## Theme ## Takeaways 1. The origin of Ghost as a 'WordPress-lite' concept. 2. Ghost's initial idea was formulated on August 14th, 2012. 3. The project's principles: focus on publishing, sustainable revenue, and modern technology. 4. A blog post in 2012 about the idea went viral on Hacker News. 5. A Kickstarter campaign raised $350,000 to fund initial development. 6. Ghost is structured as a non-profit foundation to ensure purpose comes before profit. 7. The company maintains transparency by publicly sharing its revenue. 8. The decision to build the platform on Node.js in 2013. 9. The company has a deliberate headcount limit of around 50 people to maintain its culture. 10. The philosophy is to foster an ecosystem of smaller businesses rather than building one giant company. ## Highlights - ` "It is all too easy to criticize... the act of coming up requires you to move into the new headspace creativity and creativity is the highest thing you want to push this but it is how all thoughts begin whether it is philosophical."-- Speaker 1 ` - ` "life is just this mean machine together. Sometimes the good versus the bad half is clear, and sometimes you can't quite see over that hill."-- Speaker 1 ` ## Chapters & Topics ### The Genesis of Ghost > The idea for Ghost originated from John O'Nolan's experiences with WordPress. On 14 August 2012, he conceived a new project envisioned as a 'WordPress-lite' focused purely on publishing, not a full Content Management System (CMS). The premise was to extract the best parts of WordPress for blogging while removing the associated complexities. * **Keypoints** * WordPress had evolved into a complex CMS, moving away from its simpler blogging origins. * There were perceived conflicts of interest and a confusing business model within the WordPress ecosystem. * The core technology of WordPress was considered to be getting messy, with legacy requirements like MySQL 5.0. * Ghost aimed to focus on a single user type, establish a sustainable and straightforward revenue model, simplify the design, and utilise modern technology. * **Explanation** The concept was first detailed in a 2012 blog post, which subsequently went viral on Hacker News. This surge of interest led to a Kickstarter campaign that successfully raised $350,000 in pre-orders for a hosting service. These funds financed the initial development of the open-source software, culminating in the release of Ghost 0.3, which was a very simple markdown editor. ### Ghost's Non-Profit Structure and Business Model > Ghost is structured as a non-profit organisation. This means the company has no shareholders, and all revenue is reinvested back into the company to support its mission. The organisation is overseen by trustees who do not profit from the company's revenue. * **Keypoints** * The non-profit structure was chosen to build trust and ensure transparency. * It guarantees that the company's primary purpose—building open-source technology for publishing—is prioritised over profit. * This model is analogous to institutions like schools or news organisations where the mission is paramount. * To support transparency, Ghost publicly shares its revenue and other operational metrics, a practice that was uncommon for startups in 2013. ### Company Philosophy on Growth and Structure > Ghost deliberately limits its company size and rejects the conventional goal of infinite growth. The speaker's firm belief is that there is 'such a thing as too much growth' and aims to avoid the 'corporate dysmorphia' of constantly pursuing expansion. * **Keypoints** * The core foundation team is capped at around 50 people. * The objective is not to build a single, giant, controlling company. * The philosophy is to cultivate an ecosystem of smaller, independent developers and hosting companies that build upon Ghost's infrastructure. * **Considerations** * The decision to limit team size was informed by the common observation that company culture often deteriorates after growing beyond 60-70 employees, changing from a tight-knit community to a more impersonal organisation. ### Technology Stack and Decisions > Ghost was built using Node.js from its early days (around 2013, when it was on version 0.10). The entire application, from the server-side logic to the editor, was developed in JavaScript. * **Keypoints** * Pros: Choosing a new and trendy technology like Node.js attracted significant interest and talent to the project. * Cons: For the first 10 years, the development team had to contend with the immaturity of the Node.js ecosystem, such as a lack of off-the-shelf dependencies, which meant they had to build many components themselves. ## Assignments & Suggestions * The speaker suggests the audience should ask themselves, 'What could be better?' in the context of their own lives and work, encouraging them to move into a creative headspace rather than just criticising the status quo. ## Transcript First time back in the UK for a while, first time back since the last bootcamp, I've been in Las Vegas. It was an unfortunate second time, I guess at the tech event, we were young, we were free, we were single, we were in Las Vegas watching. Maybe third time lucky? I don't know. Still haven't had that kind of exciting Las Vegas experience, but here we are. So, my name is John O'Nolan, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ghost, in fact the other co-founder, CTO, maybe at some point the door will open before I'm done. How many people have heard of Ghost familiarity? If that happens, don't worry, we're going to cover some of that today. If you're a root, you might be wondering, is this how you do it here? Which is a good question. I'm wondering the same thing myself. Fortunately, Brian kind of alluded to some of the reasons why. In 2015, there were facts problems. There's another one. Brian Dries was running an initiative called Getting Off Yard, and he had observed how the driven community had become completely