When I was a literature major at UCSC, I liked to get up early, go surfing for an hour when the swell was reasonable, and then head up to campus and read at the Kresge Study Center on campus. Most of the time I was the first person into that study room. I’d kick on the heater and pull up a big reading chair next to large panels of glass facing right into a wooded ravine. Many mornings, there’d be mist obscuring the view beyond the first few trees. This would make it easy to lose yourself in whatever I was reading that week. As a literature major, that was always something new.

I’ve been looking for a good photo of that room as it’s been 25+ years since I’ve been there. Unfortunately, all I have found so far is this uninspiring photo from the campus website.

This photo completely fails to do the room justice (although the tie dye does seem spot-on). It looks like it’s been renovated and not necessarily in a way that heightens the natural attributes. Clearly, digital cameras weren’t a thing when I was going to school at UCSC, but I would love an image shot from my reading chair in that room where I’d sit there alone to start the day.

Do you have a special place? One that’s important to you but you haven’t seen in a while?

I would not have believed so much damage could be done in so little time.

Several years ago, I left Facebook and deleted all of my history on the site. That departure was the results of years of poor interactions and/or discoveries, largely from people I know. Deleting my profile and removing myself forever has been a positive experience.

Twitter, on the other hand, is something I have lovingly curated and really enjoyed until very recently. It’s a beautiful hub for the finance industry, in particular, and I have lists of important people that I read for investment and business insights. Not anymore. I removed the app on my phone and tablet. I removed the Twitter link from my business’s website. I’m not deleting my accounts because I think there’s still hope, and I don’t want my Twitter handles to go to any poachers, but I’m done for a while.

It’s clear that Elon has no idea how to manage a social site. Not content to leave well enough and learn, he’s been dedicated to rapidly (sometimes intra-day) implementation of diametrically opposed policies. The policies only make sense when you realize Elon’s creating permissions for people he agrees with and removing permissions for people who disagree with him. Elon’s policy is that “the policy is what I say it is.”

I hope to be back when things stabilize. Until then, I’m going to explore all other alternatives and watch where the smart folks land.

Goals are binary. They create an expectation, not just of completion, but of reward. Rarely do these align with anticipation.

Instead, goals are for focusing your now. This moment.

If you can learn from this moment and realign to fit your learnings, you’ll end up somewhere unexpected, but usually far better than where you were trying to go.

Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, confirmed that Ukraine was using facial recognition software to find the social media accounts of deceased Russian soldiers, allowing authorities to contact their friends and families. The aim is to dispel misinformation surrounding the war in the country, and specifically Russian claims that it is just a special operation with few losses, he wrote on his Telegram channel.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/24/1048268/the-download-ukraine-claims-its-using-facial-recognition-to-identify-dead-russian-soldiers/

Yeesh. A new tool in psychological warfare: snuff shots sent to family members. Russian media may not produce real coverage of their unjust war (and is only reporting 498 deaths so far) but you can bet that Ukraine informing families via social media of their missing lived ones will not be easily swept under the rug. NATO estimates “40,000 Russian troops killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or gone missing.”

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.