create today
is software. Just look at Google or Microsoft, two of
the biggest companies in the history of the world, worth
trillions of dollars, and they're built largely on lines of
code that tell computers what to do. So maybe one
(00:37):
of the most surprising things about the way technology works
today is how much code people give away for free.
In fact, most of the web runs on open source software,
software that's free for anyone to use, tweak, adapt, and share.
The Internet maybe the most important engine of twenty first
(00:57):
century capitalism is built on top of this hippieish open source,
free to be you and me dream. I'm Jake Goldstein,
and this is what's your problem. My guest today is
Matt mullen Wick. In two thousand and three, Matt co
created WordPress, a piece of open source software people could
(01:19):
use to publish blogs. Today, WordPress power is more than
forty percent of all the websites in the world, hundreds
of millions of sites. Matt is also the founder of
a for profit company called Automatic. His problem is this,
how do you build a multi billion dollar for profit
company on top of software that anyone can use for free?
(01:43):
So what's WordPress? WordPress is an open source operating system
for the web. So what's that mean. It means that
if you want to have a home on the web,
a place that you call your own, call a website,
back in my website, and WordPress can power that. And
(02:07):
because it's open source and created by the community, it's
constantly getting better, so that when you choose WordPress, you're
kind of pitching your wagon to a horse that is
like on a really great path, and that a lot
of other people are contributing to. You know, we do
major new releases of WordPress three times a year, and
typically five hundred plus people work on every single release.
(02:31):
And how many of those people are getting paid to
work on the release About five so almost none almost,
So hundreds of people are doing it for free because
they love it, because they believe in it, because it's
useful to them. So developers don't like writing the same
code twice, right, So often what they'll do is, once
(02:52):
they've solved the problem, they'll create what we usually call
a library, so that the next time another developer says
needs to multiply two numbers together or combine, you take
an image and turn it into grayscale as an existing
function or library that does that, and you put it
(03:14):
out there and you publish it today on the internet.
You might publish that on repository like GitHub, which is
a place where a lot of people put open source code.
But regardless of how you put it out there, if
you're building something, now, a lot of what developers do
is Google, So they search, they say, okay, how to
(03:36):
turn an image to grayscale in Python, which is a
name of a language, or PHP, which is another programming language.
And then you'll see tutorials and you see code examples,
and you see all these sorts of things, and so
that becomes kind of the shared knowledge that we use
to compose larger and larger things. And what's nice is that,
(03:58):
you know, maybe the first person who had to turn
an image from color to grayscale, that took them like
five days to figure out, right, because you have to
look at all the color codes and then figure out
where that maps two on the gradient of zero to
one hundred of white the black. But now I could
just Google for thirty seconds, have a function, and have
(04:20):
that and then I move on to my next problem.
And so this is basically what all modern technology is
built on is people sharing what they've solved already and
future people being able to build on top of it.
I love it. And you know, if you think of
the like standing on the shoulders of giants metaphor, it's
like the shoulders get higher and higher really fast this way, right,
because everybody builds their little block and then puts it
(04:42):
out there and everybody can grab the next block. I
Mean a question I have is if somebody is spending
five days to learn how to do this one little thing,
turn a color image into gray scale, and they're working
for a for profit company, Like, why would that for
profit company give away the product of that five days
of labor that they just paid for. Well, maybe what
(05:04):
that company is selling is advertising and they don't really
care about you know, turning images from color to gray scale.
That's just something that was along the way, like a
Google like like google some code or you know and
scram filter. So I think that, Um, what's the motivation
(05:27):
for people doing open source? And it's fun again one
if you're a coder, by the way, it is so
cool to know that code you wrote is running billions
of times a day all around the world. That is
like actually kind of like characters I typed on my
keyboard or now being executed countless times all over the internet. Um,
(05:50):
that's kind of fun so that I don't know, maybe
there's a thrill in that. I don't know what you
would call that, like the joy of a crafts persons
seeing their work used. Yeah, so okay, So that's an
example of a thing that should be open source. Is
there any setting you can think of where it makes
sense for an visual or a company, for whatever reason,
(06:12):
to not make their software open source. Well, companies might
say that this is my secret sauce reasonably, so right,
Like that seems like a like a software company is
in the business of selling software in some instances, yea
or no? I mean, I don't know. Is it reasonable
to say it's their secret saucer? Do you think it's
always a bad idea? I hold no judgment for how
(06:35):
people choose to license their code, whether they choose to
make it proprietary or open. I have personally chosen to
devote my life like the past, you know, twenties on
the nears and however long I'm still able to produce
useful code to creating open things because I want to
(06:55):
be part of upgrading humanity. I want to be a
good ancestor. I want to make it so that the
generations after can benefit from the code I've read, the
things I've learned, the work I've done, and build on
it in a way that takes us to ever greater
(07:16):
heights versus having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
So okay, so that's the open source piece of it.
You've also built a big company that is for profit
that is adjacent, right, tell me about that. Yeah, So
I was having so much fun doing open source, I
had a question, maybe similar to what you said earlier,
(07:36):
which is like, how can I make a living doing this? Like,
you know, I love working with people and collaborating and
making this shared resource for humanity, but I still have
prosaic needs. I need to pay bills. So I started
to think of what could be a business around this.
