Matt Mullenweg Is Democratizing Publishing, Commerce, and Messaging

We're at a time of like super abundance. The technology can do almost anything. And so for where it's going, for us particularly as a company, we really have to come back to the humans. We've actually never in WordPress's history been constrained by the servers or the tech. It's always been by our ability to design and create an intuitive experience for providing the goals that people want. Also helping shape the environments because there is a world Maybe if WordPress hadn't existed or something like WordPress hadn't existed, where we'd all just have profiles on Facebook now. That would be the webpage. The idea of sovereignty over your digital identity is so critical and key. I want to live in an ownership society, not a society where someone else owns everything and I'm just kind of borrowing.

That's not freedom. Welcome back to another episode of Good Work. I'm your host Barrett Brooks, and this is a show made up of long-form interviews with talented people using their careers to make the world a better place. My guest today is someone I am incredibly excited to talk to. His name's Matt Mullenweg. If you've never heard of him, you've probably heard of at least one of the products that his company makes. He is one of the founders of WordPress.org. He's also the founder of Automattic, which is the umbrella company for the for-profit side of WordPress.com. And many other products that you probably use and love things like WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, and a ton of other stuff. Day One, the journaling app. I was excited to talk to Matt because he's been in startups in the startup world for 20 years now since he was quite young. I think 19 or 20 was when he got a start. He's now 40. I talked to him right in the middle of his sabbatical, which is the first sabbatical he's ever taken. He took 3 months off from his role as CEO. So I caught him at a really unique time in his career. And he's someone that I really look up to and admire. He informed a lot of the ways that I led when I was the COO at ConvertKit. WordPress piloted and really was one of the leading thinkers in remote work and asynchronous work and in kind of transforming the way that we go about building organizations. And I think that's really unique. So I wanted to hear from him on how he became the person that he is today, how he built WordPress, and just many of his ideas about life and leadership. So please enjoy my conversation with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and WordPress.com. Matt Mullenweg, welcome to the show. It's such a joy to have you here. Um, thanks for joining me.

Pleasure to be here.

You're one of those people, which hopefully will be a trend on the show, that hopefully needs no introduction for most of the people listening. But, um, for those that may not have heard of you. You are the founder and normally the CEO. I think right now specifically you're not the CEO of Automattic, um, and we'll get into why that's the case, which is a, what I would describe as a portfolio of companies and tools that is working to democratize publishing and commerce and using the open source philosophy to give people access to tools that allow them to do great work in the world. Is that a fair kind of summary?

Yeah, I would say, yeah, co-founded WordPress and that my missions in life are to democratize publishing, commerce, and now messaging is a new area we are going into.

Which is exciting cuz you guys, uh, you acquired text.com, which is a tool to kind of unite all of the various platforms where we get messages from people in our orbit and bring them into one cohesive experience that's secure and usable, right?

Yeah, it's so exciting because I love working on products when they're in that very nascent, early kind of generative phase where there's a world of possibilities and you can go any direction. That's where messaging feels like, even though messaging's been around since the dawn of communication and the internet, there's a particular point in time right now where it feels like there is a, uh, an opportunity to create something that could, uh, really make humanity more free and connected, which is kind of my jam.

Yeah, I love that. And your clarity on the mission that you're on is one of the things that inspires me about you. On my end, I have been a user of WordPress since I think 2009, so pretty long time. Started with wordpress.org and now I've had my own kind of independent site on WordPress for, uh, over a decade now. I love it. It's core to everything that I've done online, and so I'm a big fan. Um, but also you've been inspiring to me as a leader. Listeners will know, you don't know as much about it. I was the COO of a, a bootstrapped and distributed team for a number of years, and we looked to folks like you, the Basecamp crew, Buffer, and others as kind of like peers and aspirant peers for how we wanted to operate. So we have a lot of overlap in that. But before we get into all of that, I thought we might start at something that I found really fascinating, which is that you've been to Antarctica. I think more than once.

Twice.

Um, and I was just curious about where that began, where the urge to go to Antarctica began and, um, what your experience there has been like when you've gone.

How it started. I like to make funny goals. And so I think at the time I was trying to go to 7 continents in 7 months, just to say I've been to 7 continents in 7 months. I kind of liked setting those goalposts for myself. I think I was maybe running a 5K in all 7 continents in 7 months or something. I might have done that. I don't recall exactly, but yeah, Antarctica was the hardest one. So that's the one you have to kind of, kind of have to slot in. And, uh, I ended up, because the person I was with at the time would get seasick, I was like, oh, let's not do the cruise thing. So I ended up in the interior of Antarctica with, um, AILEE, I think stands for Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions. So they are the people who, for whom, if you visit Antarctica, they are like the hardcore elite elite. And so I ended up in like a very, very place where very few people have visited, but unintentionally, which happens to me sometimes.

That's awesome. On one of your interviews with Tim Ferriss, y'all were there together sitting in a tent, uh, I think drinking scotch at the time. You were there to see a total eclipse, uh, I think.

Yeah. So the first trip was for the 7 Continents in 7 Months. And while I was there, someone mentioned that there was going to be a total solar eclipse over a penguin colony in 2021. This was 2014. And I said, well, can I book that now? It's like, well, it's 7 years away. Uh, I guess so. I just kind of like did it right then. I was like, okay, 6 people. Uh, I was 2 people at the time. And yeah, so 7 years later, returned, and it was, uh, really special. We ended up not seeing the eclipse with the emperor penguins as we had planned because the weather there was, uh, uh, not conducive for seeing the eclipse. So we went back to Union Glacier Camp, but I did get to spend 5 or 6 days, 6 or 7 days with the, with the penguins. And it forced me to unplug, which is very hard to do now in the age of Starlink. So it like really, I actually truly was off the internet for that trip, uh, days.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's pretty beautiful. Um, that is a bummer that you didn't get the penguins and the eclipse at the same time, but you did get each of them separately. And there were two things. So the unplugging thing, it was so interesting to hear you talk about downloading Wikipedia or as much of it as you could to kind of be able to reference things in conversation. And, and I thought that was just a, maybe a representative reflection of kind of who you are and how you move through the world, that referencing information and having access to tools and, and being dynamic in conversation with access to all of the information we've ever had available to you must be part of just kind of how you operate. And how— I wonder if that's true and the degree to which being unplugged changes that for you.

I think from a young age, I've kind of used technology to help people and get them to like me. So I was always the kid that was like getting new gadgets or learning new things and then sharing it with my friends. Kind of like they say, like, if you want to make friends at work, like, learn to bake, you know, bring cookies or something. Like, I was like, what am I bringing to the table? Okay, I'm really good with like gadgets and technology. So, you know, how does this manifest? I like to joke that my love language is Wi-Fi. Sometimes I'll I'll go to friends' homes and I'll fix their Wi-Fi or like reset up the access points or, you know, redo everything and cabling, charging. I have a life motto, ABC, always be charging. So, you know, what's the very best cable or USB plug or different things. I kind of go pretty deep on these and it's actually one fun thing being successful. Well, it wasn't even, I didn't have to be that successful, but like from a place of scarcity where I grew up, we had very little money to the point where I was like, oh, I could just order 4 different USB chargers and compare them, you know, and weigh them on my microscale and see which one is the heaviest. And so like, it's kind of like a how to spend money to provide happiness because money does not equal happiness at all. But finding things that you can spend that provide you some generative joy I think is always a delight. Well, for me, that's, that's kind of testing gadgets and then sharing the best ones with my friends.

Yeah, I love your, uh, your What's in My Bag posts and, and just like your, your little obsessions with tools and, and just like their utility, the things that they unlock. It is about the tool, but it's really about what they unlock for you, is what I gather from it, that it's like this progressive process of having access to the things you need to enjoy yourself the most that you can, to be able to work from anywhere, you know, some of these things, other things that you value.

And there's something very core there that's also at the core of open source. Like, hey, I did this work. Let me share it so you don't have to do it again.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's just like sharing the cables or publishing, you know, like what you learned or what you do with like you learn a new podcast and everything like that. What Tim does, learn and share, um, is, is a really nice loop for sure. Because also I'm not always right. And so sometimes when I share, someone's like, oh, this is way better cable that you didn't know about. I'm like, I never heard about that. Like, so if people start to follow you because you're sharing things, you'll also get the collective intelligence of all the people that are following you, which, by the way, all the people that follow you are way smarter than you will ever be. Yeah, actually. So that, that can become a really nice loop too.

Yeah, I love that. I remember the first moment of, like, my similar moment to you realizing you could buy 4 cords was when I realized that I could buy a separate set of toiletries for my Dopp kit for my travel bag.

Oh yeah.

And then I didn't have to repack it every trip. I could just like have two toothbrushes, which seems ridiculous. A toothbrush is what, $4, $3, $2? And it felt like this little luxury that for some reason I had not embraced because of, yeah, whatever, background and just scarcity or a different mindset. And then all of a sudden it made packing that much easier. It's like it's already there.

Yeah, that moving from a scarcity to abundance mindset is I think one of the biggest unlocks. And it's interesting because for each person it's going to be very personal. One of my breakthroughs was actually buying a saxophone because it was kind of like when my parents bought me the saxophone that I ended up playing, it was a Mark VI Selmer saxophone from I think 1959. And this was like, instead of, it was a really big lift for them. They saved up and like it was instead of a car, you know, like there was, you know, a couple thousand dollars. So I had so, as a child, that had so much weight and gravity for me that then later when I was like, oh, I think I'd like to play a tenor instead of alto. Oh, I could just buy that. And actually the big unlock for me was that I was able to use points. So I did have points on my credit card. I was able to buy a saxophone with the points. And I was like, huh, okay. Like, okay, I can, I can do stuff for myself now. That's okay.

