Fireside Chat With Ma.tt Mullenweg at Nerdearla  ## Metadata - Author: [[Nerdearla]] - Full Title: Fireside Chat With Ma.tt Mullenweg at Nerdearla - Category: #articles - Document Note: # Fireside Chat with Matt Mullenweg: Reflections on WordPress, Community, and Challenges tags: - #WordPress - #OpenSource - #CommunityLeadership - #TrademarkDisputes **Author:** Fireside Chat with Matt Mullenweg **Source:** [Nerdearla Fireside Chat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg) **Reference:** Transcript sections from timestamps [10:35 - 20:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=635s) **Date Created:** 2024-11-25 14:30 --- ## Table of Contents: 1. 📝 [Summary](#summary) 2. 📖 [Main Content](#main-content) - 🗒️ [Notes](#notes) - 🗣️ [Paraphrase](#paraphrase) 3. ✅ [Action Items](#action-items) 4. 🧪 [Hypotheses](#hypotheses) - 📊 [Methodology](#methodology) 5. ❓ [Questions](#questions) 6. 🔮 [Future Research](#future-research) 7. 💡 [Implications](#implications) 8. 🧠 [Learning Styles Assessment](#learning-styles-assessment) 9. 📊 [Accessibility Assessment](#accessibility-assessment) 10. 🌍 [DEIB Assessment](#deib-assessment) 11. ✅ [Logical Validity](#logical-validity) 12. 🔍 [DARVO Analysis](#darvo-analysis) 13. 🔍 [SEO Evaluation](#seo-evaluation) 14. 🎯 [Conclusion](#conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary: Matt Mullenweg's fireside chat at Nerdearla offers a rich narrative of WordPress's evolution, emphasizing the pivotal role of community in shaping the platform. It delves into key decisions, the foundational philosophy of democratizing publishing, and the tensions surrounding WP Engine's trademark disputes. The discussion underscores the interplay between open-source values, corporate practices, and community ethics. --- ## 📖 Main Content: ### 🗒️ Notes: #### **1. Early Days of WordPress** ([10:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=635s)) - Matt's upbringing influenced his tech journey: - Father’s Microsoft-focused background vs. Matt’s embrace of open source. - Radicalization through readings of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. - Community-driven growth: - IRC forums and collaboration with Mike Little marked WordPress's inception. - Translations and global community contributions highlighted the platform's potential. #### **2. Philosophy of Open Source** ([15:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=920s)) - GPL licensing was a deliberate choice: - Ensures freedom for users to modify and distribute the software. - Forking capability underscores resilience against monopolization. - Democratizing publishing: - Matt envisioned WordPress as "the operating system of the web," stressing accessibility and empowerment. #### **3. Conflict with WP Engine** ([18:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=1125s)) - Allegations against WP Engine: - Trademark misuse, creating confusion about WordPress affiliation. - Aggressive profit-maximization strategies post-private equity acquisition. - Transparency initiatives: - Launch of WordPressEngineTracker.com to monitor migration trends. - Fallout: - Public disputes and lawsuits underscored the high stakes of community trust. --- ### 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. *Original*: "WordPress is cool, but what’s extraordinary is the ecosystem of 60,000 plugins and themes created by the community. That’s the real power." - *Paraphrase*: The strength of WordPress lies not just in its core but in its expansive ecosystem of plugins and themes developed by a vibrant community. 2. *Original*: "We’re at war. I want their customers to know there are alternatives because WP Engine’s profit-maximizing strategies harm the community." - *Paraphrase*: This conflict is about transparency—informing WP Engine customers about better alternatives that align with WordPress’s open-source values. --- ## ✅ Action Items: - Align WordPress messaging with community-centric values for transparency. - Educate users about GPL licensing and ethical plugin use. - Monitor emerging AI solutions for plugin and theme security. --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. The success of WordPress stems from its open-source licensing fostering global contributions. 2. Trademark clarity can significantly enhance community trust and brand perception. --- ### 📊 Methodology: - Conduct surveys to assess community understanding of WordPress trademarks. - Use AI tools to evaluate plugin security and GPL compliance. --- ### ❓ Questions: 1. How can WordPress remain relevant amid rising proprietary platforms? 2. What strategies can mitigate misuse of open-source trademarks? --- ### 🔮 Future Research: - Study the long-term effects of AI integration in open-source ecosystems. - Explore alternative governance models for open-source projects. --- ### 💡 Implications: Future research could solidify WordPress’s position as an open-source leader while ensuring community trust and sustainable growth. --- ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Visual**: Infographics on WordPress growth; charts on plugin usage. - **Aural**: Podcast versions of Matt’s talk. - **Kinesthetic**: Interactive workshops on plugin development. - **Logical**: Step-by-step tutorials on WordPress setup. - **Social**: Discussion forums for collaboration. --- ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - Improve semantic HTML for screen readers. - Ensure high-contrast text and mobile responsiveness. --- ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment: - Incorporate diverse case studies from global WordPress contributors. - Use gender-neutral language in documentation. --- ### ✅ Logical Validity: #### **Positive Forms of Reasoning in Matt's Arguments:** 1. **Deductive Reasoning** ([11:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=710s)): - Premise: Open source empowers communities. - Conclusion: Protecting WordPress’s open-source ethos safeguards its global community impact. - **Strength:** Logical flow aligns with the foundational philosophy of WordPress. 2. **Strong Inductive Reasoning** ([16:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=990s)): - Premise: WP Engine’s actions harm the WordPress ecosystem (e.g., trademark confusion). - Evidence: Surveys show user confusion and WP Engine’s strategic branding. - Conclusion: WP Engine’s practices undermine community trust. - **Strength:** Supported by concrete examples and user data. 3. **Causal Reasoning** ([19:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=1190s)): - Premise: Proprietary dominance, as seen in other ecosystems, can harm open-source platforms. - Evidence: Comparison to Drupal under private equity. - Conclusion: Intervention is necessary to prevent similar outcomes for WordPress. - **Strength:** Historical parallels provide a compelling argument. --- 🔍 **DARVO Analysis**: #### **1. Deny:** ([18:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=1080s)) - WP Engine's denial of trademark misuse: - Claimed their branding was permissible under WordPress's open guidelines. #### **2. Attack:** ([18:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=1100s)) - Legal actions: - WP Engine preemptively sued to prevent Matt’s public critique. #### **3. Reverse Victim and Offender:** ([19:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=1140s)) - WP Engine positioned itself as the victim: - Suggested WordPress Foundation’s enforcement was excessively punitive. --- ### 🔍 SEO Evaluation: - **Keywords**: WordPress, Open Source, Plugin Security. - **Meta Description**: "Matt Mullenweg discusses WordPress growth, challenges, and the future of open source." - **Headers**: Proper use of H1 and H2 for structure. --- ### 🎯 Conclusion: Matt Mullenweg’s insights reaffirm WordPress’s commitment to open-source principles, emphasizing transparency, community strength, and ethical growth strategies. Challenges like trademark disputes highlight the ongoing need for vigilance and advocacy in sustaining WordPress’s mission. Short Summary for [Fireside chat with Ma.tt Mullenweg at Nerdearla](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) Ma.tt Mullenweg Discusses WordPress' Journey and Legacy at Nerdearla Fireside Chat [00:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=16) Ma.tt Mullenweg shares his journey and love for culture in a fireside chat. [02:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg&t=139) Matt M - Document Tags: [[open source corporate contribution]] [[wordpress]] [[wpdrama]] [[wp engine]] - Summary: Ma.tt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, shared his journey at Nerdearla Mexico, exploring the evolution of one of the most successful Open Source projects and the latest developments in the world of WordPress and Automattic 🔥. - URL: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f15Xn23Mytg ¡Buenos días! Thank you, everybody, for coming. Is that okay? The sound, the mic's sound? Is that okay? Well, finally, you are here. Thank you for coming. Yeah, like I was telling you, Mexico City, my whole family used to live here before I was born. So my mom, dad and sister are all fluent in Spanish. I'm the only one who doesn't speak Spanish, so I apologize. That's okay. And you've been here a couple of times before, right? Yeah, I love it. the design, the culture, the... everything... is so beautiful. Yeah, thank you. And you just flew in yesterday? Yeah, just for this, just to see y'all, I love nerds, so... But thank you again for coming, and thank you, everybody, for coming. So what many people don't know is that we have planned to do this for many years, we have tried to get Ma.tt at Nerdearla's stage for many years now, and things have changed since that. A couple of developments have happened. It's been an amazing ride, you know... Yeah, so to speak... Been doing Wordpress for 21 years. Yeah. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a whole hour for us. We're going to start with some questions, some interviews to talk about the history of WordPress, how it came to be, we it came to power the 43% of the World Wide Web. So kind of like tour from around from 2003 to 2024. And then we are going to spend some time talking about the last couple of months. And then of course open up for questions from the audience. Is that okay? Sounds awesome. So in your "bio", your bio, well you said that your family originally came to Mexico, but you're from Houston, right? Yeah, born and raised in Houston, Texas, which is a beautiful, beautiful city to grow up in. And you studied arts? Yeah, well I was very lucky that there were amazing music programs in Houston. And so I ended up going to a school called High School for the Performing Visual Arts, where I played alto saxophone, actually with my friend Rene Ornelas here. Hey Renee, everyone say hi. Thank you for coming. He came down. We ended up sitting next to each other on the first day of high school and I've been friends ever since. And so yeah, really a lot of my early... well I thought I was going to be a jazz musician. Yeah. But it turned out I was a little bit better at computers than the music, so I went that path. Do you still play? A little bit, although Renee is doing way better, he sounded really good. And in 2003, around May, you released WordPress 0.7? Yeah, so I had been hacking on... you know. So you studied during the day and you hacked at night? Yeah, to be honest, I wasn't the best student. I was really, you know, spending a lot of my time online, where I found my tribe and... Anybody can relate? And so, yeah, just, you know, the nerds. So I was part of the Linux user group, the Palm Pilot user group, the Wi-Fi group, you know, in Houston, we drove around. This is a very technical conference, so we're going to nerd out a little bit on that. We literally used to wardrive, so we'd like, you know, set up... This was before Wi-Fi had any passwords, so we just drive around the city, you know, map all the access points, and you know, it was pretty fun. And, but then online is where I really, you know, through IRC and bulletin boards and all these sorts of things, I sort of, sort of, started to find a tribe of people. And, you know, I really feel very lucky to be part of the generation that, you know, I didn't grow up or had access to like Stanford, MIT, or any of those things. But online, you could access to all the best information in the world. You know, the Wikipedia, everyone was publishing. I was going to say, like, even back then, we have some young people in the audience, there wasn't a Wikipedia when we first started, there wasn't YouTube, like, you wouldn't go to YouTube to watch videos on a class on Stanford or MIT or anything, you had to find it elsewhere. You mentioned IRC, we are still active on IRC, so if anybody is still active on IRC, they can find us in Libera Chat at SysArmy, so, yeah, we are very, from that age as well. We are the last analogs, analogic generations. I'm still the admin of the WordPress channel on Freenode. That doesn't surprise me at all, but yeah, makes sense a lot of sense. Linux distribution, you mentioned using Linux. Any distributions you remember from back in the day? Yeah. What did I use? 'cause I didn't have any money, so, you know, I would either pirate software, which I'm ashamed of now, or use open source stuff. So, what did I use? Debian was the one I ended up... What was the one that you had to compile everything? Linux from scratch or Gentoo? Gentoo! Gentoo! Yes! So, you compiled Gentoo? It was so fun to watch like everything compile. But you would stay like up for two days, just compiling like X-Windows, or KDE, or GNOME. It would take forever to download... And then my mom would pick up the phone and it would disconnect me, I was like: "Oh, mom!" But you could configure a modem! That was pretty advanced already, like, if you had like dial-up, it wasn't the easiest thing to do to have a modem. I don't think I was that smart, but I was good at following tutorials. Copy-pasting. There wasn't Stack Overflow back then as well, so, you'd just go to Linux how to solve something, and you just copy-paste and hope for the best. And also gaming was really fun, so, gaming got me very into computers. What games? Can you share? Ultima. That was a really fun game. I love Civilization. Yeah. So, SimCity, you know, kind of those builder games. Yeah. So, you picked up any coding? Like any coding skills? You started coding at some point? Yeah, so, I was trading kind of websites... I would either build a computer or a website in exchange for lessons from local jazz musicians. And at one of them, actually Rene and I's teacher David Caceres, sort of randomly, I put these forums on it. So, even though it was like his website to, like, how to be a jazz musician, had this forums. And we just would all hang out on these forums online. And so, kind of like, I think it was phpBB, vBulletin, started like modifying those PHP-Nuke? PHP-Nuke, I ran PHP-Nuke sites. Yeah, that's what we ran the Linux User Group on. But eventually I found this software called b2, which is what WordPress was based on. WordPress was actually a fork of open source software called b2/cafelog. And it just had the right mix, it was PHP, so it was very easy to run everywhere. It was GPL, you know, I was really into open source. And, yeah, everything took off from there. Yeah... So, you forked... back then was it fork, the term? Yeah. So, it was already forking, like, you forked processes, back then... But it wasn't a fork because we disagreed with it. What happened was actually the sort of lead of b2 had disappeared. Michel.. something... Yeah, Michel Valdrighi. So, it was kind of abandoned. And so, a bunch of the volunteers, you know, there were about... I think three or four forks that were created because people wanted to continue the software. And I'd done blog post and Mike Little, another volunteer of b2, commented on it and said: "Hey, if you want to work on this, let's work together." And that became WordPress, just from that comment. He was in the UK, I was in Texas, we never met. You never met, like, back then, you met afterwards or never ever? Years later, we finally met in person, but we knew each other online, you know. We had both published code for b2, we had both been active in the forums, helping people. So, it's really that kind of like community volunteer spirit. Yeah. And again, for younger people, there wasn't any GitHub, or GitLab, or anything back then. Like CVS, maybe? There was something, Sourceforge though... Sourceforge it was like a repository... Sourceforge was like the GitHub of the time... It was... There was cool company that actually owned Sourceforge, Slashdot... Which was like the cool open source... Yeah. Kinda... Slashdot is still around, actually. It is but... Anyone reads Slashdot? Yeah, I think they are much younger, and we had Barrapunto, it was from Spain, but it was like a clone of Slashdot It's Spanish for Slashdot, basically... But yeah, we're talking about like 2003, 2004, back then, again no Wikipedia, Wikipedia is from 2002, I think... But just like, no Wikipedia, as it is today, no YouTube, no Facebook, we just had forums. Yeah, so.. No Twitter... I was taking a lot of photos, so my username is "photomatt" If you want to follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Tumblr, it's "photomatt". My original username was "saxmatt", right? Because I played the saxophone. It was easily... on the Internet it was easily misspelled, maybe. But then I started taking more photos, so like, okay, I'll be "photomatt" now. And I started posting these photos online. We just take photos every day, we would go places, and I got posted over 30,000 photos online. So I needed software to do that, so there was a PHP software called Gallery, that was GPL. So I started hacking that, and then eventually kind of rolled some of that into WordPress. Yeah. So you mentioned GPL already a couple of times. Was that something that really was important to you when you were thinking, okay, I want to build this thing based on, was it GPL already b2? So you had to release it under GPL again. Yeah, it was funny because, part of why I got it in the computer was my father was a programmer. He had kind of worked for oil companies. That's why my family lived in Mexico City. He was working for, I think, Brown & Root's at the time. And so he lived in Colombia, Mexico City, lots of different places, got to visit. Yeah, but he was all Microsoft, all proprietary, that was kind of like the dominant platform at the time. But grew up on the Internet, and read the essays from Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, I got kind of radicalized. I was like, wow, this open source thing feels like the future, right? Because it's software that belongs to all of us. Each one of us, each person in this audience owns WordPress just as much as I do, which is beautiful. You know, it has this license that gives you freedom. And so this became kind of my dominant philosophy, my secular religion, if you will. 