Lessons in longevity: How Matt Mullenweg scaled Automattic to $500M+ (and what's next)

And I like to think of things you can do when you're small that are very difficult when you're large or when your competitors are large. And that really, really, really high-touch people building the product, doing the frontline customer support, you can't do forever. At some point it becomes too much, but the longer you can do it, the better. And it pairs with like really tight product quality feedback because you really do need to be completely friction-free.

Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaStop. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path to securing investment, and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry. I'm your host, Alex Diemer, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. All right, welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thuma, CEO, founder of SaaS Talk, also general partner of Backfuture Ventures these days, and delighted to be joined for the first time in the podcast. We've been going for 10 years, and I'm really excited to have this conversation with Matt Mullenweg, who's CEO, founder of Automattic. How are you doing, Matt?

I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on today.

Yeah, great to have you on the podcast. And are you dialing in from Texas, specifically Houston?

Is that where you're Oh, I am based in Houston, Texas. Yes. Although today I'm in Montana.

Today you're in Montana. Okay. Very nice. I've been watching with my partner Yellowstone. Yeah, we're a little bit behind the curve, but I think I'm on season 4 now. So we've been cracking on to that. So are you on vacation there in— I almost said Yellowstone— in Montana? And is it anything like the series?

Doing some work from here and, uh, seeing some friends.

So awesome, awesome. Uh, good stuff. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Matt. We always ask our guests to kind of like kick off who they are, so I'm not going to buck the trend. Uh, so I'd love to know, know who is Matt Mullenweg.

Sure. Yeah, as I say, Matt Mullenweg, born and raised in Houston, Texas, which is, uh, still my home base today. But, um, when I was 19, I co-founded a software called WordPress, open-source publishing software. And then when I was 20, I moved to San Francisco to take a job. I dropped out of college to take the job, and then a year after that, founded the company Automattic, which I'm the CEO of today. And Automattic, the idea was creating SaaS services around open source. So we did a SaaS version of WordPress, WordPress.com. We have sort of a small business version called Pressable for agencies and things, enterprise version called VIP, run some of the largest WordPress sites in the world. And we also run Tumblr, just sort of like as a thing we acquired a few years ago. Our mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. And so cover the publishing. In commerce, we've got an open source Shopify called WooCommerce, which is an extension for WordPress, but you know, it's ginormous. Over $30 billion of goods and services are sold every year through WooCommerce. And finally, in messaging, Very excited there because we've got a brand new thing called Beeper, beeper.com. It's in beta right now when you hear this. Basically what it does is it takes all of your messaging apps, all of your messaging DM platforms, whether that's LinkedIn DMs, Telegram, Signal, basically everything, and brings it all to one app. So you can sort of manage everything across everything. So if you ever remember, this used to work like 15 years ago, there was programs like ADM and stuff like that, but they all broke. So Beeper's got this really amazing technology that's kind of reverse engineered all different networks. And, um, and also just the regulatory environment is good for this. So it brings them all together and it's a great experience.

Outside of— I can imagine, or no, you've been building software, scaling a business for a large part of your life, but outside of that, I mean, I imagine that consumed the majority of your life, right? But outside of that, um, What do you like to do? Like, how do you get away from maybe just the day-to-day of what you're doing?

The two big things for me are jazz and photography. So my username on everything is Photomatt, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T. And that's because I actually have uploaded over 30,000 photos over the years, and I do a lot of photography. Less carrying around the giant camera these days. You know, they say the best camera is the one you have on you, and the iPhone is pretty incredible. Actually, all the smartphones are pretty great. I've got a Pixel 9 as well. So that's probably what I do a lot of my photos on today. But occasionally, if I'm doing a special trip, I'll bring the big rig out.

On the jazz front, are you playing or are you just listening? Are you going to like, you know, jazz cafes or whatever?

Jazz was my original thing. So I was very lucky that the public schools in Houston had amazing music programs. So I started playing saxophone in second grade. I ended up going to a performing arts school called HSPVA where there's no sports, but we did 3 hours of our art area every day, which for me ended up being jazz saxophone. Great school, like Beyoncé went there, Robert Glasper, like all sorts of amazing musicians and artists and actors. And so how I got started building websites was I bartered with local jazz musicians a You know, I built them a website in exchange for like 10 lessons, right? Because lessons were pretty expensive. So yeah, that was how I got started with everything. My old username was Sax Matt, like saxophone. So I switched to Photo Matt when it got hard to carry my saxophone. You know, I was traveling a lot for WordPress, like visiting communities all over the world. So yeah, that's how it all got started. So today I play a little bit still, and I'm also the co-owner of a jazz club in San Francisco. Called Keys Jazz Bistro, which has live music Wednesday to Saturday. And any city I go to, I always try to find, um, you know, good, good live music. A lot of jazz, but also, yeah, I enjoy all live music. And then in Houston, all the people I grew up with are the jazz musicians.

