Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress, the open-source software that powers more than 40% of all the websites in the world.
He's also the founder of a for-profit company called Automattic.
Matt's problem is this: How do you build a multibillion-dollar company on top of software that your competitors can use for free?
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Pushkin. Maybe the most valuable thing that corporations create today is software. Just look at Google or Microsoft, two of the biggest companies in the history of the world, worth trillions of dollars, and they're built largely on lines of code that tell computers what to do. So maybe one of the most surprising things about the way technology works today is how much code people give away for free. In fact, most of the web runs on open source software, software that's free for anyone to use, tweak, adapt, and share. The Internet maybe the most important engine of twenty first century capitalism is built on top of this hippieish open source, free to be you and me dream. I'm Jake Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Matt mullen Wick. In two thousand and three, Matt co created WordPress, a piece of open source software people could use to publish blogs. Today, WordPress power is more than forty percent of all the websites in the world, hundreds of millions of sites. Matt is also the founder of a for profit company called Automatic. His problem is this, how do you build a multi billion dollar for profit company on top of software that anyone can use for free? So what's WordPress? WordPress is an open source operating system for the web. So what's that mean. It means that if you want to have a home on the web, a place that you call your own, call a website, back in my website, and WordPress can power that. And because it's open source and created by the community, it's constantly getting better, so that when you choose WordPress, you're kind of pitching your wagon to a horse that is like on a really great path, and that a lot of other people are contributing to. You know, we do major new releases of WordPress three times a year, and typically five hundred plus people work on every single release. And how many of those people are getting paid to work on the release About five so almost none almost, So hundreds of people are doing it for free because they love it, because they believe in it, because it's useful to them. So developers don't like writing the same code twice, right, So often what they'll do is, once they've solved the problem, they'll create what we usually call a library, so that the next time another developer says needs to multiply two numbers together or combine, you take an image and turn it into grayscale as an existing function or library that does that, and you put it out there and you publish it today on the internet. You might publish that on repository like GitHub, which is a place where a lot of people put open source code. But regardless of how you put it out there, if you're building something, now, a lot of what developers do is Google, So they search, they say, okay, how to turn an image to grayscale in Python, which is a name of a language, or PHP, which is another programming language. And then you'll see tutorials and you see code examples, and you see all these sorts of things, and so that becomes kind of the shared knowledge that we use to compose larger and larger things. And what's nice is that, you know, maybe the first person who had to turn an image from color to grayscale, that took them like five days to figure out, right, because you have to look at all the color codes and then figure out where that maps two on the gradient of zero to one hundred of white the black. But now I could just Google for thirty seconds, have a function, and have that and then I move on to my next problem. And so this is basically what all modern technology is built on is people sharing what they've solved already and future people being able to build on top of it. I love it. And you know, if you think of the like standing on the shoulders of giants metaphor, it's like the shoulders get higher and higher really fast this way, right, because everybody builds their little block and then puts it out there and everybody can grab the next block. I Mean a question I have is if somebody is spending five days to learn how to do this one little thing, turn a color image into gray scale, and they're working for a for profit company, Like, why would that for profit company give away the product of that five days of labor that they just paid for. Well, maybe what that company is selling is advertising and they don't really care about you know, turning images from color to gray scale. That's just something that was along the way, like a Google like like google some code or you know and scram filter. So I think that, Um, what's the motivation for people doing open source? And it's fun again one if you're a coder, by the way, it is so cool to know that code you wrote is running billions of times a day all around the world. That is like actually kind of like characters I typed on my keyboard or now being executed countless times all over the internet. Um, that's kind of fun so that I don't know, maybe there's a thrill in that. I don't know what you would call that, like the joy of a crafts persons seeing their work used. Yeah, so okay, So that's an example of a thing that should be open source. Is there any setting you can think of where it makes sense for an visual or a company, for whatever reason, to not make their software open source. Well, companies might say that this is my secret sauce reasonably, so right, Like that seems like a like a software company is in the business of selling software in some instances, yea or no? I mean, I don't know. Is it reasonable to say it's their secret saucer? Do you think it's always a bad idea? I hold no judgment for how people choose to license their code, whether they choose to make it proprietary or open. I have personally chosen to devote my life like the past, you know, twenties on the nears and however long I'm still able to produce useful code to creating open things because I want to be part of upgrading humanity. I want to be a good ancestor. I want to make it so that the generations after can benefit from the code I've read, the things I've learned, the work I've done, and