Hiring For Distributed Companies & Angel Investing: This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis

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Hey everybody, welcome to Angel, the podcast I do as part of This Week in Startups, where we talk to angel investors, early stage investors about how they make their decisions, what companies they've invested in, what lessons they've learned. So you can— well, if you're a founder, you can learn how to hack the system and get their money. And if you're an investor, hey, maybe you can get some of their best practices and become better at investing in companies. Or if you're just a fan of tech, you can learn how we make the sausage here in Silicon Valley in the tech industry. I'm really excited to have a very old friend of mine, Matt Mullenweg, who I knew when he was but a wee pup, 17 or 18 years old in 2003. He was a little developer. I don't know what city you were in. Were you in Canada or something or Houston? Where were you?

Houston, Texas. Houston, Texas.

He's my hero.

I think we met at South by Southwest.

We did meet at South by Southwest, and he came up and pitched me, "Hey, I want you to use our software for Weblogs, Inc. and Engadget." I was like, "Listen, kid, that's great, but I have Brian Alvey, and he's making Blogsmith. He's a genius. I don't need your software." But that software was WordPress, and he's been working on it now for 18 years. Can you believe you've been working on the same open source project for 18 years? And welcome to the program.

Thank you so much. It's good to chat again. I feel like we do this like once every 5 or 10 years.

It's basically what I've realized is I think the last time you were on was 2013, episodes 361 and 362. We had to break it into 2 back then because the files were getting too big and people were on low-speed connections. So anytime we went over an hour, we had to make it 2 files because people's iPhones would crap out downloading them. Now it's just like, ah, whatever. You know, they're on 5G. You could send them the HD 4K video and then You were on, you ready for this? Episode 26 in December of 2010. What an amazing run you've had. Yeah, it's crazy. People don't know also though that you are what I would refer to as a super angel. What's a super angel? Well, in my definition, it's people like Howard Lindzon, Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman, Elad Gil, Dez Traynor, and David Tisch, who were the first 6 episodes of this series. And then batting cleanup, we'll have Garry Tan, Paul Judge, and Joanne Wilson. Just a collection of investors who've done 50, 100, 200 investments and have been doing it, generally speaking, for over 10 years, in most cases 20. When you look at angel investing, which you do on the side, how did you first become aware of angel investing as a practice? And when did you make your first angel investment? Do you remember?

I don't remember.

Well, it's so long ago that you raised money for WordPress, you must have raised an angel round, right? Or did you go straight to institutional?

We did do an angel round and it was interesting for the first round there. I did speak to folks like Jeff Clavier, Marc Andreessen, as well as the institutions that we ended up having leading the round, like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, Tony Schneider, folks who I still work with today actually, which have been pretty exciting.

That's first round? I'm sorry, I'm not first round.

True Ventures.

True Ventures. I always get them too superimposed. They were early stage. And even at that time, you mentioned you spoke with Marc Andreessen, who long before Andreessen Horowitz, people don't remember, was making $50K to $500K investments in startups post-leaving AOL, correct?

It was before his blog though, so it wasn't really clear what a genius Marc was, at least to an idiot kid like me. So I wish I'd taken his money then, but we ended up not connecting at that time. For me, angel investing was very much a way to get back. I mean, when I I feel so incredibly lucky that some of those folks who I just mentioned, like Tony Conrad, Tony Schneider, Phil Black, were some of the first people introduced me by Om Malik when I was essentially fresh off the bus from Houston to San Francisco. And they really took me under their wing and helped me avoid a lot of the bad things that can happen to companies and steered me towards working with great folks and building a business in a highly ethical way that can be for the very long term. So when I then later had some of my own money, and even before then just being an advisor, I just wanted to pay it forward because I had gotten so much of a benefit from these early folks who really had no reason to help me, but they did anyway. I was like, "Well, not really for a money-making thing, but just to help entrepreneurs and other people that seem like they're trying to make things better or areas that I wish I could work on myself." Investing was a fun way to do so.

It's a really interesting observation that I think is lost on many people in a bubbly moment like now, frothy, however you look at it. And you've now been through two of these cycles, uh, since you got into the industry. You came into the industry right after the dot-com bubble burst, but you obviously were here for the Great Recession and now this incredible run-up. But people forget, in Silicon Valley, the expectation of angel investors were probably gonna lose your money. Mm-hmm. But you're going to support people, and it's almost like a donation or a way of just paying it forward, right? It's almost like in that era, 2003 to 2010, it was as much about charity and ecosystem building as it was returns, correct?

And I still think of it that way largely. Wow. We do make some larger— so today, again, my primary gig is I'm the CEO of a company called Automattic, which is about 1,400 people now. And that is, uh, it takes really all of my time. Um, my volunteer gig is running the WordPress.org open source project. So angel investing kind of fits in between the cracks there. But one thing that's been nice is, uh, I have been able to do some much larger deals actually through Automattic. So we've made investments up to $30 million in companies. And basically applying a lot of the people I know and things I've learned doing some of the more individual investing can essentially act as an institution on the Automattic side for for larger or later stage rounds, which has been really nice. And anything that's potentially a conflict with anything Automattic does, I never do personally. I always just do through the company, even if it's like a $25K check, just because I don't want any potential conflict there.

And there can be conflicts because everybody pivots into everybody else's business, it seems, over time. I invested in one Clubhouse-like audio experience, and then one of my other companies pivoted into it. And so I was like, okay, well now here we go again. Everybody pivoting into everybody else's, uh, business. Let's talk a little bit about Automattic while we have you here. I remember when I was at AOL, um, there were a bunch of people looking at maybe buying Automattic from across the entire industry, and that was in the 2006, '07, '08 range. You turned down all those offers. Here we are, With all these companies going public, what is the state of Automattic? You've got all these employees, 1,400 of them. The company's worth a couple billion dollars from what I understand. And now we have all these SPACs. The company's obviously making tens of millions of dollars. What's the outcome here? You've been at it for 17 years. Is it going to be a private company forever, or are you going to finally bite the bullet and do a SPAC? I mean, the SPAC people must be banging your door down. How many SPAC promoters call you a week? Talk about 17 of them asking for an introduction in my inbox. Yeah.

I've spoken to a number, and Atiba's engaged with a lot more. A lot of people involved with some of these SPACs are really, really high-quality folks. So when you get—

For sure.

Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the names that come to mind are probably similar. So always good to talk to. In terms of Automatic's trajectory is, you know, the private funding markets have been extremely kind to us. We do regular secondary. So if we have any early investors that that want out for whatever reason. Um, yeah, I've probably raised, I don't know, 400, 500 in secondary. So we've been able to really reset the clock for a lot of our early investors. And, um, and you know, relative to other things that people can put their money in, Automatic is, it's a really, really interesting place to have it in terms of the growth rates, scale, everything's at now. So with existing investors, there is not necessarily a strong push for anything but being an independent company.

That's fascinating.

Going forward, some of our automatics are structured a bit like a holding company. So I could imagine that some of our subsidiaries would be big enough to be public on their own.

Really?

Well, really starting this year. Wow. So that might be something that happens in the future where almost like an IAC, there could be a holdco with equity separate from one of our subsidiaries.

What are the main subsidiaries of I mean, you have Tumblr that you guys wound up buying from Yahoo. Seemed like Yahoo didn't know what to do with it and they went through a bunch of changes when they got bought by Verizon.

It was from Verizon, yeah, by the time we got to it. Yeah.

They're like, "Huh, we don't know how to run this. Consumer content is a little bit challenging." Which ones do you think would spin out?

