Wordpress CEO Matt Mullenweg talks with Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate about his early successes, setbacks, and what founders can learn from his continued growth as a manager and leader.
Matt Mullenweg:
I'd run a meeting and it would just go all afternoon with no agenda, no deliverables. I can't be this terrible manager. I need to start reading some books, finding some mentors. I need to start being better at my job, because I'm just scraping by still.
Mike Maples Jr.:
That's the voice of Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress and many other properties that are the foundation of today's web. WordPress alone is now used by more than 60 million websites and more than a third of the top 10 million website. This Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate, and it's go time with Matt Mullenweg.
Mike Maples Jr.:
When Matt and I connected, we were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, I wanted our conversation to touch upon Matt's distributed management model, because I thought it might help other entrepreneurs navigating this new paradigm for the first time. Matt's been a pioneer of this for many years. And by the way, he has an entire podcast devoted to this topic called Distributed, which I highly encourage you to check out. But as Matt and I chatted, it became clear to me that this episode was about something even more timeless and broadly applicable. You see, Matt has truly stood the test of time as a CEO, but this success story almost came to a screeching halt because of Matt's early struggles as a leader.
Mike Maples Jr.:
This is no knock on him, as one of the most honest leaders I know, and as you'll hear in a minute, Matt has no reservations about sharing his early shortcomings or even his concerns about how to avoid mistakes in the present time. This is one of his many strengths. And because of his learn-it-all mentality, Matt's been able to capitalize on some breaks and valuable connections early on in his career to set him up for greatness. And I think you'll see from the interview that Matt Mullenweg is just a gem of a human being. Let's talk to him.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Matt Mullenweg, welcome to the podcast.
Matt Mullenweg:
It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Oh gosh, are you kidding? Delighted to have you on the show. So you're a very young guy still, but that doesn't mean you haven't been at this for a while. How did you even get interested in computers and the internet in the first place? How old were you? And how did you get exposed to technology?
Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah, for me, a lot of it came from my dad. Like many sons in Texas, Houston, I know you're from Texas, too, I just did everything my dad did. So when he mowed the lawn, I'd walk behind him with a little toy lawnmower, I'd played saxophone, started playing saxophone because he played saxophone in high school. And his day job was programming. He worked for oil companies pretty much my whole life, and he had gotten from University of Houston, early computer science degree when they started offering it in the '70s and that was his whole career. So there were always computers around the house and he was very much a tinkerer, so he was fixing our cars, building furniture, fixing up boats. Whatever he would get he would always hack on it.
Matt Mullenweg:
And so, I feel like seeing that, I applied that a lot to hardware and software. Initially making some computers for myself, for gaming or friends or local musicians or things. And then later, getting into the craft of writing software, so that was just the other path I decided to go down. The sort of big things were I visited San Francisco, so that was like mega to me and it was just-
Mike Maples Jr.:
How did you go from Houston to San Francisco? How did that transpire?
Matt Mullenweg:
Totally random. Complete coincidence. In Houston, I organized a user group at a local nonprofit. We'd have interest user groups and I organized the one around Palm Pilots, so every month I'd organize a program, invite speakers, lead this Palm Pilot user group, which is, let me tell you, it was very popular. But it was really fun, and actually really good to get in front of a group of adults and do this thing every month. This designer named Jeffery Zeldman made a set of icons for the Palm Pilot, that would change all the default icons with these cool '50s Art Deco looking icons, so I became a fan of Jeffrey Zeldman. That's also how he started learning HTML and CSS standards, that's how he got into that. He posted on his blog that he was going to be in Austin, Texas for this thing called SXSW, South by Southwest, which was going through the interactive portion of South by Southwest had shrunk after the bubble of the late '90s, 2000s. It was probably only four or 500 people, so really, really small.
