I Started WordPress at 19... Now It Powers 40% Of The Internet

Sam Parr

Alright, today's episode is special. We've got **Matt Mullenweg**. Matt founded a company called **WordPress**, which is used by about **45%** of all websites on the internet, so it's a huge thing. We talked to Matt about a bunch of interesting things.

Shaan Puri

sean sean

Sam Parr

what did we talk to him about

Shaan Puri

He had an offer to sell his company for **$200,000,000** when he was 24 years old. He turned it down. We asked him what that was like. We talked to him about some of the recent drama they've had. We talked about how they've been acquiring companies — they bought a small company in **South Africa**, and how it turned out to be a huge thing for their business, like a **billion-dollar-plus win**. He's just a *student of the game*. He's been doing it for like **20 years**. This guy started this company when he was 19 years old and is still doing it, and it's become this absolute juggernaut. Enjoy this episode with **Matt Mullenweg**.

Sam Parr

Tell me if this is right, because this sounded almost too good to be true: I'd read that on 02/08 [February 8] you had an acquisition offer — I think you were only *24 years old* — for **$200,000,000**. I think you'd only raised **$1,000,000**, and I think you raised that $1,000,000 at a **$3,000,000** valuation. Relatively speaking, you're 24, you're going to be worth nine figures — something crazy like that — and you turned it down. But then you talk about how you didn't have control of the company because you were young, and you maybe made some mistakes with funding or something like that. What's the conversation like with yourself when you're turning down something that might make you worth over **$100,000,000** at the age of 24?

Matt Mullenweg

You talked about... and your, you know, your name: *The First Million*. It's kind of funny — like, technically on paper my first million was that first funding round. In theory I owned, like, half the company that was now worth $4,000,000, but as you know, that's paper money. I was still, you know, eating ramen and Mountain Dew and pizza — living a very broke San Francisco, sort-of college-kid life. But in 2008 we had this acquisition offer. You're right: it was about two to two-and-a-half years in. Someone tried to buy us for $200,000,000. The investors at the time did something which is now quite common but back then was pretty forward-looking: they did a secondary [sale]. They said, "Wow — we're 20 people, we've been doing this for two-and-a-half years; a $200,000,000 exit would be pretty amazing." And, like I said, I would personally walk away with a lot of money. But they thought this could be way bigger, so they said, "Let's build that." So we took that acquisition valuation and turned it into a funding round where we put a lot more capital into the company. I sold some stock myself; that was my first liquid million. It was kind of in 2008 — I think I was 24. That was a step change. I was able to pay off my credit cards and buy my mom her house and do all those things you dream of. It removed some of those early economic pressures, and I was really able to focus on the business and swing for the fences — which is what they wanted me to do.

Shaan Puri

You know, I hear these stories—like, *Such* turns down a billion dollars from **Yahoo** or whatever. There's this story about you, at such a young age, turning down, you know, the opportunity to exit and take a huge payday. I think you're a better man than me. I don't think I would have been able to resist. Was that an easy decision for you? Was that a hard decision? Were you like, "I think this could be bigger—let's go for it"? Is that just blind—not blind—faith, but an extreme amount of self-confidence and faith? Like, how do you even...?

Sam Parr

or did you even wanna do it and the investors were like nah it's too bad

Matt Mullenweg

No, it wasn't an easy decision at all. Of course, you have to really seriously consider these things. Also, as a *fiduciary*, you have a responsibility to shareholders to consider every acquisition. We've had other acquisition offers and people trying to buy *Automatic*, you know, as recently as this year. I think you have to ask yourself, with any acquisition: will the mission that we're doing be accelerated by this transaction, or will it be hampered?

Shaan Puri

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Matt Mullenweg

It's like we acquire a lot of companies. **WooCommerce**, I think, did a lot better because we acquired it than it would have on its own. But there are probably other companies we tried to buy that we didn't buy, and those did really well on their own. **Reddit** was one. Actually, we looked at Reddit at one point.

Sam Parr

Did you look at them in their Condé Nast? Like, "yeah, like $10,000,000 valuation days."

Matt Mullenweg

I actually really wanted to buy *Red Eye*. I couldn't convince my board; they thought it was a bit outside of our, like, early focus, so we never got that far in the discussions or anything. But yeah—there was a time when they were about four employees and for sale, and kind of in the *Wired* offices on Third Street in San Francisco. I just thought it was really cool. So, obviously, they took it pretty—very well.

Sam Parr

But when you created **WordPress**, it seems like it took off within a year. I—I forget which year you started it, but like I said earlier, I think I was using it starting in like 10/00 or 11/00, 02/00, 10/00, 02/00—like pretty early on. At the time I was a Tennessee college kid, so if I had heard about it then, a lot of people had heard about it. What was the first version of WordPress like?