So I found it a company called Automatic And basically,
(08:00):
we make add ons for WordPress. So we could sell
a plugin that enhances your WordPress, but that costs extra money.
We make it easy to run WordPress. So WordPress is
code that you can run yourself, but we can run
it for you and make it really easy. So we
charge for that, and then we've expanded into other services,
(08:23):
you know, around sort of creating more freedom on the
web and trying to allow people to express themselves, something
I personally get really jazzed about working on. And so
we have apps for podcasting in podcast we have apps
for journaling in day one, you know, for private encrypted
journals for publishing, and Tumblr and WordPress. So we're kind
(08:46):
of a little bit of a conglomerate now that makes
lots of software that we hope we can fill up
your home screen and more or less, how big is
the business? How big is automatic at this point? Way
bigger than I ever expected. Yeah, what started with me
and a couple of other folks just want to get
paid to work on WordPress. We're now about two thousand people.
(09:09):
And because we had this open source background of collaborating online,
we've actually been fully distributed from the very beginning. So
those two thousand people are actually in ninety seven countries.
You were remote forever for fifteen years, and then the
pandemic cam alogue in the world, for a very unfortunate reason,
sort of caught up with you. Yeah. So there's one
(09:31):
piece of it, when I've heard you talk about it
that is particularly interesting to me. You tell me if
I get it wrong. But it's this basic idea that
when you really get to a high level of this
remote or distributed work, people are mostly working asynchronous lee
so they don't have to be working at the same time.
And you talk about this idea of moving from a
(09:52):
sort of you know, synchronous conversation based work culture to
an asynchronous writing based work culture, and that seems like
a big hard leap to me. Like, I write for
a living, I wrote a book, I wrote for newspapers,
like I know how to write. But the idea of having,
you know, a fundamentally writing based relationship with my colleagues
(10:17):
rather than a fundamentally conversation synchronous conversation based relationship with
my colleague seems super hard. Like that leap seems giant
to me. So I'm curious how you've done it. There's
so much opportunity in the world just from taking something
that people take for granted and just take it off
(10:38):
the shelf and use it exactly as it is and
really breaking it down and questioning the assumptions. Yeah, I
know we've done it this way for one hundred years,
but what are we really trying to accomplish and is
there a different way we could accomplish the same thing
first principles they call that. Yeah, it's how we arrive
todays synchronous work. So, by the way, this is kind
(10:59):
of how open source works because right when there's people
all over the world working on a shared code base,
right the code exists on the Internet. Anyone can go
see it and make a change to it or propose
a change to it, and I don't need to be
there while they're doing that. So I think that's so
much of our particularly how we did information work kind
(11:22):
of inherited a corporate mentality from factories and you kind
of do it need everyone in the same building working
on the same car to like build the car. But
when I would walk through offices and just see rows
and rows of people with headphones on looking at their computers, Like,
why do they need to be in the same room
to do this? Yes, And what is the advantage of
them being in the same room. Well, there's a difference
(11:43):
between the same room and the same time, right, Like
I think I'm bought in on don't need to be
in the same room, But I'm struggling to make the
leap of not at the same time for a lot
of complicated communication. I really like to talk to people.
I could tell you're the right job. I suppose I'm
not a good right Literally, my job is talking to
(12:05):
people's syncreticy So maybe I'm the wrong person to evaluate.
So let me ask you this in terms of you know,
you've been doing this. You've been running a distributed company
for what fifteen years now more right, for a long
time time, So you know, I think you must know
things that would be useful for lots of people to learn.
Right now, lots of people are trying to figure out
(12:26):
things that you've spent seventeen years figuring out, right, So
is there some you know to be a little bit
reductive or didactic, just things you've learned that you want
to tell people who are just trying to figure out
how to do distribute at work that you learned the
hard way. I'll say one two things. One is a
(12:46):
subset of the other. So the first thing is, there
is so much benefit to invest in improving your writing.
Clarity of written communication as a superpower will multiply everything
you do. And you know written communication is and everything. Yeah,
(13:09):
but if you can you know, read a book about writing,
or edit your own writing as someone else to edit it. Whatever,
the processes that improves the quality of your your written
communication will pay back many fold. Just just to contextualize,
I mean, presumably the ideas written communication becomes profoundly more
important when you're working asynchronously, Right when you can't just
(13:33):
have a conversation with your colleague and you have to
write them a message. Yeah, the written word is really sticky.
We obviously have lots of options now, and there's still
something about the written word that can you know, move society.
You know, it can inspire you know a thousand, build
(13:55):
millions of people. It can you know, call people to
the ocean. It can call people to work, and call people,
you know, make them imagine a world beyond and live
their life in a totally different way just words on
a page. And yet I find the hardest written communications
for me in a work context. The place where I
most want to have a synchronous conversation is where there
(14:16):
emotional issues at play, when somebody's mad at somebody else
and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Like,
That's when I really want a synchronous conversation because the
tone and the subtext is what I find hardest to
get in written communication, the sort of emotional subtext and
(14:38):
like power dynamics, those are the things that I find
really hard in writing at work totally. Yeah. So, yeah,
that's a that's a good time to talk to someone.
