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

Sam Parr

Alright today's episode is special we've got matt molleweg matt founded a company called wordpress which is used by something like 45% of all websites on the internet so it's just a huge thing and 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 that they've had we talked about how they've been acquiring companies they bought the small company in south africa and how it turned out to be a huge thing for their business like you know a billion dollar + win and he's just a student of the game he's been doing it for like twenty years this guy started this company when he was 19 years old and is still doing it and it's become this absolute juggernaut so enjoy this episode with matt mullenweg

Sam Parr

tell me if this is right because this sounded like almost too good to be true but I'd read that in 02/8 you had an acquisition offer I think you're only 24 years old for $200,000,000 at that. I think you'd only raised a million dollars and I think you raised a million dollars at 3,000,000 in valuation something like relatively like you're you're 24 you're gonna be worth 9 figures something crazy like that you turn it down but then you talk about how you didn't have control of the company because you were young and you maybe just like made some mistakes with funding something like that what's the conversation like with yourself when you're like I'm turning down something that might make me worth over a hundred million dollars at the age of 24

Matt Mullenweg

you talked about and your you know your name the first million it's kinda funny like I guess technically on paper my first million was that first funding round right in theory I owned like half the company that was now worth $4,000,000 but as you know like that's paper money like I was still you know eating ramen and and mountain doing pizza like living you know a very broke san francisco sort of college kid life but it was in in 02/8 that we had this acquisition offer and you're right it was about two two and a half years in this company someone tried to buy us for 200,000,000 and the investors at the time did something which now is quite common but at the time was was pretty forward looking which is a a secondary so they said we said wow you know 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 walk away personally with a lot of money but you know we think this could be actually way bigger so let's let's build that and so we took that acquisition made it evaluation and you know took you know turn that into a funding round where we put a lot more capital into the company so we could you know really build things out and and I sold some stock myself so I that was my first that was my first million liquid was kind of in 02/8 I think I was '24 and and that was a step change you know I was able to like you know pay off my credit cards and buy my mom my house and like you know all that sort of stuff that you you wanna do that you dream of and it sort of removes some of those sort of early economic things and I was really able to focus on just the business and swinging 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 this story about you at such a young age turning down you know the opportunity to exit and have this huge payday I think you're a better man than me I don't think I would have been able to resist that was that a easy decision for you was that a hard decision like what and like you're like I think this could be bigger let's go for it is that just like blind not blind faith but just like 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 like you have to you have to really seriously consider these things also as a fiduciary you know like you have a responsibility to shareholders to consider every acquisition and 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 like will the mission that we're doing be accelerated by this transaction or will it be hampered

Shaan Puri

hey let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today hubspot has put together a list of 200 ai business ideas these are business ideas that you could create using ai and it's a list of 200 they did a huge brainstorm so you could check it out if you just click the link below you can get access to these 200 ai ideas I'll give you an example of a couple of them 1 of them is you could build an ai dressing room so let's say you go to an ecommerce site and you wanna see what something would look like on you you can use ai to actually take a picture of you and show you what the clothes would look like on you or what the makeup would look like on your face it's pretty cool right or ai tools for real estate brokers maybe something that takes their listings and makes them more more fancy more more more beautiful and attract more buyers so check it out it's a brainstorm of 200 possible ai ideas brought to you by hubspot you can get it free in the link below

Matt Mullenweg

it's like we acquire a lot of companies like woocommerce I think did a lot better because we acquired it than they would have on their own but there's probably other things that we try to buy that we that we didn't buy that did really well on their own reddit was 1 actually we we looked at reddit at 1

Sam Parr

did you look at them in their conde 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 like too outside of our like kind of early stuff so we never got that far in the discussions or anything but yeah there was a. When they were like 4 employees and for sale and kinda and the wired offices on third street in san francisco and yeah I I I just thought it was really cool so obviously they they took it pretty very well

Sam Parr

but when you created wordpress it seems like it took off like within a year I I forget which year you started it but like 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 and I at the time was like 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 like what people see as overnight success is often a thousand days of relevance or people haven't heard of you you know at 1 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 you know because the 1 was using software so I just kinda like would manually set it up for people you know early we used to do these upgrade parties where just I'd say like you know a new version of wordpress will come out I just open up my apartment you know go to costco bought some booze ordered some pizza and said hey just come to my apartment and I'll upgrade your site for you so yeah really you know the early days were very much bootstrapped and yeah just doing the work you know just doing everything so it looks like overnight success later we had some breakout points you know when Google type change our license and other things I think 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 a lot of everything in the you know many many days before that

Sam Parr

but what's crazy to me is like I remember like four or six years ago something I was looking at like it said that wordpress was used by something like 30 or 20% of all the websites on the internet then recently I went and looked at it now it's like 40% are you guys and like the thing that struck me I was like are you the most under monetized business on earth like how like how are you not like the biggest company on earth because 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 that I was using it was making many millions of dollars and I've got a friend sean you and I both have a friend who made a hundred million dollars off of the $300 a year license or whatever it was it was like nothing you guys have to be like the least monetized company there is

Matt Mullenweg

I think the way I put it is wordpress is almost like kind of the dark matter of the web so you know when you build like a list of like what's the top website you know we're not gonna show up I mean wordpress.com will be in the top 100 or whatever but like the beauty of it is that you know the ecosystem of wordpress is probably like $10,000,000,000 a year at least you know of revenue now my company automatic is you know 5% of that but if you add up all the companies and all the people I'm not even counting like all the stuff that you talked about like people selling things on woocommerce which we know is like I think last year was over 30,000,000,000 of goods and services sold through woocommerce but actually more than half of automattic's revenue comes from things that aren't just wordpress so we have a variety of different businesses some really cool mobile apps like dayone or pocket cast a new 1 called beeper