Matt Mullenweg

02/3

Sam Parr

oh wow okay

Matt Mullenweg

I wrote a blog post on this because basically what people see as *"overnight success"* is often a thousand days of relevance, or people simply haven't heard of you. At one point there was a joke that WordPress had more developers than users. The first few blogs were just ones I set up for my friends in high school because they were using the software, so I would manually set it up for people. Early on we used to do "upgrade parties." When a new version of WordPress would come out, I'd open up my apartment, go to Costco, buy some booze, order some pizza, and say, "Hey, just come to my apartment and I'll upgrade your site for you." So, yeah—the early days were very much bootstrapped: just doing the work, doing everything so it looks like *overnight success* later. We had some breakout points later on, you know, when Google-type changes affected our license and other things. **Fortune favors the prepared.** It was because we had put in a lot of grind—a lot of work, a lot of community building, a lot of contributions, a lot of code—many, many days before that.

Sam Parr

But what's crazy to me is—I remember four or six years ago I was looking at something that said **WordPress** was used by something like 20 or 30% of all the websites on the internet. Recently I looked again and now it's like 40%. Are you guys... the thing that struck me was: are you the most under-monetized business on earth? How are you not the biggest company on earth? I used **WordPress** and I used **WooCommerce**, which you also own, at my old company. My WooCommerce license—Sean, I think it was a $300 lifetime or $300 a year—and the product I was using it on was making many millions of dollars. I've got a friend—Sean, you and I both have a friend—who made $100 million off of the $300-a-year license or whatever it was. It was like nothing. You guys have to be the least-monetized company there is.

Matt Mullenweg

I think the way I put it is: WordPress is almost the *"dark matter of the web."* So when you build a list of the top websites, we're not going to show up. I mean, WordPress.com will be in the top 100 or whatever. But the beauty of it is that the WordPress ecosystem is probably at least $10 billion a year in revenue. My company, Automattic, is about 5% of that. If you add up all the companies and all the people, I'm not even counting everything you talked about — like people selling things on WooCommerce, which I think last year was over $30 billion of goods and services sold through WooCommerce. But actually, more than half of Automattic's revenue comes from things that aren't just WordPress. We have a variety of different businesses, including some really cool mobile apps like Day One, Pocket Casts, and a new one called Beeper.

Shaan Puri

What were, like, the **top two acquisitions**? Even **Buffett**, for example—if you study Buffett's portfolio, a huge amount of the gains came from a couple of really key acquisitions at the right time. **See's Candy**, acquired at a specific time, has given them over a billion dollars, I think, of free cash flow over the years.

Sam Parr

and what's the what what's the revenue number that you could say the whole company does

Matt Mullenweg

we've publicly saved we're we're over half a billion of revenue now

Sam Parr

okay got it alright so yeah to answer sean's question what brings it or what what's been the surprising thing

Shaan Puri

what are like the crown jewel like best acquisitions that you feel proud of

Matt Mullenweg

Our most successful is probably **WooCommerce**. This came a lot from—**WordPress** is a platform, and I did a lot of study of platforms. That led me to do a lot of deep reading on **Microsoft**, actually. It was funny: if you look at some of the press around **Windows 95** coming out, they talked about how for every $1 that Microsoft made from Windows, there was $20 made by the Windows ecosystem. By the way, that ratio is similar to what I talked about earlier, where **Automattic** makes about **5%** of the money in the **WordPress** ecosystem. So I sort of found that platforms often do this: they create a lot more value—a true platform.

Shaan Puri

Have you heard the story of Bill Gates talking about when he met Mark Zuckerberg? He was talking about the Facebook platform. There's a quote I remember reading. Gates said, "This is not a platform." He explained: "A platform is when the companies built on top of it generate far more value than the host platform." At the time, Facebook was this gargantuan thing with lots of small apps on top, and Facebook was pulling a lot of the value back in. He famously said, "That's not what a platform is." </FormattedResponse>