I'm gonna I'm not gonna argue against that, and it
could be very valuable to see. You know. One thing
that's common for us is if we find we're typing
(15:00):
to each other a lot and you know, just getting
more and more worked up, it's a good time to
pick up the phone. Yeah. But writing is just a
upset of communication, and fundamentally, all all human problems are
are usually a function of communication. Yeah, right, the myth
of separation, this idea that we're not all connected, and
(15:24):
failures of communication are I think the source of all
human suffering. After the break, how Automatic competes against giant
for profit companies that also build on WordPress and Matt's
plans for Tumblr, the old social media platform that Automatic
bought back in twenty nineteen. That's the end of the ads.
(15:54):
Now we're going back to the show. So I'm curious.
I find it interesting in general to talk to people
about things they haven't figured out yet, the things they're
working on now but don't quite know. I'll say our
big problem. Yeah, you know, we talked a lot about
open source and the fun of contributing now, and you
said companies might not want to do that because they
(16:16):
want to keep their secret sauce or something. There's another
problem that happens, so open source can fail when it's
successful through something called a free rider problem. So imagine
if people got a lot of benefit from this open
source code, but they didn't improve it, they didn't give
(16:39):
back their improvements, and then the people who were working
on improving it, you know, didn't get any of the
benefit or money from it, and so they eventually just
gave up and worked on other things. Then that sort
of core would die. So I would say the big
problem of open source is how to close the loop
(17:00):
of people using it and contributing to it. So in WordPress,
for example, you can get WordPress from my automatic at
WordPress dot com. You could also get it from go Daddy,
or from blue host, or from Amazon or Google or
a lot of other places. And these companies will take
(17:22):
your money, but they won't put any of that back
into developing WordPress and just To be clear, GoDaddy is
using WordPress. They're taking the WordPress software that is created
by everyone in the world all the time, and they're
using it because it's open source and they can. But
they're not sort of part of this open source community.
They're just taking the software and selling it to me,
(17:45):
which is totally fine, allowed by the license, by the community,
by everything, and they're not breaking the rules. But but
so why is it a problem? What's the problem? I
guess another way they framed a problem would be that
the companies who are only motivated by profits, yeah, could
(18:08):
out come peat the companies that also can shibute back, right, Like,
at some point they could outcompete automatic. And so you've
built this thing and you are dedicating your life to
the open weab and open source, but they might I
don't know, execute better, be better capitalized and put you
(18:30):
out of business and sort of shut down the openness.
But one example is like by taking some of those
profits and investing in advertising, so now of a sudden,
they're buying Super Bowl commercials or buying ads on Google,
so that when you search for WordPress, you know, the
first four or five results aren't like actually the community,
(18:51):
they're so in paying to be at the top, and
so capital that gets capital that is happening, right, Like
go Toady had a Super Bowl ad. Yeah, so what
do you do about that? Well, I thought I could
go on podcasts and tell people about it and that
might help. Here we are, it's about a Super Bowl
at but it's what I got. Well, I think that
(19:13):
I think that people really care. So if they knew
about the philosophy and the community and kind of what
we're trying to create over the long term, that we're
trying to build software that's going to be around in
one hundred years, people would be excited to be a
part of that. And luckily, money can't buy love, right,
(19:34):
So there's forces in the universe and even in capitalism
far far stronger than dollars. And so essentially what we're
betting on is that those forces win in the long term.
But we also have to do a good job at
telling our story, at being out there, at sort of
making it easy for people who contribute and get involved.
(19:55):
If we don't do a good job there, WordPress will
fail and it will die and it will just be
you know, one of the thousands of open source projects
that have withered on the vine and died. But if
we get this right, it could be something that, you know,
a thousand years from now, they were running WordPress on
Mars or in other galaxies. That is good, big that's
(20:16):
a good big frame a word press in another galaxy,
like not even another solar system. Just go all the way.
Let's talk briefly about Tumbler. How's Tumbler going? You bought it.
I downloaded it for this conversation. I don't quite get it, Like,
can you help me get it? Help me love Tumbler.
(20:38):
Tumbler is a blogging system. It's a social network. It
was one of the original ones. It was quite good
under after it got bought for a billion dollars by
Yahoo in like twenty twelve, it was kind of mismanaged
and withered a bit on the vine. We bought it
to revive it, and part of why we bought it
(21:01):
was it turned out the kids are still there. So
Tumbler's primary demographic is thirteen to twenty four. So I
think always youth has wanted a place where their parents weren't,
someplace that was maybe a little even harder to figure
out it, kind of like Snap was in their early days.
So like not supposed to get it. The fact that
(21:22):
I don't get it as a feature not a bug.
I'd buy that. Well. I would say that the fact
that you don't get it right now is probably why
kids love it, ye or younger folks really like having
their own space. So essentially, by anchoring Tumbler on art
and artists, which was always kind of the core of it,
(21:43):
like people sharing their creativity, we're creating like a third space,
like a place that's not like you need to be
professional like LinkedIn, or be fancy like Instagram, but someplace
you can just go like, be weird, be creative, be yourself.