'cause I was like, well, I want to live in a world, and contribute to a world that gives people liberty and freedom. And that freedom is what I worked for ever since. Yeah, cool. So you released WordPress 0.7, it picked up, like people that were using b2, they shift to WordPress. You mentioned there were a couple of other forks, but yours was the most popular one. Well, I reached out to a bunch of other forks, 'cause you know, they say: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go with others." Yeah. And so everything I've ever done has been with a team, it's never been just me. Even co-founding WordPress, you know? So, you're the co-founder. And so I reached out to the other forks and said: "Hey, let's work together." That's the beauty of open source, it's like you don't need 10 different things doing the same... solving the same problem. So, hey, let's all work together and make one thing that belongs to the community, and that can become the standard. That's kind of what WordPress has done for the web. We're trying to be the operating system for the web. And so that's why, you know, we've got 40% of websites now, 43%. Hopefully someday that's even more. But if that were proprietary, that would be very bad for society, right? Because that would be like a monopoly, it gives too much power. But when it's open source, the power belongs to the people. So if, you know, I started taking WordPress in a direction that the people didn't like, they could easily fork it and the code would belong to them. And then something else would become the standard. And that would be 85% ofthe web, or 90% of the web. Cool. So WordPress got more and more popular, the early versions, how were the like? Of course, they are nothing like it is today, but they were hacky, things put together? Yeah. I think the real thing that was important and what I learned so much from like my background in music and other things was it's not just about the software, it's about the community. So for the very beginning, we always had, you know, the IRC channels for chat. We had forums. We had, you know, we started doing meetups to bring people together. Yeah. Started doing WordCamps, you know, pretty early on. And so this, kind of like, community building is really what creates the power. And then, you know, kind of version 1.2 and then 1.5, we introduced plugins and themes. And this idea of action and hook system, that allows people to extend WordPress. 'cause at the time, if you wanted to modify the software, people literally modified the core code. Exactly. Like, go to line 23, copy-paste this and like... Forget this semicolon at the end... And it made it hard to upgrade, right, et cetera. So we created this plugin and theme system that allowed people to extend it. And that's why... I mean, that's the real power of WordPress. WordPress is cool, But I'll say you could like... In Rails, you build up a bloging system in five minutes, right? It's very easy to duplicate the core features of WordPress. But what's cool is there's now like 60,000 plugins and themes which can transform WordPress into almost anything you can imagine. And that is really where the power is, in that community created stuff. So, that's hard to duplicate. Yeah, so it was intentional, like an intentional decision, let's keep WordPress core like tiny, just like the basic functionalities, and then let allow a ecosystem of builders that they don't need to, to code, to work another WordPress itself, like the whole CMS, the whole thing is just plug into like this layer and you build your, I don't know, like social platform or your forum or anything. That was an intentional decision, right? Yeah. And so, you know, some point along there WordPress kind of transformed from being something that just felt like it was for me and some friends, to something that we were really building for humanity, the Internet. And that's why we adopted this idea to democratize publishing. So today... Sorry, do you remember that... When did you realize like, okay, this is bigger than me and my five friends on IRC? It actually came from translation... OK you know, because WordPress was just in English. And there was a gentleman in Japan who downloaded the software, and at the time there were probably 60,000 lines of code. He went through all 60,000 lines, and line by line changed all the English to Japanese. So that's when you realize probably we should have like... It blew my mind, because I downloaded this, I installed it, and I was like, wait, this is the software we wrote, but it's all in Japanese, which is of course really beautiful, right? Like the scripts, but I could not, you know, like Spanish, I could kind of read it, I could kind of pronounce it. It's, you know, Latin characters. Yeah... But seeing the Japanese, I was like, wow, this is incredible, mind was blown. And so I was like, oh, this might be something that's a lot bigger. So we really got to think of it as a long term thing. And that's when started to really make the plans not just in weeks, or months, but actually in decades, which we're doing still. So you realized, okay, this is getting big, like more and more people contributing probably to the project. When did you decide to build a company around it or how was the decision made? Yeah. So around this time, sort of parallel, I've been in college. I visited San Francisco, and you know, went to a lot of companies like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, CNET, and they tried to hire me. They wanted me to drop out and go work for them. Now, my mom really wanted me to go work for Google because she was worried that when I moved away, I wouldn't have anything to eat and Google had free food. So she really wanted me to work for Google. That was really compelling for mothers. That was like the higher pitch for the family. (Right?) But at Google, you know, because they were a tech company, you had to give them all your intellectual property, you had to sign everything away. And they weren't doing a lot of open source at that time. And so there was this media company called CNET. They ran like download.com, news.com, GameSpot, bunch of early websites. And so they said, we'll hire you, and we'll let you work part of your time on open source, and you can retain the copyright to that. So we don't have to own that. So I was like, ooh, sounds pretty good. But, sorry, the project was already a GPL. Yeah, yeah, WordPress was already GPL. And so I think maybe this job offer I thought, well, I could stay in college two more years, hopefully get this offer, or, you know, I could drop out move to San Francisco. I forget how much it was like maybe 70K or 90K or something, and that's what I did. So, you know, packed the bags, me and my mom did a road trip out from Houston to San Francisco. And I started my first job. So I was at CNET for about a year. It was actually awesome because I didn't know how to work or anything. I never had a real job. And so they taught me, they gave me like a management training, I had an office, et cetera. But, you know, I kind of had this idea that, well, WordPress at the time was kind of hard to install. You had to set up a database, and download it, zip files and everything. So I thought, well, what if we could make it just kind of where you click a few buttons and you get a WordPress? So I pitched this to them. I was like, hey, let's do this as part of the company. And they just didn't want to do it. But they said, hey, if you want to do this, you know, we'll actually invest in you, do this as a startup. So that's when I created Automattic, and that was in 2005. At CNET, what was your role? What were you doing? You were coding for them, like a project? Yeah, so I was a product manager, but I was really coding all day. And they, again, they didn't really know where to put me. So they were running some WordPress, so I helped out with that. But they actually had this product called help.com. Help.com. It was like a question and answer site. And they were spending like a couple of million dollars a year on the software, to run it, and I rewrote it all on WordPress, so I saved them a couple of million dollars, so I felt good about leaving because I was like, OK, I kind of earned my keep there, 'cause I had a lot of loyalty to them, right? They paid me to drop out, they paid me to move, et cetera. And then I got to San Francisco, and San Francisco for technology is like, it's the mecca, you know, everything happens there. You know, I'd go to cafes and I see like Craig from Craigslist, or my friend Tantek who is like one of the engineers behind Internet Explorer or different things. So every... like a lot of the tech is there, and even today when you walk around San Francisco, like you see the buildings... I was goind to