Matt Mullenweg:
And I was like, "Zeldman's going to be in Texas, no way." I wrote what was actually a hot cheque to get a student ticket to South by Southwest for a couple hundred bucks. My sister lived in Austin, so I just crashed at her place. And I had a gas card from my parents. So I was like, "Hey, can I use this gas card to go to Austin and go to this conference?" They're like, "Yeah, okay." And at the conference, it was so small, that I ended up meeting my idols. Jeffrey Zeldman, there was a fellow named [inaudible 00:05:49] Chelik who was developing one of the major web browsers at the time. Eric Meyer, who was a big advocate of teaching people how to code. So I just got to meet all the biggest bloggers. I mean Ev was there, I met Ev and Jason Shellen and all the Blogger folks, so it was the whole internet at that time, the independent internet came together.
Matt Mullenweg:
And, again, it felt like a couple hundred people, so you met everyone.
Mike Maples Jr.:
So this is still early in Web 2.0. I remember going to the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference in [crosstalk 00:06:21]-
Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah. Was that the one that Bezos came to?
Mike Maples Jr.:
Yeah. I remember he was sitting a few seats down. Just he's there sitting in the audience just like a normal person with his MacBook Pro laptop.
Matt Mullenweg:
Totally. I was at that one, and I got a picture with Jeff Bezos and it's funny. It's a really young dorky me and a really young dorky Jeff Bezos, before he got swole. Yeah, so [inaudible 00:06:42] Chelik later invited me to come out to San Francisco to crash on his couch. And I was like, "Cool." I was like, "Okay." So saved up some money, flew out and that week I was in San Francisco. Both [inaudible 00:06:55] and I met a lot of really cool people here, but I really feel like I found my tribe. In Houston there was a dozen of us were into 802.11b an open source and the Linux group and the Palm Pilot group and everything like that, but it was the same people in all the groups. We'd all go to each other's stuff.
Matt Mullenweg:
And in San Francisco, I felt like this was all the people we were following online and I visited Yahoo and I visited Google. I visited all the companies I could, and one of them was CNET. I blogged that I was going to go out and a fellow at CNET named Mike Tatum reached out and said, "Hey, you're going to be in San Francisco, why don't you come out and meet us." What I didn't realize was all these companies were interviewing me essentially. I think at Google they wanted to make a Blogger appliance, because they had a Google Search Appliance. It would literally be a box that you'd buy that looked cool, and it was in Google colors, and you'd stick it in your data center and that would be your internal Google. So they wanted to do that for Blogger, for internal blogging.
Matt Mullenweg:
Very pressuring actually. But they way they have written Blogger I wouldn't work for that, so they wanted to see if WordPress could run on this box that they sold to people. It was funny, it reminds me of Silicon Valley where the guy comes in and he's like, "We're going to make this box." It was what you did at the time. So I talked to them about that. Basically, when I returned back to Houston, I started getting some job offers from these companies. And WordPress was still pretty early and was generating zero dollars, so I was still just making money from computers and building my websites, so the most interesting ended up being CNET, and the reason was they were a media company, not a technology company.
Matt Mullenweg:
So if you go to work for Google, still today, if you work for any software company, you sign off all the intellectual property to that company, for good reasons. They need to, if they sell the company or IPO, they need to know the owner of the IP for what they do, but CNET didn't care about that because they were a media company. And so they said, essentially they'd have to carve out for me, where they said, "Anything you do that's open source, you can retain the copyright and all the intellectual property rights." So to me and especially growing up steeped in jazz culture, there's so many stories about these musicians who sold their masters. They sold the rights of the original recordings.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Without even realizing it.
Matt Mullenweg:
Without even realizing it. It had been taken advantage of and so, honestly, it wouldn't have mattered, I could've gone to Google and kept doing WordPress, but in my head, there was this concept of, You have to own your masters. So, that was the thing I optimized for, it ended up being a great decision because WordPress is a CMS, Content Management System. Content Management Systems were invented at CNET because they were the first large scale publisher. So Vignette and all the early ones, Vignette had actually spun out of there.
Mike Maples Jr.:
So then is WordPress a business yet? Or it's still a hobby with a group of people?