And it turns out the Internet wants that and needs
it now. Our challenge is running a social network is
(22:07):
both technically and shistically very difficult to make the algorithms
that show people what they want but don't inflame things,
to garden and curate the community so that it has
positive interactions but not like hate speech or violence or
anything like that. Is you know, you'll never here recriticize
(22:27):
Facebook for that because it is a really really hard
problem to do. Its scale. Tell me, so, you know,
tell me about the well, I assume I saw what
you said before that Tumbler is open source, I mean
sort of fitting into your broader galactic worldview, and what
does that mean? Right, So what does it mean to
(22:48):
have an open source social network and in what important
ways is it different from other big social networks along
that time? Tumbler was and is proprietary software when we
bought it. But what we're doing is we're actually switching
it to WordPress. So one of the projects, and it's
going to take years because it's it's big, is over
(23:09):
half a million blogs on Tumblr that we've got to
migrate over. So it's just a lot of data, a
lot of things support, but we're actually switching those all
to be power my WordPress underneath, and so those will
all be part of the open web as we do it.
So like in terms of whatever algorithms there are that
you know shows you content or serves you ads, like,
(23:30):
are those open or it will be Yeah, So that's
that's what that's what we're grading. We're relutely building that
right now. So you'll be able to see like why
am I getting served these certain things. You'll be able
to see exactly the code that's choosing which posts they're
served at the top for you and you'll be able
(23:51):
to choose other algorithms if you want, maybe create your
own and put it up there. That feels big and
exciting to me? Is it? And if so, why we'll
see you know. I mean, honestly, this hasn't been done before.
It's kind of new in society. But fundamentally, I want
people to have freedom and autonomy. And right now you
(24:14):
you know, you get whatever algorithm TikTok, Facebook, Instagram decide
to serve you, and that aligns with your interests to
an extent. It also aligns with their interests to an extent.
Like what will happen if we allow people to have
complete autonomy and choice there? Maybe it fails because people
say they just want to you know, see MPR New
(24:37):
Yorker articles. But you know, when TikTok serves them, you know,
the more like carbohydrates of information or entertainment, that's what
they actually choose. So they say they want to eat healthy,
but they really choose something, but don't plausible When you
put it that way, it seems plausible. Yeah, yeah, But
I mean naturally I could put you know, a thousand
(24:57):
candies in front of you and at some point you'd
stop eating them in a minute. The Lightning Round, including
a couple of things Matt thinks shouldn't be open sourced,
and his favorite feature on a very high end toilet. Now,
(25:21):
let's get back to the show. Let's do the Lightning round.
Given that you've been sort of, you know, building the
web in a pretty significant way for twenty years or so,
what do you think you understand about the Web that
most people don't. Something I understand about the Web that
most people don't is that we don't have to accept
(25:44):
things the way things are. It is eminently possible to
change it and modified, especially on the web, and it
can be so incredibly freeing. What's your favorite feature on
a total neores toilet? Definitely the heated seats nice. What's
(26:05):
something in the world that should not be open sourced?
Doesn't have to be software? Anything to me open source
you want to see more of. So if there were
technology for harming people, I wouldn't want that shared or
open source weapons, viruses, etc. Is right? Do you play
jazz saxophone? Is that right? Right? I did? Who do
(26:29):
you think is a particularly underrated jazz musician? Particularly underrated
jazz musician? Oh, give me a moment Jacob Collier. He's
actually seen as a little bit of pop musician. He
came up on YouTube and everything, but I think he's
(26:49):
one of the most talented instrumentalists alive today. Wow. Interesting good.
I've also read that you can type really fast using
the Is that the divor jack keyboard like the other keyboard?
That's like better basically? And I'm curious, are there other
sort of optimizations life hacks like that that you've done,
(27:13):
or there are other things where you've just done the
better way thing that most people don't do. Yeah, typing
is definitely a different Typing layout is something I'm glad
I invested in many years ago. You know. The other
thing is it just and technology. It really does benefit
you to update as frequently as possible, and so I'm
always surprised when I see people with an older phone
(27:35):
or computer or who have a ton of app updates
they haven't applied, especially when you think of how many
times you look at your phone and how much time
you spend on these tools. Assuming you do, I think
it is worthwhile to always invest in the latest and
greatest good. Okay, two more, what's one piece of advice
you'd give to somebody trying to solve a hard problem.
(27:58):
Unplug So just force yourself to be bored and sit
with it, Meditate, take a walk, but like remove yourself
from distractions. If everything goes well, what problem will you
be trying to solve in five years? I think how
to to manage and scale at ten thousand person plus organization?
(28:23):
How big is it now? Two thousand? So that's a
lot of growth getting from two to ten. It's a
big leap already. Dan Matt Mullinweg is the co creator
of WordPress and the founder of Automatic. Today's show was
produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered
(28:46):
by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Woldstin, and I would
love to know what you think of the show, what
you want us to do differently, What guests do you
think we should book? Please really please email us at
problem at pushkin dot fm. Once again, that's problem at
Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me on Twitter
(29:08):
at Jacob Wildstein. We'll be back next week with another
episode of What's Your Problem.