Matt Mullenweg

I would agree with that assessment and and also that's not a platform which now a lot of businesses are built on and there were some that sort of came up in the early days like zynga or whatever but like or spotify even but it it's now not something that like every business is built on because you can get work pulled right like a not true platform they might give you some distribution early on when you align with their interests but then they can easily pull the rug on you which I think facebook ended up doing to a number of companies so yeah I want to build a true platform but of course Microsoft famously had Microsoft office so they had an application built on top of windows which ended up being very lucrative so it was like what's gonna be you know I have this platform wordpress which is now becoming like an operating system for the web we were obsessed about backwards compatibility and auto updates and things like that learning a lot from successful operating systems in the past what's our Microsoft office and that ended up being woocommerce which was a sort of small company like I think 40 people based out of south africa a plugin for wordpress and actually started as a theme company it's called woothemes they developed this actually a fork of another open source ecommerce thing and they they started doing it just to sell more themes because themes were kind of the big business for wordpress at the time and this e commerce plugin took off a bit actually we looked at buying it years prior but the you know candidly the code was really crappy and so we were like oh this is like really crappy code we're we're you know automatic is very much like engineering led like technology r and d companies so we're like oh this is but it just kept taking off because they did such a good job like building something people want so even though the code wasn't scalable well organized you know they built something they they were really great at that product market fit so woocommerce was taken off and so we that was the early acquisition that we did funnily enough the the competitor there was there were there's some private equity that was trying to buy this plug in so we kinda won over the private equity because they wanted to join like our culture and everything like that and woo you know like I said at the time it was 40 people pretty small they only had like 4 engineers by the way so a lot of those people were like customer support or other things we were able to take what we were really great at which is like engineering scalability all that sort of stuff and and apply it to what they had done really brilliantly which is like great this thing that people love to use and that's like I said I think last year did over 30,000,000,000 of goods and services sold so that's that's definitely 1 of our our best acquisitions that we've done but I also know that ecommerce is is an incredibly competitive space and you know we're we're blessed to have an incredible competitor at shopify which is a a company I have a ton of respect for you know the the founders and entrepreneurs and the whole thing they they they're actually a really really great company so you know toby and I think have a a lot of mutual respect for each other and you know drive each other to be better

Shaan Puri

So, do you look at that? This is, again, like we're kind of giving you a compliment and an insult at the same time. The *"backhanded compliment"* is in full effect here. On one hand we're saying, "Oh my god — **43%** of the internet uses WordPress," or "there are **500,000,000** websites using WordPress." That is just such a mind-boggling number. On one hand that's absolutely incredible. On the other hand, Sam was saying, "Are you the most... like, under-monetized? Are you the most under-monetized, given that...?" Because you look at Shopify: Shopify alone right now has a market cap of **$150,000,000,000**. One could say — the ruthless capitalist could say — "Matt, you're doing all this work. Your whole company, including WooCommerce and all this stuff, is going to be worth several billion dollars." But the closed-source Shopify variant of the e‑commerce side is worth **$150,000,000,000**. Like, what should I take away from that? And what do you take away from that? What meaning do you put on that?

Matt Mullenweg

there's definitely some things that are easier in a proprietary sort of closed ecosystem software model you know it's easier to you know shopify is really great at forcing people to use their payments for example and in woocommerce you know you can use ours but you can also use a lot of other stuff I think their sort of average revenue per subscriber is is like 10 x what what woocommerce is is how I think about it is is very much sort of short term versus long term so 1 we have this philosophy of open source which is you know I I want all of the work I do all of my creative output to increase the amount of freedom and liberty in the world I just something I I believe very morally so that's why I've dedicated my life to open source because open source software you know you sort of have a bill of rights attached to it right the freedom to use the software for any purpose to see how it works to modify it to redistribute it as modifications the 4 freedoms of the gpl and to me that's that's a moral decision you know that is the software I create I want not to have a proprietary license you know shopify is amazing if shopify changed your policies tomorrow their customers are stuck with it you know they they have their recourse on their proprietary license we're with open source you know we could change our policies tomorrow I could become evil or whatever and automatic could be you know sell or be a terrible company you would still own all the code you know wordpress and woocommerce etcetera belong just as much to you as they do to me and that sort of freedom and liberty is I think better in the long term so I'd say open source has a slow burn so it often is kinda slower to start up but then over time it builds sort of this compounding momentum that is a bit unstoppable and there's 2 things 1 it could be very successful in its own right as wordpress has you know it's 10 x the number 2 in the market but two one great thing it does is it forces the proprietary folks to be a bit more open so I I use proprietary stuff myself a lot of apple things are proprietary and I you know I really love their products I think apple is probably a bit more open than they would be otherwise because android exist right there's there's an open competitor and which is by the way open source and so that that it kinda influences the market so even if we don't have make as much money as shopify or don't have the market share of shopify in the ecommerce space yet although you know check-in in ten twenty years let's see where we are that we force the proprietary folks to to be a bit more open with how they do things

Shaan Puri

**Short answer:** I do it because that's what I believe. I believe in open source. I believe the moral decision comes first. Secondly, in the long run... we'll see. Is that a good summary?