The best way to think about Automattic's business is there's a consumer subscription business and the anchor there is really WordPress.com and Jetpack. There's an enterprise business that we call VIP. That's where I believe we host your site.

Yeah, I'm on vip.kalicanis.com.

Yeah, we need to get your blog in more, but that's anything from that site to like the New York Post runs on that. All Facebook sites run on that. There is an e-commerce business, the anchor brand there being WooCommerce. And then finally an advertising business, which Tumblr is probably the most well-known. So yeah, each one of those is reaching a really interesting scale. I would say particularly enterprise and e-commerce as being something that in the past We raised money from Salesforce about 18 months ago. They put in $300 million into the company. That's largely around the enterprise side of the opportunity with WordPress. We're seeing more and more folks, yeah, replacing things they were spending millions of dollars on a year for things they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a year and doing way better, including Salesforce itself. And then on e-commerce, I mean, everyone's seen the huge tailwind there. I think we've publicly said that, Last year, $20 billion of GMV went through WooCommerce. So there's a lot of goods being sold through it, and that's doubling year over year.

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You know, I'll make an old-school analogy since we're both— think of WooCommerce to Shopify like WordPress is to like Typepad.

Got it. So more advanced.

I don't know if you got that, but.

More advanced is what you're saying? Like a newer version of it, like a refresh?

So WooCommerce is built on WordPress. It's totally open source and it's 100% customizable from the top to the bottom. So versus a SaaS service, like a Typepad or Shopify, you can control every line of code, every customer interaction, every pixel on the checkout page, every email everyone gets. You don't have to pay a tax if you want to use alternative payment providers like Affirm. Like, so there's, there's really complete control and flexibility. So, you know, people— it doesn't mean you're not going to still list on Etsy or an Amazon or something like that as a possible channel, but for the— your direct-to-consumer, where you're— they're coming to your website and you're having direct relationship to them, WooCommerce provides the most flexibility of anything on the market. Maybe the only thing close would be other open-source e-commerce like Magento.

Got it. So that would definitely be a great spin-out. But then you built all these things together. Why not take the whole thing out and go public with the whole thing? Too confusing?

Maybe that's a good option.

Do you want to run a public company and be under that level of scrutiny? I've always seen you as somebody who's head down, likes to build. That seems to be the big complaint of people who've been private for a long time is, "Oh my God, what a headache to be public, to deal with public markets, going on CNBC, doing quarterly things." Is that something you would want to do personally, or would you rather have the life you have as a private company?

My role is so public-facing already because leading the WordPress open source project is thousands of volunteers, millions of developers and users. It wouldn't be that big a difference for me.

I have lots of friends.

Or people, builders who run companies. Tobi at Shopify is an amazing example. Drew from Dropbox. There's so many great examples where you can still stay very connected to the product and the building while being a public market CEO. It's not something that personally bothers me.

How about you?

Would you ever run a public company?

I don't think so. Running companies is so hard. I find I really like the position I'm in as essentially a full-time investor. I mean, I still run inside.com as a CEO. But I've got a pretty strong management team there running it. But running companies is hard. And the companies I like to run are media companies, which are probably the hardest. And so it's almost like to be a media executive in today's environment is just like signing up for being the captain of a ship that has to go around Cape Horn every day, the bottom of South Africa. It's just too hard. It's just like, it's like being an explorer or an astronaut or something like that. You're just— chances of death are almost certain and pain is certain. Media companies are just too hard. And I love media companies, but way too hard.

Which probably means it's the best time to invest in them, right? Because the time when everyone's like, oh, media's done, it's not too hard, it's etc. It's, uh, which I mean, you're always ahead of the curve too, so the fact that you're doing it, it's probably a good sign.

What I've done is I've basically swapped out journalists for researchers and hired analysts and researchers because what I found was from the blogging days, journalists really took the craft of writing and being objective seriously. And then I think I was talking to one of the team members at Weblogs and they were like, "We caused this problem." And I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Well, we did a lot of opinion stuff on blogging and in Gadget and Autoblog and Joyce taking all these things. And we added opinion. And then a lot of writers, a lot, especially a lot of young writers and next generation writers, were like, well, I want to give my opinion. I don't want to just report on something. And so now you've got a generation where nobody wants to report on something. You know, people want to either be like a Trump superfan or, you know, a Bernie Sanders superfan, but they don't want to write a story down the middle about Biden or, you know, or, or be objective about either side. They just want to pick a side. And so it's made it I think, very hard to do the journalism that I love, you know, which is objective reporting. And, you know, you tell all sides of the story and try to get closer to the truth. Now it's advocacy, and that makes it hard, I think. I mean, you did it too. I mean, blogging did it. I mean, once people realized they didn't need a publisher, editor oversight, you know, just say whatever you want, and, you know, that's great in some ways, but it's also good to have an editor. It's also good to try to, you know, be a reporter and just report it straight. But that doesn't drive page views. I don't know how you feel about it.

I haven't met a single writer, or any of my own writing, that hasn't been vastly improved by really great editing.

There you have it, folks.

And I see this sometimes when people go independent, like especially at the very beginning, it gets a little wonky, and then usually they get an editor. It's not that you need an editor, it's a sign of weakness. It's that Engaging your ideas with another human just improves them every single time.

So that is a very important observation, which is talking to a human will help you clarify your ideas, and writing is a forcing function for having clarity of thinking, right? Like, when you write something, you have to really examine your own thought process and your own logic, right?

And it's great, you know, even Paul Graham essays, at the bottom of every single one he says, "Thanks for feedback on this from..." and then he lists like 10 amazing people.

Yeah, so he's like, "Okay, is that a humble brag, a dunk?" But it's just the nature of his, uh, the— I think it's the nature of his, the circle he runs in, having been there early.

It's what I love about your, um, your All In podcast, that if you ever have guests on, I'd love to go on.

Yes.

Because you can see each person on that podcast making each other's thinking better in real time. And it's very unfiltered and candid. And it's actually probably one of my favorites right now.

Oh my God, thank you for saying that. It's really interesting. Like, people are like, wow, I love your podcast. I'm like, oh, thanks. They're like, yeah, I just started listening to All In. I'm like, you ever listen to This Week in Startups? They're like, what's that? I'm like, well, just did 1,200 episodes of that for the last 11 years. But okay. It's like being like I was on some sitcom for 10 or 11 years, and then I'm on like Game of Thrones or something, or some like very high profile instead of the, the niche podcast. Uh, but it— yeah, podcasting is also a good way to do that when people build on each other's. Look, going back to your portfolio, what was— you know, I'm looking at it right now and it's very nice on your website. Um, Audrey, as in Hepburn, CEO Audrey.co.

It was in fact inspired by Audrey Hepburn.

Really? Did you have a crush on her, or is there something specific about Audrey Hepburn?

I think just, um, you know, from a young age, just, uh, seeing some of those old movies and just loving both what she represented on screen, which is like a timeless elegance and grace, but also as I began to learn the story of her entire life She's someone who in a time when celebrities weren't as impactful as they try to be now, really got involved with the United Nations and helping lifting up, using her stature to lift up a ton of issues and people. And then just also lived her personal life in such a beautiful way. I don't know, maybe I probably have an idealized version of Audrey Hepburn, but I couldn't think of someone better to to be inspired by the namesake.

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DailyBurn was, I think, Well, one, Tony Conrad had two exits in those first 10 investments, which was both Fear and About.me. He got really good at selling things to AOL. Yeah, like you.