Pushkin. Maybe the most valuable thing that corporations create today
is software. Just look at Google or Microsoft, two of
the biggest companies in the history of the world, worth
trillions of dollars, and they're built largely on lines of
code that tell computers what to do. So maybe one
(00:37):
of the most surprising things about the way technology works
today is how much code people give away for free.
In fact, most of the web runs on open source software,
software that's free for anyone to use, tweak, adapt, and share.
The Internet maybe the most important engine of twenty first
(00:57):
century capitalism is built on top of this hippieish open source,
free to be you and me dream. I'm Jake Goldstein,
and this is what's your problem. My guest today is
Matt mullen Wick. In two thousand and three, Matt co
created WordPress, a piece of open source software people could
(01:19):
use to publish blogs. Today, WordPress power is more than
forty percent of all the websites in the world, hundreds
of millions of sites. Matt is also the founder of
a for profit company called Automatic. His problem is this,
how do you build a multi billion dollar for profit
company on top of software that anyone can use for free?
(01:43):
So what's WordPress? WordPress is an open source operating system
for the web. So what's that mean. It means that
if you want to have a home on the web,
a place that you call your own, call a website,
back in my website, and WordPress can power that. And
(02:07):
because it's open source and created by the community, it's
constantly getting better, so that when you choose WordPress, you're
kind of pitching your wagon to a horse that is
like on a really great path, and that a lot
of other people are contributing to. You know, we do
major new releases of WordPress three times a year, and
typically five hundred plus people work on every single release.
(02:31):
And how many of those people are getting paid to
work on the release About five so almost none almost,
So hundreds of people are doing it for free because
they love it, because they believe in it, because it's
useful to them. So developers don't like writing the same
code twice, right, So often what they'll do is, once
(02:52):
they've solved the problem, they'll create what we usually call
a library, so that the next time another developer says
needs to multiply two numbers together or combine, you take
an image and turn it into grayscale as an existing
function or library that does that, and you put it
(03:14):
out there and you publish it today on the internet.
You might publish that on repository like GitHub, which is
a place where a lot of people put open source code.
But regardless of how you put it out there, if
you're building something, now, a lot of what developers do
is Google, So they search, they say, okay, how to
(03:36):
turn an image to grayscale in Python, which is a
name of a language, or PHP, which is another programming language.
And then you'll see tutorials and you see code examples,
and you see all these sorts of things, and so
that becomes kind of the shared knowledge that we use
to compose larger and larger things. And what's nice is that,
(03:58):
you know, maybe the first person who had to turn
an image from color to grayscale, that took them like
five days to figure out, right, because you have to
look at all the color codes and then figure out
where that maps two on the gradient of zero to
one hundred of white the black. But now I could
just Google for thirty seconds, have a function, and have
(04:20):
that and then I move on to my next problem.
And so this is basically what all modern technology is
built on is people sharing what they've solved already and
future people being able to build on top of it.
I love it. And you know, if you think of
the like standing on the shoulders of giants metaphor, it's
like the shoulders get higher and higher really fast this way, right,
because everybody builds their little block and then puts it
(04:42):
out there and everybody can grab the next block. I
Mean a question I have is if somebody is spending
five days to learn how to do this one little thing,
turn a color image into gray scale, and they're working
for a for profit company, Like, why would that for
profit company give away the product of that five days
of labor that they just paid for. Well, maybe what
(05:04):
that company is selling is advertising and they don't really
care about you know, turning images from color to gray scale.
That's just something that was along the way, like a
Google like like google some code or you know and
scram filter. So I think that, Um, what's the motivation
(05:27):
for people doing open source? And it's fun again one
if you're a coder, by the way, it is so
cool to know that code you wrote is running billions
of times a day all around the world. That is
like actually kind of like characters I typed on my
keyboard or now being executed countless times all over the internet. Um,
(05:50):
that's kind of fun so that I don't know, maybe
there's a thrill in that. I don't know what you
would call that, like the joy of a crafts persons
seeing their work used. Yeah, so okay, So that's an
example of a thing that should be open source. Is
there any setting you can think of where it makes
sense for an visual or a company, for whatever reason,
(06:12):
to not make their software open source. Well, companies might
say that this is my secret sauce reasonably, so right,
Like that seems like a like a software company is
in the business of selling software in some instances, yea
or no? I mean, I don't know. Is it reasonable
to say it's their secret saucer? Do you think it's
always a bad idea? I hold no judgment for how
(06:35):
people choose to license their code, whether they choose to
make it proprietary or open. I have personally chosen to
devote my life like the past, you know, twenties on
the nears and however long I'm still able to produce
useful code to creating open things because I want to
(06:55):
be part of upgrading humanity. I want to be a
good ancestor. I want to make it so that the
generations after can benefit from the code I've read, the
things I've learned, the work I've done, and build on
it in a way that takes us to ever greater
(07:16):
heights versus having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
So okay, so that's the open source piece of it.
You've also built a big company that is for profit
that is adjacent, right, tell me about that. Yeah, So
I was having so much fun doing open source, I
had a question, maybe similar to what you said earlier,
(07:36):
which is like, how can I make a living doing this? Like,
you know, I love working with people and collaborating and
making this shared resource for humanity, but I still have
prosaic needs. I need to pay bills. So I started
to think of what could be a business around this.