say the billboards, even, on the high ways... There is openAI! (Yeah, exactly.) There's Claude, you know, there's Cloudflare, there's GitHub, you know, like you just walk out the street and you kind of see the whole Internet there. And you know, I drive around in a Waymo, but so, you drive around in self-driving cars. Like, all the delivery apps, Uber started there, everything. You know, the Uber co-founder Garrett lived literally across the alley from me. So just being able to be it, it's kind of like, like if you're going to do jazz, you know, maybe New York City is the place where you should be. Yeah. Or finance you do go to New York. If you're doing, you know, entertainment, you want to be an actor, you should probably go to LA. So there's places you should go. And I think that at that time, at least being in San Francisco, actually still, you know, I spent a lot of time in San Francisco because it is kind of where everything's happening. With AI now, it's like, yeah, everything's there. Yeah. So 2005, you created Automattic, just you or you had cofounders, and you have some other people? It was just me, but then hired a few people, It was people I was working with on WordPress. And then hired a CEO Toni Schneider, a few months later. So we were kind of off to the races, raised some venture capital, $1.1 million dollars, was our first round, it was a series A. And yeah, we started creating plugins for WordPress like a Akismet and the WordPress.com, which was this idea that anyone can host it. You kept on building the core of WordPress at the same time, so you build Akismet, you build this plugins, Hello Dolly, and... but you keep building the core, and also some of the like one of the... Akismet is already installed when you start WordPress, right, still? Yeah, it's an anti spam system. So now we'd call it like machine learning or AI. It's an adaptive anti spam system. Has five nines of accuracy for web spam, it's bundled with WordPress, so, it's a really cool system. And but we were all doing, you know, every single person there was like a coder, we wrote the documentation, we designed, we did the customer support. Like everyone kinda did everything, which I really like. We're actually trying to bring Automattic back to that now, where kind of everyone does everything. Yeah. I still do customer support, by the way. Yeah. I heard that you also did for other companies, but we're going to talk about later. That you also had to to support for other companies, but we'll talk about that later. So, OK you built Wordpress core, you built Akismet, and the company get growing... So you built Automattic and you built wordpress.com as a hosting platform, for people that may... didn't have the skills to download a tarball, install a MySQL database, do all the heavy lifting, you just say "I'm going to do like a SaaS" Even SaaS wasn't the term wasn't there at the time. But you are going to let people use WordPress without having to install it. That was the idea behind WordPress.com, still is the idea. Yeah, kind of innovated by companies like Salesforce. We're creating this idea of like software as a service, online, which now we take for granted, but at the time was very revolutionary. And then Facebook was created, I think the same year, so things were starting to happen. It was this whole idea of Web 2.0, which was this idea of open web. So things like Flickr, Technorati, Delicious. Even if they were services, they often had open APIs. Like RSS feeds or tagging was invented around that time, so this idea that kind of what we would call like the Fediverse now, where everything interoperates, was kind of the first version of that. And that's what's so exciting to me now, it feels like the pendulum kind of swung towards proprietary for a while, like Facebook and Snapchat and all these closed networks. And now it's opening back up, which is so cool. We had somebody from Mastodon, yesterday I don't know if she's around, but somebody came with a Mastodon mascot, here Oh, yeah, Mastodon, awesome! Yeah! She's helping, she's part of the Mastodon Network. So you started building, well, you created Automattic, you built WordPress.com, you started getting customers, like, more people that wanted to run WordPress. But they still, since it's open source, they still could download the tarball, install everything on their own, right? Yeah, it's always been that way, so we will run WordPress for you, or you can run WordPress in lots of other web hosts. Bluehost, Stream host, GoDaddy, SiteGround, anywhere. Or just on your Raspberry Pi, on your whole computer or whatever. You can run WordPress anywhere. Now actually today with things like playgrounds, we have people actually, running WordPress as an app on your phone, you can run it in the browser, like, it's kind of wild. Yeah, so again, to remind everybody, there wasn't iPhones when you started. Like, there wasn't a mobile web. No, mobile web, no iPhone, no anything. So that's what's been cool is that because we've been so community focused, it's we've been able to ride these big sort of technology changes, because it's not common for software to not just stay relevant after 21 years, but actually accelerate... you know, some of the market share that we're picking up is even faster than we were 10 years ago. And why do you think that WordPress gets relevant and growing? Because you had competition, you had other open platforms. Because of y'all, because of community! I have a couple of good ideas, but really most of my good ideas come from things like going to MeetUps, going to WordCamps, and just listening to people. You know, hearing the stories of what people build and what they're doing. And that's where we really get the kind of best feedback. And sometimes as just ideas, also, sometimes people just contribute code. Here's a patch to make something faster or secure or more encrypted. And WordPress is really the sum of, at this point, tens of thousands of contributors, hundreds of thousands, maybe, if you count like translations and volunteers and forums and everything like that. And that's why it's, again, hard to replicate. Yeah. So you started hiring more people, and then you heard people that maybe were developing plugins or WordPress or submitting patches, you hired them into Automattic, that was kind of the line of thought. Yeah, the company started the grow, we had a big pivot point. So actually just two years after founding the company, or, yeah, two and a half, three, 2008. Someone tried to buy it. So again, I'm 24 years old, and we got this offer to buy the company for $200 million dollars. Who would have said yes? Who would have taken $200 million dollars if they were offered like that? $200 million guys, seriously? You know, I thought about it. Because I would have walked away with $100 million dollars myself personally. I could have retired, that was kind of my life's dream. I was like, you know, okay, let me make a bunch of money, retire. You know, go sit on a beach. You know, go to, go to Tulum or something. You know, sit on the beach, sip some magaritas. But, what made you say "no" to that offer? Because it's really tempting to get the $100 million in the bank and go to Tulum. Well, I got some really good advice. People were like, okay, you know, if you get all that money, what do you want to do afterwards? And I kind of realized that, you know, I don't think I could sit on the beach and sip magaritas forever. It's nice to do it for a little while, but at some point, you know, it becomes about impact. And I was like, well, gosh, what would I want to do? I would want to travel the world and meet WordPress users. I would want to work on software with people that I love working with and are creative and push me to be better. And so I was like, well, I kind of want to keep doing what I'm doing now. So we turned that into a funding round, so instead of selling the company. You didn't reject the $200 million, you said, "OK, let's give it for a round." So instead of selling the company, we said, all right, let's raise some round of funding at a $200 million valuation. And it was innovative at the time. Now it's a little more common, but what the investors did was they said, we're going to buy some of your stock. So they allowed me to take some money off the table, like $10 million dollars, which changed my life, right? Now that I can help set up my mom, my family, everything like that, I didn't have to worry about money anymore. And they were like, okay, now we'll shoot for the fences. They're saying, no, do this, what are you building? I was like, okay, well, let's build something that's worth billions of dollars that reaches the whole world. And yeah, that was, yeah, 2008. And then we started really swinging for the fences. You know, trying to build something that really changed the whole Internet. Yeah. So when was the WordPress foundation born? WordPress foundation was a couple of years later, that was probably 2010. So yeah. And why do you think there was a need to build a foundation? Like you had already, you were CEO of this very successful company. So you had that already. You had the money that you can pay. And you said, okay, now I have to build a foundation. Why was that? So when I set up Automattic, I put