Would it be easier to own a jazz cafe in Houston or in Texas?

Or— oh, it's, um, you know, it's funny because San Francisco actually has 4, 5 great jazz clubs, jazz venues. Houston right now has no dedicated ones. Although one's opening in a few months in July called Docks. So yeah, just a funny thing where the markets end up being a little different. Now the cool thing about Houston is there's great live music, lots of restaurants. So lots of restaurants, so amazing musicians will play at like, you know, Eddie V's, you know, or something like that on Wednesday's is one of my favorite ones to go to. Kind of like Austin, you know, how there's just like this great live music culture everywhere. So, um, Houston has that too.

What can we do to get you playing the saxophone and taking photos at SAS USA?

I don't know. I don't want to drive away your conference attendees. I'm not as good as I used to be.

But, um, yeah, no, as you said, there's huge amounts of, uh, music and great music in Austin. Uh, so we would expect, uh, certainly the welcome parties, maybe at the conference itself, some, uh, I don't know, some Austin-infused Texas, uh, uh, style, uh, uh, music, uh, for sure. So, um, uh, watch, watch out for that.

A big passion of mine is getting creators paid, you know, and that's something we do a lot with open source and, you know, WordPress and everything. So, um, that was part of the idea behind the Jazz Club in San Francisco, was a place that would, uh, it's part of this fair wage thing, so it pays, pays very well for the, uh for the jazz musicians. And, um, yeah, something in New York and Houston in the future, uh, would definitely be interesting, but I'm pretty busy. So, you know, San Francisco works because, you know, there's a partner that does everything. I'm just kind of like, uh, I just, uh, you know, get to show up.

And can you, can you just share, like, paint a picture? Look, I'm, I, I'm going to make an assumption that our listeners have— they've heard of WordPress, they've heard of Automattic, they've heard of you. I think it's hard, uh, not to, um, But may— maybe just, uh, share any sort of like data in terms of how big the business is, um, you know, whether it's sort of team size, revenue, or just anything that kind of gives that sort of color. Uh, and also if you're bootstrapped or venture-backed as well.

Yeah, so Automatic is venture-backed. Uh, raised a fair amount of money over the years. Uh, what have we publicly said? So we publicly announced that we're over half a billion in revenue and ARR and everything. So that was an exciting milestone to reach. Looking forward to a billion next. WordPress, you know, the open source, runs over 40% of all websites in the world.

Do you see this as your life's work in terms of— well, I guess, you know, on that statement, and do you foresee that 20 years' time you're going to be the CEO of Automattic and however that looks like? —then?

Yeah, assuming I still have my wits about me. Yeah, so I do consider WordPress my life's work, and I consider actually Automattic, the culture, the way we do things, we're distributed from the start, you know, we have this open source, really good culture, one of the things I'm most proud about creating and really excited about working about day to day. One exciting thing about the WordPress ecosystem is that, um, we're a small percentage of it. WordPress ecosystem is at least $10 billion per year. And so it's really a true platform where there's lots and lots of plugin companies and hosting companies and agencies and everything built on top of it, um, that generate a huge amount for everyone. And that's not even counting the e-commerce stuff that I spoke about earlier.

How, how are you thinking, like in the, uh, the age of AI, How do you think about that with regards to WordPress and Automattic?

It's really exciting because I would say one of the biggest barriers to people adopting WordPress is, um, it's, you know, it's a power tool in a lot of ways. You, it's got a ton of functionality, um, which is, we try to, our goal is always to make, um, simple things intuitive and complex things possible. Uh, but you know, with software design, that's always, you know, a work in progress. We actually just, just today, so probably it'll be out for a few days once this post on WordPress.com launched our AI site builder, which we've been working on for a good while. It was kind of easy to build something simple, but what we wanted to do was also teach people how to use WordPress as the AI builds it. And so we've got this incredible block editor on WordPress called the Gutenberg editor, and And so it's using those blocks and building very cool sites. And it can do all the stuff. You can just talk to it and say, change the colors, change the fonts, change the images, make more starter text, like all these sorts of things. So it can take what sometimes people would have needed to hire a developer before, or they would just struggle trying to do it themselves. I think it'll be a path that will be very intuitive for folks, especially if they're familiar with the chatbots and everything like ChatGPT.