So I found it a company called Automatic And basically,
(08:00):
we make add ons for WordPress. So we could sell
a plugin that enhances your WordPress, but that costs extra money.
We make it easy to run WordPress. So WordPress is
code that you can run yourself, but we can run
it for you and make it really easy. So we
charge for that, and then we've expanded into other services,
(08:23):
you know, around sort of creating more freedom on the
web and trying to allow people to express themselves, something
I personally get really jazzed about working on. And so
we have apps for podcasting in podcast we have apps
for journaling in day one, you know, for private encrypted
journals for publishing, and Tumblr and WordPress. So we're kind
(08:46):
of a little bit of a conglomerate now that makes
lots of software that we hope we can fill up
your home screen and more or less, how big is
the business? How big is automatic at this point? Way
bigger than I ever expected. Yeah, what started with me
and a couple of other folks just want to get
paid to work on WordPress. We're now about two thousand people.
(09:09):
And because we had this open source background of collaborating online,
we've actually been fully distributed from the very beginning. So
those two thousand people are actually in ninety seven countries.
You were remote forever for fifteen years, and then the
pandemic cam alogue in the world, for a very unfortunate reason,
sort of caught up with you. Yeah. So there's one
(09:31):
piece of it, when I've heard you talk about it
that is particularly interesting to me. You tell me if
I get it wrong. But it's this basic idea that
when you really get to a high level of this
remote or distributed work, people are mostly working asynchronous lee
so they don't have to be working at the same time.
And you talk about this idea of moving from a
(09:52):
sort of you know, synchronous conversation based work culture to
an asynchronous writing based work culture, and that seems like
a big hard leap to me. Like, I write for
a living, I wrote a book, I wrote for newspapers,
like I know how to write. But the idea of having,
you know, a fundamentally writing based relationship with my colleagues
(10:17):
rather than a fundamentally conversation synchronous conversation based relationship with
my colleague seems super hard. Like that leap seems giant
to me. So I'm curious how you've done it. There's
so much opportunity in the world just from taking something
that people take for granted and just take it off
(10:38):
the shelf and use it exactly as it is and
really breaking it down and questioning the assumptions. Yeah, I
know we've done it this way for one hundred years,
but what are we really trying to accomplish and is
there a different way we could accomplish the same thing
first principles they call that. Yeah, it's how we arrive
todays synchronous work. So, by the way, this is kind
(10:59):
of how open source works because right when there's people
all over the world working on a shared code base,
right the code exists on the Internet. Anyone can go
see it and make a change to it or propose
a change to it, and I don't need to be
there while they're doing that. So I think that's so
much of our particularly how we did information work kind
(11:22):
of inherited a corporate mentality from factories and you kind
of do it need everyone in the same building working
on the same car to like build the car. But
when I would walk through offices and just see rows
and rows of people with headphones on looking at their computers, Like,
why do they need to be in the same room
to do this? Yes, And what is the advantage of
them being in the same room. Well, there's a difference
(11:43):
between the same room and the same time, right, Like
I think I'm bought in on don't need to be
in the same room, But I'm struggling to make the
leap of not at the same time for a lot
of complicated communication. I really like to talk to people.
I could tell you're the right job. I suppose I'm
not a good right Literally, my job is talking to
(12:05):
people's syncreticy So maybe I'm the wrong person to evaluate.
So let me ask you this in terms of you know,
you've been doing this. You've been running a distributed company
for what fifteen years now more right, for a long
time time, So you know, I think you must know
things that would be useful for lots of people to learn.
Right now, lots of people are trying to figure out
(12:26):
things that you've spent seventeen years figuring out, right, So
is there some you know to be a little bit
reductive or didactic, just things you've learned that you want
to tell people who are just trying to figure out
how to do distribute at work that you learned the
hard way. I'll say one two things. One is a
(12:46):
subset of the other. So the first thing is, there
is so much benefit to invest in improving your writing.
Clarity of written communication as a superpower will multiply everything
you do. And you know written communication is and everything. Yeah,
(13:09):
but if you can you know, read a book about writing,
or edit your own writing as someone else to edit it. Whatever,
the processes that improves the quality of your your written
communication will pay back many fold. Just just to contextualize,
I mean, presumably the ideas written communication becomes profoundly more
important when you're working asynchronously, Right when you can't just
(13:33):
have a conversation with your colleague and you have to
write them a message. Yeah, the written word is really sticky.
We obviously have lots of options now, and there's still
something about the written word that can you know, move society.
You know, it can inspire you know a thousand, build
(13:55):
millions of people. It can you know, call people to
the ocean. It can call people to work, and call people,
you know, make them imagine a world beyond and live
their life in a totally different way just words on
a page. And yet I find the hardest written communications
for me in a work context. The place where I
most want to have a synchronous conversation is where there
(14:16):
emotional issues at play, when somebody's mad at somebody else
and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Like,
That's when I really want a synchronous conversation because the
tone and the subtext is what I find hardest to
get in written communication, the sort of emotional subtext and
(14:38):
like power dynamics, those are the things that I find
really hard in writing at work totally. Yeah. So, yeah,
that's a that's a good time to talk to someone.