a lot of stuff into it, like, included the trademark for WordPress and other things. That was part of the deal? At the time you went and registered the trademark before... There was no trademark, so... The trademark was registered by Automattic. And that was just kind of the advice I had at the time, but the company, I didn't control the votes or anything, right? It was controlled by the investors, and the board, and everything... so, I was, OK, ups... It was a mistake, I was young, 19, 21, when this was all happening. So I didn't start this, not, battle, but kinda long negotiation, to like take some of that stuff out, like the trademark and other things into the foundation. Why did you believe that that fight was worth it? What was the trademark's value to you at that time? Well, I mean, WordPress came first, so I wanted the community to have a balancing to Automattic. Automattic is a for-profit company, you know, It's a C-Corp based out of Delaware. It's just to serve its shareholders, make money, service customers, etc. But I wanted something... WordPress came before that, it kind of exists with the community. You wanted to make sure that if something went wrong with Automattic that wouldn't hurt WordPress as a project. Obviously, it's an edge case, right? But sometimes you have to plan for the worst. It's why you make a will or something like that. Obviously, Automattic is done well, and since then, I've been able to sort of take control of the voting and everything. But at the time, that wasn't certain, so that's why we did all this. So you have Automattic on one side, you have the WordPress Foundation two years later. Is WordPress.org part of the foundation? Is it like a third entity? So, WordPress.org is just me personally. That's just the website that I run. Because that's how it started, I just registered on GoDaddy or something. Yeah, but for example, if I want to download, I have it in my mind because I use WordPress a lot, so I just, wget or curl, WordPress.org/latest.tar.gz, at least that was the case. It's kind of nuanced, but because the foundation is a nonprofit, so it's tax deductible, the IRS has very strict rules around what can exist in the nonprofit. So WordPress.org, just being a personal site, essentially, has a lot more flexibility. So we can have commercial plugins on there, like Yoast SEO or something like that, or kinda WooCommerce that can all be on there. So it allows it just to kind of do whatever, we can be very pragmatic at doing things for the community. So who owns the plugins ecosystem, the marketplace, if you will? Yeah, so all the plugins are GPL, so there are all licensed under GPL. Is that a requirement that you, if you'll be like a plugin for WordPress, that needs to be GPL? The rules of the GPL and how plugins link to WordPress, basically, yeah. And in the WordPress.org directory, we only host things that are 100% GPL. Okay. So in theory, you could create a plugin, which kind of worked around the GPL rules, that was proprietary. And people do that, but we don't promote that. But, like that's still because GPL allows to you, you can also sell or distribute. So you can have your own GPL version of the plugin, and then you also can have your proprietary version or pro version or something, that people may need to download from a third party website and install it manually. Yeah, it's kind of like what's possible versus what's good. So for example, you know, it's possible to like kind of encrypt PHP code, Yeah. Make it really hard to read or modify, I mean, that's not illegal, but kinda sucks... Don't do that... Don't do that... So like, I mean, you could do that legally... Yeah. On WordPress.org, we try to only promote and host things that are fully GPL, not obfuscated, we wanted to be very user friendly. So just to clarify, like, GPL only or other licenses, Apache, BSD, MIT. I think WordPress plugins need to be GPL, but other code that's GPL or freer, like Apache or MIT could be there. Like for example, Gutenberg is actually dual licensed on the most of the GPL, and I think the Mozilla Public License because we wanted Gutenberg... Gutenberg we think can actually be bigger than WordPress. It's this blog editor that we started creating, I think eight or nine years ago. And we wanted to be embedded in different mobile apps, and we even wanted like, I would be perfectly happy if like Wix or Squarespace adopted Gutenberg, I think that'd be pretty cool actually. So that's why we dual license it to actually be even more free. Or as you know, the GPL, is viral, right, so we wanted to be embedded in proprietary stuff as well. Okay. So going to the question, who owns the plugin ecosystem? Like if I am a plugin creator and I upload my plugin to WordPress, what am I uploading it to? So the WordPress.org has its own set of rules and committee guidelines, and yeah. So it's under the domain of the WordPress.org. Well, you own the plugin, right? So you own the code and you're choosing to distribute it through WordPress.org. You can also distribute it through Envato or your own website or anything like that. So it's owned by you. Okay. Whoever owns it. Now the distribution is going through WordPress.org, so it's going through me. Yeah. But it could also go through WordPress.com, it could go through WPEngine, it could go through anything, you know? Okay. So again, if I own my own local copy of WordPress in my server under the desk, I just go to the plugin section and whatever I see on the search bar is hosted, at least the metadata is hosted on WordPress.org. By default, yeah, we integrate with WordPress.org, Okay. That's an open thing. And also we do a lot of stuff like we ensure security. we scan for security. We do a lot of like proactive making sure things aren't doing things that are user hostile or stealing data. You know, because plugins have access to your whole database. Yeah. It'd be very easy for them to like, send data or make your site hackable or something like that. Okay. We do a lot of work just like in the App Store to ensure that like the, if you're getting a plugin from WordPress.org, it comes with like a little, almost like a set of guarantees. Yeah. And again, probably you built this before the App Store or the Play Store. Around the time probably... Yeah, it is this before the App Store, and one thing that's very exciting now is, a lot of what I just described is very manual, so it takes volunteers. But now with new AI stuff, I think we're actually going to be able to automate a lot of this. And so I believe that, you know, the 60,000 plugins and themes are going to become radically more secure and better because we'll be able to sort of, you know, cover all of it. It's tens of millions of lines of code, so covering it with humans takes a lot of effort. But, yeah, we can now automate a lot of that. Okay. But when you say we scan for security, we scan for a lot of things... In this case, who is "we"? The volunteers on WordPress.org... Not Automattic... Automattic does volunteers, so we have about, I think, a hundred full-time people that volunteer. But if you like join the WordPress.org Slack I think it has like 49,000 people. So, you know, somewhere around there is the number of active volunteers. And it's, and people can contribute in a variety of ways. So there's a bunch of different teams. So, I mean, day to day, I'm making like 0.1% of the decisions on WordPress.org. It's really happening with like the people who show up and like run the teams, all the security team, and everything like that. Now, ultimately, it all reports to me, so I'm like the CEO. I was saying like, you still own, you are the sole owner of WordPress.org Yeah, so there's a hierarchy of decisions, and I, in theory, could override things. But that happens extremely rarely, right? Because, again, all of us are smarter than any one of us. So really like, you know, I'm kind of like the mayor of a city. Yeah. Okay. So we started talking about the early beginnings and went on into history. And that brings us to November 2024, but I wanted to jump back two months ago. What happened? Yeah. So the WordPress ecosystem has grown a lot. You know, Automattic's done very well. It's, you know, become a very successful company, but there's lots of other successful companies. We estimate there's about $10 billion dollars per year of revenue going through the WordPress ecosystem. Now, there's a company called WPEngine, which started in like 2013. And for the first five or six years, did things in a really nice way. Like, they contribututed back to WordPress, they were kind of part of everything. But then they got bought by this private equity firm called Silver Lake. And if you don't know, it's like this $100 billion dollars kind of firm that buys things, maximizes thier profit, then sells it, they flip it. Yeah.. Just to set the record straight, at some point, you owned part of the WPEngine or invested. A very small part, we invested $25,000 dollars. But then when Silver Lake came in, they kicked us out, they kind of took over the company. Why did you invest in the company? And why $25,000 dollars, you said? That's pocket, like for a big corporation... At the time, it was a lot for us, and a lot for them. But it was... we tried to support everything in the