Matt Mullenweg:
We'd gotten some donations, but I mean, we're talking about hundreds of dollars. I was basically funding it out of my CNET paycheck and credit cards that went running out. It wasn't really clear it was going to be a business yet, but when I moved out, I did start to hear from some venture capitalists who said, "Hey, you should go do this as a thing." One of the earliest users of WordPress, and now one of my best friends today is Al Malek, who is a journalist. He was hyper-connected and as a journalist knew everyone. And the very first WordPress meetup, we did it Chaat Cafe, which is an Indian place on 3rd Street. It was maybe eight people and I was one of them. One of the early times we met, he really connected me to both our initial investors, Phil Black, Tony Conrad, includes the people who I ended up not taking money from that I should have like Jeff Clavio, Mark Andreessen.
Matt Mullenweg:
And he also introduced me to Tony Schneider, who is a gentleman who would be recruited to be the CEO of Automatic. So it was really, really special. Tony had just sold his company called Outpost to Yahoo, which was the big exit. So if you sold to Yahoo, that was like, you made it. And [inaudible 00:11:01] did a cover story for Business 2.0 on the sale. And he said to Tony, "You're not going to last this big company. There's this kid out of Houston, who's making this cool thing. You should meet him. I think you get along." And that was that the matchmaking that led us to meet.
Mike Maples Jr.:
But it sounds like it still wasn't a company yet.
Matt Mullenweg:
All the places we're saying you should raise money or these fees is trying to put in but honestly, I had just talked to my parents and they let me move out from Houston. And part of the pitch was, Oh, it's a public company. They have healthcare. They have a building. My mom drove out with me so she could check it out, make sure I wasn't getting scammed or joining a cult or something. So she warmed them up to it. I wasn't yet ready to say, Hey, all that health care, all that everything's all going away. My idea was WordPress was working well, but to use it, you had to be a developer. You had to set up a database and upload these files and things like that. So if we could make it where you could click just a few buttons, like Blogger and get it up all going. We had a cool interface and flexibility that would be really compelling.
Matt Mullenweg:
So I pitched us to CNET and said, "Hey, now all of these other internet giants have a blogging system. Really they held it, the big four at a time, AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, all have a blogging system, you should have one too." But blogging was becoming a bad word, so the ones that were going mainstream were more political blogs and they were known for what I think we've described now is an early version of a cancel culture. So there was a one story I remember... I'm going to mess it up because I don't remember it exactly. But there was a politician, a congressperson of some sort who said something he thought was private, an event down in Louisiana, it was recorded. Someone had a little recorder and that became a huge big thing on the blog, tried to report the sites at the time, blew it up, and he ended up resigning.
Matt Mullenweg:
And that seemed to be what it was going to be. It was like a bunch of people fighting on the internet and CNET just didn't want to touch that. And then also the other thing going on was CNET was a mainstream publisher for tech news. So they had news.com, GameSpot, they had things like big tech publications with hundreds of employees and developers and editorial staff and everything, they looked a lot like newspapers and they were starting to be disrupted by blogs as well, so my guarantee was starting TechCrunch. Nick Denton had Engadget and all the Gizmodo blogs and things like that. Oh, I think Jason [inaudible 00:13:35] had Engadget. So whatever it was, people were starting these blogs that were creating content for one, 100 the costs. And with one, 100 the staff of these big publications that scene that was running and they were pretty good and they were getting popular.
Matt Mullenweg:
And in fact, getting quite competitive to CMS publications. So internally there was almost this anti-blog thing where they were like, We don't want anyone to be able to publish, we're about trusted content that gets edited and fact checked, and they were right it was amateurs. It just turned out, those amateurs could get really good and they actually knew a lot. And one of the amazing things about Arrington was he was a lawyer. So he was great at reading stuff and could write really quickly on any number of topics. So he would get the post out hours before they could boot up their old CMS. That was another thing at CNET, the most awkward meeting I'd ever been in. I think I was the editor in chief or something. This is one of the big conference rooms, 12, 15 people.