Yeah. Oh, I love that. Yeah. I have so many memories like that now. For me, one of them was growing up. My dad always wanted, you know, he had that scarcity mindset even, even as, so my mom was the breadwinner. She was an entrepreneur. And as I got older, they had more resources available. But when I was younger, they were like lower middle class and then they kind of rose maybe to upper middle class. So we had everything we needed. But also when I went shopping for basketball shoes, for example, we were buying the on-sale stuff. And so I had this moment similar to your saxophone moment, I don't know, 8 years ago, when I realized I could buy, within reason, whatever pair of Jordans that I wanted, which was like always what I wanted forever. I just wanted one pair of Jordans to play basketball in, and I never had one. And so somewhere around the age of 30, I realized, oh, I can just buy myself $150 pair of shoes, which from where I came from, that would have been a lot of money. And now, you know, it's not nothing, but within reason I can do whatever I want on that end. And there's— there is this unlock to that, you know.

It's—

it seems stupid because these are hobby things. It's like a pair of shoes, a saxophone. But I do think they represent an aspect of, number one, mindset, and number two, identity. They become a way of like unlocking these little pieces, maybe re-embracing these little pieces of yourself along the way.

And then you discover that That doesn't provide happiness stuff. And actually stuff can be quite a burden. Yeah. Your stuff starts to own you.

Yeah.

You get too attached to it. Like it can become its own sort of other thing. There's the prison of like scarcity and there's the prison of like protecting your stuff and being too attached to it.

Yeah.

Which are, are kind of, you kind of have to experience it. Like you and I can talk about it, but I feel like it is something that needs to be a lived experience for someone. They have to have their version of whatever that is. Yeah, you realize the ridiculousness of it all.

Well, it's like the hedonic treadmill thing, you know, eventually you have to choose your enoughness and choose what you really value. And that's, that's been the rebalancing act for me is you get a little bit more freedom. And then you come back to okay, but what does that mean for me? And how do I want to access that intentionally? Saxophone thing, though, I want to use that as a jumping off point, because that's not an insignificant part of your life. I mean, you're a musician. And saxophone and jazz. And okay, so you shake your head a little bit, but I mean, you, you grew up a musician, right? I mean, you, you played on stage and you performed, and it's a core part, I think, of what shaped you. Yeah. Um, maybe just talk a little bit about that, like what role music has played in your life and playing music.

I, I'm so glad, and I feel like it's something I've been trying to support more, is music education, because there's something kind of fundamental to the human condition and soul It happens with music. These vibrations do change our mind. They literally change— they can change our mood. You can play a major chord or a minor chord and one sounds happy and one sounds sad. Like, what is that? Right? And when you study it, there's the overtone series. So these are actually based on like perfect ratios. It's like almost like physical laws. So there, there is, there is a beauty to music, which sort of is the same as like a beauty in math or beautiful formulas. That's why I love artists like Jacob Collier who are actually now like making music with these perfect ratios. There's a whole history about like how some of the tones got kind of rounded off to play on things. But anyway, I think it was great to learn that, you know, getting in front of people, you know, which is, uh, I think a lot of people, they say public speaking is the biggest fear, you know, so like Getting in front of people and performing repeatedly from a young age was, I think, really helpful. Collaboration, you know, because I think every human should have that experience of whether it's, you know, rowing or being in a choir or being in a band. Like, you can tell when you're not all in sync and how good it feels when you are. And there's equivalents of that in every human endeavor, whether it is a marriage or personal relationship or a team building something together. And we use these different metaphors. Rowing is one I return to often because it's very accessible. But like, you know, when everyone's not rowing the same direction or hitting at the same time, you're not as effective. But when you all hit at the same time, like, it's kind of magical how fast you can go, just slice through the water. And I see teams like that. As I, you know, we talked about companies, you know, other things, scaling. I did a lot of organization and ran different groups when I was younger, but as these start to become larger and all of a sudden I was at the head or responsible for things that weren't just tens of people, but hundreds or thousands or now tens of thousands of people, how to scale that orchestration, how to make sure everyone's rowing in the same direction. Or he, you don't really make sure, but how to find, give him the opportunity to be on the same path.

Right. Yeah. I mean, there's so much of that and you lose control. You like progressively lose direct control over it. And so it becomes much more about influence and systems and ways of being in some ways. And, you know, one thing you talk about is jazz and you've both played some jazz and obviously have been a listener of it for a long time. So my wife and I, we moved to New York for just under a year in 2018. I was actually, I was going to go to work for a mutual friend of ours named Seth Godin, and that became its whole own story that I won't go into. But one of the things we did in New York was we went down to, uh, to the Lincoln Center, and there's like a Coca-Cola Theater down there where there was a jazz performance one night, a 3-person jazz performance. And I had never seen jazz live. But we had a table up close, and I was struck by the level of vulnerability I felt being close to the performers and how intimate it was to be watching these people perform. And jazz is this other thing entirely, even than seeing— you know, it's one thing to see like a singer-songwriter. They've written their songs, they perform them over and over, they know what they are, and they're doing it again. Jazz is not that, you know. I mean, I guess to some degree you could be performing improvisation.

Yeah, which I love.

Yeah, so I just, I would love to know from your view, as I know what it felt like watching, from your view, having performed in that way before, what is that like to be trusting in that way and to try and build that rhythm together?

Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing is like, there's, it's, and there's amazing solo performances, but you ask any musician and playing with someone else is always better. The kind of things you can create together and the surprise. So with improvisation, you know, there's a structure, but then you're making it up as you go along and you mess up, you make mistakes, you kind of catch each other, you respond to each other in real time. It's just very, very intellectually engaging. You know, at some point in my 20s, I had a— because I was traveling all over the world, going to all the WordCamps in the world, and I would deliver the same talk. So at some point I delivered the talk so many times I got bored of it. And so I was like, okay, I'm now just going to do Q&A because it was nice because I never knew what was going to happen. It was a little more improv. Now I'm trying to actually go back and deliver the same talk sometimes because like, I think there's a space for both. So I have to surround myself with people who are a little more organized because I have a little bit more of that chaos jazz energy. So I need folks who are more like the, like, COO, operationalize, make things very organized. To complement, uh, my, uh, very random generative self.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I don't know if I realized that there is kind of a baseline structure to jazz. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what is that structure that is kind of in the background? I think this highlights a thing I think you talked about with Shane Parrish, this idea that, you know, a novice learns the rules and an expert learns the exceptions, something like that. And it's— this feels like a reflection of that in a way, that if you understand the basic structure, then you have all of this improvisation you can do on top of that. So what is the underlying structure there?

Yeah, so there's two interesting things there. So a typical jazz song, and there's exceptions to this, of course, but you'll have a melody. Behind the melody are chord changes. Now let me tell you something cool about the chord changes. The song, let's say it's I Got Rhythm, I've got rhythm, I've got music, that can be copyrighted. The chord changes behind it cannot. Those are open source. And so the I Got Rhythm chord changes are actually the basis of hundreds and hundreds of other jazz songs. And so there's examples where people will take the sort of background structure of the chord changes and, uh, yeah, those are— cannot be copyrighted. Now the song can, the lyrics. So typically at, uh, you know, standard jazz playing, they'll play the song, the melody with some embellishments, and they'll go into, you know, solos. Where each person will then, playing on the chord changes behind the melody, improvise their own whatever they want to do on top of those chords, on top of that structure. You'll play a couple of— they call it choruses, you know, you play a couple of, uh, turns of the song, you know, which has a structure. Uh, and I Got Rhythm's the AABA structure, meaning that it kind of does the same thing twice and it goes into a bridge and then it comes back to the same thing. Which, by the way, these— a lot of music, what we like about music, is based around familiarity and tension and resolution. So that's why if you've heard Pachelbel's Canon, there's actually like a lot of pop songs or other things built on these chord changes. And so like when we hear something like that, we're immediately kind of primed to enjoy it because we've heard something like this before. So yeah, that's also kind of interesting that our our sort of pleasure centers are primed for familiarity, you know, and recognition. It's like when you can sing along to the song or you've heard it like a million times. They do studies where they look at sort of a random distribution of songs, what becomes popular. There are some things that make a good or bad song, but it's also just repetition.

Yeah. So yeah, you know, I had heard that about some producers that they kind of rely on these background patterns that are familiar to help almost generate pop hits.

Yeah.

Like there's this way of trying, giving yourself the best chance possible of having something that resonates because it's familiar. This is reflective of another idea you talk about, which is, um, I think this was also with Shane, which is not surprising. I love that interview so much. And if anyone listening hasn't heard of The Knowledge Project, I mean, Shane is a fantastic thinker, wise person, thoughtful, and the interview was great. But I think in that interview you also talked about this idea that you've begun to— at that time you had begun to embrace more almost like intuitive feel for things that seem right. Uh, you were talking about it specifically and some of the things that you were learning from your coach at the time, which we'll get into later, but that you then also enjoy going back and learning some of the scientific principles that might underpin that. Yeah, this feels like an example of that, that there's like this intuitive enjoyment of patterns and songs that the untrained ear might just enjoy from an intuitive, like, body feel standpoint. But then that there is a deeper understanding too. There's a deeper, like, scientific principle too on some level, which is fun to dive into.