I'm gonna I'm not gonna argue against that, and it
could be very valuable to see. You know. One thing
that's common for us is if we find we're typing
(15:00):
to each other a lot and you know, just getting
more and more worked up, it's a good time to
pick up the phone. Yeah. But writing is just a
upset of communication, and fundamentally, all all human problems are
are usually a function of communication. Yeah, right, the myth
of separation, this idea that we're not all connected, and
(15:24):
failures of communication are I think the source of all
human suffering. After the break, how Automatic competes against giant
for profit companies that also build on WordPress and Matt's
plans for Tumblr, the old social media platform that Automatic
bought back in twenty nineteen. That's the end of the ads.
(15:54):
Now we're going back to the show. So I'm curious.
I find it interesting in general to talk to people
about things they haven't figured out yet, the things they're
working on now but don't quite know. I'll say our
big problem. Yeah, you know, we talked a lot about
open source and the fun of contributing now, and you
said companies might not want to do that because they
(16:16):
want to keep their secret sauce or something. There's another
problem that happens, so open source can fail when it's
successful through something called a free rider problem. So imagine
if people got a lot of benefit from this open
source code, but they didn't improve it, they didn't give
(16:39):
back their improvements, and then the people who were working
on improving it, you know, didn't get any of the
benefit or money from it, and so they eventually just
gave up and worked on other things. Then that sort
of core would die. So I would say the big
problem of open source is how to close the loop
(17:00):
of people using it and contributing to it. So in WordPress,
for example, you can get WordPress from my automatic at
WordPress dot com. You could also get it from go Daddy,
or from blue host, or from Amazon or Google or
a lot of other places. And these companies will take
(17:22):
your money, but they won't put any of that back
into developing WordPress and just To be clear, GoDaddy is
using WordPress. They're taking the WordPress software that is created
by everyone in the world all the time, and they're
using it because it's open source and they can. But
they're not sort of part of this open source community.
They're just taking the software and selling it to me,
(17:45):
which is totally fine, allowed by the license, by the community,
by everything, and they're not breaking the rules. But but
so why is it a problem? What's the problem? I
guess another way they framed a problem would be that
the companies who are only motivated by profits, yeah, could
(18:08):
out come peat the companies that also can shibute back, right, Like,
at some point they could outcompete automatic. And so you've
built this thing and you are dedicating your life to
the open weab and open source, but they might I
don't know, execute better, be better capitalized and put you
(18:30):
out of business and sort of shut down the openness.
But one example is like by taking some of those
profits and investing in advertising, so now of a sudden,
they're buying Super Bowl commercials or buying ads on Google,
so that when you search for WordPress, you know, the
first four or five results aren't like actually the community,
(18:51):
they're so in paying to be at the top, and
so capital that gets capital that is happening, right, Like
go Toady had a Super Bowl ad. Yeah, so what
do you do about that? Well, I thought I could
go on podcasts and tell people about it and that
might help. Here we are, it's about a Super Bowl
at but it's what I got. Well, I think that
(19:13):
I think that people really care. So if they knew
about the philosophy and the community and kind of what
we're trying to create over the long term, that we're
trying to build software that's going to be around in
one hundred years, people would be excited to be a
part of that. And luckily, money can't buy love, right,
(19:34):
So there's forces in the universe and even in capitalism
far far stronger than dollars. And so essentially what we're
betting on is that those forces win in the long term.
But we also have to do a good job at
telling our story, at being out there, at sort of
making it easy for people who contribute and get involved.
(19:55):
If we don't do a good job there, WordPress will
fail and it will die and it will just be
you know, one of the thousands of open source projects
that have withered on the vine and died. But if
we get this right, it could be something that, you know,
a thousand years from now, they were running WordPress on
Mars or in other galaxies. That is good, big that's
(20:16):
a good big frame a word press in another galaxy,
like not even another solar system. Just go all the way.
Let's talk briefly about Tumbler. How's Tumbler going? You bought it.
I downloaded it for this conversation. I don't quite get it, Like,
can you help me get it? Help me love Tumbler.
(20:38):
Tumbler is a blogging system. It's a social network. It
was one of the original ones. It was quite good
under after it got bought for a billion dollars by
Yahoo in like twenty twelve, it was kind of mismanaged
and withered a bit on the vine. We bought it
to revive it, and part of why we bought it
(21:01):
was it turned out the kids are still there. So
Tumbler's primary demographic is thirteen to twenty four. So I
think always youth has wanted a place where their parents weren't,
someplace that was maybe a little even harder to figure
out it, kind of like Snap was in their early days.
So like not supposed to get it. The fact that
(21:22):
I don't get it as a feature not a bug.
I'd buy that. Well. I would say that the fact
that you don't get it right now is probably why
kids love it, ye or younger folks really like having
their own space. So essentially, by anchoring Tumbler on art
and artists, which was always kind of the core of it,
(21:43):
like people sharing their creativity, we're creating like a third space,
like a place that's not like you need to be
professional like LinkedIn, or be fancy like Instagram, but someplace
you can just go like, be weird, be creative, be yourself.