build on it in a way that takes us to ever greater heights versus having to reinvent the wheel over and over again. So okay, so that's the open source piece of it. You've also built a big company that is for profit that is adjacent, right, tell me about that. Yeah, So I was having so much fun doing open source, I had a question, maybe similar to what you said earlier, which is like, how can I make a living doing this? Like, you know, I love working with people and collaborating and making this shared resource for humanity, but I still have prosaic needs. I need to pay bills. So I started to think of what could be a business around this. So I found it a company called Automatic And basically, we make add ons for WordPress. So we could sell a plugin that enhances your WordPress, but that costs extra money. We make it easy to run WordPress. So WordPress is code that you can run yourself, but we can run it for you and make it really easy. So we charge for that, and then we've expanded into other services, you know, around sort of creating more freedom on the web and trying to allow people to express themselves, something I personally get really jazzed about working on. And so we have apps for podcasting in podcast we have apps for journaling in day one, you know, for private encrypted journals for publishing, and Tumblr and WordPress. So we're kind of a little bit of a conglomerate now that makes lots of software that we hope we can fill up your home screen and more or less, how big is the business? How big is automatic at this point? Way bigger than I ever expected. Yeah, what started with me and a couple of other folks just want to get paid to work on WordPress. We're now about two thousand people. And because we had this open source background of collaborating online, we've actually been fully distributed from the very beginning. So those two thousand people are actually in ninety seven countries. You were remote forever for fifteen years, and then the pandemic cam alogue in the world, for a very unfortunate reason, sort of caught up with you. Yeah. So there's one piece of it, when I've heard you talk about it that is particularly interesting to me. You tell me if I get it wrong. But it's this basic idea that when you really get to a high level of this remote or distributed work, people are mostly working asynchronous lee so they don't have to be working at the same time. And you talk about this idea of moving from a sort of you know, synchronous conversation based work culture to an asynchronous writing based work culture, and that seems like a big hard leap to me. Like, I write for a living, I wrote a book, I wrote for newspapers, like I know how to write. But the idea of having, you know, a fundamentally writing based relationship with my colleagues rather than a fundamentally conversation synchronous conversation based relationship with my colleague seems super hard. Like that leap seems giant to me. So I'm curious how you've done it. There's so much opportunity in the world just from taking something that people take for granted and just take it off the shelf and use it exactly as it is and really breaking it down and questioning the assumptions. Yeah, I know we've done it this way for one hundred years, but what are we really trying to accomplish and is there a different way we could accomplish the same thing first principles they call that. Yeah, it's how we arrive todays synchronous work. So, by the way, this is kind of how open source works because right when there's people all over the world working on a shared code base, right the code exists on the Internet. Anyone can go see it and make a change to it or propose a change to it, and I don't need to be there while they're doing that. So I think that's so much of our particularly how we did information work kind of inherited a corporate mentality from factories and you kind of do it need everyone in the same building working on the same car to like build the car. But when I would walk through offices and just see rows and rows of people with headphones on looking at their computers, Like, why do they need to be in the same room to do this? Yes, And what is the advantage of them being in the same room. Well, there's a difference between the same room and the same time, right, Like I think I'm bought in on don't need to be in the same room, But I'm struggling to make the leap of not at the same time for a lot of complicated communication. I really like to talk to people. I could tell you're the right job. I suppose I'm not a good right Literally, my job is talking to people's syncreticy So maybe I'm the wrong person to evaluate. So let me ask you this in terms of you know, you've been doing this. You've been running a distributed company for what fifteen years now more right, for a long time time, So you know, I think you must know things that would be useful for lots of people to learn. Right now, lots of people are trying to figure out things that you've spent seventeen years figuring out, right, So is there some you know to be a little bit reductive or didactic, just things you've learned that you want to tell people who are just trying to figure out how to do distribute at work that you learned the hard way. I'll say one two things. One is a subset of the other. So the first thing is, there is so much benefit to invest in improving your writing. Clarity of written communication as a superpower will multiply everything you do. And you know written communication is and everything. Yeah, but if you can you know, read a book about writing, or edit your own writing as someone else to edit it. Whatever, the processes that improves the quality of your your written communication will pay back many fold. Just just to contextualize, I mean, presumably the ideas written communication becomes profoundly more important when you're working asynchronously, Right when you can't just have a conversation with your colleague and you have to write them a message. Yeah, the written word is really sticky. We obviously have lots of options now, and there's still something about the written word that can you know, move society. You know, it can inspire you know a thousand, build millions of people. It can you know, call people to the ocean. It can call people to work, and call people, you know, make them imagine a world beyond and live their life in a totally different way