Like me. Yeah, I sold some two things to AOL as well. Yes.

You know, that kind of 2010, for me, 2010 was an interesting year. WakeMate, I think, was one of the first investments made on YC. Oh, not YC. It was one of the first investments made through AngelList. Wow. And was the check I gave to Whitmate, and it ended up like literally exploding. The device had like a USB charging error, and it was a YC company. But then SendGrid later went public and merged with Twilio, so that was amazing.

Of course, that's an amazing one. You were in the angel round of that?

Yeah.

What kind of return would that get? Um, 100x? 1,000? I guess it depends on when you sold.

Yeah, I guess it depends on when I sold, but—

or did you sell? Are you still holding all your Twilio shares?

I, I'm a big fan of Twilio still.

So you still own your shares, or did you sell those? Uh, that's a hard decision. You sold some shares?

Yeah.

How do you think about that, when to exit? Because you, you get in so early, and, uh, yeah, how do you think about that?

I would say prior to 2018, I would often not hold, I would sort of sell at different places, particularly if it were a public company which I wasn't as familiar with, like MakerBot sold to Stratasys, which was a public company. It was also a really good exit. That was probably a 40 or 50x. SyncGrid probably ended up being higher. But the, Now I'm very much like I'm at a point in my life where I don't need to sell as much anymore. So I'm more inspired by like a, uh, guys like a John Doerr or Steve Jurvetson that basically has never sold a public share of stock.

Let your winners ride.

And so let those winners ride. Steve approaches that, he'll donate stock. From his investments, but never sells them. And I think I'd like to try that for the next decade, just see what happens there. Yeah.

Let your winners ride is something Sachs said he learned this whole time because he's kept selling when companies went public. He's like, "Okay, I'll just do more private company investing." But some of these companies, when they have escape velocity, it's very hard to stop them. I mean, they can be stopped. Obviously, Yahoo and AOL had challenges, but even in those cases, those were 30-year stories, and they still exist to a certain extent now. Still have billions of users, I think, combined for Verizon, which is really weird.

And if I think of every time I've sold, either on secondary or once a company's gone public or been acquired by a public company, I regret every time except for one or two. So it's like a 95%, uh, hindsight, I would probably do something differently with the knowledge I have now.

But in fairness, we really haven't had a severe down market since you started. You started in earnest really in 2008, 2009.

Are you saying everyone looks smart in a bull market?

Well, we do. Yes, of course.

No, we all look smart.

But I mean, we— I've seen— I remember Fab.com pitched me and they were going to do a gay social network, and I logged in and I was like, wow, this thing is popping off, like, what a great idea. Um, and then Jason emailed me and said, I'm going to change it to do like flash furniture sales because I guess Van Privé and Guilt Group and everything were the rage, and it ran up. I said, "I'm out. I'm going to pass. I don't want to be in the furniture business or whatever. Thank you." Then it went up to $1 billion. I felt really stupid because it was like a $10 million valuation. Then I knew somebody who had owned a large percentage of it, and they were flying private and doing all this great stuff. They thought they had a $50 million position, and it went to zero. The whole thing just came apart. People can get caught up because they might be taking loans against those holdings and then— Yeah.

Yeah. I think that brings up something that I definitely learned early on was just try to keep your personal burn rate low. And where I struggle the most with there is I love supporting companies and investing. So it's actually my biggest thing is it's not that my lifestyle gets so expensive, it's that I put every possible dollar I have into mostly private market investments, which at some point in my 30s, I was like, "Hey, I really need to shift this a little bit towards things that aren't just crypto or private companies." What are your thoughts on crypto?

We both got exposed to it very early. My wife bought a bunch of Bitcoin at under $100, so she's got the best-returning investment in the family, and I have the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh investments.

But she now has the number one.

It doesn't, but I like to say it does. So I guess it would be if she bought it $100, um, it's $47,000 now or something. Yeah, so that's 470 times, right? If it was 5 times, that would be $500. 10 times would be $5,000. Yeah, it's 100 times. Yeah, so she's probably over 100x, but yeah, no, that doesn't come close to actually Uber. Now that I think about it. Um, but she did do fabulously well on it. What are your thoughts on it now? Because it does seem like it's having another moment, but I wonder, like, nobody's really using crypto for anything. I guess we have our first use case— non-fungible tokens— other than money store and speculation. So what do you think?

NFTs are also kind of speculative.

You think somebody just bought a $6 million painting on an NFT or a video or something?

I saw Yeah, it's like a GIF or something.

It's a GIF, right? A $6 million GIF.

It's crazy, but not that much crazier than other things that we spend money on. Art, baseball cards, cars.

That's crazy, too. That's crazy, too. I guess collectibles.

You know, late-stage capitalism is a weird place to be.

It is very weird.

We're definitely in a strange thing. But I am bullish from just purely a technical point of view on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Shiba Inu.

Which piece of it, as a technologist, which technical pieces of it do you find the most interesting? Is it the immutable blockchain? Is it the distributed, nobody, no central server or control? What is the piece that you find most fascinating in all of this?

My life's work is really around open source. And I think when open source touches any area of our life, it vastly disrupts it and improves it. And that's been the story of WordPress for CMS. It's happening with WooCommerce and e-commerce, you know, Wikipedia with, with encyclopedias, and I think Bitcoin with many parts of finance.

Yeah.

And it's sort of children and grandchildren as well. So the, to me, the open source is the fundamental thing, and other things like distributed ledger, you know, all that kind of follows from that open source approach. One of my big worries in the world right now is the balkanization of the internet, the nationalization of— everyone's going to have their equivalent of the Chinese firewall.

You mean countries or companies or both?

Both.

Really?

What's the difference?

I figured that out in my head. I was like, yeah, the nation-state of Google or Alphabet or the nation-state of China. Turns out Google has more users than China has citizens.

Yeah, it's true for Facebook and others as well. They still nominally are regulated by the countries where they do business in, but as they start to shift their muscle more in Uber-like ways of influencing policy, we'll see how long even that continues. I forgot the question.

I think we were just talking about what we like about— What about this distributed nature to it where nobody controls it? Is that— Plus and minus. Plus and minus. What's the plus to it? What's the minus to it?

The plus is that's how the internet should work. The minus is that bad actors can have 100-to-1 impact on messing up the system for others. So imagine like email and spammers. Or any online service including the ones we run and people trying to abuse it for search engine spam or things like that. In the fight against bots, most internet companies take a much more cavalier approach than we typically do with our properties because it makes all the numbers look good. I would not be surprised if 20 or 30% of followers on Twitter are are spam.

Oh, they totally are.

Um, so all of our number— and that compounds, of course, over time. So everything looks smaller on our properties, but we are really, really good at keeping spam out. It's actually the first service I launched was called Akismet, and it's— it was essentially a machine learning approach to anti-spam that we still run today and is highly, highly, highly effective. But it does make some business metrics look worse than it would otherwise.

So if you're running Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and the public markets are obsessed about how many people use the service, you get to— if, I don't know, some spamming group in India decides they're going to run 10,000 accounts— you get 10,000 users counted. And it's not in your best interest to shut them down because that might be If you grew 1% this week, that could be 1% of your weekly growth. So why stop it?

Also, what the spam bots are typically doing is engaging with real accounts in a way that incentivizes real users to be more engaged. It feels good when you get the likes and the retweets and everything. And the really good ones don't have bots.

So it's making it even more pernicious. Yeah.