And it turns out the Internet wants that and needs
it now. Our challenge is running a social network is
(22:07):
both technically and shistically very difficult to make the algorithms
that show people what they want but don't inflame things,
to garden and curate the community so that it has
positive interactions but not like hate speech or violence or
anything like that. Is you know, you'll never here recriticize
(22:27):
Facebook for that because it is a really really hard
problem to do. Its scale. Tell me, so, you know,
tell me about the well, I assume I saw what
you said before that Tumbler is open source, I mean
sort of fitting into your broader galactic worldview, and what
does that mean? Right, So what does it mean to
(22:48):
have an open source social network and in what important
ways is it different from other big social networks along
that time? Tumbler was and is proprietary software when we
bought it. But what we're doing is we're actually switching
it to WordPress. So one of the projects, and it's
going to take years because it's it's big, is over
(23:09):
half a million blogs on Tumblr that we've got to
migrate over. So it's just a lot of data, a
lot of things support, but we're actually switching those all
to be power my WordPress underneath, and so those will
all be part of the open web as we do it.
So like in terms of whatever algorithms there are that
you know shows you content or serves you ads, like,
(23:30):
are those open or it will be Yeah, So that's
that's what that's what we're grading. We're relutely building that
right now. So you'll be able to see like why
am I getting served these certain things. You'll be able
to see exactly the code that's choosing which posts they're
served at the top for you and you'll be able
(23:51):
to choose other algorithms if you want, maybe create your
own and put it up there. That feels big and
exciting to me? Is it? And if so, why we'll
see you know. I mean, honestly, this hasn't been done before.
It's kind of new in society. But fundamentally, I want
people to have freedom and autonomy. And right now you
(24:14):
you know, you get whatever algorithm TikTok, Facebook, Instagram decide
to serve you, and that aligns with your interests to
an extent. It also aligns with their interests to an extent.
Like what will happen if we allow people to have
complete autonomy and choice there? Maybe it fails because people
say they just want to you know, see MPR New
(24:37):
Yorker articles. But you know, when TikTok serves them, you know,
the more like carbohydrates of information or entertainment, that's what
they actually choose. So they say they want to eat healthy,
but they really choose something, but don't plausible When you
put it that way, it seems plausible. Yeah, yeah, But
I mean naturally I could put you know, a thousand
(24:57):
candies in front of you and at some point you'd
stop eating them in a minute. The Lightning Round, including
a couple of things Matt thinks shouldn't be open sourced,
and his favorite feature on a very high end toilet. Now,
(25:21):
let's get back to the show. Let's do the Lightning round.
Given that you've been sort of, you know, building the
web in a pretty significant way for twenty years or so,
what do you think you understand about the Web that
most people don't. Something I understand about the Web that
most people don't is that we don't have to accept
(25:44):
things the way things are. It is eminently possible to
change it and modified, especially on the web, and it
can be so incredibly freeing. What's your favorite feature on
a total neores toilet? Definitely the heated seats nice. What's
(26:05):
something in the world that should not be open sourced?
Doesn't have to be software? Anything to me open source
you want to see more of. So if there were
technology for harming people, I wouldn't want that shared or
open source weapons, viruses, etc. Is right? Do you play
jazz saxophone? Is that right? Right? I did? Who do
(26:29):
you think is a particularly underrated jazz musician? Particularly underrated
jazz musician? Oh, give me a moment Jacob Collier. He's
actually seen as a little bit of pop musician. He
came up on YouTube and everything, but I think he's
(26:49):
one of the most talented instrumentalists alive today. Wow. Interesting good.
I've also read that you can type really fast using
the Is that the divor jack keyboard like the other keyboard?
That's like better basically? And I'm curious, are there other
sort of optimizations life hacks like that that you've done,
(27:13):
or there are other things where you've just done the
better way thing that most people don't do. Yeah, typing
is definitely a different Typing layout is something I'm glad
I invested in many years ago. You know. The other
thing is it just and technology. It really does benefit
you to update as frequently as possible, and so I'm
always surprised when I see people with an older phone
(27:35):
or computer or who have a ton of app updates
they haven't applied, especially when you think of how many
times you look at your phone and how much time
you spend on these tools. Assuming you do, I think
it is worthwhile to always invest in the latest and
greatest good. Okay, two more, what's one piece of advice
you'd give to somebody trying to solve a hard problem.
(27:58):
Unplug So just force yourself to be bored and sit
with it, Meditate, take a walk, but like remove yourself
from distractions. If everything goes well, what problem will you
be trying to solve in five years? I think how
to to manage and scale at ten thousand person plus organization?
(28:23):
How big is it now? Two thousand? So that's a
lot of growth getting from two to ten. It's a
big leap already. Dan Matt Mullinweg is the co creator
of WordPress and the founder of Automatic. Today's show was
produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered
(28:46):
by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Woldstin, and I would
love to know what you think of the show, what
you want us to do differently, What guests do you
think we should book? Please really please email us at
problem at pushkin dot fm. Once again, that's problem at
Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me on Twitter
(29:08):
at Jacob Wildstein. We'll be back next week with another
episode of What's Your Problem.
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