Matt Mullenweg:
And it was a team and the leads of the people building the in-house CNET, CMS. And I said, "All right" They projected the screen and I said, "Okay, I've got a post ready to go. Here it is, here's the text." He emailed the document said, Now post this to the website. On the live website and let's see how long it takes. Long story short, the process took about 15, 20 minutes for them to load it into the system, set all the fields. And then the publishing time was probably five or 10 minutes. He says, "Matt." and I'm literally, I look like I'm 12 years old on the corner with my laptop. And he's like, "Okay, post it to WordPress." So plug in the laptop and copy and paste and you post it, it's live seconds later.
Matt Mullenweg:
And the daggers, the lasers, these guys were looking at me, they were just like this punk kid, what the... I felt like one foot tall, it was definitely awkward. But to see it was great, they had started to use WordPress a lot places. And they were really seeing that the speed of publishing, the agility of the Content Management System was holding them back. So they want to make their thing just as fast.
Mike Maples Jr.:
But didn't you pitch CNET to invest in WordPress and you would have stayed there, but instead you started the company because they turned the pitch down?
Matt Mullenweg:
So I pitched it to build it there. So CNET had all these cool domains, like online.com, calm.com. They just had every cool domain in the world because they got them early. And I was like, "Hey, why don't we do online.com or a web.com or something. And just allow anyone to make a sub-domain, publish, have a website." And they just didn't want the user-generated content. They were really about editorially driven stuff. I also felt a lot of loyalty because they had moved me out or they gave me this great salary. They gave me a few thousand dollars to move my stuff and everything, but I wanted to do this thing. I was pretty committed. But they said, "Well, will you finish up this project you're on?" So I was like, "Yeah." So I ended up staying another three, four months to finish out those projects, but they were like, "You can go do this thing."
Matt Mullenweg:
And in fact, Shelby, who is the CEO in CNET itself each put in, when we later raised around, I put in 25K each, which they sold for over a million two years later. They should have held onto it, it would be even more now, but a part of it as well for me is I was in conscious like, I don't want seeing it to come back later and say like, "Hey, we own this thing you did." I was actually ended up being the third or fourth employee at Automatic. So started the company and just started paying the other guys out of my paycheck and we started working together. So they got sort of working on what would become wordpress.com. And I finished up my work at CNET and it being a project that saved them over $5 million a year.
Matt Mullenweg:
So I was really proud of that. They could replace some software, they were using with something with WordPress, so they saved a ton of money. So I felt like I paid my dues and could then start this company, so it was very informal. The first few employees were other engineers who had already been working with on the open source thing. And then I joined myself and we're all taking diminimous salaries, probably I think me almost nothing, maybe like 40 or 50K a year, but much less than we would work at any other jobs we could get. But that was the bootstrap. We were like, Okay, let's build this thing together. And if we do it right, maybe we can like be full-time contributing to open-source, which was really our dream.
Mike Maples Jr.:
And when did Tony join as a CEO then?
Matt Mullenweg:
I think I met him, I don't know if remember the exact timeline, but he ended up joining probably six or eight months later. When I got introduced to Tony, it's like meeting a business soulmate. He was very kind. He's from Switzerland came over, I ended up going to college, Stanford, did startups, eventually became the CEO of this company and sold to Yahoo. But had engineering background, so we're willing to start the tech side, had the Swiss German mentality, always on time, really no drama. I just wants to figure out the best thing and also believe and believes now in opensource. I just got it from the very beginning. So this guy's always on time. I ended up being like 45 minutes late to our first meeting because I just moved to San Francisco.
Matt Mullenweg:
I didn't realize how far things were. So I thought, Oh, this is just like two miles away. I'll walk to it. Ended up not realizing they were hills and other things. So I ended up getting there really late, but he waited and what was supposed to be probably an hour. We were together. We both ended up staying until basically nighttime in this patio outdoor restaurant thing to the point where I hadn't brought a jacket and I was just shivering because I was so cold, but we were just connecting when we were talking so well. It was like, we didn't want the conversation to end, so we ended up speaking like six or seven hours. He was the reason I decided to raise money actually, because I was just playing a bootstrap and we had some early revenue. We were making 10, 20 grand a month, had started to really build the revenue of the company more than enough to support us.