If you or I can tell it's a bot within 10 seconds of looking at it, it's not a good one. The really smart ones are using, you know, generated faces. They have real links, real bios. They're retweeting things. They're probably starting to apply things like GPT-3 to create real sounding content. So, you know, the good bots, you can't really tell without seeing the backend or other characteristics of their behavior on the network.

As someone who's invested in over over 250 startups and advised many more, I want to talk to you about a serious pain point that we see all the time, and that's reducing your burn. You need to conserve your capital, you need your money to go far so that you get time for product-market fit. How much money are you spending right now on various software products, and how much time does it take to integrate all of them? Let me take a guess, way too much is the answer. And Because of that, Odoo is here to help. Odoo is a suite of business apps that run your company on one platform. If you're currently using a Frankenstack of individual software solutions that aren't talking to each other, then you're wasting time, energy, and money. Odoo streamlines your workflow by bringing all that information together. Your workday can be more productive because Odoo's integrations eliminate repetitive tasks and data entry. Plus, if you only need 2 or 3 apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you need to pay for. Odoo won't stick you with a bill for apps you don't use. Your first app is free forever, and right now Odoo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. That's no joke, $1,000 right now. All you have to do is go to odoo.com/twist. That's odoo.com/twist to get that $1,000 credit. How do you think this should be solved ultimately? Do you think we move to a system like in Korea where if you want to have an account you have to put in your Social Security number and driver's license and be more authenticated? You have— I guess Twitter is now, you know, confirming phone numbers and email, so it's a little bit more friction. What are your thoughts?

I hope not, right?

Yeah.

Um, I'm a big believer in pseudonymous speech the importance of things that might be minority views today actually being on the right side of history. And it's happened so many times we can think of in the civil rights movement and other things. So protecting that space is really, really important. And balancing that with countering abuse is, I would say, the most difficult problem humanity is facing in general, whether that's through political realms, whether it's preventing child abuse materials. All of these problems are incredibly hard. And this is why I never pile on to any of the large social networks who struggle with this, including Facebook, et cetera, just because the bad actors are constantly changing their approaches. And so addressing the improper use of these tools is really, really, really, really difficult.

Why hasn't anybody come up with a peer-to-peer version of podcasting— I'm sorry, podcasting— of publishing? And have you thought about creating that? So we've had, you know, we have Bitcoin. Nobody can stop it. I mean, you could ban it, you create laws against it, but you can't really stop it. It's too— it's too many servers out there. Same thing happened with BitTorrent, just impossible to stop. I mean, you can make it illegal to use, you can prosecute people, Has anybody ever made a version of WordPress that is serverless and across, you know, peers? And have you, have you created that or thought about that? And then does that come with it too many problems for a corporation to engage in because it's uncontrollable?

It's funny because the, the uncensorable part of Bitcoin is, was created to solve a problem that hasn't happened yet. Essentially governments banning it, which, um, you know, I would also be fascinated to know the number of active users of Bitcoin that are not going through a Coinbase or equivalent, right?

So even though it's decentralized, people have chosen to use centralized Balkanized places because they want those services— security whatever bundle they put around their wallets.

I honestly don't know if I'd recommend most people run their own wallets, although I know that would be controversial in the cryptocurrency world. Much better to trust a Coinbase with it from a security, upgradability, all sorts of reasons too. Now with publishing, does making something uncensorable, is that a real issue that most people have?

No.

For all of the the whining about, you know, Trump conservative voices or other people not being able to publish. Is that something that most people are ever going to run into, despite what they say? Um, no. And in fact, the terms of service on almost everything is, is pretty, pretty broad, especially American-based companies. And when people make a big deal of something getting blocked, as actually someone, a conservative site, did recently on WordPress, they're typically doing it to raise money or gain some other form of support. It's not an actual censorship, like their voices are being silenced in a way that they won't be able to be heard. So you end up with, by and large, the strongest users of these systems being actors for whom their activity would be deemed illegal or not part of what's allowed. And some of that's on the right side of history, and some of it probably a free society operating with a social contract would say yes, that is not allowed. Clearly, we would define as criminal activity. Yeah.

And hate speech, which I guess some people feel is their right and other people feel is hate speech, and then there's gradients of you saying mean things and versus hate speech. And then you have to deal with this every day when you have a conservative publication that you choose not to provide service to. In this case, you mentioned one of them. What do you think of the fact that when I guess it was Parler was basically— they weren't doing policing. And then even AWS, like the system level, was like, we don't even want to host your app. What did you think of that? Was that a moment where you thought, wow, this is kind of like they're being banned from the internet if they can't use this cloud service?

Yeah, but they're back now, right?

So I guess— did they find— I guess they found another Host.

It's another provider. So I typically believe that the closer you are to the wire, the more open, meaning like, are you like providing IP addresses or bandwidth or things like that? The more open you should take to like essentially defer what's allowed or not to society and the legal system. For us and most, people often conflate hate speech with calls to violence. And for us, you can actually say really, really terrible things on WordPress that myself and every other employee of the company would strongly disagree with. But unless you're calling, like, a call to violence type action, we're happy to let people publish dumb ideas and for people to respond to them and refute them and, you know, the marketplace of ideas to work itself out there. And so, but when it gets in the calls of violence, I think we've seen with the Capitol insurrection and many other things, like, how that can turn into something really, really nasty really quickly. And also how even the threat of that can silence speech very quickly. How many times have we heard of a really gifted commentator or something getting weird threats or stalkers or other things online that essentially drive them from sharing their wisdom and their knowledge and their research with the world?

It doesn't take a lot of that to drive people away. Were you caught up in the Trump thing? Did he have servers on WordPress and did you have to take him down. Because, because it did seem like if Trump was allowed to continue tweeting during that period of time, more people might have died because people were taking his fight like hell comments— I hate to make this political here, but that's just— he seemed to know exactly how to dance up along the line of like, well, I didn't actually tell them to murder anybody, I just told them to fight like hell, and if you don't fight, you don't have a country. And people did feel like he was pushing them towards— or some group of people really took that as a call to arms. They literally brought guns, they brought body armor, they, they took it as a call to arms. And he just seems so insincere, and he's like such a stress test. Like, he knows that he's pushing the envelope, and he knows— this is my take on it— he knows they're going to misinterpret it. He knows that what they're going to do, but he also knows that then he can claim, "Well, I didn't exactly tell them." So he's kind of like—

plausible deniability.

Yeah, you got the plausible— he's like the perfect troll, you know.

And that's what people do, not just Trump, but anyone who's like sort of looking at the rules of a system and saying, "If you follow these rules exactly, what I did was totally allowed." Um, the— I like to think— have you ever read the Foundation sci-fi series by Asimov?

Of course. Yeah, I didn't read it, but I know.

I think of Trump as the mule, right? The exception that broke all the systems and proved where we had sort of gaps or weak points in our norms, in our legislation and everything. I mean, we forget that so much of the internet is governed essentially from telecom legislation from the '40s and the '30s. It's ridiculous how outdated and how much we could honestly use new laws and regulations that takes into account how the internet and modern speech in society works. It's also weird that like the leader of the free world was fomenting these like non-democratic autocratic things.

So yeah, nobody ever brought the terms of service where their attorney went, okay, so now what if the President of the United States had 100, 250 million followers and he decided to incite an insurrection on the day the election was certified?

Go!

Like, terms like, what? Well, what if aliens came down and they said something hate speech while they were giving us the cure to cancer. Like, would you ban them? And it's like, wait, I'm sorry, aliens are coming from— it's like nobody expected the president to incite violence. That just makes no sense that somebody would be able to get the job who would do that, but yet here we are.