Well, I think everybody is getting Certainly very familiar with those these days. Or— but I'm still having to remind myself, like, not to go to— or try not to go to Google to, like, search things and, and try and, uh, you know, go to one of the, uh, the GenAI, uh, sort of like chatbots.

Yeah, I've completely replaced Google with Perplexity, basically.

I really like Perplexity. Yeah, uh, very, very cool. Very cool. And, and look, Matt, you've built a business that's over, uh, half a billion dollars. Um, now, and that, you know, it's taken time, but also, also it's a fantastic achievement. And I, I think none of our listeners, and, um, I, I would imagine, have done that, and they're probably quite far from doing that. Like, I would say generally our, our sweet spot is the early stage, you know, SaaS founder and their, their teams. But if you've got any key lessons into how you've done it that may be transferable to, you know, founders that are listening would love to hear these, right? So like how you've grown and scaled, you know, Automatic to be this huge success, but actually might be some lessons that, you know, people listening to say, you know, okay, I'm a million ARR or $10 million, but this is super interesting and I could perhaps like think about this and apply.

Well, one thing that's fun inside Automatic is that we've got businesses at different stages. So some are very mature and scaled like WooCommerce or WordPress.com. So some of the lessons from when those were going from 0 to 1, probably less applicable. Things are actually, I would say, so much easier now. You've got things like Stripe billing and other things that make it a lot easier. So for our newer products, like we've got some apps, Day One, a journaling app, Pocket Cast for podcasting, Beeper, which I mentioned earlier, those are more going from that 0 to 1 or 1 to 10. And it's so fascinating. I would say, you know, there's things that are very relevant for me right now. One, product quality is incredibly important. It's so easy to lose someone if they're running into bugs. Now, however, if you have a really nice feedback loop, make it very easy, especially when you're small, for people to contact you. And you want the founders, the developers doing that frontline support. Those bugs or when things are broken actually become an opportunity to create a lifelong fan depending on how you respond to them. And don't underestimate the power of word of mouth. It's easy to spend money on Facebook and all these other places, but nothing beats word of mouth in terms of one really passionate person could bring in dozens of their friends. We see that with things like Beeper, people get so into it and they just get everyone else on it. Beeper actually has a pretty— not to say challenging, we make it as easy as possible, but you have to set up every single network with it. So if you have 5 things, you got to go through like 5 little processes to hook up your WhatsApp and your Instagram. And so it's actually like a pretty, uh, it's a lot of investment. So when you have a friend who's like walking you through that or sort of like helping you with that, it's, uh, it really helps. So that word of mouth, I think, is really, really key because you're really also finding that product-market fit, and your customers are going to be the number one source of truth there. It's important to talk to people who aren't just current customers because you are trying to build for maybe the hundreds of millions or the billions someday. And dogfood as much as possible. Ideally, it's kind of easiest— pretty much all of our products are things we can use ourselves. Which is nice. And I think I might have to, if I were making like MRI software or something, or to fit startup, like I would, I don't know if I'd be able as effective at that because I do get a lot out of just using it myself, doing customer support myself, you know, going to WordCamps, hosting events, and just kind of that really close contact with customers.

In terms of the word of mouth, actually funny because this is the second podcast I've been recording today. I just finish with Rahul Vora from Superhuman. He also talked about word of mouth and the key for word of mouth in that growing the business and, you know, having this product that surprises and delights, you know, like really kind of focusing on the product side of things. I guess from, from your side, what I'm hearing, like obviously the product is really important, but perhaps also at this early stage, just that, that customer service and how you perhaps, you know, handle, uh, the bug fixes, how you show up, how you communicate with the customer and delight them from that side as well.

And I like to think of things you can do when you're small that are very difficult when you're large or when your competitors are large. And that really, really, really high-touch sort of people building the product, doing the frontline customer support, you can't do forever. At some point it becomes too much. But, um, yeah, the longer you can do it, the better. And it pairs with like really tight product quality feedback because you really do need to be completely friction-free.