Matt Mullenweg:
But I knew that if I raise money, they'd want to bring in adult supervision, because I was there, Eric Schmidt at Google, that's the thing you did then. And I was like, Well, I don't know if I want that. But then I was like, Well, I could pick the adult. This guy I'd be lucky to work with him. I learned so much every time I talk from him. And so it wasn't that I was hiring a CEO. I was just like, I really want to work with this guy in whatever capacity we can, probably the rest of my life. And it was really like being a business soulmate. So I was able to convince Tony to join. And then we've raised our first round, which is about a million dollars.
Mike Maples Jr.:
He was your business soulmate, but was there anything premeditated on either one of your parts about knowing the traits you were looking for, a business partner or is it just a accident of fate that you just happened to run into each other at the behest of home and it just worked out?
Matt Mullenweg:
It was matchmaking. It's a blind set up. Neither of us had met each other before, but [inaudible 00:20:38] was like, "Y'all get along. You should really get together." Then once we got together, it became clear. I wanted him to be CEO because I believe in clear lines of reporting, that I was going to report it to him. But he did a really fantastic job knowing that I loved running things and leading things, making a lot of space for me to essentially be an understudy in a lot of ways. So I'd learn from his experience, he took a lot of things off my plate that I didn't like, but later grew to love, but like at the time I wasn't in the HR legal stuff or other things and made space to really collaborate... Let me lead the product, but let's collaborate on it.
Matt Mullenweg:
So bringing his experience to bear and his common sense approach to things. So true partnership in a lot of ways. Learned a ton, I could have never become CEO of Automatic or be CEO where I am today, if I hadn't studied essentially under Tony for eight years.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Did you ever have any struggles at Automatic in the early years? Or was it one of these things where you were just happy to be getting a paycheck so that you could keep working on this thing and it just started to get a life of its own and it just one thing led to another?
Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah. Especially if we're trying to join made every mistake in the book. But we had no credit at the time because I had gotten a best buy card in high school, forgot to pay it, so as a sole founder, the company credit became my 600 credit rating or something. And so we couldn't get any credit even after we raised money at a million dollars in the bank and the limit on our credit card was like $5,000. So the servers were just costing more than that. And so there was crisises of like, how do we pay the credit card bill for all of our servers and things? How do we wire money to people? How do we... There was issue where we didn't have the wordpress.com domain. There's a whole drama around getting that domain. People suing us. They were trying to catch us, all the above that we were going through.
Matt Mullenweg:
And in some ways tumultuous, in some ways we didn't make a lot of mistakes that I see solved by other companies, years down the road. So for example, we brought in a CFO really early, part time, a great woman named Ann Dorman, who was part-time CFO. And Tony took over the books for me and did it for a little while. And he found this person who could come in and really kept all that clean. She also did HR and gave us the documents and everything, so we were pretty good about following HR best practices from early on and how we hired, how we did compensation and compensation is never perfect. In any snapshot in time, there's going to be things which are not perfect within it, but I want to always on the arc towards fairness. Any decision in the company, if someone wants to talk about it, we're totally open to it and we can explain it and we can talk about it and strive to be as fair as possible because ultimately that's really what you want people to feel.
Matt Mullenweg:
We're still a growing company. We're not as profitable as like a Nintendo or an Apple or something like that. So it's not the highest salaries in the world, but we want people to feel like they're contributing to something and they're getting fairly compensated for their contributions to it.
Mike Maples Jr.:
And was there a palpable time when you felt like you transitioned from this zero to one? What were some of the things that where you had to have a new fun as you got bigger?
Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah, we did a lot of friction around the 15 to 20 people range, because I had no idea what I was doing. So I run a meeting and it would just go all afternoon with no agenda, no deliverables. And I was working with people who were generally much for our space. And so I remember once at our first offsite, we were up at the Stinson Beach and we're all in one house, it was pretty small. And this fellow who joined from Cisco actually, just got up and walked out, just fed up with us. He literally just stood up, walked out of the house to walk down the beach. He was just so pissed off. So those things were rough and also because we were such better than worse, you become really close personal friends with everyone because you're in the trenches. So when you fight, it feels like here you're fighting with your partner, with your significant other.
Matt Mullenweg:
So [inaudible 00:25:02] an offer to buy the company, so when try to buy the company pretty early on. So when we were around that size, like 20 ish people, and it was constantly saying hindsight, but one of the things that maybe seriously consider it was that, I was like, Well, we're all fighting with each other. Maybe this is not fun. This is not something I want to do. Maybe this is just where it gets to, because it was just so heart wrenching to disappoint these people who you really respect and care about and to be at odds with them. That was definitely a pivot point, deciding not to sell.
Mike Maples Jr.:
How did you get your act together? What were the things that helped you transition into being more effective? I mean, I suppose Tony helped quite a bit.
Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah, he would give me a lot of hope too.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Yeah, definitely. Now you run the place and it's pretty big. So clearly you've made some progress in your ability to manage things.
Matt Mullenweg:
He'll probably sell it if I didn't listen to Tony enough, that was pretty headstrong. I remember distinctly, so all the big things was the offer to buy us was like a 200 million, which was just ridiculous because we were not making that much money. It would have netted me, nine figures. And we would have joined a new thing that we'd had a pretty significant equity going forward in this new thing. And so that was definitely a serious consideration because I'm 23. Someone's like, you can be a syntagm millionaire and there also was a culture back then a little bit more of exiting early.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Oh, I remember well. I remember even the Flickr folks, right? They exited for, I think $25 million and it was one of the defining [crosstalk 00:26:49] companies of Web 2.0.
Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah. So you rinse, repeat, sell it, say a year or two, then you do it again. Actually, I think when I started Automatic, I felt like a good outcome would have been if I could have sold it to Yahoo in a few years.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Yeah.
Matt Mullenweg:
I was even like, you should get this Mike Moritz guy. Have him invest, because he's on the board of Yahoo. So he'll help the deal in a couple of years and-
Mike Maples Jr.:
He'll make it happen.
Matt Mullenweg:
He'll make it happen. But I also realized that while there was challenges, I was like, Well, what would I do if I had a hundred million dollars? I was like, Well, I want to do exactly what I'm doing. I want to write software. I want to travel the world and meet WordPress users. And I want to build something with team because that's the funnest thing. You've built something that has an impact and will the chance that gets messed up be larger or smaller if we join this larger thing? And there's also time when lots of things were get shut down by the big companies or neglected. So I was like, Well, I think we should make a go at it.
Matt Mullenweg:
And our investors as well were also making a pretty compelling alternative where they said, "Take that as a valuation." We'll put in another, I think it was 25 or 30 million. Some of it can go in the company, but I'll just take some of the secondary so I'm making this million make a few million, and then you can just focus on this. You don't have to worry about paying your rent or something like that. Just like really build for the long-term. And I give them a ton of credit because this was not common at the time, secondary sales, now they're pre-standard, but at a time, especially for a young kid, this was probably something that was not something you see a ton. But I don't know if it was Phil Black or John Callaghan, or maybe it's going with the true folks was like, If you're saying no to this, what are you saying yes to.
Matt Mullenweg:
And that just etched in my mind like, Well, what am I saying yes to? And so as I was like, Well, let's say yes to create the web operating system to make the thing that could be 85 or 95% of the web. And what do we need to change to do that? Well, we need some more capital, so we raised the money and how do I need to work on myself? I can't be this terrible manager. I need to start reading some books. I need to start finding some mentors. I need to start really being better at my job, because I'm just scraping by still, maybe what I was doing in college. I just doing the minimum to get by. So I needed to really up my game. And that was a big wake up call.
Mike Maples Jr.:
And was there any, in terms of your transition from sort of minimum viable sort of leader with making a lot of mistakes to now running an organization with a huge number of employees. What's the latest counts like?