Matt Mullenweg

**Proprietary** — it's just as easy for a proprietary company to fail as it is for an open source project. I think being proprietary or open source is somewhat orthogonal, not causal, to whether you're a successful product. People get really attached to that distinction. In the short term, it's usually a bit easier to monetize a purely proprietary stack. But over the long term, you can create a much, much bigger thing if you have a flywheel of an open source community — adoption, innovation, etc. A ton of innovation happens with open source.

Shaan Puri

By the way, **Sam** — isn't it nuts that **Matt** is clearly this *thoughtful*, almost *soulful* entrepreneur who has been building this thing since he was literally a kid, 19 years old?

Sam Parr

like a guy you'd call wise when he was 21

Shaan Puri

"Yeah, exactly. Like, 'oh, he's an old-soul' type of thing. He works on open-source software — like you said, it's widely used, it's almost free; it's so, so low-cost and so affordable. All I hear is *'only good.'* Then you had this random *'villain arc'* people tried to paint on you in the last... year with this drama that's going on. I couldn't believe it. I was like, if I were going to put money on who's the least drama-attracting founder, it might have been you. So I thought that was nuts. **Sam**, quick reaction to that — real quick. And then I want to hear **Matt**'s thoughts on it."

Sam Parr

So, I'm a **WordPress** user, and I'm friends with **Jason Cohen** of **WP Engine**. You guys had a fight. I was actually *shocked*, Matt. I thought that some of the stuff that you said — I was shocked. You're like... people were insulting you, and you felt like they insulted you back, and I didn't. I've read a lot about Matt's work. I don't know Matt personally, but from listening to him he doesn't seem like someone who would ever insult someone. I was actually surprised that you were going as hard as you were. I guess your perspective is that they're coming after everything you made, or that they don't contribute, whatever. But I was surprised you were *pissed off*; I didn't think you would be the type of guy to come off that way.

Matt Mullenweg

You know, a failure mode — and I think that can kill many open source projects — is when they get taken advantage of. And so, just like a schoolyard bully, you kind of have to **stand up for yourself**. It's kind of funny because you say you don't think of me as doing this, but actually, if you look at the history of WordPress, there have been maybe four or five times when I had this kind of *"villain arc."* People were like, "we had a fight to protect our principles and the sustainability and the future of WordPress."

Shaan Puri

Can you give the **one-minute summary** of what happened? I even followed it, and I'm sure there are a bunch of people listening who don't know what we're talking about. Could you give the one-minute version and try to be **objective** about it — not just your side of the story, but what actually happened? Can you explain?

Matt Mullenweg

You know, it's an ongoing legal battle, so I can only say so much. But basically there's a company called **WP Engine**. It started off very positive in the community. **Jason Cohen**, I think, is awesome, by the way. In 2019 they were bought by a private equity firm called **Silver Lake**. Over the subsequent five years they became, I would say, more parasitic toward **WordPress**. Their marketing and branding created a lot of confusion in the marketplace in a way that threatened our trademark — the **WordPress** trademark. People would say, "it's WordPress Engine," and they wouldn't correct them. They let people think it was official. I even had very close friends who were **WP Engine** customers who thought that was my company. I would frequently get support requests for **WP Engine**, like "my site's down," and things like that for a long time. For two years prior to this fight, we were doing our best to partner with them and resolve all these things, including the trademark, but they just weren't responding.

Sam Parr

And basically **WP Engine** is a web-hosting service, mostly—or maybe only—for **WordPress** sites. The accusation, I believe, was that you felt they weren't contributing to the project as much as they should have been, given that they make a lot of money. There was also a trademark issue: people confused the two companies.

Shaan Puri

On the contribution thing—what's your *leg to stand on*? I guess, does somebody have to contribute? Is that a **rule** or a **suggestion**? For example, is this like when you're at church: you should "put something in the tray," but you don't technically have to, although it's frowned upon? What's the take there?

Matt Mullenweg

So, WordPress — we do have this program we call **Five for the Future**. By the way, this is all voluntary. It's an open-source license; you don't have to do anything. You do whatever you want. But we say that if you're building a business on WordPress, if you can allocate, you know, somewhere between **0–15%**...