I think we took it for granted post-Arab Spring and other things where we saw social media impact the politics and future of countries that some of the downsides of that wouldn't happen here. And I very much sympathize when they— when Twitter or someone said like, hey, the rules don't apply to necessarily the president, right? Like, because there's some newsworthiness to his, uh—

And I agreed with that call. You agreed with that call, right? Like, you can't ban the president until he— and he just kept pushing it and pushing it, and people were like, we have to ban the president. I'm like, you can't ban the president of the United States from tweeting. Come on, that's ridiculous. He's the president. I know you don't like him, he might say things you don't like, he's the president. And then of course he's like, okay, he gave them a perfect off-ramp in a way by inciting violence because that was one thing where nobody wants to have blood on their hands.

And I do wonder if sort of the rules have been more evenly applied years earlier, if that would have raised other questions sooner that probably in conversations we probably should have been having in, in 2018, 2019.

Well, that's an interesting counter.

It's impossible to to know. Like I said, I have a ton of empathy for the difficulty of these types of decisions. I don't envy a Zuck or a Dorsey there. This is really, really hard to navigate, especially when you're also a public company and there's all sorts of other things happening.

Well, you don't want to alienate a third of your user base that's ardently Trump supporters, etc. Called him the mule. I, I've been calling him the trolley car problem. He's, you know, like the trolley car problem was like, do you kill this baby and the mom, or do you kill these 6 adults and these are their ages, and you go do the math of what's morally correct? And it's like, there might not be a morally perfect answer here of banning the president or not. Did you see they're going to be sending it to an oversight committee that Facebook has organized? What do you think of this, like, kind of third-party funded by big tech court of appeals, if you will. A place to go if you do get banned to have a bunch of intelligent ethical thinkers decide if you should have your account reinstated.

It's not a bad idea, but it is a reflection of the extreme dysfunction and lack of our ability to legislate or create systems in government where really these things should live. The Social Contract, at least in the United States, is like the consent of the governed. We agree to monopolize violence and other decision-making elements of justice to elected officials, institutions. We give that away in return for expecting certain accountability, transparency, fairness, and those things. And any private body, no matter how well-intentioned I think is less good than a well-functioning government entity trying to do the same thing. Now, many, including I think some of your co-hosts on All In, would disagree with the well-functioning part or even the idea that something like that could be well-functioning, but it's very possible.

Let's talk a little bit about the pandemic. You pioneered work from home and remote work. I remember when you were scaling up Automatic, you had these like sort of co-working type spaces where all these employees could go if they wanted to, or they could work from home. And yourselves and 37signals and considered like odd companies for doing this. Then the pandemic comes around and 100% of people adopt it, and 100% of people say they're— I would say almost 100% of people say they're more efficient taking out their commutes, etc. What do you think life looks like? You know, we're taping this in month 12 of the pandemic, in fact, and we literally are, you know, 2 weeks away from the 1-year anniversary of people going into shelter-in-place in most cities. What do you think the world's going to look like in 6 months when everybody's got their shots and are back to work in at least the United States and Europe?

Yeah, the numbers aren't quite 100%, I think it's typically, but it's more than half. Generally people prefer the flexibility of what they've experienced of working from home. I think that will go up once people are able to work from anywhere. Right, so part of my favorite part about working in a distributed fashion in the past, and that's really how we built Automattic from the ground up, as you mentioned, was being able to work from Japan for a month or go to coffee shops or, you know, even just the idea that you're not forced for your social network to be your colleagues. You can, you know, really build a robust social network of folks you choose to connect with. And that could be around local sports or volunteer organizations or religious institutions or anything else that sort of gives you that, that sense of community, not just where you happen to work. So I'm very, very excited to see the post-lockdown world of what I call distributed work. It was weird for me because I just started like The Distributed.blog podcast. I was planning to make this my advocacy for the next 5 to 10 years.

Right. Everybody was like, "No, we got it. We're in. We buy it." Yeah.

It's actually made the podcast kind of tricky where now I'm like, "Okay, everyone's doing it. Here's how to do it well." Actually, my last guest was Jack Dorsey, who's sort of put a strong stake in the ground saying—

Tell me the name of this podcast. I wasn't even aware you were doing it. What's this podcast called?

It's called The Distributed Podcast with Matt Mullenweg, and it's at distributed.blog. .is one of the TLDs.

How many have you done? Then what's the consensus when you talk to leaders about this? How has their thinking changed? Because a company like Twitter made this incredible destination and they spent an enormous amount of time, money, cycles thinking about, "Hey, here is our mothership. Here's how we're going to have collisions." Then you have Apple building the the literal mothership, and you have Benioff putting a giant— largest building, I'll just leave it at that. Put it this way, San Francisco's got a giant finger up to the sky that you can see from San Francisco Airport, SFO. It's kind of weird. What is the general thinking now from that group of people who absolutely did not buy into this?

I'll tell you what I'm hearing privately. Yes, yes, I think that that, um, you know, some of these companies have invested literally billions of dollars in real estate.

Wow, billions.

And a very small percentage will, I think, triple down on that. Apple probably being one of them.

And Google, maybe Facebook.

Yeah, Google's— I think a larger— the, the thing in the middle will be some sort of hybrid where, to be honest, colleagues do want to see each other. And I can very much imagine this could actually be bullish for WeWork. More things like meetups, which has been a big part of our culture, where wherever the team is, they fly together for a week, work together, brainstorm, share meals, etc. And so office space that maybe previously was dedicated towards cubicles or places that people don't really want to be can now start to go to collaborative spaces or bring in users or hosting events or things like that. And I think that that doesn't need to just be in the most expensive cities in the world like the San Franciscos and New York. Actually, the Birminghams and the other countries and the Whistler. Nashville.

Miami.

There's so many great places you can go that when people can kind of go anywhere are both cost-effective and more fun to be in. That's my expectation. It actually makes me incredibly bullish for all these companies that have the largest investments in real estate to start to shift that either to the bottom line or towards investing in their employees in other ways. That's interesting.

All that money and effort could be redeployed. Anybody working in these crazy facilities groups that were managing buses and commutes— I always felt this was the sign of something had gone perversely wrong in the Bay Area when you would get on the 280 or the 101 and you would see these giant luxury buses taking people from a city to the country, the suburbs.

The suburbs, yeah.

And it's like, wait a second, you're, you're paying the most expensive rents in the world in San Francisco, like Hong Kong level rent, $4,000 for a 2-bedroom, $4,500 for a 2-bedroom, not a great one by the way. And then taking a bus for an hour plus each way to Apple, Google, and Facebook. And it's— and you're getting paid.

Once you get there, yeah, campuses are so large that you're on video conference most of the day anyway because you don't have time to get in between the buildings in between meetings.

I never even thought about that. So it's completely ridiculous. You're literally taking a video conference from your desk. So you're commuting for 10 hours a week to do video conferencing from your desk. Here's a mind-blowing statistic. 42% of the American workforce continues to work remotely according to Upwork, and an estimated approximately 27% will still be working home through 2021. Yeah, I— this is the thing I'm hearing privately. Let's do a little private talk. This is what I'm hearing on the— this way you and I don't have to say it, uh, but I'm hearing there's a big fear in that it used to be, you know, if you were really talented, sure, you could work from home if you could get a seat at 37signals or at Envision or at Automatic, but there really weren't that many choices, right, to work from home. And now these big companies are like, oh, wait a second, if Twitter and Jack is saying you pick how you want to work, we just added a really good option. What if somebody is a just transcendently good sales executive or product manager, and now instead of going to Facebook or Google or Apple, they'll go to Twitter or Square because Jack is saying you can work from Nashville for half the year and Austin for a third of the year and Malibu for 10% of the year or whatever, we're not going to be able to compete for top employees. So it's almost like a prisoner's dilemma.