Matt Mullenweg:
1400 now.
Mike Maples Jr.:
1300 people distributed throughout the world, multiple product lines, 38% of internet sites. Was there a single book you read or a bit of advice or a course you took or just were there a couple of things that were just defining moments in your improvement?
Matt Mullenweg:
For me, I learned from books probably the best. So I consider like these authors, my mentors, even though I might never ever meet them. So things that I came across, I had already read a little bit of Plato but I started to read some of the [inaudible 00:30:16], our friend Tim's book. I know you're friends with Tim too [crosstalk 00:30:22]. Seth Godin books. I don't remember which your particular one, but they're all good guy. The Kawasaki to the book called The Art of The Start. Start to read some of the business classics, like Good to Great, Robert Cialdini's Influence. I think there's Jeffrey Gitomer, Little Red Book on selling. I just read books on sales. Anything that we're trying to figure out, I just go to Amazon order five or six books on and just read them all.
Matt Mullenweg:
I felt like we weren't doing our pricing right. So I just got six books on pricing and went through them all. I think the one that worked that well was the Pricing on Purpose. But I also read the GE book on pricing, the super corporate stuff, is it in habits? It was a blogger that led into a book. So all of these and I still try to read as many books as I can per year now because I still have so much to learn, Black Swan by Nassim Taleb felt like it was around that time, hugely influential, not just because it was amazing book on its own that really changed how I thought about things, but it was a portal to so much of the literature. He would have dropped so many illusions and references to other books that it was almost like I stumbled into this magical alladin library or something full of treasure.
Matt Mullenweg:
And just everything I took off the shelf would blow my mind. You can find gold everywhere, even like the really cheesy, corny stuff, like a book of quotations. Those can be really powerful and I do believe in extracting something from all of them. So a lot of what Automatic was, was also just an experiment. I read a book, Drive by Dan Pink. He says, mastery, autonomy, purpose are more important than anything else for people being happy. I was like, Okay, that's framework. Let's try it out. How do we give people more of those three things and see how it goes? And one of the things I'm very proud of is Automatic's retention rate is off the charts. We have ever regretted a tension that the big acquisitions would do, we'll throw it off sometimes, but most years it's like 4%, 5%, which for tech companies is really, really low. I think it's because we really invest in these things that help people feel fulfilled in their work.
Mike Maples Jr.:
But another thing I seem to notice about you Matt, is that you seem to have this trait, that a lot of the long-term successful founders that I've seen have, which is, you're more of a learn-it-all than a know-it-all. And so I've seen some founders get attached to the idea of being right or being the smartest person there, or feeling sort of an imposter syndrome if they don't know. Whereas it feels to me like the folks that can go much farther than you'd ever imagine are the people who are just learning all the time and they always realize there's more to know and there's always more learn. And it's like, there's nothing wrong with not knowing all the answers. There's just more joy in being a learn-it-all than in trying to keep the illusion that anybody could be a know-it-all.
Matt Mullenweg:
I wish I was more of that in my 20s, if you were to zoom back and you might see a bit more arrogance or a strong headedness back then, but definitely in my 30s now, like that's been probably the title of the decade is there's so much more. You just get knocked on your butt a few times. It gets very humbling and you really start to realize all the things you don't know versus when you're young and thinking no at all, I really don't.
Mike Maples Jr.:
And there's going to be a lot of founders listening to this. What would you like founders to know? I mean, we're in this pretty wild time where we have a pandemic, we've got all types of political unrest and social strife and international friction and Fortune 500 spending trillions of dollars just to buy back their own stock. What would you like entrepreneurs to know? What would you like to see from them? What do you think they could learn from your experience? Or if you are in their shoes now, how would you think about the future?