ecosystem. So I invest in a lot of the things in the WordPress ecosystem. But yeah, then kind of from 2018, they started to get more and more kind of, I would call it evil... You used stronger words. Yeah. Okay. You called them evil, you called them worse. And in 2018, they started shifting towards the evilier side of things, you said... And to that kind of summarize what happened is, like, they started really abusing the WordPress trademark and the WooCommerce trademark. And they create a lot of confusion, where people thought, like, WordPress engine, WPEngine was like an official thing from us. And so they got a lot of customers through this, including friends of mine, who thought, like, WPEngine, even my own mom, thought like, WPEngine was like part of us. And so they built a really large business, like, $400, $500 million dollars in revenue. And we kept trying to do a deal with them, like, saying, hey, like, license the trademark do something, they refused, they refused, they refused. So starting September 17th at WordCamp US, in Portland, I sort of gave a presentation. I said, hey, we're going to have to kick them out of the community, because what they're doing is actually really harmful to WordPress. And if they continue, it'll harm the WordPress community, and potentially even kill it. Okay. If you look at what's happened when private equity has taken over, like, Acquia, Dribble, or other ecosystems, it can be really, really harmful. And so I didn't want that to happen in WordPress. So I was like, okay, we're going to have to fight this. And it's going to be messy, I don't like fights, I'm a lover not a fighter. Okay. But I was like, occasionally, you have to stand up to a school yard bully, you know? And it doesn't happen often, this is probably the biggest fight we've had in 21 years. But when it happens, you really got to stand up for yourself. Okay. When you say that they are infringing trademark, again, who owns the trademark of WordPress today? So the trademark belongs to the WordPress Foundation, and then Automattic has a license, and I have a license to the trademark. Anybody else has a license or just... you personally, you Ma.tt Mullenweg? Automattic has a commercial license and can sublicense it, So it sublicenses it to companies like Bluehost, and we were trying to create a sublicense to WPEngine. And they wouldn't... They wouldn't do it, so... So we decided, okay, well, all right, we're just going to start telling your customers what you're doing. And so we started this public campaign. And guess what happens? People were like: "Oh, I didn't realize WPEngine was doing all this bad stuff", and they started suing us, by the way. Okay. If you look up the timeline, we actually didn't sue them, they sued us first. Because they were like: "Stop saying bad things about me on stage." And so that's when the fight started. There's now a site actually, if you go to wordpressenginetracker.com. I didn't know that one. And so what we did is we built something where we just took some public data sources, and mapped every single site hosted by WPEngine. I think it was like 800,000 that we found. And then we started tracking how many had left. And I think as of yesterday, it was like 16,000 have already left, and that number is picking up. So what's happening now is that as their customers are learning all the bad stuff that WPEngine has been doing, and now switching to the other host. They're going to Pressable, they're going to Bluehost, they're going to Site Ground, they're going to like all the other hosts that are actually part of the WordPress ecosystem. Yeah. What's different from WPEngine? What were they doing that was different from Bluehost or GoDaddy or all of these other platforms, companies that use WordPress as a platform to get customers and profit from that? They offer WordPress, but they're not confusing. Like if you go to GoDaddy, you don't think you're signing up with WordPress. Right? No one's ever thought that. It's called GoDaddy. They've their own brand, they spend millions of dollars marketing this whole GoDaddy brand. And they offer WordPress, but they don't call it like "WordPress Hosting", they don't make it confusing. Kinda you could have a restaurant that sells Coca-Cola, and you say... and you can have a Coca-Cola thing and you sell Coca-Cola, but you don't call it the "Coca-Cola Restaurant" in a way that confuses people. Yeah. But they are called WPEngine, and before this whole thing, "WP", sorry, wasn't trademarked, right? "WP" is still not trademark. I was going to say like it's WP trademark? WP is a very common abbreviation, lots of people do "WP something". But there's a way to use it that is kind of like clear that you're doing something different, and there's a way to use it that is confusing to people. And what we found in surveys, polls, etc. a lot of people were confused. And if you look at their branding guidelines, they were actually kind of leaning into this. So they were actually, I think, actively trying to confuse people to make people think they were an official WordPress thing. Okay. And, since this whole thing started, like if you went to the documentation from WordPress, it says like WP is okay to use free, it's not trademarked, and now you have changed that. No, and actually says it's still free to use. It's still free to use, but... We say, don't do what WPEngine did. Okay. So, yeah, still use WP or whatever, but don't do what WPEngine did. Okay. Like, again, September 17th, or September 20th, when you gave that presentation at WordCamp, what happened before that? Because that's when we all learned what was going on, that's when you came public about it. But did you try to reach out to them before? How was that, that private conversation before that? Of course, yeah, I'd been trying to do deal with them for months, 18 months, and actually, a whole sideline to this is that their CEO, Heather Brunner, had actually kind of fooled me and said, she... I thought she was actually applying for a job at Automattic, so at some point, she was like: "I want to leave WPEngine and run WordPress.org for Automattic." And so, in hindsight, now I think she was just milking me for information and deceiving me, but at the time, I really believed that she was thinking about doing that. Okay. So, they drag you.. That's the big drama. That's the drama that sort of has us all on the press and everything like that, that's the big fight. Now, while all this is happening, WordPress is going just fine. Okay. You know, WordPress 6.7 is coming out on November 12th. It's going to have, you know, 600, 700 contributors, there has been hundreds of millions of downloads of plugins and themes, like, everything is just cranking along. But what WPEngine is doing, their strategy is to make everyone really scared. They want to say: "Oh, WordPress is in trouble, Ma.tt is taking over things. He's trying to control things." They're trying to fork the meetups. They're trying to say: "Oh, let's create a separate Meetup system, let's create separate WordCamps." Is it something that you know for sure that you can, for sure, say that this is something that they are doing? Like, do you have any evidence to say, like: "These people or these group from WPEngine is forking the meetups, is forking, like, or trying to co-opt" Literally, so, like, there was just a WordCamp Sydney, and a WPEngine employee stood up at the thing, and he said: "Hey, what if we created a separate meetup system?" And the whole audience was like: "Uh.. why?" But so, yeah, it's literally happening. Okay. (So, you...) What's cool about the Internet is you can all, this is all transparent, you know, the best disinfectant is sunlight, and so, that's why everything we do is open source, like the WordPress Engine tracker site, all the data is open source, you can check it. If there's a mistake, submit a bug report, it's all on GitHub, we'll fix it. You know, if there's a problem there, like, it's all open source. So, I believe that transparency is like the best solution to all this sort of thing. Why did you believe it was important to build that tracker? Like, why track sites that were before on the WPEngine and now they are elsewhere? Because that's a lot effort, like, it takes time and effort and who build that? I mean, is it mean for them? Yeah, of course, that's what we're doing, we're at war! You know, like, you actually said: "I'm going nuclear, like, this is war." Well, what I want their customers to know is that there's alternatives. 