Why do we like something? There's typically a reason, and a lot of it's in evolutionary biology or how the neural networks of our brain form, where pathways that we use more are kind of more grooved and things. And What's interesting is this works for good and bad things, right? Like you can have bad habits or addictions as well that get highly grooved patterns that can be hard to break. There's a really fun book called Why Buddhism Is True. And it's, it's not actually a religious book. It's not someone trying to— Robert Wright is the author. He's a science writer. So it's not a book trying to convert you to Buddhism. It's sort of looking at things that, you know, through perhaps trial and error, there's some wisdom. And how Buddhism describes the mind and what we've learned from actually neuroscience of how like the different chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, et cetera, work and our neural networks and the firings of things. And so I find that kind of fascinating because all around us is billions of years of evolution and we are the tip of the spear of all of that has happened, you know, going all the way back to, you know, single cells that divided and how amazing that we are having this conversation now through like internet and all, you know, if you really start to think about it, it's like kind of incredible all the layers that are built up that allow us to even do what we're doing now and just how much of wisdom in that sort of trial and error that took millions and millions of years. And now how we can accelerate it through more directed introspection and hypotheses.

I go to a place of, you know, there's, there's this whole category of stuff that gets referred to as pseudoscience now, and it's interesting because sometimes it can be dangerous, but I wonder also if that's just the space of we don't yet know. And so in some ways there are all of these exploratory hypotheses that might be based on things like what you're talking about. Maybe Buddhism tapped into some stuff that was ancient wisdom level true, but that we didn't have an understanding of yet. And now we're growing an understanding. And within that field of kind of pseudoscience type stuff that we refer to now, there may be a lot of stuff that's true, but we don't yet know how to prove it. And there might be a lot of stuff that's false. And so there's this interesting gray area as we're trying to develop this learning where It's uncomfortable to admit we don't know, but we might find out, and we have to have the hypotheses before we can find out.

It gives you a lot of humility, you know? Yeah. I don't like looking at the ocean or looking at the stars is look at how much we don't understand about even just consciousness, the big question of consciousness, which I enjoy because, you know, you never run out of things to do. Uh, life will never be boring, and you're really only limited by your curiosity and, uh, and drive.

It might have been, uh, I don't know if it was Mike Maples or maybe Jason Calacanis, but one of them referred to you— they refer to these two categories of people of like know-it-alls and learn-it-alls. They referred to you at the time as a learn-it-all, and I really loved that as an idea. I mean, I identified with that, that I'm just insatiably curious. What's what makes podcasting so enjoyable to me? It gives me this like targeted way to learn so much about a human being, but also the topics that they're interested in. That seemed to resonate with you at the time. And I wonder if that still resonates with you of kind of being a learn-it-all and having this curio— natural curiosity that leads you down rabbit holes and that you relate to over time, if that's still a piece of how you identify.

Yeah. The fancy way to put it might be epistemological humility, right? But I've always been surprised. The smartest people I've ever met or read about, whether it's Richard Feynman, reading about him, or like a Stephen Wolfram meeting him, how unembarrassed these folks are to ask dumb, quote unquote, dumb questions, because they really want to understand things and they're not shy to say like, what does that word mean? Or what does that acronym mean? It can sometimes expose that we use a lot of abstractions without actually understanding what they mean. So maybe we use an acronym, without knowing that it stands for something. And if you know what it stands for, maybe you'll understand it better. Or once someone does have the deep understanding, you can kind of get to the, you know, build your mental models and sort of the lattice work of mental models that Charlie Munger talks about to understand the higher level concepts based on some lower level things.

A concrete example of this that, you know, it's interesting because when you do When I go and do prep for a conversation like this, it's like I get to hear 10 years of your life, 20 years of your life, but in a condensed period. And so I get to kind of see this like lifeline almost of what you've shared in public. And one of those lines within that of learning was on AI and hearing how your perspective grew and changed and shifted over time from— I mean, I think in an interview 8 or 9 years ago, it was already a prominent topic, and it was fascinating for me to go back and realize that that was the case. But at the time, you were referring to it as like, we're still 15 years away from it being really impactful on society. And right now, you basically have some machine learning models that can do a little bit of stuff occasionally, like maybe it can help out with support volume and some other things like that. To now, I think maybe in 2021 or 2022, you spent kind of a year reading academic papers about AI to really try and go deep and understand it. And so I, I just love you to kind of unpack how you thought about that. Like, what was your approach to really trying to go deep on this thing that seemed like it really was going to become big and now is?

When it seems like there's a new area that I'm really ignorant in that I need to like catch up on, my hacks for trying to like bootstrap a little bit are, um, through people. So I try to just kind of search around or look for what might be the podcast that actually is a good distillation of a lot of things, maybe guests that appear on multiple podcasts. So like you did, you apparently— thank you so much, by the way, for listening to all these different podcasts I've been on over the past 20 years. I should probably do that at some point and go back and listen to my old self. I could probably learn something. And so when you can find the people And then you can like follow them on like Twitter and social media. Like what papers are they sharing right now? What are they talking about? So there's all these great filters that can kind of like help bubble up both. Hopefully where I struggle the most is sometimes it's actually kind of easy for me to find what the bleeding edge is. Even if I don't fully understand it, I can kind of see that like, this is where things are going, which is a little bit frustrating sometimes because I'm like, hey, I know this is the thing. But I can't really explain to you why it's the thing. I had a partner, close friend go through breast cancer last year, had that BRCA2 mutation. And I was able to discover like a lot of things that were on the edge of that latest treatment, even though I couldn't fully explain the ATP pathways or the energetic thing. Like, I felt very much, I was very much aware of how I was kind of floating out a little bit, but there's kind of a zeitgeist that you can see around, like, who are the researchers, who's promoting, who's publishing, who's like, uh, what's being referenced to get a sense for it, uh, which is kind of interesting. That's really useful. I do that for tech all the time too, like for engineering and like, you know, what's the latest trend or, uh, language or thing we should have an eye on. And then picking what you place your bets on is, is, is a tough one. Because if you kind of hitch your wagon to the wrong, uh, horse, it can be fatal actually. You know, if I look at, there were so many other CMSs that started at the same time that WordPress did. And we were one of 50 or 60. And one of the reasons I think we were evolutionarily successful, the phylogenetic tree of, you know, all the different CMSs. Was our choice of platforms. You know, we hitched our wagon to PHP and MySQL, even though those weren't my favorite languages. You know, I kind of preferred Postgres or Python at the time, but there was a practicality to them and the way they were able to be distributed and available, especially on these like $2 or $3 a month hosts. You know, so cheap and easy to run them. Different ways. That was the reason I was like, okay, we gotta, you know, we'll make it work. And so even though like this language is, you know, has some things that I don't love, let's make the best of it. And it ended up being a really good investment. And many other folks at the time, Yahoo, but then later Facebook, Wikipedia, others who sort of also hitched their wagons to PHP, we ended up getting a lot of tailwinds from the improvements. They make to that open source community. So for example, when PHP went from version 6 to 7, it basically doubled in performance. So as a startup, this means that all of a sudden that saves me tens of millions of dollars of CapEx, like servers I don't need to buy. Like literally, like we just kind of like upgraded a language one day and everything got more efficient because we were a part of the ecosystem that was the one that was evolutionarily getting the most investment. Things. That's always tricky to, to identify. And there's some things I really, really love, like Erlang, that are so robust and so amazing, but maybe it didn't have that same, like, or Ruby, actually Ruby is probably a better example. Ruby has it now with Shopify and others, but like, at the time it didn't yet have enough of that backing that the core engine was getting the improvements that you kind of got some of this for free. Optimization and, uh, tailwinds on you, which again, that means you don't have to raise money and lose equity. That means maybe, yeah, that can have all these downstream effects as technological decision, but maybe that meant I didn't need to raise money at an opportune time, which meant I would've lost control of the company, which meant maybe Automatic wouldn't be where it is today. Or, you know, there's all sorts of downstream impacts of, uh, what might seem like a very disconnected decision.

It's interesting, you know, PHP was actually a topic I wrote down as something we could get into because when I was leading the ConvertKit team, there was a period where we had no engineering leader. We were in between leaders and I was recruiting and I actually managed the team directly. I'm not an engineer by background, but it was such a wonderful opportunity to learn so much and seeing these debates over technologies to adopt or not adopt was a huge aspect of the engineering culture, right? It's like, do we want to place a bet on a thing that opens up new possibilities because it's new and it's based on today's web standard, but it might not continue in 3 years to be supported by a wider ecosystem? You know, we might not be able to recruit people if it doesn't continue, you know, etc., etc. Or do we use something that's more proven and has been around a long time, but that might have frustrations that aren't reflected by the modern web? You you know, and these are like, these are the trade-offs. So if we back out of that and we look at principally, and maybe we look forward from where you are, so like that's an example from the past, right? PHP is this thing and it gets a lot of flack because it does have shortcomings. Like there's a lot of engineers who would say like, I'm never working in PHP again in my life, I'm done with that phase of my career for whatever reason, you know, maybe they want to be on the edge. And it's really tempting to want to be on the edge because you feel cool, like I'm on the edge. I'm learning, I'm, I'm leading, but in building a company that stands the test of time, that might not be the best place to be. So I guess as you look forward and you think now from where you are on what technologies to adopt or, or even other aspects of building the company, what are the principles you use for making those bets?