just words on a page. And yet I find the hardest written communications for me in a work context. The place where I most want to have a synchronous conversation is where there emotional issues at play, when somebody's mad at somebody else and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Like, That's when I really want a synchronous conversation because the tone and the subtext is what I find hardest to get in written communication, the sort of emotional subtext and like power dynamics, those are the things that I find really hard in writing at work totally. Yeah. So, yeah, that's a that's a good time to talk to someone. I'm gonna I'm not gonna argue against that, and it could be very valuable to see. You know. One thing that's common for us is if we find we're typing to each other a lot and you know, just getting more and more worked up, it's a good time to pick up the phone. Yeah. But writing is just a upset of communication, and fundamentally, all all human problems are are usually a function of communication. Yeah, right, the myth of separation, this idea that we're not all connected, and failures of communication are I think the source of all human suffering. After the break, how Automatic competes against giant for profit companies that also build on WordPress and Matt's plans for Tumblr, the old social media platform that Automatic bought back in twenty nineteen. That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. So I'm curious. I find it interesting in general to talk to people about things they haven't figured out yet, the things they're working on now but don't quite know. I'll say our big problem. Yeah, you know, we talked a lot about open source and the fun of contributing now, and you said companies might not want to do that because they want to keep their secret sauce or something. There's another problem that happens, so open source can fail when it's successful through something called a free rider problem. So imagine if people got a lot of benefit from this open source code, but they didn't improve it, they didn't give back their improvements, and then the people who were working on improving it, you know, didn't get any of the benefit or money from it, and so they eventually just gave up and worked on other things. Then that sort of core would die. So I would say the big problem of open source is how to close the loop of people using it and contributing to it. So in WordPress, for example, you can get WordPress from my automatic at WordPress dot com. You could also get it from go Daddy, or from blue host, or from Amazon or Google or a lot of other places. And these companies will take your money, but they won't put any of that back into developing WordPress and just To be clear, GoDaddy is using WordPress. They're taking the WordPress software that is created by everyone in the world all the time, and they're using it because it's open source and they can. But they're not sort of part of this open source community. They're just taking the software and selling it to me, which is totally fine, allowed by the license, by the community, by everything, and they're not breaking the rules. But but so why is it a problem? What's the problem? I guess another way they framed a problem would be that the companies who are only motivated by profits, yeah, could out come peat the companies that also can shibute back, right, Like, at some point they could outcompete automatic. And so you've built this thing and you are dedicating your life to the open weab and open source, but they might I don't know, execute better, be better capitalized and put you out of business and sort of shut down the openness. But one example is like by taking some of those profits and investing in advertising, so now of a sudden, they're buying Super Bowl commercials or buying ads on Google, so that when you search for WordPress, you know, the first four or five results aren't like actually the community, they're so in paying to be at the top, and so capital that gets capital that is happening, right, Like go Toady had a Super Bowl ad. Yeah, so what do you do about that? Well, I thought I could go on podcasts and tell people about it and that might help. Here we are, it's about a Super Bowl at but it's what I got. Well, I think that I think that people really care. So if they knew about the philosophy and the community and kind of what we're trying to create over the long term, that we're trying to build software that's going to be around in one hundred years, people would be excited to be a part of that. And luckily, money can't buy love, right, So there's forces in the universe and even in capitalism far far stronger than dollars. And so essentially what we're betting on is that those forces win in the long term. But we also have to do a good job at telling our story, at being out there, at sort of making it easy for people who contribute and get involved. If we don't do a good job there, WordPress will fail and it will die and it will just be you know, one of the thousands of open source projects that have withered on the vine and died. But if we get this right, it could be something that, you know, a thousand years from now, they were running WordPress on Mars or in other galaxies. That is good, big that's a good big frame a word press in another galaxy, like not even another solar system. Just go all the way. Let's talk briefly about Tumbler. How's Tumbler going? You bought it. I downloaded it for this conversation. I don't quite get it, Like, can you help me get it? Help me love Tumbler. Tumbler is a blogging system. It's a social network. It was one of the original ones. It was quite good under after it got bought for a billion dollars by Yahoo in like twenty twelve, it was kind of mismanaged and withered a bit on the vine. We bought it to revive it, and part of why we bought it was it turned out the kids are still there. So Tumbler's primary demographic is thirteen to twenty four. So I think always youth has wanted a place where their parents weren't, someplace that was maybe a little even harder to figure out it, kind of like Snap was in their early days. So like not supposed to get it. The fact that I don't get it as a feature not a bug. I'd buy that. Well. I would say that the fact that you don't get it right now is probably why kids love it, ye or younger folks really like having their own space. So essentially, by