Totally true, by the way.

Is it?

Why would the best employees in the world choose so little autonomy in a third of their day or more that they spend working? By the way, I also think it's so hypocritical when some of these most office-based companies— I'm going to talk about Goldman because I think recently said they're all going to go back to the office.

Goldman Sachs is all going back to the offices.

Great. As soon as possible.

Except for the CEO.

What about the CEO? I don't know him personally, so I'm not speaking to anything. How much time would they spend in the Hamptons or in Florida or internationally or things like that?

Private jets.

I really think it's going to come from all levels of the company. I hear from top executives, like, gosh, their lives are so much better and they're just as effective. And I'm hearing from the talent, the people actually doing the work, they're like, hey, like, I'm going to take the job wherever it allows me to do this. So I think it's going to come from really every level of the company. The strongest resistance is coming from middle management. That's actually why I created the, the podcast, was to talk about the best practices.

Because why does middle management find this is so hard to deal with?

Because it's different from what has made them successful their entire career. You know, you could run a 20-person team, a 100-person team, a 500-person division in an in-person way. The CEO of Google, by the way, has been working this way forever. Like, if you're running 10,000 people, really above 1,000 people, you're already pretty distributed in the way you work. But for smaller, that kind of middle, that kind of like 20 to 500, Um, most of the town or the market has done this in, in person.

So they know how to do a stand-up, they do a lunchy meeting, they do 3 meetings a day, and then all of a sudden the meetings that they were setting up are happening in a Slack room and they get resolved in a chat or on a Notion page or in a Slack group or after a quick Zoom or a quick audio-only, you know, Google Hangout or whatever. And it actually isn't the truth that maybe they're not needed? And that's the actual fear, is that maybe you don't need to have a GM of that group. Maybe you need a lot less people. Because this is what I found when we went remote. I found out where the dead weight was real quick. And I know a lot of other founders I've talked to, when they moved to remote, they just figured out all of a sudden who was productive and who wasn't. Because there were people in the office who were great culture in the office They were great meetings, but maybe a lot of that was performative. And then when you actually look to contribution, when you take out their performance in a meeting, when you take out their performance as a co-worker taking people, you know, out for culture walks or whatever, maybe they actually weren't doing anything or doing anything that moved the needle.

I feel like you're much more responsible, you're much more graceful than I am. What's exciting to me about this isn't that necessarily a job isn't needed, but that that time can then be redeployed towards something which can be even more customer-centric. Something that can move the needle. That again makes me very bullish on every information technology company. Not just— was it Dropbox that just publicly took a $500 million write-down of their real estate or something? Oh, they did? Wow. I think Pinterest paid like $90 million to get out of their lease.

Yep.

So there's some big things happening. I'm getting the numbers wrong, so yeah, but there's something—

you're directionally correct. There was a big kill fee for them, and then I just heard, uh, you know, in a news story that Uber might be not moving into their amazing new HQ, or not all of their HQ, at the Staples Center. What do you think happens to San Francisco? You spent a lot of time here. You were here during the booms and such a wonderful city and so many great memories. But let's face it, you know, the Tim Ferriss and, you know, Chris Sacca and, you know, whatever era that we were all involved in the Bay Area is kind of over, is it not? And what do you think happens to this, you know, once central part of the industry?

That's a good question. I would argue that even prior to all of this, um, there was almost like a jet-set version of where people were congregating. So maybe it was at one of your events, and then it was at the— was it the Slush Conference or Web Summit, or, you know, there'd be kind of TED, you know, there was kind of like a circuit which was actually quite global where regardless of where you were, you could connect with people. And that's honestly what I did because I moved back to Houston in 2011. Most people didn't even realize because they'd seen me at all this stuff.

Nobody knew. Yeah.

I could sort of strategically pick the lobby conference or whatever it was to be at to make those connections with folks without having to spend every day of my life in San Francisco, which wasn't the place that for my family and other reasons was the best place for me to be. Now, that said, I love the Bay Area. I think it's one of the prettiest places on Earth. I think that as the prices come down, it's actually a great place to be. And there is something to the density of just people passionate about the things that you and I are passionate about, building companies, et cetera. So I'm honestly, I feel like the market forces of like the vast shift of say offices or headquarters or things out of the Bay Area will lower the prices, kind of what's happening in Manhattan already. Enough that people will start to move back in and it'll get interesting again. And hopefully, like, that also brings in non— you know, more artists back in and more teachers back in and more like all the other things that creative restaurants, right?

Like 20 years ago, if you wanted to start a restaurant in San Francisco, you could go down to the Mission or Potrero or just somewhere off the beaten path and open a little restaurant or some experimental space. In Manhattan, you used to be able to go to the Lower East Side and open some creative art space or do a gallery. And then that all ended because the real estate just got too expensive. And then this boom-bust cycle could be great. I mean, whatever that Pinterest headquarters were, all these headquarters are going to be redeployed, I believe, into housing. And then people will start getting cheaper, right? I mean, what other choice do they have?

It's going to take a long time, but how cool is it to imagine Salesforce Tower, instead of being 100% office space, if it was 20% office space and then 80% the most amazing view apartments and things you could imagine? My understanding is repurposing and rezoning and all that is going to take longer. But, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of square thousands of square feet, probably millions of square feet just in San Francisco alone that could be repurposed. And that to me is kind of neat.

This really cool website, socketsite.com, which I obsess over because I love real estate. That's a San Francisco real estate site where all the brokers talk in the comments and they just, they're super unfiltered. Um, but they did an infographic and it was like 9— 8 or 9 Salesforce Towers equivalent of open office space right now in the Bay Area. It is crashing in terms of expense. And then nobody's going to be moving back into those. So, you know, one of the great things about New York when I lived there in the '90s was we had all this crazy office space available. You know what people did? They built lofts. I lived in a loft where I hired a crew from— I think the statute of limitations is over, so I hired a crew in the '90s. I literally— some— the landlord of this commercial building said, yeah, just go down to Home Depot in Red Hook and there'll be some guys in the parking lot. Just tell them you want to build a bathroom. So I go there, there's a bunch of— let's face it— illegal, uh, immigrants. And I said, I want to build a bathroom. They're like, great. And they went into the store with me They told me what they needed. I put it into a bunch of things. They had a van. We got into their van, drove back to my apartment, my loft space. They built me a bathroom in a weekend, and I just gave them $5,000 in cash. Boom, done.

And this is an area where I'd love to see a loosening, you know. What's, what's the like way to do that with still having the protections and making sure that like, yeah, you have your neighbors and stuff like that?

Yeah, like a variance or something.

A variance. Again, my hope is that the market forces eventually will drive some of this.

Yeah. In that way, then the Bay Area becomes a stop on the world tour of events, right? The Bay Area doesn't have to go anywhere, but certainly people are considering other options. I'm considering other options. Sure, why not? Maybe Austin.

There's a generation of internet giants that I don't think is going anywhere, including Google, Facebook, Apple. So no, they're saying pilgrimage to visit them and are built on their platforms.