insolent, and was evolving, but was not necessarily paying attention to the way it was done well. And so he encouraged all four contributors to get off the island and explore other sorts of project ideas and bring back the Drupal project. And so I was invited as part of that to come back to WordPress, which was just, it went very well. So I think, so there's this one form of course, some of you might remember on there, it's like a bit of a while, which sort of maps out the journeys of life. I think in this room, we think of software development, and I think any disease, life is just this mean machine together. Sometimes the good versus the bad half is clear, and sometimes you can't quite see over that hill. And so every decision that we make, all of us collectively in life, is stuck to this moment. space that we're in right now. We all know the path, but there are all these other parts that are no longer open to us, right? The decisions we could have made, the different we could have gone. And so, I'll call this here, a fun exercise that we don't explore, a lot, but it's a rare theoretical. If I'd studied differently or harder in school, could I have ended up? So that's what we're going to do in the next half an hour or so, is talk. you through where ghosts have come from and ended up in our world, within our world, but, then living on the wall, not technically. So, my background, I was on the WordPress. My hair's not grey today. I loved it. It was wonderful. I got into contributing with WordPress because I was a freelance web developer. This week I contributed to WordPress. Freelance rates. But along the way, what you'd expect to happen was that I'd be enamored by the story of web from the right. It's formative, set up by Eric Cathedral. It's meticulous, centralized, multiple development. of Microsoft Windows, through the chaos of its iterative collaboration process of Linux. How is it that you can take billions of dollars and tens of thousands of developers, collaborating in presumably a very organized and easy way. I grew up in a world where we've never met. And this philosophy of collaboration and competition and building infrastructure where we have shared software we see rebuilding the same. It was something that spoke deeply to my heart, and the idea of doing it started publishing. And so I went from being an open-source pragmatist to an open-source evangelist. I took WordPress events, my time to talk, and a lot of it was pretty instilled a lot of motivation. And at the same time, some other things weren't there, which kind of bothered me. I didn't see something weird, a taste to figure out what was, or why that was. There were certain decisions that I made. Not about what was best for me. Did you get it? Perhaps what was best for me was interest. Confidence of interest. How we do things within awe. They're really detracted from the idea that I hadn't, bought into. And so that was. difficult, and it was a nagging feeling. And so what's kind of funny, as we showed, is I found touchdown the exact moment the branch of Ghost forked off, as an idea of original Greek. And it was in a DM with Chelsea Othkamp, who is my co-collaborator for the Codebook of Wembro society. And I said to her, one fine morning, August 14th, 2012, I'm millimetres away from starting a new project called. Presumably by Morpho 1. Open source up, kind of, or WordPress-lite, publishing-focused, not CMS-focused. The premise would be that WordPress is now CMS. All the great parts of WP for blogging. Mine is a video. And she said lots of people talk to Nelmoo, or perhaps the subtext to Summit Service. And that little letter I gave Nelmoo was updated for me. And an hour later, I said, you know, the more notes I make, the more and more this is to exist. Oh, God. Slippery slope. Four years later, it was very slippery slope. And what's funny is I actually took a picture of these notes, which is not something I usually do. And I don't think I even sent this picture to her. This is the notes from that day. on my lap, dribbles under the WD light. The things I like, the things I don't like, the things that bother me. The genesis, the beginning, the seed of an idea. And so the question really then is why, any sort of thought or any decision, open source, why do this thing? As I said, the mission that I really walked into was exciting to me, that I had a clear idea of what I should be. And that was different to what I had discovered the reality to be. And there were some parts of WordPress that I loved and wanted to carry forward and be exactly the same. And there were other parts that I didn't love. I loved that there was open source, decentralized, customizable, that it could do all these things without. One of the new products, which was by all accounts, the first time we described this in the direction of web operators. Not to say there's anything wrong with that, not that there's more. The conflicts of interest bothered me a lot. There was a lot of confusing business model with restahawks.com which was like, I'll give you this account, I'm not sure why you use that. And then there were these hosting companies which were fuzzies, but they didn't sustain the open source project. So I found there was a tech-harm story that was sort of, say, confusing. And then there was, you know, core UoT, getting a little messy despite the core UoT backstasis. One of the ones, the minimum today still, MySQL 5. So, what could be better about this? And I had a desire to do something that was focused on a single user, rather than trying to compete with Squarespace and Medium simultaneously, focused on one whole algorithm. Having time, straightforwardness. sustainable revenue, simplify the design, go up to modern tech, and have just a dense, simple, no-need-to-explain advice on this. So that was the principles behind it. I wrote this into a blog post in 2012 that sort of laid this out, and almost for no other reason than to get the idea