'cause WPEngine actually, part of their profit maximizing is they've been charging their customers a lot and giving them less and less. And so, there's a lot of other companies out there that are more ethical, that are part of the WordPress community and are contributing back, that are alternatives. So, I mean, WPEngine has done some amazing things as well. They built a huge customer base, you know, they built a lot of subscribers, they... it is a lot of good stuff. They are a successful business. They're very successful business. That's part of the issue, right? In some sense, like... It's not an issue! I think it's great that they're successful. But... And I think it's possible to be successful and do it in a way that contributes to the community. That's what literally every other business in the WordPress space is doing, so, that's what's kind of cool, It's like they're trying to say: "Oh, it's like Ma.tt's going after all these businesses, or if you get too big, Matt will come after you." No, of course not! If you look at it, literally every other company, GoDaddy, private equity companies as well, like, Newfold, every other company is like: "Hey, we're part of the community, come to us, you know, Newfold will also serve your website, we'll also pick up the phone, we'll also provide you a service. And we'll contribute back to WordPress to make it better for everyone." Newfold has a license, right? Newfold has a license... Newfold has a license, yeah... Okay. Can you say what other companies have licenses? Can I say what? What other companies are... name some other companies that have licenses, commercial licenses. I would say that everyone except WPEngine is in good standing with the WordPress trademark. And Newfold has a commercial sublicense which allows them to use like "WordPress" in their advertising, Google ad words and stuff like that, and they pay for that. So they have an extra license, but, lots of other people can offer WordPress, and you can say like: "Hey, get, you know, GoDaddy hosting with WordPress" or whatever like that. Yeah. So what's the threshold like? Why WP, well... whenever some other company becomes as successful as WPEngine, are they at risk? There's no threshold. Companies can be as big as they want. Salesforce.com uses WordPress. Yeah, there are 50, 60 billion dollar company. Facebook uses WordPress. They're a trillion dollar company. You know, like everyone can use WordPress. Like there's no threshold, it's open source. So, now, if you break the rules, if you look at the fights I've been in my life... Another one was Thesis, just come back up. It's like what, you know, as someone who broke the GPL, you can't break the GPL. WPEngine broke the trademark, don't break the trademark... So don't break the rules, but like you can as successful as you want, and I love that. I want to see billions and trillions of dollars of things built on top of open source, that's why it's really beautiful. Okay. Of course, they are saying they didn't break trademark, and I guess that's one of the legal battles here that you say: "You, you, broke it", they say you think they didn't. Well, and that's why we have a legal system, and so now this is all working its way through lawyers and the courts. And if you follow the legal case, it's going to take a few months, you know, because the legal system of the US is designed to be, you know, take time. But I feel very, very confident in our legal standing from what we're doing. Okay. So going back to that. That's why I'm doing conferences and press. Like, if you notice, no one from WPEngine is on stage talking to people, they're not talking to journalists, they're not doing any press or anything, but I'm here. I came down to Mexico City, I'm talking to people, I'm talking about this stuff. And normally, if you're, if you've done something wrong, your lawyers will say: "Don't do that! Don't get on stage! Don't answer questions! You might mess things up!" But if you're right, they're like, well, okay, talk about it. And like I said, our best... "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" We try to be totally transparent in all this. Yeah. So, let me just... People, please, if could just lower your voice, because it's kind of difficult to listen here, thank you. So, again, they say, they didn't, you say they did. It's going all to the legal system now. So going back to the timeline, you went... For months you tried to talk to them about making a deal because you were seeing this path, like, okay, they are breaking the trademark law, they are profiting from it, they are taking... People, people are believing... people believe that they are WordPress, or they are part of Automattic, they are not. So you communicated with them privately with their CEO, you interviewed her, like, you were talking. And it got to a point where you say, like: " I'm done with this, I'm going nuclear unless you, like..." You offer them term shift first, and they rejected the deal, they say... And what happened? You went on stage, and it is public now that they have filed screenshots from your private conversations. Yeah, I said: "Okay, if you're not going to do a deal, I'm going to tell people what you're doing." So I gave a presentation on stage, started talking about all the evil stuff that they have done. Not just to WordPress, but that Silver Lake has done the other open source communities, Like Unity and Talent and others that they've hollowed out. And, you know, you all know this, like, freedom is not free. You have to fight for it sometimes. And, you know, people will take advantage of you sometimes if you're very open, so you really have to fight for it. So this is us fighting for it. Okay. So, you went on stage, you said those things, you got some mixed responses from the audience, I watched the recording when everything happened, so you got some... even from Automattic employees. It was awkward! Yeah. It was awkward to watch. And I bet it was more awkward to be there on the stage. But, at that point, it's when you decided to offer team members of Automattic a chance to leave the company if they thought this wasn't in the right direction to go. Oh, it's separate thread, yeah, so Automattic had, like many tech companies, we'd hired a ton of people during like COVID and the business boom and everything like that. And so separately as a company, like honestly, like we're finding we can get a lot more done with fewer people, you know, so like having smart engineers leveraging like AI stuff and working really efficiently, we can serve a lot of customers with fewer people, so, yeah... And we also had a number of people with the company that were like not aligned philosophically. Like they didn't really believe in our mission or anything. So it became, you know, as... I forget who said it, but I think Churchill: "Never wasted a good crisis." So I thought, okay, let's use this crisis, everyone's all emotionally charged and worked up. Let's use this to kind of like give people an opportunity to like kind of trim the fat from the company. And so we did this offer and we said, okay, if you resign, you get six months of pay, so a half a year of your paycheck, whatever it is, what for most people would be you know, 40, 50 for some people was hundreds of thousands of dollars. And some of them took that offer, the ones that were like hundreds of thousands? Yeah, yeah. And so 159 people took it and it was great. So Automattic's been a running great ever since. How many people worked before that opportunity? How many people were working at Automattic at the time? I might get the numbers wrong, but I think like before this started, we were 1888, actually, 1-8-8-8 people, and I think today we're around 1,730 something, because we're also hiring. Because we know one cool thing about this is that like, you know, those thousands of sites living WPEn, some of them are coming to us. So we're actually hiring to like serve customer demands and everything like that, help people migrate and everything, so... So... And we're doing acquisitions. So a lot of people don't know this, but Automattic, you know, we've talked a lot about WordPress, but Automattic actually has a broader mission, so, my life goals are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging actually, which we haven't talked about messaging, which is pretty cool. So messaging is, we have this cool new app called Beeper. Has anyone tried out Beeper yet? She... Oh, two people. Okay, check out Beeper. So... you know how you have like a bunch of different messaging networks like you have like Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, all these kind of different things. So what Beeper does is it brings it all into one application, so you have one app that has all your messages. And then what we're going to do is we're going to kind of make that open source, and then also make it so it can run over open source networks like Matrix and stuff. Yeah. So we want to kind of do for the messaging space, what we did for the CMS space. You also acquired a Tumblr. We acquired Tumblr as well, any Tumblr users? Tumblr. Tumblr? Yeah... Tumblr users? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So talking about acquisitions, there's a whole theory that you are doing all of these in order to put down the valuation of WPEngine in order to acquire them at some point. Have you heard that story or that that theory that you're doing all of this to get their valuation down in order to acquire them? That's an interesting theory... Automattic is definitely trying to build like an open web ecosystem, so we're doing, we're going to announce like a few acquisitions the next week or two. We're growing very, very rapidly. Because what we want to do is create this kind of like open web operating system. This idea that you can build... Yeah, Internet belongs to all of us, right? Because Meta, or Facebook or whatever, like they all want you to use their networks, but for you, all you care about is your friends. And so like if we're both on Beeper, like we should just be able to message each other, so check out Beeper, check out some of our other apps. Like we have Pocket Cast, is an open source podcasting app, it's way better than Spotify, and others for podcasting. Day One is a fully encrypted local journal, I journal every day, journaling is actually really, really powerful. So we've got a lot of really cool fun apps. Sorry, the other stage has started, I have asked to turn the volume down. Is it the wrap up? Yeah, so just five more minutes. So you did this on stage, then there was like this check box that was added to the login page of wordpress.com saying that you can only login if you are not affiliated with WPEngine. That happened... that happened after, right? Yeah, so on wordpress.org, we say if you're with WPEngine, don't be part of wordpress.org 'cause they're, 'cause they're suing us. I'm having to spend, at this point, there'll probably be millions of dollars to defend against their legal attacks. So yeah, of course not. And then... And it's like if you have a restaurant that hands out free ice cream and someone across the street starts like throwing oranges and fruit at you, you're gonna say: "No, you can't have the free ice cream." Okay, but at the time you also blocked WPEngine from accessing wordpress.org updates and plugins. They are blocked until they drop their lawsuits. Okay, so if they drop, they can go back to WordPress.org. (Of course!) Okay, but you realize in doing that you are like, of course you're hurting WPEngine, but you're hurting this, like, all of these millions of websites that depend, that are still running on WPEngine because they cannot get updates. Well, WPEngine, in a few days was able to recreate their own update servers and everything like that. So they've been using all this WordPress.org stuff for free, but they were able to recreate that on their own infrastructure. Which is by the way, what people pay them for, no ones pays any... Who pays any dollars to WordPress.org? No hands, right? There's nothing to pay for, it's all free. But people are paying $400 million to WPEngine, that promises them security, updates, hosting, et cetera. So they were selling the free stuff on WordPress.org to their customers. And then when we turned them off, they got mad. How is that fair? It's messed up, right? So that's part of the lawsuit. It's like: "Hey, we should have access to this free stuff." And that's one of the things that the judges like: "Wait, why?" So, you'll see this legal stuff. It'll take like a few weeks, but you'll see the legal stuff start to work a step out. And finally, like the last thing that I was able to follow, because when this thing was happening we were running our event in Argentina, so I guess that was why you couldn't come to Argentina, you had bigger things to do in September. But the last thing that I am aware of is that after blocking WPEngine from WordPress.org, there was a takeover, they say, about the ACF, Advanced Custom Fields plugin? Oh, yeah, the plugin... So they have this plugin called... that WPEngine had bought actually... So part of what private equity does is they buy things. And so they bought some good stuff, including this plugin called Advanced Custom Fields. Now... (Go ahead...) You were gonna ask if anyone use this Advanced Custom Fields. Anyway, so we were like, okay, well now Advanced Custom Fields, we started looking at code, we found security problems, we found all these things. So like, okay, well, it's in the directory, the directory promises you to have the most secure code, most... the best stuff. So we essentially, you know, exercise the right, which the directory has, it's only happened, you know, probably five or ten times in the history of WordPress to kind of take over the plug-in. So for plugins "abandoned", it can be taken over by other developers to continue it. Kind of like any open source library, right? Like if you are reliant on a library, you don't want it... and the person who's running the library goes evil or starts doing something bad, you should be able to fork it and continue running it. So that's kind of what we did. So we created Secure Custom Fields, which has better security, and we're now developing that. So it'll start to get some new features, it'll start to get some new stuff. Again, when you say "we", is this Automattic? Is this... who is "we" that's actually coding on the keyboard? So the first version, that was actually the WordPress Security Team, because the WordPress Security Team found these vulnerabilities. So again, what we were supposed to do. So we notified them about the vulnerabilities, but then for our users, they're getting updates from us, we're like: "We need the fix this!" So we shipped the fixes to all of our users. Because otherwise people who were running this code would have been insecure. Okay, but this is like... As an engineer, you have a responsibility, right? So like if you build a bridge, that bridge needs to not collapse when cars drive over it. As a software engineer, you have the ethical responsibility to your users for the code to be secure. And so this is part of our keeping our ethical responsibility to all of our users. It just all happened to happen in between these... like since all started, the bugs were probably already there for months before this whole thing happened, right? Or was it like? Sure, I mean, does it hurt WPEngine? Yes. Is it a part of our attacks? Yeah, sure, of course. But like the, who cares? Also, for the community this is better. So again, this is all GPL code, so if WPEngine didn't want the code to be forked, they should had not published it under the GPL. They should not had distributed it through wordpress.org This is all the things they chose. Yeah, but what you did, what happened, so to speak, is not that you forked and you say: "Hey, we found some bugs, they didn't take them, we are building this new plugin. If you want the latest security from WordPress Security Core Team don't... Like uninstall ACF, download, Secure Custom Fields and go on with your life." You took over the Slack, the amount of downloads, the likes. We're kind of in the weeds now, but... if you look at it, they have a, they now run their own update servers. So they have something you can install that allows you to get all the updates from them. WordPress.org has its updates servers, so you get updates from us. Can you still get Advanced Custom Fields? If you are a WordPress user on WordPress.com, can you still install Advanced Custom Fields? Yeah, it's good. You can install the plugin and run their thing, yeah. You download it from their repository or you build it like you... No, we allow people to control... So if you want to run, even on WordPress.com or Pressable, if you want to run the WPEngine version, which I think you shouldn't, because they're showing themselves to not be that competent. By the way, they've had a ton of downtime as well, all this... During this whole thing? Through this whole thing. Their own homepage, WPEngine.com was down for like 30 minutes, two days ago. Okay. At the same time... That happens... Automattic, by the way, we run all the major news platforms. We run WhiteHouse.gov, we host all this stuff. By the way, I don't know if you know there was a big election a few days ago in America. Traffic spiked, everything spiked, zero downtime, zero errors, zero everything. And WordPress.org as well, it's now been running for 21 years. Has anyone ever heard of WordPress.org being down? No. We serve billions, and billions of requests, and updates. So we're really good at infrastructure. Now that they're trying to run their own infrastructure we're starting to see like how competent they are. And they're also starting to have some of the best engineers leave. So for example, one of the things that they were sort of known for was WPGraphQL, which was a plugin that creates a GraphQL API for WordPress. I actually thought they owned it, but it turned out they just were paying the guy, a guy named Jason Ball, he actually owned it. And when all this stuff started, he said: "Hey, I don't agree with what WPEngine is doing, I agree with what you're doing, Ma.tt, I agree with Automattic. Can I come work for you?" I said: "Sure!" And now WPGraphQL is going to become an official WordPress canonical plugin that belongs to the community, so... Okay. So I think on time we're running out. Yeah. Okay, so sorry, I got to fly out. I'm literally going direct to a plane and everything, so... Okay. Well, thank you so much for doing this, thank you so much for coming. I know it was a long trip... It's been a pleasure. And thank you to the community. Yeah. WordPress belongs to every single one of you, we're fighting for open source. So remember that, like, these little battles, this little stuff... By the way, Silver Lake, we're not going to be thinking about them in 10 years, they just buy stuff, they sell it. Like, we're building things for generations, You know, if you plant trees for your children, you build things for future generations, and so that's the beauty of open source and that's what we're all fighting for, so, thank you! Thank you!, Fireside Chat With Ma.tt Mullenweg at Nerdearla, Nerdearla, 01jd0ng56gcanyy4nzqjdqaja2.