Sam Parr

profit or revenue

Matt Mullenweg

it doesn't matter however you wanna define it it could be time it could be hours it could be whatever but and put that back into what we call core core wordpress which is something that belongs in the open source project so it's accessible to everyone it doesn't just benefit your company that's part of what's made us so sustainable and allowed us to be a open source project which has really thrived more than you know some of you know other great cmss that were open source that came up at the same time like joomla or drupal or something like that which haven't has as much assesses us by the way I think this is great self interest as well and wp engine is fairly unique in that pretty much every other company in the wordpress ecosystem does this quite a bit and in fact if you look at old versions of wp engine's website they were very supportive of this and actually even say on their website they would dedicate you know to afford full time people and everything like that you know fast forward to 2024 they were had less than that on core so I think that's that's a whole like sustainability health of the ecosystem health of the product issue it's not a legal issue at all the trademark abuse of not just the wordpress but also the woocommerce trademark so you could argue that wordpress wp whatever but like they're also using the woocommerce trademark which is fully owned by automatic you have to protect that if you don't protect your trademarks you lose them and so we're having discussions around that we have trademarked licenses with other web host great relations with every other and they're they're just a web host they're not a tech company they don't really create a lot of ip and there are web hosts which people think is the largest but they're actually you know probably the sixth or seventh largest wordpress web post there's a lot of bigger ones and they're a single digit percentage of all the wordpresses in the world you know they probably have like 700000 8 hundred thousand or something so people have made this into a bigger thing all it is I you know some of these previous controversies that got mainstream media coverage as you know cnn I had this hot nacho scandal in the first couple of years of wordpress or a thesis fight or the easter massacre of thieves like all these things I'm mentioning you probably haven't heard of it used to be like half my wikipedia page now it's not today if you go to my wikipedia page their pr firm has a whole paragraph about this I think in five years maybe it'll be a sentence or not even out there at all so it's not my first rodeo sometimes you have to fight to protect your open source ideals and the community and and and your trademark by the way but you know I expect this to resolve in the next few months and and now they're they're sort of although it's easy to find like if you're on reddit or twitter I get a lot of hate

Sam Parr

A lot of people were **pissed at you**. I tweeted out that you were coming on to the pod yesterday. There were a lot of angry people, and I was a little surprised by that, *to be honest*.

Matt Mullenweg

Yeah. And some people are uncomfortable with us having to fight and protect ourselves. **WP Engine** took some very aggressive legal action. It turned out that when we thought we were negotiating in good faith, they were preparing a legal case to attack us. Three days after I gave this presentation, they launched this huge lawsuit with **Quinn Emanuel** — it's kind of one of the biggest, nastiest law firms. **Private equity** is so famously aggressive: it goes in, hollows out businesses, extracts all the value, and kind of kills them. There's this crazy story — I don't know if you saw it recently — where one of the reasons there were shortages of fire trucks in **LA** was that the fire-truck manufacturers had been rolled up by private equity. They were jacking the prices, and that created huge waiting lists for new fire trucks and for fire-truck repairs. There are lots of examples. Not all private equity is bad; there are good investors and bad investors in every...

Shaan Puri

Asset class—look, I didn't follow the story in depth; I didn't need to. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't need to be. It's common sense to me. Whose side am I going to be on? The **private equity–backed company** that, you know, sounds almost like it's made by you guys but it's not—or the **founder** who's been working on this for twenty-plus years of his life, open-sourced it, and it's used by everybody. It's kind of a staple of the internet and, you know, captures a tiny bit of the value along the way. It was pretty obvious to me which side I was going to come down on. I think it was actually a common-sense test for most people, and I can't believe how many people are, you know, on the PE [private equity] side. It actually reminds me a little bit of the AI stuff right now.

Sam Parr

Wait, Sean — we did a whole podcast about the founder of this PE firm, though, and how *fascinated* we were with them. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

We do profiles on ruthless killers, and then we're at the end and we're like, "Isn't that awesome?" And we're like, "Yeah — do you want to be that way?" Hell no. That's not me. But I'm glad that these people exist. You need all these people in an ecosystem; they're not all bad. There are impressive things about how— I think his name was **Egan Durbin** or whatever. I think that's the guy that we talked about. You know, it's impressive in the same way that **David Goggins** is impressive, but I'm not going to go out there and run until my toenails bleed. I like that he exists, but that doesn't mean I want to be like him, or even that I think that's the right thing for most people to do.

Sam Parr

I think it was on your blog — it could have been on the Tim Ferriss podcast — where you wrote about how WordPress, or Automattic, has roughly 2,000 people. You described how you tried a bunch of different ways to hire people: tests, those brain-teasers that Google uses, and other methods. Two things you said stood out. First, you found that **the people who are the best writers are often the best hires** — not PhDs or master's degrees, but a correlation between someone's ability to write and communicate in the written word and their job performance. Second, you said you used to hire people just by emailing or texting — essentially through chat, not face-to-face or phone calls. Do you still hire people strictly through text communication?

Matt Mullenweg

Yeah. For some roles we might do Zoom—if it's a sales role or something like that. Obviously it's important to see how someone interacts. But basically, for a lot of our roles, **written communication** is going to be the primary thing. Also, if people want to talk to someone, we're not going to be like, "no, you can't." A lot of our hiring process can be completely **asynchronous** and completely **text-based**. For the first 1,000 or so hires, I did a final chat with every single person.