And also, like, with, with the business that you have, you, you have a platform and then you have multiple products that you're, you know, continuing to build onto that platform, which helps, you know, grow the revenue. And I'm sure some of them, uh, are a massive success or a success just in general, but perhaps not every single product works. And like, how do you, how do you know? Like, how do you kind of, you are just launching, testing, trying and say, okay, maybe this one is, is not working. At what point do you kind of make that decision to maybe shutter that and look at something else?

Yeah, that can be a tough one. It's probably easiest if it doesn't work and you don't get any users. Some of our failure modes though are things that have a ton of users but just don't monetize. Tumblr is actually a great example. Huge number of daily active and weekly active and monthly active users, like a good-sized city in the United States. But however, just the— it's a user base which doesn't like paying for things. Tends to be a little younger, like there's It's been challenging to find things that they'll consistently subscribe to, to make it a really sustainable business, because of course with that much usage, it costs a fair amount to run. So that's the hardest, and honestly, I don't have a good answer there. Things that we retire or shut down are things you wouldn't have heard of because they didn't get any usage at all. I'd say that's the easiest. We do have a number of things that are in essentially maintenance mode though. So, and it might be something that we get to sort of a feature complete stage and it doesn't need necessarily a full-time team working on it anymore. We can put it into a mode where it's stable, it works well, and it can kind of go on autopilot. And those can actually be very profitable.

I'd love to know what does the day-to-day look like for you, you know,— and obviously, you know, that's running a company that's generating over half a billion, right? What, what does it look like for you? And maybe how does that differ to like 10 years ago as well?

It's probably actually kind of similar. The biggest change for me was just, um, I forget exactly when it was, but going from like daily coding or coding mission-critical things to more like what I do now, which is coding stuff for myself, or that's not in the mission-critical line of path. So I try to, what I would call an ideal week, is I spend about a third of my time on people. That's hiring, HR, which reports directly to me, performance management. So kind of the people side, which if you don't get that right, nothing else matters. And if you get it right, things can be very easy, running a company or managing a team. And if you have the wrong people in there, it can be miserable and also demotivating for their colleagues. Second is I spend about a third of my time on product. So I'm in a lot of product meetings, architecture meetings, working with the business leads. Sometimes it's working more on the business side, sometimes it's on the design side, sometimes I'm sort of more product, and sometimes it's engineering. I love all of those and I've done a lot of each in my career. So it's nice to be able to work across all the things we do, which like I said, there's some big ones and then there's a lot of small things. So I do enjoy that variety of moving between scaled products where the biggest thing might be like internationalization or something like that and something brand new where you're still figuring out that a product-market fit. The last third, I would say, is just stuff that bubbles up to the CEO. I'm not gonna even call it emergencies all the time, but it might be things that only the CEO could do, like fundraising, dealing with the board, dealing with existing investors. It might be sort of like the weird emergencies that, you know, make their way to the— it's gone through a couple layers, so by the time it gets to you, it's pretty unique. Um, so that's, uh, yeah, that's probably the last third of my time is just that kind of like things that are popping up that weekend. It's different every single week.

And I guess sort of connected to that, like, um, you sometimes hear or read that people say that like after this 10-year mark of being a CEO, often CEOs get a little bit tired. They decide to sell their business or they replace themselves as CEOs, but not, not always, but sometimes. Uh, you've been going for longer than that, so I would love to kind of know maybe like what your— whether they're secrets, but like tips to kind of like keeping the energy, you know, keeping the, the passion there. So you're showing up and you're being your best self like every day, and you're the, you know, the best CEO for the business.

