Summary: CEO Matt Mullenweg on why he bets big on small companies Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, which he co-founded, and Tumblr, the irrepressible social network it acquired from the wreckage of AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along. That bet is perhaps most pronounced with WordPress itself. Around 43 percent of all the websites on the internet run on WordPress, which is a piece of open-source software anyone can download and use for free. It is officially administered by the WordPress Foundation, but if you don’t want the hassle, you can just go to WordPress.com and pay Automattic to do most of the work for you. It is an absolutely fascinating model that has obviously worked really well, and I wanted to know more about why Matt set it up that way and what the challenges of that structure are. I also wanted to talk about Tumblr — it’s Taylor Swift’s favorite social platform, and it is one of those things that users have kept alive no matter how many corporate owners have tried to kill it. But like every social platform, it has meaningful moderation challenges. Famously, to get an app on Apple’s app store, it had to ban porn, which users are still upset about. Matt and I talked about those challenges. One note: Matt mentions something called “Gutenberg” a few times — that’s the new creation experience in WordPress, the part of the site where people actually make things. This is a long one, but it’s deep. I think you’ll like it. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the co-founder of WordPress, and the CEO of Tumblr. Welcome to Decoder. Very happy to be here. The last time you and I chatted was right after the Tumblr acquisition. That was a fascinating conversation, but it was years ago, so there’s lots to follow up on. Automattic has bought a lot of companies. You released a lot of products — started with WordPress, which you obviously founded. You acquired Tumblr, bought Pocket Casts, you have WooCommerce. Start at the beginning: What is Automattic? How do you think about it? What are all of your companies? Sure. So Automattic has been a fully distributed company since 2005. For 17 years now, we’ve been trying to make the web a better place. We want to democratize publishing in commerce. We’ve been saying that for a long time, before democratizing was cool. To do that, we both build, buy, or partner with things that make the web more open and fun. Pocket Casts is one of the very best podcasting apps. It’s very user-centric; it’s an independent alternative to the Spotifys and Apples of the world. We’re just relentlessly iterating on it to try to respond to user requests and make it better. Most of our business models are through people paying us, as opposed to advertising or other models. We provide upgrades and that recurring revenue is what allows us to come to work the next day. We’re about to come up on 2,000 people working full time with Automattic. It’s really grown a lot, even since the last time we talked. I think we hired over 700 last year. 700 people. Where did you hire them all? All over the world. We have folks in 93 countries now. From the very beginning, and especially last year, one of our big advantages is that we’re not really geographically restricted in where we hire people. We are strong believers that talent is evenly distributed in the world, but opportunity is not. When we provide opportunity to places where they don’t normally have it, we find really, really amazing people and they tend to be great colleagues that stay for a really long time. The other unusual thing we do is we pay global pay rates, which also helps for international re
