I loved this Nilay Patel interview of Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic (and thereby WordPress, Tumblr, and WooCommerce; as well as the maker of high quality apps like Simplenote, Pocket Casts, and Day One).
I had no idea how prevalent WordPress has become.
WordPress in the CMS space now has 43% of all websites. It’s growing faster than all the others combined. That will reach probably 80–85% in the next decade.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
43%! In the interview, Matt talks about a potential market share of 85% within the next decade. He could be wrong, but his directional velocity is probably right. That’s incredible. What’s even greater than that, in my opinion, is how he’s scaling the company ethically. You can see the responsibility he feels for monetizing the right way and empowering distributed decision-making across the entire organization.
Most of our business models are through people paying us, as opposed to advertising or other models. We provide upgrades and that recurring revenue is what allows us to come to work the next day. We’re about to come up on 2,000 people working full time with Automattic. It’s really grown a lot, even since the last time we talked. I think we hired over 700 last year.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
The other fun thing I like to say about Automattic is that it’s fractal. When you zoom in or out, it’s self-similar. When the entire company was 20 people, it looked a lot like what a team of 20 people looks like now. We try to make it so there’s a natural growth and division of teams.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
The final bit I wanted to call out and record for posterity, because it’s novel and aligns with how I think distributed companies should be run, is this bit:
I ask for transparency, so that things are written down, shared, communicated. I love the idea of decision journals. We use this internal blogging system built on WordPress called P2. […] What’s interesting at Automattic is there’s no internal email. I get a handful of emails a year from my colleagues. Everything happens on these internal blogs. What that means is we have essentially an organizational blockchain where every single decision going back to 2007 is on one of these internal blogs. You can find how every piece of code works, or every business decision, or every logo. Everything is in there somewhere.“WE HAVE ESSENTIALLY AN ORGANIZATIONAL BLOCKCHAIN WHERE EVERY SINGLE DECISION GOING BACK TO 2007 IS ON ONE OF THESE INTERNAL BLOGS.“
Even if you and I decided something in a meeting, we need to write it up afterwards. It’s on this P2, so people can participate in it asynchronously. Future generations or future versions of ourselves who’ve forgotten why we made a decision can tell why we did that.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
Nothing is done until it is written up and recorded. This has always been an aspirational goal of mine, even when it is out of alignment with how my employers worked. Now that I run my own company, though, I get to do it how I want.
Eric Frankl.in 