Exactly. How do you keep people who are not in the office in this situation? How do you think you keep people from not becoming second-class citizens if they're not near the locus of power? So if the CEO and the management team are in the Facebook office and you want to move up in the company and you're not— kind of think there's this issue that I've been thinking about, which is the two-class system. At a place like Automattic, everybody's basically remote. You're remote, everybody's remote, so everybody's on par. Same with 37signals, InVision, whoever does this fully remote. But when you're half remote or you're hybrid, how do you deal with that, that out of sight, out of mind issue?

Hybrid's harder than either extreme. If you think of all in-person over here, hybrid in the middle, and all remote here, the hybrid is the hardest one to do right.

Yeah.

How you have to counteract for that that natural affinity that comes with co-location, is documentation and transparency. So even if you're going to be in person, how do you make it so that others can participate and be privy to the information decisions that are happening? And the number one place that, like, I think our innovation here, or the thing that's allowed us to scale and work as well as we have, is actually an internal blogging system called which actually you can sign up for now. I'm actually curious if you ever try it for one of your companies.

No, I should.

I'd love to get your product feedback on it. It's essentially a private blog, internal, that's threaded, fast, easy to use. But effectively what P2 is for us, think of it like an organizational blockchain, like a ledger of every decision we've ever made for the past 14 years. And it allows the institutional, you know, normally, especially when you're hyper-scaling, like we're hiring 400 people this year. You lose so much institutional knowledge and you end up with almost like a Groundhog Day. Someone experienced like yourself probably is driven crazy by this. When every previous decision and discussion is essentially documented, it becomes so powerful for new folks. I feel like the organization accelerates as it gets bigger versus slowing down as it gets bigger. Because you tap into the same modalities and forms of interaction that make Wikipedia better than Encyclopedia Britannica. So when you about how to adopt these things internally to your company. I think that has the most potential to unlock the wisdom, the institutional knowledge, everything that normally is lost when companies scale.

Wow, this is very cool. I've made it my own P2 instance. So basically, everybody— it's just a reverse chronological blog. Of every decision.

Comments on the homepage, it's real time, so when something new comes in, it shows up immediately.

I'm gonna try it.

This is really cool. It's, uh, yeah, you can make it private by default. We're launching a lot of new stuff in the next few weeks too, so.

Oh really?

Yeah, I love, I love you.

Give me a little tip, give me a little tip of a card. What do you got coming? You're not public, right? Give me a little something, give me the zone.

Right now it's, it's really— so we have over 1,000 of these internally, different P2s, and right now the version that you sign up for on the website makes multiple P2s a little challenging. So if you're like a sub-20-person team, it doesn't matter. But if you're bigger than that, the current version is, it's a little harder to scale. So we're basically taking all the stuff that we've built to make our company really effective and productizing it for other companies to use.

Smart.

And you know, right now I'm obsessed with kind of the next generation of Automattic. So how do we go from 1,000 to 10,000 people? And to me, that is, yeah, just what I think about a ton. And when you build the tools there, like WordPress works just as well for the New York Post as it does for your or my personal blog. So you can take, create things that are both powerful and scalable, but also intuitive for new users. And to me, that's like the sweet spot of software, when you can make it both like infinitely flexible and powerful, but also like easy to use to start.

Awesome. As we wrap here, What should young founders, uh, or I should say new founders, people who are on their first company, um, think about in those first year or twos, the first year or two to really get it right? Because now you're in year 17, 18 of Automattic and WordPress. When, if you could go back and talk to 18-year-old Matt Mullenweg and talk about those first two years of building the company and the culture What tips would you like to give yourself and other founders when they're getting started, especially when it comes to fundraising and building that product or service that people can't shut up about?

My mind is exploding because there's so many things that come flooding in when you say that.

Oh, do it. Yeah, let's go.

I'll go in an unordered list. The importance of hiring, but also firing. Letting go of someone or managing someone out is the most painful thing, even at the scale of our company. But you almost never think you did it too early. That's very seldom. Something else that came to mind is something I've heard you talk about very eloquently, which is making a sustainable business. So once you start getting that revenue and even on the edge of profitability, time is on your side. Investors, like everything is on your side. You're default live versus default dead, as Paul Graham might say. And that point, the sooner you can get there, the more options that you'll have with investors, really everything else. And I think a lot about both early in the company but also today, just the importance of principles. And to the extent that there's some things that I think transcend every single company, like work ethic, integrity, It's so important both to represent those yourself as a founder, but also to really not have any tolerance for lapses there elsewhere in the company. So, what— For early founders, know that you're gonna set the bar there. So if you are not impeccable with your word, if you're not on time for things, that is gonna then become the culture and everyone's gonna come in below that. You really have to set a good example there.

Yeah, work ethic is super important. People are afraid to talk about work ethic now. If you say you should hustle or work hard— I mean, if you're going to make it work for a company, you've got to put in 50, 60, 70 hours a week. It can't be done 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week to build an at-scale company like Automattic. It has to be your obsession, right?

I actually think more of the problem is that at some of these ultra-profitable large tech companies, people managers aren't working even 40-hour weeks. They're really like phoning it in in a lot of ways. And so I've just been shocked by that. So, you know, whether the 40-hour work week is, is an ideal or just a historical accident, I feel like it's a good kind of middle point, at least in America, to talk about a sort of a unit of full-time work. And I do fully believe that someone working well in that time can have a huge impact.

Sure.

Um, I've seen people work 80-hour weeks and not produce much. And I've seen— yeah, and you know Honestly, if someone works less than that and does just as much as an average person working 40 hours a week, I don't mind. Like we don't track hours, we just track output. So, but we do try to set the expectation when joining Automattic that this is a job with high expectation of output. But where companies go wrong is I think when they try to micromanage how people do the work. And we, as much as possible, try to say like, you do you, you know? If you wanna work in the middle of the night, if you wanna work 4 hours a week, if you wanna do work 4-day weeks, we actually recently started allowing part-time options where people could work 80% of that, essentially 80% of the hours for 80% of the pay or 60% for 60%. Really?

So people could say, I wanna check off a box and work a 4-day work week, essentially.

Yeah.

And it's kind of the honor system.

'Cause we have kind of unlimited vacation as well. So how all these things interact. Is tricky, but that's actually something we introduced kind of as a COVID thing. So we found a lot of people wanted to be able to shift up from full-time to not full-time work because of obligations with their family or children's education or something like that. But, you know, part of the nice thing about this, this program we introduced is you can shift back up to 100% whenever you're ready. So, you know, maybe you move down to 60% for summer And then you go back up to 100% for the rest of the year. It's a little expensive for the company, 'cause benefits are, especially in the US, are still essentially full-time equivalents. So it's not actually necessarily a money saver, but I think it sets expectations on both sides very well. And it also allows us to plan hiring really well. So if we know that where we thought we had, people use FTE, full-time equivalents, we thought we had 10 full-time equivalents on this team, we actually have 8, that's good to know so we can hire additional people onto the team.

Fascinating. Wow, what a great innovative idea. All right, Matt, it's been a great 70 minutes. Thanks for taking the time. Continued success. And, uh, everybody check out, uh, P2. Just type P2 into Google, you'll find it real quick.

Always a pleasure. And I, Jason, when this is back to normal, I really would love to hang out.

I know, I'm so lonely.

We usually run into each other at least once a year.

I know.

Hang out again.

So I would love to hang out again. I'm going to come down to Austin and spend a couple weeks in Austin. The Austin crew is trying to recruit me, so I'm getting recruited heavily into Austin. I don't know if San Francisco might lose me to free agency. I don't know, we'll see.