Sam Parr

is your chat like slacking or g chatting or something

Matt Mullenweg

Yeah, it ended up being on **Slack** when **Slack** was invented. Before that, I think it was on **Skype** or **AIM** or something — you know, in the early days, or **IRC**.

Shaan Puri

I think the way you said it was, **"we do auditions, not interviews."** So, what does that mean? How do you—how do you do auditions?

Matt Mullenweg

well we do a trial project so we actually hire people on a standard sort of 25 an hour contract and so we pay them to do you know we have screens with you know resumes and a little interview and stuff but then we say like let's actually do some work together and and there's various versions of this for different roles we've done sandbox versions we've also done it where they were actually talking to real customers you know like a support person was actually like answering real tickets we've always been smaller than a lot of the big tech but we compete with them and so we need to have like the same caliber or better of talent so part of I think automattic's advantage is we've created an environment and also sort of a way of hiring that finds people who might be overlooked by sort of a a meta or Google or something like that and we give them an opportunity not just to be hired but also to participate in a company in a way that they can still be just as influential and have as much impact because even like you know there's there's other companies that might have remote workers but if you're not at headquarters you're not gonna be you know close to the site you're not gonna be next to the ceo you're not gonna be able to grow or or have an impact but we've tried to create it where our center of gravity our headquarters is really on the internet and you know I have colleagues in 90 countries 90 even though we're only you know 750 people so and another sort of innovative thing we do we didn't do this in the beginning but we moved to it probably in like 2012 '20 '13 is we pay people the same salaries regardless of location so it's it's kinda funny because we all like the equality dei stuff whatever so much of I feel like is virtue signaling because if you ask these companies and say like hey you know I'm not gonna call anyone out by name let's say big tech company do you pay someone in pakistan the same that you pay them in california usually the answer is no if they're doing the same job you know the same like code wrangler or engineer or whatever like that and they usually say no and they usually have some reason like cost of living or local markets or whatever but we sort of moved to where we said hey same work same pay you know it's kind of something that you know the past hundred years that wasn't always true for men and women even you know or racial things or something like that so I think the same moral reasons why I say like same work for same pay of you know people of different skin colors or something like that within a country I think you should do that globally and I think that's the future of work actually because to the extent that you can be equally as valuable and generate as much value for a customer wherever you are you should receive the equal pay for equal work

Sam Parr

Have you guys read *American Kingpin*—the story of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road? Have you read that, Matt?

Matt Mullenweg

I think I've read some of the long form wild articles but I've never read the whole book yeah

Sam Parr

Oh, you gotta read this book, man. I'm rereading it now because it just got released, and it's like the best book I've ever read — it's a total *page-turner*. The story for listeners: basically **Ross Ulbricht** was accused — and I think he did it — of starting **Silk Road**, which was like eBay for drugs. In two years it did about $2 billion in gross sales. What's crazy is, it kind of sucks because this whole business was documented, since he chatted with everyone. He had 12 coworkers, and he did two things that were interesting and that I actually think are going to be common. The first thing is that, because it was an illegal enterprise, they didn't know the identity of the workers. It was just their usernames. One guy's name was "Chronic Pain" — that was his username — so he didn't know this guy's real name; he just knew "Chronic Pain" as the guy.

Shaan Puri

Ross knew everybody's name. They didn't know each other's names—or his. He made them send a license so that he could basically have that... always have it in his back pocket, to have **leverage**.

Sam Parr

but chronic pain didn't know ross's yeah sorry I forgot that was actually important detail

Matt Mullenweg

that's actually very similar to like early hacker culture yeah everyone was sort of known by their username

Sam Parr

There's interesting merits to that. Then the other thing was that they *only communicated via messaging*. I was reading this book—I'm rereading it now—and I thought those two attributes are kind of interesting for a company: *anonymous workers*, yet you're still oddly friends. He'd developed relationships with his coworkers.

Shaan Puri

This is a great LinkedIn post for you, Sam: **"13 Management Lessons I Learned from the Silk Road."** Here you go.

Sam Parr

I believe that he did *murder-for-hire* four times. He did a lot of bad shit, but he was actually an *inspiring leader* — like when you read some of his stuff.

Shaan Puri

Well, he was very idealistic. He had certain beliefs that drove him. He didn't necessarily intend—for example, he wasn't super interested in selling guns on the platform—but he believed that people should be able to sell what they want. His team was like, "No, no. You shouldn't do this. This is gonna increase the target on our back. You're cool with the drug side, but you don't care about this, so let's just ban it. It's gonna cause problems." He replied, "No, that's not the *ethos* of what we're doing. We wrote a creed of what we stand for and why we're doing this, and therefore we have to stand by it."