Matt Mullenweg:
Only two big things I advocate for distributed and open source. The issue is a little easy now, but if you're building a company, if you can create opportunity all over the world through a distributed structure, that's really powerful. And then open source, I believe if you want to accelerate humanity, if you get jazzed by the idea of going to Mars or all this other stuff like thinking of the Earth as a big connected thing, open source is the best way to accelerate humanity because software is now the software of our culture, of our evolution. We're evolving now in the information space, not the physical biological space, although maybe someday and open sources is the best way to do that. First, I would say if you're considering anything like, you only get a few chances to have a swing at it.
Matt Mullenweg:
And life is relatively short, your younger years you do have a ton of energy and like natural resources you can put to bear on problems. So just work on the thing that really, really, really matters. And I believe open source and big problems can be that. In Pearl, there's this funny saying that there's more than one way to do it, I would get really discouraged early on because I didn't have the background, the college education, the whatever it was of all the other entrepreneurs that I was seeing, all the role models I was looking at, knowing that there's more than one way to do it, but yeah, there's never going to be someone with exactly my path or exactly Mark Zuckerberg's path, and sending us again, it was a point in time. And that's cool because the thing that replaces Facebook's, hopefully that doesn't replace WordPress, but maybe someday it would be created by someone who does it from a completely different point of view and completely different frame and a completely different way of doing it.
Mike Maples Jr.:
If you could think about how to improve the internet in the next decade, how we get back to a world where it feels like it's a bottoms up phenomenon rather than a few really big companies that own all the data seem to be aggregating and amassing more power all the time.
Matt Mullenweg:
Cooperation. I really appreciate the idealism that existed then is very much open web, very much connecting things, something that John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly really advocated for this Web 2.0 was going to be about how everything was open and connected. And I try to bring that idealism today. It's 2020, the world is a little rough sometimes, we have the internet turning into the splinter now. We're having firewalls, balkanization and I think there's still so much potential in that vision of an open connected, independent web but really I try to make it my business and life mission to bring that back. The deep psychosis of a lot of these companies that survived dark period, or went through something really tough, including like an Apple, is that they end up with this permanent underdog mentality or it's like them against the world.
Matt Mullenweg:
And Apple is now a $2 trillion company, wildly profitable. Has more in cash than the GDPs of most countries. But they'll still not let you change, it'll still lock you into iMessage and not likely to change here to false web browser engine and things like this that probably are good for them competitively. But it feels a little bit like, Hey, can you open it up a bit? And one of the things I liked about that time was the companies were all building businesses, but they would try to inter-operate with each other. I would love if just particularly the big tech companies, will just look around the room and say, Okay, we won. We've captured so much of the economic growth of the past decade. We have unassailable cash positions and things like that. And no matter how bad it gets, we can be Microsoft and go through a dark decade and still come out the other end with hundreds of billions of dollars and the ability to reinvent ourselves. So let's go consumer first, let's go user first and say, what do our users really want?
Mike Maples Jr.:
I've seen this happen time and again, you start a company and it becomes a platform and it grows really fast. The rising tide lifts all boats, but then you start to fight your own ecosystem because the pressure to grow is so great that you end up not being able to grow without extracting value from the ecosystem at ever accelerating rates. And before you know it, the world around you would rather find a new platform, they'd rather find a new way to run their business.
Matt Mullenweg:
And there's so many examples of this. I mean, you have Shopify now starting to go to war with their own ecosystem and like take... I think it's [inaudible 00:39:03] seeking behavior and where they're just capturing value, not adding value as much. And I know this is for early entrepreneurs going from zero to one, there's one thing I would ask everyone to remember is, when you make it, try to make it for some other people too.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Cool. Well, right Matt. I really appreciate your taking the time. I think people will be excited.
Matt Mullenweg:
Cool.
Mike Maples Jr.:
Thanks for listening to the starting greatness podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode or you're new to the show, I hope you listened to our past interviews with legendary founders like Reed Hoffman, Mark Andreessen, the Instagram founders, and Keith Rabois. I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful. If you leave us a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow me on Twitter @m2jr and subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content and events at greatness.substack.com, until we catch up again, I hope you'll never let go of your inner power to do great things and whatever matters to you. Thank you for listening.