out of my head. I didn't really notice, which is a great blog about it. No one cares. And alongside the proper picture of what any sort of light, focused version of work, I haven't got a business model, not a single, non-profit company employed to help us to, if the software was good enough, use us and let us use it. I was doing four hours of all over a different group of folks and so it's like a team. In fact, I found a little slide deck from a team or so where I described it as something. of software like that at some point. But the blog post did take off. Hit the front page of Hacker News. Immediately went viral to some extent. Following that kind of engagement and interest, that turned into a case of, hey, that's it. This is why I look so young. So, I mean, do you ever think about like when you see an old picture of yourself in. post-20, what would you whisper in your ear? What would you tell yourself? It's like, stay away from redheads. Like, what would really help you? And the Kickstarter campaign did incredibly well. Over the course of a 29-day campaign, we raised $350,000 in pre-orders for a hosting. And so that was a way to sort of start that flywheel, that cycle going, the initial projection, the pre-orders for the hosting, to fund the foundation, to fund the entry-building of the open-source software. At the time, it was the third most popular. in the open-source category. Wow, thank you, you too. Without even talking about it. And about three months after that, which was, it was very, very, you know, the old adage about being shit. Check that box. It was basically just this very simple markdown that was about it. It didn't do very much, but it took us from an idea in the theory of labor work to something real, something that exists in the world. And so that was the initial prime. We fought in separation, philosophically, into something new. And along the way, there have been other twists and turns that could have worked out for me, but were the same decision that would have taken us to run. So the other twists and turns are what I would refer to as the unusual thought I think along the way of making decisions about it. There's the expected decisions that are made, things where you tell people, and so then we did this, and they go, and there's the unusual walks, and so then we tell people, and so then we did this, and they go, why? And we've got handles. And they're the more interesting parts of what has contributed to how we've been developing, and this is decisions we've made along the way. So, the first of us is the non-profit structure, and it's funny, perhaps less known in this room, but in most, like, side of our views, it's an overwhelm, right? It's something about the world, perhaps, that we live in. But it's a confusing term. Non-profit is a confusing term because over ghosts swore the history of being profit. So, well, non-profits doesn't mean the company isn't a non-profit, it means the company doesn't, the non-profit organization keeps all its revenue within the company towards, there are no shareholders, there are trustees, the trustees steal the company, but they don't have the money, the company is guaranteed to be in all of its revenue. So, why would you want one of those? Well, certain companies, you would hope, but the purpose of this, the purpose is actually more important for examples, where you might hope for a school, a news organization, and indeed... These are all places where profits come first and come before purpose. So the non-profit structure was really key to me to engender trust and transparency like it felt like the right way to do things. And to make it a transparent and sustainable business, we report revenue stream, we share our revenue. And that's perhaps not so unusual today, but back in 2013 it was up to maybe a couple of other small startups to have this idea of selling like, here's how it's going, and giving a window into the operation. And we decided, particularly in 2000, that Node.js was a 0.10. And we sort of started building this editor in that way. javascripts on the server and stores all the posts. which we know is a prototype, and we just did the whole thing. and there were significant pros in the months of that decision, particularly then I think the obvious pros were it was new and exciting and trendy so it attracts a lot of interest that it might not have, in the morning. There have also been for the last 10 years or so. microservices all kinds of stuff but not for the ship. we reached for independency off the shelf and sold the whole post to someone else so upsides and downsides. and then finally these last two of mine come together we've got a headcount, 50-ish, I am more than, and there's no concept diet to have. And there's a really clear reason for that. Companies sort of always start out the same way, keep it all fixed, and you just get it going, you want to grow this thing, you want to become successful, and, you know, so you hire a few people, different organisations in general, and by and large, as they get bigger, suddenly they start eating their brothers and sisters, and you just go, well, that's what we were bigger, and before you know it, they kind of consume everyone, until, at some point, the same company. And my firm belief is that there is such thing as too much, but when you are popped up with a couple of steroids, you end up in this sort of form of dysmorphia, where you want growth, you want growth, you want bigger. So what if not possible? What if infinite growth, huge, wasn't the goal? And that's what we've tried to do with our structure. So we have this core foundation with the idea that the limit will never be more. And so rather than trying to put a giant company in control, so within that there will be hosts, developers, people who are building on top of that infrastructure. I think where I view the world, I prefer one where there's lots of smaller, thinking about people more as cities, the