Sam Parr

And they called them *"captain."* You know, it was very much just like, *"We are revolutionizing things,"* and that's a really interesting thing.

Shaan Puri

"Matt has a—you don't get called 'captain'—but what is your, like, *benevolent dictator for life*, right? **B.D.F.L.**"

Matt Mullenweg

It's a term in *open source* that's applied to, like, Linus [Torvalds] at Linux, or Guido [van Rossum] for Python, or David Heinemeier Hansson at Rails. But it's sort of a joking thing, and one that I think none of us really attach ourselves to — it's just kind of an *internet lore* thing.

Shaan Puri

Well, you do a couple of other interesting things. You have this multibillion-dollar company used by most of the internet, but you run it in interesting ways. You're famously early and heavy into **remote work**, and you've talked a lot about that. We also talked about *auditions instead of interviews*. But you do another notable thing: everybody in the company, including yourself, works *customer support* for one or two weeks each year. Can you talk about that?

Matt Mullenweg

**Yeah.** Part of our hiring process is that your **first two weeks** are spent doing customer support for **every single hire** — whether you're our new CFO, Chief Legal Officer, or whatever role it is. Then, once a week a year, you rotate back into doing customer support. By the way, lots of companies have versions of this, so we weren't the first to do it or anything like that.

Shaan Puri

why should a company do that

Matt Mullenweg

**If you look at every successful business, the closer they are to customers, generally the more successful they are.** It's very easy, especially when you're running something on the internet and distributed, for people to become numbers or stats on your Looker dashboard. Getting back to every individual—every number of your signups—matters. You might have 5,000 signups in a day, but each one of those people has a story. You've just learned a lot about your product, and I think it's the best way to do iterative customer development. Eric Ries talked about this, and Steve Blank does too: they kind of "get out of the office and go meet the customers." I'm very inspired by leaders at Salesforce, like Marc Benioff. They'll typically spend a quarter to a third of their time with customers, even at that scale. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Is there a story or any *epiphany* you had from doing this? You've probably done this now, you know, for decades. So is there, like, an insight that came from this?

Matt Mullenweg

Just the other day — a few days ago — I spent thirty to forty-five minutes with the gentleman who checks expenses at the company. Because we have these **Ramp cards** and people expense things and stuff like that, sometimes we say, "You need a receipt for this," or we question an expense. I just called to understand more about this and also to make sure that the way we were doing this was...

Sam Parr

the most hated man at the company by the way like oh well

Matt Mullenweg

I had gotten some feedback from folks: they felt some of the questions people were getting sounded a little aggressive. So, we want to talk about a couple of things. First, I just kind of want to see the tools they used and how the work was done, and stuff like that. Some of that was just shadowing. I was like, "Okay," because I wanted to understand the interfaces. This was also really helpful: going through support, I realized that some of our internal tools don't represent best practices in design or usability. Sometimes the internal stuff doesn't get the love that your external stuff does. We also talked about the culture of Automattic—**bedside manner**, if you will. How can we hold these principles? We need to really enforce our policies and make sure we get audited and everything. So we need to have these things from a good accounting principles point of view, but also do it in a way that, when we have these conversations, we're discussing the principles and the reasons why. It's not just like, "I'm giving you, Sean, a hard time because you didn't have a receipt." It's more like, "Hey, if we don't have these receipts, a certain auditor might question this," and that might create an issue for X, Y, Z or something like that.

Shaan Puri

When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I came to work with this guy, Michael Birch. He represented everything I wanted. He had already built successful tech companies and he had made it. I was a 23-year-old kid who wanted to make it, so I was super excited on the first day. I thought, *I'm gonna learn so much from this guy*, because he had not just done it one time — he'd built four successful companies. I was ready for him to teach me the kind of "dark arts." I wanted the strategies, the growth hacks, that super high-level strategic thinking. And in the very first week, he put me on — not the new stuff — the oldest company he had started, something he started back in "02/1" [spoken as "zero two slash one", possibly 2001].