Yeah, well, one cool thing was that the first 8 or 9 years, I actually, uh, did have a CEO, a gentleman named Tony Schneider. Who's still on the board today, still very close to the company. And he actually filled in as CEO again. I took a sabbatical last year for 3 months. So he came back for, you know, like Michael Jordan returning back to basketball. And I was able to sort of run things for 3 months while I was out. So yeah, but I am around that 10-year mark now. I think I'm coming up on 10 or 11 this year. For me, the business changes so much. And actually, with a lot of AI stuff, I'm as energized and excited about the potential of things as I have been, I think, since we started. So it's including— it's allowing me to code a lot more and do things that maybe used to would have taken me 8 hours or 10 hours now happen in like 20 or 30 minutes. It's kind of incredible. And also seeing the pockets where Automattic is adopting that, not just for our users like the AI Site Builder, but really engineers or designers, you know, now creating full prototypes where they might have previously just done a mockup. Very, very cool and very, very exciting. I think it's also going to be huge for WordPress as a platform because, you know, we've got one thing about WordPress we didn't mention was there's, you know, over 60,000 plugins and themes. So almost anything, just like there's an app for that, anything you can imagine, there's a plugin for it. A lot of them are free, some of them are free with paid versions, some of them are paid only. But, you know, there's a lot of variable quality code across all of this. As you can imagine, being, you know, 21 years old, the WordPress codebase is very secure, very performant, very everything. It's had a lot of people, I mean, tens of thousands of people work on it at this point. But the plugins is where, when you see a headline like 30,000 vulnerable WordPress sites. It's, it's 30,000 because it's a plugin that 30,000 sites have installed. So I think AI is going to allow the finding and fixing of those bugs way better than anything that's ever happened. So I'm looking forward to that improving the overall security just of like the long tail of, you know, the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of WordPress sites out there. The I do, I'm a big believer in sort of the, I'm a shareholder as well. So if I felt someone else could do a better job, I would love that. And I would say a big part of what I do actually is hiring executives to do something I used to do better than I can do it and do it full-time versus just part of my time. So I think that's part of how I've scaled. Something I think about a lot. It's also because of my role as a founder and the history, my ability to recruit and do things is— you get like a little extra boost there versus someone who might have come in as a professional CEO or something like that. Now, that said, there are some great examples, whether that's Satya or Tim Cook, or there's some really good examples of of non-founder CEOs essentially becoming like founders. I think it's Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn. So I mean, there's a few out there. There's also a lot of examples of founder-led companies far into it, whether that's a Mark Zuckerberg or a Warren Buffett or even like a Rupert Murdoch or something like that. There's a lot of those examples as well. And that tends to be the archetype that I both study and aspire to. Awesome, awesome.

Do you ever get anyone saying to you, Matt, you know, you're the CEO of the company, it's so huge now, you should stop coding?

Um, no, I, I think, you know, in general my colleagues, uh, appreciate, um, well, anyone, I think, you know, if you, if you're able to understand the work a little bit better, it just allows you to have higher bandwidth conversations. I kind of like that maybe the engineers in the company think I'm better at design, but then the designers are like, "Nope, he's better at code." So if everyone thinks you're maybe like— it's kind of like having a bit of a wide area and exposure. And I read a ton and listen to a lot of podcasts and other things to try to always be learning about different areas. Like for product, there's this amazing podcast by Lenny, Lenny's Newsletter. He has this great newsletter and podcast. And if you read that for a year or two, you're going to actually get pretty decent at understanding product. And you've heard from some of the top product people in the world. So I mean, that's one of the great things about the sort of medium blogging culture right now. The newsletters, the podcasts, I include it all in that. These are different forms of blogging to me. You can get the best education in the world, better than anything at a university. Current, up to the hour almost, you know, with new podcasts like this one that are just coming out. And really, you're only limited by your ambition and your curiosity.

Yep. No, 100%. 100%. We're going to move into the quickish fire round, sort of, Matt. So we'd love to know what's the best advice you've ever received? Ooh.

It's actually the phrase, this too shall pass. And there's a beautiful story about it. I'm not going to do it justice. But that this too will pass also applies to really positive of things. So knowing that, like, you know, it seems like you're on top of the world or you just like fundraised your company or whatever it is that's like, you know, a huge thing, like, well, this too shall pass. And then, you know, whatever you consider your most challenging days, and that's definitely something true about founding or running anything, is there's times that are, how did Elon Musk put it, like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. It's actually amazing how many of the companies that we look at as straight-line successes, when you dive in, they've had existential crises or huge things. So I always tell entrepreneurs, I'm an investor in a number of companies, and so I'll hear from them often when they're like, "It's all going to heck. Everyone hates me, the employees, the investors, everything." I'm like, "This too shall pass." And you would be amazed that basically every entrepreneur that you look up to has experienced that.

100%, 100%. And, uh, great advice there. What, what about, uh, in your opinion, like, what is the hardest thing about being a, a CEO?

Hmm, it can be a little bit isolating, you know, certainly within your company. Um, there is sort of a— especially as you scale, there's just sort of a distance that can be created just by virtue of your position. Um, A funny thing actually in Automattic is sometimes people ping me less because they think I'm really, really busy. It's true, I am really, really busy, but I don't want them to communicate less to me. Part of something I really enjoy and I'm good at is processing lots of incoming information. So that's hard. I would say the best thing to do is if you could find other CEOs or other people who have been CEO in the past or something like that, whatever role you're doing. Um, it could be really, really helpful to have sort of a small cohort that you can speak to or vent to, or just talk about what you're going through, because they've probably been through something similar. Awesome.