anchoring Tumbler on art and artists, which was always kind of the core of it, like people sharing their creativity, we're creating like a third space, like a place that's not like you need to be professional like LinkedIn, or be fancy like Instagram, but someplace you can just go like, be weird, be creative, be yourself. And it turns out the Internet wants that and needs it now. Our challenge is running a social network is both technically and shistically very difficult to make the algorithms that show people what they want but don't inflame things, to garden and curate the community so that it has positive interactions but not like hate speech or violence or anything like that. Is you know, you'll never here recriticize Facebook for that because it is a really really hard problem to do. Its scale. Tell me, so, you know, tell me about the well, I assume I saw what you said before that Tumbler is open source, I mean sort of fitting into your broader galactic worldview, and what does that mean? Right, So what does it mean to have an open source social network and in what important ways is it different from other big social networks along that time? Tumbler was and is proprietary software when we bought it. But what we're doing is we're actually switching it to WordPress. So one of the projects, and it's going to take years because it's it's big, is over half a million blogs on Tumblr that we've got to migrate over. So it's just a lot of data, a lot of things support, but we're actually switching those all to be power my WordPress underneath, and so those will all be part of the open web as we do it. So like in terms of whatever algorithms there are that you know shows you content or serves you ads, like, are those open or it will be Yeah, So that's that's what that's what we're grading. We're relutely building that right now. So you'll be able to see like why am I getting served these certain things. You'll be able to see exactly the code that's choosing which posts they're served at the top for you and you'll be able to choose other algorithms if you want, maybe create your own and put it up there. That feels big and exciting to me? Is it? And if so, why we'll see you know. I mean, honestly, this hasn't been done before. It's kind of new in society. But fundamentally, I want people to have freedom and autonomy. And right now you you know, you get whatever algorithm TikTok, Facebook, Instagram decide to serve you, and that aligns with your interests to an extent. It also aligns with their interests to an extent. Like what will happen if we allow people to have complete autonomy and choice there? Maybe it fails because people say they just want to you know, see MPR New Yorker articles. But you know, when TikTok serves them, you know, the more like carbohydrates of information or entertainment, that's what they actually choose. So they say they want to eat healthy, but they really choose something, but don't plausible When you put it that way, it seems plausible. Yeah, yeah, But I mean naturally I could put you know, a thousand candies in front of you and at some point you'd stop eating them in a minute. The Lightning Round, including a couple of things Matt thinks shouldn't be open sourced, and his favorite feature on a very high end toilet. Now, let's get back to the show. Let's do the Lightning round. Given that you've been sort of, you know, building the web in a pretty significant way for twenty years or so, what do you think you understand about the Web that most people don't. Something I understand about the Web that most people don't is that we don't have to accept things the way things are. It is eminently possible to change it and modified, especially on the web, and it can be so incredibly freeing. What's your favorite feature on a total neores toilet? Definitely the heated seats nice. What's something in the world that should not be open sourced? Doesn't have to be software? Anything to me open source you want to see more of. So if there were technology for harming people, I wouldn't want that shared or open source weapons, viruses, etc. Is right? Do you play jazz saxophone? Is that right? Right? I did? Who do you think is a particularly underrated jazz musician? Particularly underrated jazz musician? Oh, give me a moment Jacob Collier. He's actually seen as a little bit of pop musician. He came up on YouTube and everything, but I think he's one of the most talented instrumentalists alive today. Wow. Interesting good. I've also read that you can type really fast using the Is that the divor jack keyboard like the other keyboard? That's like better basically? And I'm curious, are there other sort of optimizations life hacks like that that you've done, or there are other things where you've just done the better way thing that most people don't do. Yeah, typing is definitely a different Typing layout is something I'm glad I invested in many years ago. You know. The other thing is it just and technology. It really does benefit you to update as frequently as possible, and so I'm always surprised when I see people with an older phone or computer or who have a ton of app updates they haven't applied, especially when you think of how many times you look at your phone and how much time you spend on these tools. Assuming you do, I think it is worthwhile to always invest in the latest and greatest good. Okay, two more, what's one piece of advice you'd give to somebody trying to solve a hard problem. Unplug So just force yourself to be bored and sit with it, Meditate, take a walk, but like remove yourself from distractions. If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying to solve in five years? I think how to to manage and scale at ten thousand person plus organization? How big is it now? Two thousand? So that's a lot of growth getting from two to ten. It's a big leap already. Dan Matt Mullinweg is the co creator of WordPress and the founder of Automatic. Today's show was produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Woldstin, and I would love to know what you think of the show, what you want us to do differently, What guests do you think we should book? Please really please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. Once again, that's problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me on Twitter at Jacob Wildstein. We'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.