Definitely before you, before you buy a place, definitely go in the summer.

It could be— it's brutally hot in the summer.

Yeah, I guess for someone like you who could also like have part of the year in different places, it's not too bad. But for people making the move full-time I will say that some of these places, including Miami and Texas, which both of which I love, can have really brutal summers.

Houston is, I heard, insufferable in the summer. Like, you cannot stay.

I don't know if I call it insufferable, but, you know, people underestimate things like mosquitoes and other things.

It's like 90 or 100 degrees, right?

Oh, easily, yeah. But you're not outside, you know, there's so much indoor stuff. You can do any sport indoors, you can hang out indoors. It's not unlike Singapore Dubai or other place that's really hot.

Yeah. What do you do in the summer? You just, you decide to travel in the summer, right? Just get out of there.

Yeah, I guess previous summers, um, I do a mix because I have some friends' kind of birthdays and other things that might take me back to Houston during the summer. Um, but also, yeah, I, I, you know, before lockdown I would travel 500,000 miles per year.

Wow.

So, um, I'm always happy to go to— actually, summertime is when I would like to go I enjoyed going to places that would empty out in the summer. So like Florence in August, right? Everyone leaves, everything closes down because it's really hot. I don't mind the hot, so I can kind of like essentially travel arbitrage. Parts of Japan, people really don't visit then. So yeah, that's fun.

That's what I miss is Japan. I like— I've been sitting here at home and I wanted to go skiing in Japan. I wanted to go to the cherry blossoms, couldn't do either of those. And now here we are. So I think I'm gonna go to Japan in the spring. I don't I can't take it anymore. I got this— this pandemic's got to end for me. I think, I think I'm done, period. Thank God for these vaccines. But, uh, yeah, I cannot wait to get the pan—

the lockdown fatigue. Like, I— in the beginning I was a little judgy on that, and now I'm 100% experiencing it.

So it's just, you know, I think what we— I don't know what you take out of the pandemic, but for me, you know, the end of the day, what I took out of this is I, I need to see people. Like, it is a big part of who I am is being amongst humans, and I am not built for solitary confinement. So now I understand why you ever watch these documentaries about solitary confinement and like, I can't take it.

It's torture.

Yeah, it's, it's literal torture to put people in solitary confinement. And in the— unless the person is murdering the prison guards or prisoners, like, which I understand is a very acute situation where like prison guards can't be murdered, like But that's a person who maybe does need to be in solitary for some period of time until they decide they're going to stop killing prison guards. I think putting people in solitary is a level of torture that it will mentally break people. It's going to mentally break people forever. I don't think that they get unbroken. So what are we doing? Like, we've got to think about this incarceration situation. I kind of changed my position on that. I've also changed my position on the death penalty since this is so unfairly executed upon. We're executing people who it's obvious that this person is getting treated differently because of their socioeconomic status or the color of their skin. In either case, not fair. Rich people don't get put to death and poor people— Rich white people don't get put to death and poor Black people do. Period, end of story. Just look at the statistics. Heads up, same crime, different outcomes.

Yeah, I think that's a good place for— we're both very opinionated people, and it's a good place for, for as friends to hold each other accountable. Like, yeah, if we're not changing our mind on certain things over time, then we're not learning. And there's definitely positions I held 5 or 10 years ago that I would think are just the dumbest thing now. So it's a good sign that you have changed your mind on some of these things, and I hope we do that many times in the future.

And you're— we live in an environment where changing your mind is like We, we basically kill politicians if they change their mind. And it's like, new evidence, change your mind. Like, I have new evidence. I looked at my own personal experience not traveling or not being able to see people, and it made me mental. Okay, like, firsthand experience. Like, I'm allowed to change my mind about solitary confinement now. All right, brother, I cannot wait to see you in person. Let's go, let's go! Let's get Tony Conrad, Kevin Rose, and let's go. Maybe I could sneak into one of these cool kids Japan trips. You've gone to— have you gone on these Cool Kid Japan trips with Tony and Kevin?

Japan, but actually going with Kevin and Tony would be on my bucket list. You haven't done it, right?

Uh, no. Let's do it. Me— here's what we do. You and I go, and then we invite Tony.

I've seen Tony Conrad there, uh, but I don't think I've seen Kevin there.

But screw it, you and I will go. We'll go as besties, and then we invite them, and we see if we get our bestie. We'll do a besties crossover. I'll get Sachs or Chamath or Friedberg to come. You get one or two of of your True Ventures Kyuretsu, and we'll have like a crossover.

I think what's tough is in Japan, or particularly, like, it's hard. Some of the best places only have 4 or 5 seats, so it makes it tricky for group trips.

Oh, right.

Yeah, you'd have to do versus Italy or really any place else in the world, right?

So what we'd have to do is you'd be like, okay, tonight we're gonna program sushi over here and tempura over here, but we're gonna meet for karaoke over here.

Boom.

Yeah, that's smart.

See, you're, you're a planner.

You already figured out And then you just randomly draw people's names from a list. But I have the great tip for you. I stayed at this hotel. Have you ever stayed at an Aman Hotel? A-M-A-N? Aman?

Yeah. And the one in Tokyo is pretty incredible.

You've been to it? Okay. You're the first guest who's been to it. It is unbelievable. That to me was the best hotel I've ever stayed in my life. Like, just gorgeous. Did you go to the pool at the Aman Hotel Tokyo?

Yeah.

The pool was unbelievable. It's like on the 40th floor, there's a pool. Pool with 30-foot-high windows looking out on the world, and you're just like, is this like some science fiction Blade Runner future that America is not aware of? But you can put a pool on the 40th floor of a building with a view of the entire city. Or that's my other head trip about Japan, is all the great restaurants are on the top floor. And in America, we're like, oh, the top floor, sell that to a rich Russian person or Chinese person who's never going to go there. And we'll just have the top floor be empty. And then everybody else is like, no, the top floor should have 8 restaurants and you should get off at a rotunda and you walk around and pick one of the 8 restaurants with incredible views. It's like, oh, so everybody gets to enjoy it.

In the US, usually the, the view is inversely correlated with the quality of the food, I find. Correct. You know, the tourist places.

Yeah.

Where in Japan they seem to just do some really good stuff everywhere. But, uh, yeah, have you been to the Aman in Utah? Amangani?

I haven't been to Amangiri. Amangiri I haven't been to. That's the one I hear is the best one in the world.

I don't know. And they're open. So if you're looking for a little—

Oh, really? That makes sense. Yeah, maybe I need to make a little trip. All right, I got to bounce. I got to do another podcast. Matt, I could talk to you for hours. We miss each other. This has been great. I hope for those of you who listened in, this was great as well. But this is basically an excuse for Matt and I to get together. If people want you to invest in their company, you invest. And so figure it out. You have a category you love right now?

Oh, anything related to open source. Honestly, I'm a sucker for any company in the open source space.

I have to talk to you about this because there's a big movement right now with this audio, casual audio, like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, and there's 3 open source projects and I'm meeting with all 3. So after I meet with them, I'll give you my feedback and maybe you and I can do a little tag team. I'd love that. And maybe we can figure out which one of those open-source projects is best to back. There needs to be many options here.

The companies where we overlap are really good ones, so we should probably try to do that more.

I know Chartbeat we're in together. Calm.com did well for you. Is that your biggest win?

We'll see. I think their story is not yet finished, obviously.

Incredible company. All right, brother. We'll talk soon. Cheers!