Um, I, I wholeheartedly agree as well. And you mentioned that you read a lot. Um, whether it's your favorite of all time or perhaps in the last 12 months, what, what has been, uh, like your favorite book that's helped you from a business perspective?

I'll give you 2 all-time favorites from— and this one's a little more traditional from a business point of view, but not entirely. It's by Nassim Taleb called Antifragile. And to me, this has been really interesting because I, you know, I want WordPress and Automattic to be very, very long-term companies, you know, where we're measured in decades. And who knows, maybe with life extension even longer in the future. But There is, as you know, this huge turnover in S&P 500 and other things. And so building a company that isn't just resilient to things that might happen, like the current economic blowups in stock market, but actually can become stronger in those periods is an incredible challenge. That's what antifragility is. And I pair that with the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, which is one of my favorites of all time. Maybe a little bit more on that "this too shall pass," like, philosophical side. But I think that's just as important to study because when you're building something, you need to have a why and you need to understand how it fits in and you need to understand people and you need to be able to motivate people and inspire people and you need to be able to motivate and inspire yourself as well. So something like Siddhartha, I think, is a book everyone should read.

Yeah, awesome. Two great recommendations. Thank you for, for sharing that, Matt. And, and lastly, uh, we mentioned at the top of the podcast that you, uh, you will be speaking at, uh, SASOC USA, which is, uh, mid-May, 13th and 14th, in, in Austin. So not too far from your hometown of Houston. Um, do you know yet, like, what you'll be speaking about? And also, uh, hopefully— I'm sure that you've been to, uh, Austin— maybe any like fun tips or favorite things that you have to do in Austin itself?

Ah, that's a great question. So yeah, my sister moved to Austin in the '90s. So I've been going there regularly since probably '96. Austin's grown up an incredible amount. So the— well, one, just walking around by the river, by downtown, there's the bats thing that happened at night from the bridge, which is pretty fun. I love barbecue, so there's some great ones there. Terry Black's, Franklin's obviously. But honestly, you can, you know, the average barbecue in Austin is going to be pretty darn good. Also Tex-Mex food is definitely a go-to I always have. It's just not the same in other places. Actually, you can get pretty good barbecue all around the world now, but the Tex-Mex in Texas and Austin in particular is really great. Um, and again, sometimes I'll just go to, like, I'll be driving around and just stop at like one of the, the, um, they're not shacks, what's it called? The food trucks. And so like, I encourage people just to explore and experiment. Um, Austin's a very, very special city for that.

Yeah, it's really, uh, we love it. I've been there many times. I always come back a few pounds heavier, um, uh, generally because of, uh, all the great food there. That's why you need the walking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I'm probably doing too much Uber. When I'm there. But it is a very walkable city, right? As you say, like, you know, just from down the river, like where the conference center is in the Palma, which is in like in the park. I can't remember the name of the park, but you can walk from there into downtown very quickly. And I think I'm just overreliant on the, the Uber. So I need to get the steps in whilst I'm there. Typically you get a lot of steps in at the conferences. Does Austin have Waymo now?

If you haven't taken a Waymo, it's incredible.

I do that all the time in San Francisco. Yeah, I think it might have it, but I've never done it. So we'll see. I have seen driverless cars in Austin, but I don't know for sure if Waymo is there. But if it is, we'll check it out for the first time. But great stuff, Matt. Look, really appreciate you joining the podcast. Thank you so much. It's our 10th year for SaaS Talk, 10 years of doing the podcast. Actually, also fun fact, I don't know if you know this, and maybe I haven't shared this with you, but how SaaS Talk existed, I started a blog on WordPress 10 years ago, and then that built an audience, and then I started doing events. And so, you know, WordPress has played a part of our journey for sure, or a big part.

That's amazing. And yeah, that's a— I would say a great ending advice to everyone is blog, blog, build an audience, blog more, publish. Like, you'll be amazed both how it improves your thinking, but also when you start to build a community. I think that's when it's really special.

Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, for joining us on the SAS Revolution Show today. And see you soon in Austin at SAS Doc USA.

See you all in Austin.

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