Well, we were lucky that PHP was a primarily, we were using it as a web language, right? So it was delivered through the browser, which meant we got access to the investment in browser engines, Chrome, V8, and others, you know, which also then enabled JavaScript, which enabled Node, which, so that is probably the richest development ecosystem around. Maybe some stuff with Go and others, but Rust, Rust is kind of interesting, but yeah, the browser engines are probably the place that have the most investments. Uh, if you just look at the hundreds of millions of dollars of engineering effort that goes into improving those, securing those, everything as a sort of development environment. So where it's going is actually, you know, I think the browser paradigm and the sandboxing and everything there is, uh, is definitely the future. It's getting wild. So there's something now for WordPress called Playgrounds. We can now run PHP in the browser. So it's kind of come full circle. It's kind of wild. You can go to wordpress.org/playground and it will create an instance of WordPress in real time in like a couple of seconds, depending on the speed of your computer, you know, anywhere from like 2 to 20 seconds. It will create a whole server environment, you know, things that before you used to have to download and compile like Apache, MySQL, PHP, et cetera. And we could just do this in real time. Instantly and allow you to play with it, which is really cool for learning, for testing, for, you know, this, this sort of transient environment. It means that we could embed it at the edge. We could put it on a CDN. You know, we could run WordPress. It's the biggest mind mess thing I've experienced in the past couple years was when I saw that happen. And that's enabled by WASM, WebAssembly language. So where it's going, it's kind of cool because the technology, we're at a time of like super abundance. The technology can do almost anything. And so for where it's going, for us, particularly as a company, we really have to come back to the humans. We've actually never in WordPress's history been constrained by the servers or the tech. It's always been by our ability to design and create an intuitive experience. For providing the goals that people want. Also helping shape the environment of like what's possible, where people should expect. Because there's a world, maybe if WordPress hadn't existed or something like WordPress hadn't existed, where like we'd all just have like profiles on Facebook now. That would be the webpage. And that's kind of what happened with China and WeChat. Webpages aren't really important. But the open web movement, which WordPress is a contributor to, has really fought hard for why it's important to have a domain and a website and all the things that opens up for, not just for the big folks, you know, the google.com and the facebook.com, but also like everyone else all the way down to individual blogs or publishers. And you know, Seth.blog or Tim.blog or FS.blog, right? To refer to Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and Shane Parrish, who we've talked about earlier. Their websites can then become whole portals. And so their archives, their ecosystems— for Seth Edson, we actually create a little chatbot where you can like chat with their archives. And that's pretty, pretty exciting. And that's not something that you might get just on a Facebook profile page or a Twitter profile page. So the ability to really own and control that enables a lot more innovation and, uh, and continuity. Also ownership, the idea of like a sovereignty over your digital identity is so critical and key. I want to live in an ownership society, not a society where someone else owns everything and I'm just kind of borrowing it. That's not freedom. And I worry about that as we particularly move to the cloud. What can we do to give more power in the hands of people? And luckily Moore's Law and all the cool stuff that they're doing with chips and everything, I think will help this. You know, our laws and computers are we're using really a fraction of the capabilities of them right now. And I'm very excited to unlock more local computing, distributed computing.

Yeah, there's so much here. I mean, you know, I think in the, your latest State of the Word address, you talked about, um, data portability as something that y'all really want to work on as a priority. And, you know, in my context, we kind of got our asses kicked a little bit by Substack, to be frank. At ConvertKit. I mean, ConvertKit is a great business and it's not going anywhere, and that's the beautiful thing about how it's been built, about how we intentionally built it while I was there and how Nathan continues to build it. But Substack had a lot going for it, you know. But what's interesting is they're taking an open platform, which is email, and building lock-in on top of it. And now ConvertKit can— started to move that way as well. So I don't want to act like it's like good and bad or anything like that. But if you look at things, small decisions like you don't pay for a number of email addresses on the platform, or you didn't used to on Substack. In a way, that's a lock-in feature. Yeah, because all your other alternatives are that you do pay for it and you're dependent on the Substack ecosystem for your site, your forms, your email hosting, sending the emails, publishing your posts. You know, it becomes this— these little pieces of lock-in along the way that make it really hard, even if technically you can export your subscribers. It makes it really hard to move. It makes it really hard to maintain control. That's always made me nervous. You know, there's something I really love about, you know, not to like toot WordPress's horn, but I love that about my site. Like, barrettbrooks.com is mine. I can plug any email into it. I can publish when I want. I have control over the format. You know, there's just a lot of good stuff to be said about owning it.

Well, and as you mentioned, and I'll give full credit, there's so much to admire about Substack. Including the fact that from the beginning they've given you the ability to export your subscribers, including, I think, even your credit cards and stuff, which is— yeah, I love, you know, make it easy for people to leave. They're far more likely to stay. Yeah. And they've given people— you just described a number of them— really good reasons to stay on the network. But what's beautiful about business is the most— I think Jeff Bezos said it, and I call it the most terrifying phrase ever uttered. Which is your margin is my opportunity.

It's so true.

So, you know, you know, uh, Substack has created this amazing ecosystem and they have a margin, 10% or whatever it is. It's different for probably the biggest publishers. At some point that number might become large enough that WordPress, Ghost, Ben Thompson's launching this new thing called Passport that he announced at WordCamp Asia. Which is pretty interesting because Substack was basically modeled after Ben Thompson. Wow. So now he's got his open source WordPress version of the same thing. I mean, that's what's, what I love about sort of business as like the greatest infinite game. It's that we're all responding to each other and everyone's free to choose. I love competition. I love that there's, you know, 50 CMSs out there and like, you know, people are like, oh, aren't you mad that So-and-so is doing well. Like, no, because now I get to learn from why they're doing well, because they've created something in the market that is serving a need that I'm not. So like, okay. I mean, it's not like they're holding a gun to their customer's head and forcing them to choose it. These are people freely choosing it. And is it marketing? Is it features? Is it functionality? Is it integrations? Is it distribution? What is it? And yeah. You can kind of debug that. If you can figure it out, then you can evolve your own thing. And everyone's doing that. That's what's kind of cool about, I think, particularly working in a technological realm. And I will contrast to this, contrast to like academics or particularly medicine, how fast the rate of innovation is. Because everyone kind of watches each other and reads kind of the same articles and the same news and the same, you know, like we're all kind of part of the same zeitgeist. In a way that when I did sort of briefly delve into healthcare world, I was really shocked that even people at the very, very top of their field, because of the constraints of serving patients and publishing and all those sorts of things, literally didn't have the time to follow as much of what else was going on. And so there was less of— I feel like the rate of change was much slower. Just because there was lack of awareness. It wasn't that the people— people are just as smart, by the way, as anyone in tech or anything like that. There's not a difference of talent or intelligence. It's really just kind of a difference of distribution of information. I love that Bruce Sterling quote that says the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. I would say the amplitude between the very latest in technology and kind of the the median is much smaller than it is in healthcare or some other fields. And healthcare at the very latest could be sometimes decades ahead of what will be available to the median. Where in technology, I mean, look at fields like AI, which are hypercompetitive right now. The very latest thing is often caught up to by competitors in a span of weeks or months. Which, you know, things have happened there, which I would have predicted wrongly would have taken years, particularly open source catching up to things, the breaking frontier models. It's happened so, so, so, so quickly. That's, that's pretty cool. And I think that is to the nature. It's not pure open source, but there is kind of the ethos of learning and sharing and some transparency that I think makes for good science, good progress.

There's a lot here. I want to see if I can kind of reflect back some of what I'm taking away from this portion of the conversation. Number one, I'm interested in the healthcare thing. We talked a little bit about, and before we started recording, about my dad, and we found out he had Parkinson's last year. And they're in Central Florida, which is largely the healthcare system is built around folks who are older in age. And so there's a lot more kind of managing, like symptom management type stuff, almost like managed decline versus like ideal thriving type healthcare. And I hear the protocols they're following for his treatment and I think, oh, they're managing his decline. That's what's happening.

Yeah.

They're not trying to apply the latest in that field to helping him feel the best he possibly can and optimize for quality of life as long as possible. You know, so there's the whole personal dilemma of like, how plugged into that do I want to get? To your point about like doing the research on the breast cancer thing, right? But there's this other thing where, how do you solve for distribution of information in fields that aren't technology? I think about, I interviewed Packy McCormick for the podcast. He'll be one of the earlier episodes, and he based one of his articles on an article by Stewart Brand called Pace Layering. And Stewart's concept— Stewart Brand, he's awesome. If you've never heard of him and you're listening, like, so there's a whole world there that you could start to explore. But the concept he shared as pace layering is that there are these layers to society and they have different rates of change. And so you might have nature, you know, operating on timescales of millions of years, uh, you know, the planets, and then it goes all the way up to technology and healthcare might be somewhere kind of like at the infrastructure layer where the rate of change is just not very fast. And there's a reason for that. You know, you need good baseline structures in healthcare because they do provide a baseline level of benefit. But then you get to these edge cases or individual cases where at the individual level that might not be optimized for them. And there's a complex set of criteria there about what to prioritize. You know, I say all of that to say my summary takeaway for— we began with your learning process on AI. It was how we kind of followed the track here. You're thinking about, I think, what applies here? You know, there's like, what's the edge? But then it's what applies in my business. And then how does that relate to the human value that we provide to our customers, to our team? And therefore, how do I make decisions as a leader that optimize for the appropriate things and not just the bleeding edge? And I think that's interesting, but you had to go down and learn all of it to even be able to make those decisions, right?