Matt Mullenweg

it was like birthday calendar or something

Shaan Puri

yeah birthday alarm

Sam Parr

is that still going birthday alarm

Shaan Puri

still going and so I as like twenty five year old company now so I at the time I was like oh man like I gotta do this like whatever and he tells me the story so I actually learned this really valuable lesson in it I go so what's the I got curious because instead of just like being bored at doing like birthday alarm which seemed like this old outdated product at the time I got a little curious so I started asking him like where did this come from like how did you even come up with this idea why did you build this product and what he told me was he goes my very first startup I had quit my job I wanted to like build a successful tech company like do an internet company internet was like the new thing back in and he quit a high paying insurance job while his wife was pregnant and was like I'm gonna make it so he tried to create something really fancy so he's like oh with the internet he tried to create something that many people have tried like sean parker tried to create this a self updating address book which is like you know I have your information I have your name your address but you moved matt now I don't know that you moved so wouldn't it be cool if you could just update your info in 1 place and it updated in all your friends' address books so we now have your latest and greatest address so that's what he wanted to build and he's spending like nine months heads down like doesn't leave the bedroom coding this thing and it's not really going anywhere but because he was a 1 man show he was also doing you know he was the designer he was the developer he was the ops guy he was the customer service guy like he did all of it and he was like it's the customer service that was actually the key because he was answering support tickets and he's like over and over again he's like I spent like you know seven hours a day banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why nobody wants to use our product I think it's so cool but nobody wants it and then in the hour I was doing customer support he's like I noticed that a bunch of people kept thanking me for the birthday reminder feature I had built in like just the 1 feature which was like a throwaway idea which was just if if you know forget the address if it was someone's birthday I would just tell you you know hey it's our birthday today remember that this is before facebook existed right so you didn't have facebook or a bunch of other ways that people could do this so he just threw away the whole product and renamed the company birthdayalarm.com and he's like I expected to go nowhere and that was the thing that took off and you know at that time birthday alarm had generated for him and his wife personally like probably $20,000,000 of pure profit by that time because it was just every year was just generating a few million dollars of profit and it's still to this day generating a few million dollars a year of profit like it's this incredible business this is the gift that keeps on giving that only came because he was answering the support tickets and he got curious like like why are they keep talking about this birthday reminder thing is that is that actually maybe I should do that and he did it on a on a whim and then in two days had built the product that actually people wanted you know

Matt Mullenweg

that's awesome

Shaan Puri

I have one last question for you, and it's on **AI**. There's a lot you could talk about with AI, but I'm curious about your quick take on **DeepSeek** [also referred to as "DeepSeq"]. They came out with an open-source release, and there are a lot of people on either side about how much they believe the story. What's your quick reaction to what you saw with **DeepSeq**?

Matt Mullenweg

**DeepSeek's a really cool model.** Every model has a vibe based on how it's tuned, and DeepSeek is a fun one to play with. One thing I tell people about all this AI stuff is: **use it, play with it**. It's *such early days*, and there’s a skill to prompting and interacting with these models that you'll learn over time. The vibes of the DeepSeek model are very cool. What I'm most excited about as an open-source person is that they actually open-sourced the model. There were really amazing papers about how they built it, and they've open-sourced the weights. For example, at my company I would say don't use deepseek.com for various reasons — that's hosted in China — but we can run the model ourselves locally, which is pretty cool. You can also access it through Perplexity, which is hosted in the U.S. There are lots of ways to access it. All these models are good at different things. They have a coding version, and they just released a cool image capability. Think of these as little entities you can interact with, spin up, and run. You should learn the nuances and flavors of each one.

Sam Parr

Matt, do you guys actually believe that they've only taken the amount of funding that they've said? Didn't they say something like $5,000,000 or $10,000,000?

Shaan Puri

they said that's what it cost to run the final training

Matt Mullenweg

That might be true for some things, but obviously I'm sure they've invested a ton in other areas. I also know there's a theory that maybe that's a PR or a psy-op [psychological operation], or whatever. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

When I started reading about them, I got *fearful*. It was pretty *insane*, right, that the market reacted the way it did — it wiped out $1 trillion of value in 24 hours. It was pretty wild how big that announcement was. I didn't think that was going to happen. I think you called it, Matt — didn't you tweet about this during Christmas time?

Matt Mullenweg

Well, Andrej Karpathy — full credit. He tweeted about this the day after Christmas, and I saw his tweet and retweeted it. That's when I first learned about *DeepSeek* and started playing with it. I think with all these things there are parts you can verify. They made some amazing advancements in how they train models, how they run systems, how they implemented memory interconnects, and how they work within constraints. There are some really cool engineering breakthroughs, and they shared them. This is stuff I think *OpenAI* had also figured out but hadn't shared publicly. What I love about the DeepSeek team is they're open-sourcing everything. It's available under a true open-source license — not like the LLaMA license where it's free until you have 700,000,000 users or something. Also check out *Qwen* (the Alibaba model), which is a really great model that people are sleeping on. Some of these other models coming out of China are really, really good. But it's a true open-source license, so...

Shaan Puri

"That's awesome, Matt. Thanks for coming on, Matt. It's good to see you again, and thanks for sharing everything you did about WordPress."

Matt Mullenweg

it's been a pleasure

Sam Parr

yeah we appreciate you man alright that's the pod