view of the world. Sounds nice, right? It's a bit of a utopian idea. So how does it actually go? I think, or is this all theoretical? Well, over 12, 13-ish years now, we've come a long way from that first 0.3 version of the terminal matchup. So there it goes. And we've needed native analytics built in, you know, email newsletters, so when you publish a post on the web, RSS, you can also deliver it to the boxes. That's a new system so that publishers can pay into access, which has brought the business model of SaaS, SaaS software, to journalists, creators, and publishers. nostalgia. So it's come a long way, and this is one of the ones we're most proud of, and what has really resonated is the people who care about the use case. We have lots of media and news organizations, some of the most excited, in particular in this part of the world. We've got the Manchester Mail, the Review, the Birmingham Dispatch, and in fact, in the capital itself, London, all running on Go, all making sustainable revenue, operating on Go that is helping. Outside of that, many of the start-up blogs that we've come across or read in London today, including Y Combinator itself, that's great. I think you might have heard something about something else, but way back in the day, the. original founding structure was the founding designer of YouTube for like, and as all the growing up, the creation of YouTubers, podcasters, people who are creating content on the internet. who drive us to celebrate and to love. uh journalists or media but nevertheless and so today starting from humble roots is just me and hannah getting going we're now a team of almost 100 a year and over the lifespan of ghost we, managed to amount to 37 37 million dollars in total through the non-profit or no outside no. investors no additional dollars 107 million dollars by independent reviews open source projects entirely bootstraps so that's the one i feel in my own particular that we. And so this winding path is taking us in lots of interesting directions based on some strange thoughts. Most of you have seen this, but this is only one half of it. And the second half of it is looking forwards rather than backwards. And while the black parts that are the road are not taking the runway, there is, of course, which direction the decision to make is a sort of, again, and deciding what might be better. And so the thought for me is, what could be better? It's very easy to some extent to pick out what's wrong, whether it's WordPress, whether you find yourself with it. It's easy to find just the faults, or what would be better. One thing I see nowadays from an outside perspective, dissatisfaction in this data square, and rightfully so, there's a lot to not be happy with. But it is all too easy to criticize this. and the act of coming up requires you to move into the new headspace creativity and creativity. is the highest thing you want to push this but it is how all thoughts begin whether it is philosophical. what could be better if not this and that was the question that you have to ask yourselves ask me in the context of your life ask there are tons of options whether you look to something like ghosts something that many love incredible ideas what ideas can we find how to use. details, but it looks like we do have two or three questions. Yes, how did you settle on work, guided work? Yeah, totally arbitrary, honestly. There's sort of like bits and pieces. You've got people who come from like worked out companies or been in a company as it's gone from small to large, and the story that I've heard the most often, things were great, and then we got to around, it's usually like six. 60 70 and then like a new era came in it started being hard to know things change from this like. ragtag group of people working together on something a tight-knit community to now being small community so it's sort of like just under that and aside from the ecosystem that's also. doesn't seem that fun i know people who do it i talk to them about what it's like the things they. say don't make me think i wish i was there it sounds very stressful 35 people is quite i think it feels like the upper limit but it is arbitrary, And you know what, if I was going to do it again and start another company, I'd really like to have lots and lots and lots of all sorts of all of these things. If you only have it, then it goes to the strengths of really creating that. And the answer to all your problems is, well, just because that means you don't think so, I'm sure I'll share it with you right about then. And the world of creating, re-opening. Okay, let's start with one here. Two more questions. I'm curious, you used Wea a lot, and company, and you showed us a lot of the speed science. How big actual sound post-it versus low-on-ghost post-its? What's the name of the club across the area, sorry, in the wild that you basically own and host? Yeah, so we host, I think it's about 12,000 sites, 29,000 maybe. I think there's at least the same amount within the kind of top million that's self-hosted. And there's, I think, the same amount again in sort of longer tail. And then there's an amount beyond that in some way or another. And it fluctuates, but somewhere anywhere between like a lot of, we host the minority. There's a lot of self-hosted. It's not as easy to self-host. So that's. But it's a fun one, because coming back to the last question, if you have a 50,000, at a certain point, you can have too many customers. We are incentivized to make it easier to sell. In fact, we need customers to support us and customers to be able to sell to us as easily as our customers. So I expect that ratio to actually get there as fast. Amazing. Well, if anyone else has a question for John, keep it to yourself. John's going to be taking a round for a little while. You can find him here. But for now, we need to start changing over. So give John another round of applause. All right, so our next speaker.