And a lot of self-experimentation, you know, in healthcare. I have flown to Roatan or Prospera. I did the lantern fireworks thing. Where they put this GMO bacteria in your mouth that basically instead of converting sugar to acid, it converts to the ethanol. So you'd never get cavities again, but that's, you know, an experimental treatment that's not available in the United States. The FDA has not approved that. But how cool that if you fly to Honduras, you can, uh, get this. So I like that, that we have sort of spacious for experimentation. Hopefully that can accelerate some of the healthcare stuff as well. Like, I feel like there is some of this in America around people at end of life get access to experimental treatments. They don't have to go through necessarily the same things, but by that point, you're kind of too late. Like you said, what's the proactive stuff that we can do kind of earlier in life that might have like really great benefits? Like, why are we not giving this modified bacteria to every single child so they never get cavities the rest of their life? You know, like just doing it in like As soon as they get their teeth or something. I think it, those things will become standard of care. There's a conservatism, which I think we could both easily state the reasons for. We've had examples in the past, lead in paints or other things that were standard that we found were actually quite, what's the word for harmful? Iatrogenic or something? Iatrogenic. Perhaps, especially using the better data collection we have now. And monitoring, perhaps we can get to things faster. You know, during the COVID stuff, there was this idea of challenge vaccines. So people who would be deliberately infected, uh, or exposed, deliberately exposed, which to, to COVID, and seeing if a vaccine worked. That obviously has a lot of ethical qualms, right? Because you're exposing someone to a known pathogen. But for folks who want to volunteer, you know, I would have volunteered for that. I'm kind of young and healthy and like If that could help move science a little bit faster, yeah, sure. Should my mom do that? Absolutely not. You know, her health is much more frail. So like, you know, deliberately exposing her to a pathogen has just way more downsides. But, you know, close to 8 billion people, I think society can sort itself out into people who are willing to take more risk. This is our firefighters, our police officers, our military, our other things. To protect the rest of us. So finding the scientific equivalent of that, where the people who are maybe willing to subject themselves to, you know, perhaps having a negative downside, all the radiation that people who, uh, were supposed to, who worked on the Manhattan Project before they realized what that was, many of them dying of cancer and other things like, but it moved science forward in a really great way. You know, what's our equivalent of that today? And we maybe have gone too far on the safety side. As long as it's informed, I think it's fine. Like, there's some terrible examples, including that the US government's done in the past where they ran experiments.

Yeah. AIDS treatment and like things like that.

It's wild stuff. I forget the name of it, but it's on Wikipedia where they like, like drop the pathogen like across a wide area to test like a biological weapon. Like there's some wild stuff. So let's not do that anymore, but If we can do this in forum that controls with transparency, I think that could be kind of interesting.

There is wisdom in the precautionary principle of if you can test for efficacy, it is better to test for efficacy before you go put something out all over the place. But there's this like trade-off between that precautionary principle and getting the data on the efficacy. There's a middle ground there you have to move through where there's uncertainty. And I love the idea that. Informed agency or informed choice is a potential pathway through that, that you give people the known quantities and you say, here are the risks. Are you willing to take them on behalf of finding the answer?

Yeah.

I think that's pretty valuable, you know?

Yeah. And it goes back to that open source ethos. I know I keep tying things back to it, but like I see it, it's mentioned in life, you know, the kind of true thread of everything. That I am really philosophically attached to in modern society is this, these ideas of transparency, verifiability, ownership that are sort of built into the license of open source as that applies to different parts of society, whether that's papers being public instead of requiring paid access or whatever it is that appears to be a good thing. And that feels like a sort of secular religion or philosophy that I have trouble finding downsides to.

Yeah, I think I'm with you on that. Okay, there's one more topic. We're going to take a break here in just a minute and then move into the second half of the conversation, which I want to dive much more into kind of leadership, team culture, uh, leading distributed teams, some of the more like we might call it practical stuff on leading teams and growing companies. But before we get there, I would be totally neglecting my opportunity here if we didn't talk about sabbaticals. I think you're about two-thirds of the way through your sabbatical right now. Is that roughly right?

That is true, yes.

Okay, so Automatic introduced a benefit to the team, which is every 5 years you get to take up to a 90-day sabbatical, fully paid. And if you delay that, you have to wait an additional 5— you still have to wait the full 5 years before the next one. And so if you wait till your 8th year, you don't get your next one till your 13th year. So there's some benefit to taking it as, as early as possible. Uh, however, you've been there for 20 years and you had never taken one.

18 years.

And so I think you framed that as being a little bit of a hypocrite, and this has been your first chance to really do it. And there's been this big process around— I mean, you're the, the leader of the company, you had to hand off responsibility and really unplug. And so there's this whole lead-up to it. I think you, you did a podcast with, uh, with Tim Ferriss about the lead-up, but you haven't talked to anyone that I've heard yet about what it's been like. Ah, and so I'm just curious, what's it been like to unplug at least somewhat? I mean, here we are doing a podcast right in the middle of your sabbatical, but what's it been like to have this time and space, and, and what have you been doing?

Ah, so much there. It's been great to be at choice and the freedom of— because automatic is such a humming machine that being plugged into that can be used as an excuse for a million things. And workaholism is the ism or addiction which is most societally accepted and even rewarded, but I think it can have all the downsides of any other addiction that we might point to, heroin or alcoholism or anything else, you know, some of those downsides that it could, can disconnect you from loved ones or stated goals or other things. And so, yeah, for me, I found that I was deprioritizing my health. I was deprioritizing reading. I was deprioritizing, like, things I say I want to do. I was, you know, kind of putting behind the automatic stuff and I don't think I needed to. That's the other thing that it really shows. So part of what a sabbatical proves to you is that things don't collapse when you're gone. It actually kind of keeps going. My hope is that when I take future vacations and things, you know, prior to my next sabbatical, I'll be able to feel more comfortable unplugging a bit more and maybe not need to like check the Slack every day or whatever it is that I I have convinced myself that I need to do. I think you mentioned that one of your interviews will be with Jerry Colonna. And I love his phrase or his question. He has so many good questions, but how am I complicit in creating the conditions that I say I don't want? So a lot of things that I would complain about, if you would ask me like, ah, everything's dependent on me, blah, blah, blah. Like, okay. Well, how did I make everything dependent on me? Why was it so hard? I've tried to take sabbaticals before and I had to cancel them. So how did I create the conditions in the past where when I tried to take a sabbatical, some emergency would come up and there was no one else that could handle it except for me?

What insight do you have on that? What have you seen from this time that now reveals that to you?

Well, I mean, so much of it, and something I'm very, very proud of is maturing Automattic to a space and the incredible growth of the leadership team, largely self-driven. I won't take any credit for it. That has created a space for me to feel more comfortable doing this and it also working. And I will say, so to answer your original question, like, how has it gone? Poorly at first, to be totally honest, like the lead up to it. And the first, you know, there was, there was like a major crisis in the first 6 weeks. I've actually added on 2 weeks to my sabbatical because I was like, I had to write off a couple of weeks in there where I had to be very, very, very engaged with the company and things. But I see that as a last gasp of some maybe previously tightly held inefficiencies or pathologies in the sort of organization or psychology of the organization. So. It was kind of like the last fight of something that we were doing wrong, but really attached to. So there's the, what were the crises, crises, which there's a lot of learning from. They're also like, what were the sort of things that just kind of like gently broke down that maybe I didn't even realize I was not aware that I was kind of like spinning 20 plates at once in an unsustainable way that probably would break down when I was unavailable. But I didn't know this. So when I left for a longer period of time, it became very obvious that like, oh, like, ah man, we don't have like a great like crisis PR setup. That's one example that we definitely experienced and you can kind of see where we went through that. I realized as well how dependent I was on the organ of Automattic. So if you think of Automattic almost like an instrument, my ability to tap into those 1,900-something You know, brilliant people, what is something I had taken for granted. And so the sort of restraint or, uh, constriction I put on myself that I was really going to go through Tony Schneider, the person. So all of a sudden, instead of I could talk to 19 other people, I'm talking to one, sort of reduced the bandwidth of my access to that instrument in a way that I messed up a lot. Like when I did, there was a whole Tumblr thing where I kind of screwed things up. Part of that was me not having access to like all of Automattic to like advise me or help me do things. So it was kind of like riding solo and it made me so aware of like, oh wow, being part of the team is actually part of what allows me to do good work as well. And in the absence of that, I, it's very easy for me to make mistakes or screw up and everything.

It goes back to that collective wisdom thing that you talked about.

Yeah, I, I really, really miss my colleagues. That's, that's one thing that is very salient and it's like a really good thing to experience, right? Because familiarity can breed contempt. And after 18 years of being around, you know, these people, I maybe had become accustomed or didn't really appreciate just how incredible they are and how much I would miss them when I didn't have daily access to them. Again, a self-imposed constraint. They're also there. I can still do them and I've had some fun conversations and ability to catch up socially with not as many as I would have liked. In a different version of this, I would have loved to have just gone like, you know, taken each of the 12 weeks and kind of like taking a vacation with 12 different folks, sets of folks or something, or, you know, done a fun adventure or something like that. So maybe that'll be my next sabbatical. So I wasn't able to do that version of it, but I have crossed paths with a few people, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. I have a colleague who's opening— his father's opening a restaurant in Dallas. I was able to visit that. And, you know, so fun stuff like that is, uh, it's also great. It also reminds me that when I go back, I need to make space not just for the work, but also just for, you know, getting to know each other as humans, which I think is, uh, a really valuable part, particularly when you start to work together, not over just the years, but sometimes decades as Uh, some of us have. It's really great to see that evolution.

So my last question here on the sabbatical thing is, did you create any background structure for yourself? You know, if we go back to that kind of metaphor of, of the jazz thing that you highlighted, did you create any kind of background structure for the time, or have you just been letting your kind of intuition guide you and your energy guide you since you, like— so if we start after the crisis, you know, when you've actually kind of separated, yeah. What's been, has there been any structure to it and what's that been like?

Well, yeah, and I suppose that maybe like some of the things I wanted, like healthy habits I want to do for myself, even without Automattic, I can easily fill my day with things that aren't that.

Yeah, they didn't just magically start happening.

No, no, no. So the excuse I had used, or at least the acceptable excuse, this is for the company, is revealed as just, no, it's just me. And I'm kind of left with myself as the only reason for why I'm not doing these things, which is a far more uncomfortable answer for why some of this stuff isn't happening. So need to work on that. I allowed myself only two goals because I didn't want to, you know, if there's something I say that externally people perceive me as having a tremendous amount of, but also is the thing I yearn for the most, it's freedom. This idea of freedom, I didn't want to put too much structure. I didn't want to try to like write a book on this or, you know, have some other like really kind of like big goal. I allow myself to learn to sail and get better at chess. So kind of like a skill and a play, both of which I've kind of put off to the end. So I'm doing like a month in Spain where I'll finally do the sailing at the very end of this. It's been fun. It started off pretty good though. So I'd say I had like 2 weeks of that very like, just kind of like Ah, doing fun adventures with friends. I rode with a friend to Alcatraz. You know, we rode the boat. He's a, he's a, a world-class rower. Did some other fun things and then kind of like life caught up to me.

Before my departure from ConvertKit, we had also introduced a sabbatical benefit. It was, um, that one was a month every 5 years, so it wasn't quite as generous as, as the automatic one, but we had kind of a thoughtful 6-month roll-off for me in my role. 'Cause I was so, I, I kind of managed the entire team. Basically, uh, so it was a big departure. And before we did that, we let the executive team know about my departure, and then I did my sabbatical to make sure that I wasn't just tired or that I didn't just need a little perspective before we told the whole team. So we wanted to kind of give this spaciousness first. The structure I gave myself was I wanted to prioritize— I almost went back to like, what did little Barrett enjoy? Well, little Barrett enjoyed building models and Legos, spending time in nature, playing sports, and like playing, you know, whatever, home run derby with friends and things like that, and fishing. And so I basically made a list of things that younger me enjoyed that I still kind of in my head aspire to or would love to experience, but that's just hard as a dad and a leader and everything. So a couple days a week. I made like this color-coded calendar. A couple days a week I said, okay, this is a day for a model, this is a day for a hike. And so I gave myself a little bit of background structure of that. But then there were days where I specifically labeled them cannot make plans, must wake up and decide. And so this was different, right? It wasn't quite your situation. Like, I still had my family at home and my wife was still working, and so I had responsibility. I couldn't go travel was one constraint for the whole time. But like, my wife and I did a weekend away without the kids. And that was a thing that's not normal. So I tried to create basically like joyous structure, but also intentional and uncomfortable lack of planning on days of that. And some people would hear that and be like, doesn't it kind of defeat the purpose if you schedule it all out? And but it— for me, it was like forced discomfort and active choice on how I wanted to spend my time on those days or weeks when it was like, no, you don't have a plan for today. Your plan is check in with yourself. What do you want to do? Uh, and that was really beautiful for me. I needed that.

Well, that sounds like amazing sabbatical advice. So I, I fully endorse everything you just said. I think that's a really good model. There you go.

Well, with, with 6 weeks left, maybe it'll be helpful. Okay, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about distributed teams. We're going to talk about creating company culture and probably a little bit about the immense amount you've learned on hiring great people. And your years leading the company. And we'll leave it at that and we'll come right back. Matt, welcome back. Took a little break, maybe grabbed a drink, um, ran to the restroom. I want to talk about leadership and I want to talk about the company. We talked a lot about, you know, my framing for the first half of this conversation, or a little more than the first half, was kind of like I try and build this mental map of who the person is, like, who is this person sitting across from me? And so we talked about music and we talked about travel and your sabbatical. You know, just a lot of the things that I think have shaped you as a person through my eyes, which I only have a limited bandwidth on, but I also have a lot of, a lot of admiration for how you lead and the philosophy from which you lead, or the philosophy from which I perceive you to lead. And it seems very altruistic and optimistic and hopeful. And I view kind of the, the realm that you've created, the ecosystem that you've created, the Marvel universe that you've created, both in Automattic, but also with, with Audrey, your, your investment fund. As being this kind of ecosystem of hope and openness, uh, is my take on it. And it connects back to this mission that you have of democratizing publishing, commerce, and now messaging. I wonder if you can kind of recall when you first felt attached to this mission at the personal level and where that came from for you.

All right, first felt attached to it. Huh. I feel like I was pretty lucky to get internet access, kind of unfiltered internet access relatively early on. And so I was on newsgroups, you know, Usenet, forums, Slashdot as a news site, sort of exposed me to like some of the world of open source, a site called Corrosion with a K that was an early kind of news aggregator, and kind of like a small hacker community in Houston, which, um, Wired magazine, you know, at the computer store, like these little like portals, 2600, you know, like these little portals into like a different world. So it wasn't really media actually, probably that as a kid you pick up that magazine or you pick up that or get referred to that website. You're like, wow, there's a whole other world out there. I never would have known otherwise. And what could be a bit of a rabbit hole towards a new way of thinking or a philosophy or, yeah. So that, that, that was probably some of it.

You know, so you, you first got involved, you branched off of this, this open source tool called P2, right? P2. Um, originally to create, to create WordPress. And that was the beginning, but you were only 19. And so you've been at this, I think you just turned 40, is that right? Yeah. So you've been at this over 20 years now. I wonder how your connection to that mission has kind of matured over time, you know, so you get these early seeds and exposure, um, and, and you talk about your dad introducing you to computers and kind of like playing around with computers with him. And so there are a lot of these early roots that kind of built towards— only in hindsight does it make sense probably, but at the time you can see the seeds getting planted and now you've been at it a long time. How's your relationship to the mission grown and changed? Like how is it maturing from where you are today?

The good news is that I was lucky to have picked a few things, the themes we've talked about, open source, freedom, choice, like that have, have remained actually quite true. I think that if I had to say my perspective now, or what I'm a little bit obsessed about, is actually security and how to increase security in a digital realm? Because computing is built on so many layers of abstractions, and all these layers are written by humans. There's bugs in all of them, you know, from the top-level application you're running all the way down to like the CPU. There's ways it can work that are unintended. What does it mean to create like secure communication or privacy or like protect these things that I think are I think they're fundamental human rights. And if we can't, maybe do we have to think about what society is like without those, where everything is just transparent and accessible? What does that mean? So that's a little bit of the sort of leading edge philosophical realm I am exploring and working with now, including, you know, kind of returning to some of my roots of kind of hacking security stuff and other things. Thinking about WordPress as a platform, which now powers a lot of the web, and messaging as security and communication, and encryption and everything there being something that is, governments invest tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in, both to have secure communications and to break other people's secure communications. So those are interesting realms to be playing in. You know, I don't love it because it is very, it's much more adversarial. I do kind of prefer the positive sum aspects of publishing and that kind of core WordPress mission, which is publish, you know? Yeah.

And is it because there's a, there's kind of like a bad guy on the other side, like the need for security implies a bad actor in some way? Yeah.

And there's definitely bad actors that, you know, spammers that try to spam WordPress sites and other things. So it's not that we haven't been without that. Yeah. There is something I wonder if long-term I have the temperament for this. So we'll see. I, I got a decade to do it, you know, it's probably my 40s, but yeah, yeah, you see that in my 50s and 60s if I still remain in that kind of, um, kind of more adversarial security space, or whether I return back to just sort of pure publishing tools and stuff like that.

That's really interesting. Yeah. So kind of looking, noticing in this moment how it is changing, how your relationship is changing, and what that means. And you don't know, who knows, maybe it'll become really fun.

Maybe it won't. Social media is another thing that, you know, with Tumblr has provided great joy, but also like great sorrow. You know, the dynamics of running a social network are far, far more challenging than I would have ever predicted. Because I, you know, I kind of assumed that the network of WordPresses had, was social and like, so I knew a bit about it, but I truly like attuned social networks and the dynamics that can happen with reblogging, things going viral. Is a totally different beast. So I think I've learned that lesson. I think Elon has learned that lesson. Yeah, it's, uh, it's quite challenging.

Part of the meaning I make of that on the security thing, and even on the social thing, is the orientation to it. And, and how, how much of that is internal versus how much of that is the reality of the thing is an interesting question. And so an offer I'd make to you is, I wonder if there's a very affirmative and hopeful orientation to it, which is that In a way, I look at security— like, I use Signal with many of my most important conversations with friends because there are some things that I just want to know, like I can explore my thinking on, you know, it's not like I'm talking about horrible things, but it's just like there's some things I'm not going to say in an open forum because I don't want to be attached to them because I'm exploring what I think is right. So there's an element of security that's actually very pro-freedom, it's very pro-agency, it's very pro-preservation of rights, to your point. And it'll just be interesting to see how that orientation develops for you, how it feels over time as you wade further and further into it.

And what you just described you doing personally is actually what's happening across society right now, which is people are leaving some of these more open social networks and shifting more of their generative output to chat groups and private discussions. I think there's two big reasons for this, or three perhaps. One, that space to experiment and change and evolve over time. Two is the exploitation of the open networks by bad actors, both spam and mis and disinformation. So I guess that's the three things that I think is creating a very natural move. You know, we just launched a feature called Share Journals on Day One. So Day One is a journaling app, kind of like a private blogging app that we acquired a few years ago. Really, really love it. It's like really beautifully built and And really useful. And it's now called Multiplayer. It's always been a single-player app where it's just private and it's fully encrypted, like say similar encryption to like 1Password, everything. So it's very, very secure. Now, like you and I could have a shared journal that, um, is like super, super secure, but it has the dynamics of blogging. Like we can comment on things, we can do posts, we can, or social media. So that is, you know, pretty early still. They just launched it, I think a month or two ago, but One of the things I'm really excited to return to, uh, when I get back to Automattic is, uh, kind of exploring the different use cases for that, whether it's, you know, maybe shared notes with your therapist or maybe it's families, you know, having a really secure place they could put like, uh, photos and other things when their children are growing up. These just get like, uh, yeah, pretty exciting to me.

Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that. You know, I'm conscious that we, we're winding down on our time, and I want to get to a couple of key topics here. But before we do, I actually want to— I want to offer this as a choice point for you. I love the automatic creed, and I have it here. I thought I might read it, but I wondered if— would you like to read it, or would you like me to?

Sure, I can read it.

Okay, I love that. I mean, because I read it and I hear your voice after having listened to so much of you, and so it just felt— actually, in this moment, I realized that would be beautiful for you to read it.

All right. I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate, loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible because it's the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint. And no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. By the way, that's the longest sentence in there. Finally, given time, there is no problem that's insurmountable. So yeah, that's the automatic creed. Written a while ago, probably after reading like a Seth Godin book or so, these like really inspirational writers. And it's a version 1.0. It can and will hopefully evolve over time, but it's actually been interesting. Like, as we've debated what to add or remove from it, it has stood up pretty well. And also I like that it's written in that sort of, uh, what's it called? Second person? You're saying the I AMs. So we put this actually in people's employment contracts when we send them the offer letter. You know, when you sign, there's all the legal stuff, but then there's the automatic greed and you sign right below it. So we really want people to, uh, uh, read it and, you know, sign up for it or not sign up for it. You know, like be conscious about the, what they're committing to if they, if they join the company.

Well, I just want to say to you, I mean, I read it and I, it was just inspiring to me. It felt very wholesome and I can totally understand why people would sign up for it. It feels like a thing that has clarity and principle behind it. When's the last time you read it out loud?

That's a good question. It probably would have been. Maybe a few months ago, like the midnight. So when I was, uh, starting my sabbatical and passing the CEO torch to Tony Schneider, uh, we did a sort of a live broadcast at midnight of the day we're supposed to switch over. So we started 30 minutes before. So for the first 30 minutes, I was CEO and the last 30 minutes he was CEO. Because I think the sabbatical role, you probably experienced this as you said you were COO, at the higher levels is a lot more concerning for the team. So one thing that we've done, which I think I'd recommend, is actually a full month before the sabbatical started, Tony shadowed me. So he just would come to all my meetings and things and kind of sit back and watch. And actually on return, the idea we had when we did a check-in call a few weeks ago was like, hey, how about when I come back, instead of just like passing the torch, how about I shadow you for a month? The team has a continuity. It's not like I'm back and I'm changing a bunch of things because I want to like really learn and understand the things that he changed and his leadership style and what he's doing. And I might change some of the things, but I want to do it from a place of really deeply understanding it, not just like my gut reaction of, oh, this isn't what I would do. And that also provides some continuity for the team and kind of get an extra month out of Tony, which is great because I really love working with him. It's, uh, at this broadcast, I brought a number of quotes and poems to read. And also did a reading of the creed because I was very melodramatic and sentimental at this.

I think it's really powerful though. There is sometimes a lack of emotion and vulnerability in business that I think really adds a dynamic character to both leadership and the connectedness of a group. And so yeah, maybe one way of describing it as melodramatic. Another might be that this company has been very important to you. And taking time off is a really vulnerable act, actually. And passing off leadership for a period of time is a really vulnerable act. And commemorating that through some form of ritual is kind of beautiful. I don't know. I mean, that's, that's another way of looking at it.

I've been thinking about that a lot because one of my failure modes is just doing the work. I think creating more physical artifacts. One thing I do after every WordPress release is for sort of the lead contributors. You know, we name every WordPress release after a jazz musician. And so something I do is I find some old records of that jazz musician and we get them framed in a cool thing that shows like the square thing and the record. And I send that to all the release leads. Been doing this probably for 30 or 40 releases now. So some people have a lot of them. And it's kind of cool. It's a little artifact. You can only get it if you lead a WordPress release. It's not something that's really documented or said anywhere., but, uh, I really enjoy it and it becomes sort of a, you know, hey, I did this. So that's something that I feel like, uh, I really admire Reboot and other cultures that, that do this. I think GitLab has some really cool versions of this. I love studying other companies and cultures. I don't think ours is better or worse than others. It's just different, you know, it evolved with their own set of environments and circumstances and people. Actually, on our creed page, if you go to automatic.com/creed, you know, links to some other creeds or other manifestos, which I think are also really great. They're just different than ours. They were sort of developed in a different environment than ours was, but they're still actually really great. And it's kind of neat, like Amazon has its set of values, and I like linking to those and learning from those, and sometimes even just adopting them, like, hey, let's try this out for a while.

So this strikes me— two things strike me here. One is you said on, on one interview that You know, part of your growth process, you started leading from a very young age. And I'll just name that people should go listen to some of the other interviews where you talk about your relationship with Tony, because there was this time when you were receiving investment and there was this kind of conventional wisdom that like you were too young essentially to lead effectively and you should bring an adult in. You kind of bristled at it. And then you met Tony, who you have described at times as your, your kind of like business soulmate. And then you felt open to him leading, actually him taking on the CEO role. For a time, and then you became CEO after him, and now he's back for a period. And there's this beautiful symmetry to all of that that I just think is really interesting. And folks can hear you talk a little bit more on that on some of the interviews that we've mentioned. But one of the things you talked about as you were growing and learning from him and others is books as a source of knowledge, you know, learning about other companies, learning about ways of doing things, and then Automattic being this testing ground for those things that you're learning. And so I'm really fascinated in this relationship of the openness. I would, I would guess that on like the Big Five factors, you're probably pretty high on openness, I would guess. And so you're looking for these sources of information. And another thing you did recently, and so I'll bring this into a question here in just a second, was you did a joint town hall with Sonos. Is that right? And you all were very open and transparent and kind of like directly and jointly sharing learnings across those cultures. In a way that allowed you to live both learn yourself and share different ways of doing things with your respective teams. So I guess I use those as some examples of like pulling things from books and doing something unconventional like a joint town hall as ways of bringing in new information and then testing them and seeing if they work. Like, how do you— well, how do you think about that, I guess, as a leader, the testing versus full implementation and looking for ideas to test on the culture?

It's really just the best way to learn. It's not possible for a variety of reasons, but I bet if you were to take like the CEOs of say Apple and Google and said like you could wave a magic wand and trade roles for 6 months, that would be something they'd want more than anything else in the world. Because just to see and understand how a different organization works and what are the similarities, where the differences, like it's like a, such a gift. And so, you know, Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, you know, he's a leader I admire and a company I admire, the products really love. It was nice though. It was kind of the perfect fit of like, we're not at all competitive, right? Apple and Google could never do that, right? Because they compete so much. So we're not at all competitive. We're not ever going to be in the same spaces, but we share a lot of similar values, even though we're in very, very different spaces. And so that was, uh, we ended up being able to do some of this, uh, open sharing between our executives and ourselves. I've always really appreciated— I feel like CEOs get access to a lot of this. There's a lot of CEO groups, or there's organizations like YPO, like Young Presidents Organization, Henry Crown Fellowship, to do some of this peer-to-peer sharing. That's some of the, the best learning I've ever been involved in. And I've really appreciated— I was part of a coaching program with Joe Hudson for a while, but it was cohort of 10 or 12 leaders. And, you know, I really appreciated that him as the coach really made the primary way we were learning was from each other, not just, you know, top-down. It was really kind of peer-to-peer exercises and learning, which I really, really enjoyed because you'd be talking to someone and, you know, the thing that's holding them back is just so obvious to you and so invisible to this brilliant person across from you. And then you realize, oh, that's exactly what I'm doing. You know, I have these, these, uh, you know, blind spots in my, my understanding that like, wow, it's like so obvious to everyone else, but like, I just can't see it. So that reflection is, is, is really, really powerful. And you can really only get through engagement with others. It's kind of like why every writer needs an editor. You know, it doesn't matter how good a writer you are, you can be the best in the world. Something about the editing process, and it really needs to be another mind. Another human or, or LLM, uh, exposes things that you would never ever see otherwise.

All right, so I want to ask you one more kind of functional question here, and then I've got two typical wrap-up questions that I use. There's so much here we're not going to get to, which is classic. That's the beauty of a long conversation, is there's so much you get to cover that wasn't expected and so much that we could keep going on. But one of the things that you talk about is what you've learned from doing so much hiring. You've now got in the neighborhood of 2,000 people on the team. You know, you've reviewed who knows how many applications at this point and really refined a process for finding good people. And this was an interview that was many years ago, 5 or 8 years ago, where you said there were 4 of these key qualities that you looked for in people that were non-technical. They were more like inherent qualities that someone developed and non-teachable. And, and they were, as you shared them then, work ethic, taste, integrity, and curiosity. And you go on to then reserve the right to change your mind over time, right? That you'll adapt to what you learn as you go. And so I'm curious, as you hear me repeat those back, are those still the qualities that you look for, and what have you found are reliable ways to search for them in people?

Yeah, I still like those 4. It might be missing some things. Maybe there's a few things that could be added there. So it's not a comprehensive list, but I would fully endorse at least those 4. You know, as much hiring as I've done, and it gives me a lot of humility, is no one bats 1,000 in hiring. No one. And so there is a trial and error process, and working together itself, like any relationship, is something that needs to evolve and grow. And sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow apart, or needs might change over time. So I now try to approach it with a little more lightness, meaning that I used to really beat myself up on a hire that didn't work out or missing someone, you know, that I really wanted to hire. And now I think about more that, you know, there's 8 billion people in the world and A lot of them, actually far more than we could ever hire, would be amazing automaticians or people that could be part of our company. And some of the people I work with, there might be a better path for them, you know, doing something else. You know, we have, we do little versions of sabbatical, actually tries to make it so you can stay longer by giving you some time off and ability to try some other things and hopefully you come back and miss it. But it's, I will say that something I look for, I really love attention to detail and looking for how people give a passion or an enthusiasm to something. And I just say something generically because I really don't care what it is. It doesn't have to be that you like, you know, spend all your nights and weekends coding or whatever it is. It could be He's not a colleague, but he's a fellow contributor to WordPress. As a fellow who spends a couple of months of his year doing the most amazing, like, Christmas light setup. So much so that, like, in his neighborhood, it becomes like something like the cops come out and volunteer to, like, sort of direct traffic to everyone going by this because he has, like, hundreds of thousands of LEDs all synchronized to music and stuff like that. Like, that's a cool obsession. And so if you can be obsessed and do that to, like, a world-class level. You're probably going to be able to do other things at a world-class level. And how you do anything is how you do everything. There is that, I think, imbued in those 4 things: taste, work ethic, integrity, curiosity. There's, there's some synergistic effects when they're all in place that creates, I think, a really high quality of outcomes. Doesn't mean you don't fail, you know, and successful people fail constantly, but it's more like, what is that kind of path and how much of like a, a really good set of things have you found in your life?

So as you sit here, you know, you mentioned you might add a couple things. Is there one or two that immediately come to mind that now feel at that level of essentialism?

I think I said attention to detail. That might fall under taste, but it's not necessarily under taste, but there's a conscientiousness that I really appreciate. You know, something I am curious to explore more that some other companies, including Coinbase, are doing some fun stuff around, and famously Bridgewater, is more standardized testing. Not as like a pass/fail thing, but more just like, hey, let's be aware of what might be our natural inclinations, some of which we can probably change, some of which maybe, yeah, we should just work around and build a team around different strengths and You know, whether that's silly things like Myers-Briggs or, you know, the equivalent of like the quizzes you would take in magazines or more rigorous quizzes and testing that have perhaps more data and science around them. I kind of like the idea of just giving people a ton of these, totally opt-in, and sharing the results. We did one executive thing. I forget the name of the test, maybe the Harrison Assessment or something. Where we gave our whole executive team that, I just published mine. You know, I was like, here's, here's my results, the good and the bad. Here's the things that says I'm bad at, here's the things I say I'm good at. Because like, it's just me at the end of the day. So my flaws and shortcomings, hopefully I'm aware of, and also y'all should be aware of them as well. I love this kind of concept of a README that some people publish, just like a software project you download might have a README. Read Me, a lot of people are doing these personal ones. I think that's actually kind of a really cool concept. I haven't done one for myself yet, but I'd, I'd like to. Again, not as a fixed mindset, like this is unchanging, but maybe this is just kind of the state of play on the ground right now. This is the state of reality. And here's kind of what I've learned so far in the 40 years. And, you know, hopefully it's something, a document I can update over time, but maybe this'll help shortcut, save you like 6 months of frustration of getting to know me.

Okay, so I'll give you an option between the two closing questions I usually use. One of them is, um, I named the entity— this isn't what I operate the name under, but the, the formal name of my entity is called Unbearably Beautiful Futures. And that's tribute to the idea that, you know, there's a lot out of our control, but we have so much ability to impact things positively in the world and to use our careers and our work to do that. And I think you're a great example of that. And so the first option of a question would be, what is the future that would be kind of unspeakably or unbearably beautiful that you're trying to work towards in what you're building? And the second question is more on the personal level, which is, who are you as a human, as a leader, becoming at this point in your life? And so I wonder if one of those resonates more for you as our kind of closing question here.

Yeah, what would be An unbearably beautiful future. Thanks for sharing that. That's a cool name. For me, that would be that we can have all the benefits of what we get from centralized technologies like social networks, messaging, etc., in a way that gives us a lot of independence and sovereignty over our digital lives. And hopefully, that can go to the rest of our lives. So Yeah, if all the coolness of like a Twitter could happen in a fully distributed open source fashion, that'd be pretty special. And I think it's possible. The second part of how I'm growing as a leader, you know, I think this, the biggest thing for me this year is definitely going to be the sabbatical, the lead up to it, the experience of it, and then coming back from it. And that kind of forced unplugging in space. Is really forcing me and the organization to confront a lot of things we might have just been allowing to be the status quo. And the creed said there's no such thing as a status quo. But, you know, we're all the biggest hypocrites. Like, we totally have status quos. We have so much we do just because that's the way we've done it before. And, you know, the kind of forced, you know, little death petit mort of of a sabbatical is kind of forcing us to try out some different things. I'm really curious to see like what people did while I was away that they couldn't do while I was there and learn from that. And so that I think is, uh, gonna be my big focus for growth this year. In prior years, I would say it was probably leading with a bit more vulnerability, particularly being a younger leader, felt like I had to show up as like never making mistakes or invulnerable or other things. And that was a very, uh, probably inauthentic way to lead, or it's also just really stressful. It's hard to do. And I found that sharing some of my struggles, you know, in a container, in an appropriate way, has actually been really freeing for others and really helpful for myself because then others who maybe have gone through similar things and then share their versions of it or what they've learned. So I would say if I had to think of next year, it's like probably figuring out that line of like, I tend to overshare something else and I've experienced some downsides of that too. So like kind of figuring that out for myself, like what I have a desire to share everything. Yet, as I just described, I've experienced some downsides of oversharing. So what does that sort of line look like for me? Going forward. And it's definitely shifted, you know, from 19 to 40, what I blog or what I say. You know, I used to post like every photo. I post every day photos of everything I did that day. And I don't do that anymore, even though it'd be kind of fun to. What does that look like? And what are the context and spaces where it feels like really safe and helpful to do so? Like you said, like you maybe don't publish some things that you are perfectly happy to share in like group chats or DMs. So what's that version for me is probably what I'll work on next year.

I love that. One mental model I've been playing with on that is, um, sharing things even that can be quite vulnerable once I've had the chance to process them myself. So like not sharing before I've done the processing, because that— I've noticed that that can sometimes be received as a burden, that it's someone else's job to help carry that for you. Whereas when I share having processed and integrated my learnings, it becomes more of like a, it's okay to have experienced this kind of thing. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, I certainly have people that I talk to that I do process things with, obviously. And though that's like the inner circle too.

Well, there is that, that downside, that the pathology that like vulnerability bombing, and people who kind of like overshare really vulnerable things when they first meet you as like a way to build trust in maybe a way that's not like earned.

Yeah, that's totally there. It's just this interesting human problem.

I have a formula I love for trust, which is that it's communication multiplied by time.

I love that so much. We'll wrap up there. I think that's a really wonderful way to wrap up. Matt, thank you so much for your generosity. Um, 2 hours feels like a huge privilege to spend with you. This was really, really joyful for me.

So thank you. I love everything you put into this. And, um, I'll just plug at the end my blog, ma.tt, and, um, Photomatt, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T, on all the social networks, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, etc. So if you'd like more, please follow me there, and I'll definitely be following your podcast and everything you publish. Thank you so much for reaching out.

Uh, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Good Work. The show is created and hosted by me, Barrett Brooks, and it's produced by my friends over at Podcast Royale. If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love it if you would hit subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts, whether that's Pocket Casts, which is owned by Automattic, or Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or even on YouTube. Really grateful if you'd follow along with the show. My guest today was Matt Mullenweg. He's the co-founder of WordPress.org. And the founder of Automattic. You can find his work at ma.tt. What a baller URL that is for his blog, his personal writing there. You can also find Automattic at automattic.com. That's A-U-T-O-M-A-T-T-I-C. And then you can find all of his investment portfolio and activity at audrey.co, which is named after Audrey Hepburn, which we didn't get into today, but is a fun little nugget there. And of course, You don't have to remember those links. You can get all of the summary takeaways from today's show, clips, quotes, links, and everything else you could want in the show notes at goodworkshow.com. All of the past episodes and all the past show notes can be found there as well. So make sure to check out goodworkshow.com. If you enjoyed today's episode, there's two ways you could help me out. The first one is to copy the link and text it or email it to one specific friend who you think would enjoy this conversation. Maybe they love remote work. Maybe they've been a longtime decade-long WordPress user like me, or maybe there's just something else that might resonate with them. One-to-one word of mouth is how podcasts grow. And so I'd love your help sharing it with a friend and growing my audience. The second thing you can do is if you're feeling really generous and you have a couple minutes, you could leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or just a comment on YouTube. The comments and reviews fuel the algorithms to help new people find the show. So that's why I ask for it. Be really grateful if you'd be that generous to go do it. Thanks again for tuning into today's episode. Next week on the show, you can expect to hear from my friend Polina Pompliano. She's a fellow University of Georgia graduate. Go Dawgs. She's also the founder of The Profile, one of my favorite newsletters on the entire internet. She both writes profiles, interviews interesting people, and shares some of the best profiles in audio, video, and written format every week in and her newsletter, which is originally hosted on Substack and has grown so big and reaches so many people in the world. So look forward to that conversation with her, and I will look forward to seeing you on that episode.