Shaan Puri

what were like the top 2 acquisitions right like even buffett for example if you study buffett's portfolio it's like a huge amount of the gains came from like a couple of like really key acquisitions at key time right see's candy at a 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 and so this came a lot from you know wordpress is a platform and so I did a lot of study of platforms and so that led me to do a lot of deep reading on Microsoft actually and it was funny like if you look at some of the press around windows '95 coming out they talked about how for every dollar that Microsoft made from windows there was $20 made by the word windows ecosystem by the way that ratio is similar to what I talked about earlier where automatic 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 that story of bill gates of talking about the when he meets mark zuckerberg he talks about the facebook platform have you heard this there's like a quote I remember reading which was like gates was like this is not a platform he goes a a platform is when the companies built on top of it generate far more value than the the the host platform whereas the facebook platform at the time was like facebook was this gargantuan thing all the small things on top and facebook was just sucking a lot of the value back in and he he kinda famously was like that's not what a platform is

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 kinda giving you a compliment and an insult at the same time so the backhanded compliment is in full effect here so on 1 hand we're saying oh my god there's 43% of the internet uses wordpress or you know y'all y'all's products there's 500000000 websites using wordpress like that is just such a mind boggling number and so on 1 hand that's absolutely incredible and on the other hand sam was saying are you the most like under monetized given that are you the most under monetized because you look at like a shopify shopify alone right now market cap is a hundred and 50,000,000,000 so 1 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 all like variant of of of the of the e commerce side is worth 150,000,000,000 like what what what should I take away from that and what do you what do you take away from that what's 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

the the short answer there is basically I do it because that's what I believe I believe in open source I just believe that the moral decision comes first and secondly in the long run let's see in in the long run we'll we'll see is that is that a good good summary

Matt Mullenweg

proprietary it's just as easy to have a failure of a proprietary company as it is an open source website so I think you know being proprietary open source is a little bit orthogonal or not causal to like whether you're a successful product or not and so people get really attached to it but I would say in the short term it's definitely 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 this kind of like flywheel of an open source community adoption etcetera innovation you know ton of innovation happens with open source

Shaan Puri

by the way sam isn't it nuts that so matt is clearly like this thoughtful almost like soulful entrepreneur who is has been building this thing since he was literally like a kid nineteen nineteen 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 works on open source software like you said it's widely used it's like almost free it's so so cost so affordable and so like only good all I hear is like only good and then you had this like random villain arc that people try to paint on you in the last you know year with this like drama that's going on I couldn't believe it I was like if I was gonna put money on who's like the least drama attracting founder it might have been you so I thought that was nuts sam quick your reaction to that real quick and then I wanna hear matt's thoughts on it

Sam Parr

so I didn't follow it too much I'm a wordpress user but I just and I'm friends with jason cohen of wp engine you guys had a a a fight but I was actually shocked matt I thought that some of the stuff that you said I was shot you're like ins you you were you were people were insulting you and you felt like I insulted them back and I didn't and I was like I was like I've read a lot about matt's work I don't know matt and I've listened to him he doesn't seem like someone who would ever like insult someone and I was actually surprised that you were going as hard as you were and I guess your perspective is like they're coming after everything I made or they don't contribute whatever but I was actually surprised that you were you you were pissed off and I didn't think that you would be the type of guy that would come off pissed off

Matt Mullenweg

you know a failure mode and I think that can kill many open source projects is when they did get taken advantage of and so just like a schoolyard bully like you kinda have to stand up for yourself and so it's kinda funny because you say you don't think of me as doing this but actually if you look at the history of wordpress there has been maybe 4 or 5 times in the history where I had this kind of villain arc people were like we had a fight to protect like our principles and and like the sustainability and like the future of wordpress

Shaan Puri

can you give the 1 summary of what happened cause I even have followed it and I'm sure there's a bunch of people listening that don't even know what we're talking about could you give like the one minute and try to be objective with this like like not not just the your side of the story but there's what what it what 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 started off like very positive in the community jason cohen I think is awesome by the way but in 2019 they were bought by a private equity firm called silver lake and so over the subsequent five years started becoming I would say more parasitic of wordpress also creating with how they were marketing themselves and branding themselves a lot of confusion in the marketplace in a way that was threatening our trademark yeah the wordpress trademark so people would sort of say oh it's wordpress engine and they wouldn't correct them and they they think it was official I even had very close friends who were wp engine customers who thought that was my company and I would frequently get support requests for wp engine like my site's down and things like that and you know you know for a long. Of time and you know two years prior to this fight started you know just doing our best to partner with them and resolve all these things and resolve the trademark stuff and they just weren't responding

Sam Parr

and basically wp engine is a web hosting service mostly or maybe only for wordpress sites and 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 like a lot of money and also there was a trademark people confused the 2 companies

Shaan Puri

on the contribution thing is that like is I I guess like what's your leg to stand on on that like you know for example you know like does somebody have to contribute is that like a rule or is that a a suggestion right is this like you're at church you should put something in the tray but you don't have to technically but your it's frowned upon like what what is the take there

Matt Mullenweg

so wordpress we do have this program we call 5 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 I tweeted out that you were coming on to to the pod yesterday there was a lot of angry people and I was I was a little surprised by that to be honest

Matt Mullenweg

yeah and you know some of the people are uncomfortable with you know us having to to fight and protect ourselves you know wp engine took some very aggressive legal action so it turned out when we thought we were sort of good face negotiating they were preparing a legal case to attack us because you know three days after I gave this presentation they launched this huge lawsuit with quinn emanuel it's kinda like the 1 of the biggest nastiest law firms and you know private equity is so famously like goes in hollows out businesses extracts all the value kinda kills it there's this crazy story I don't know if you saw it recently where like 1 of the reason there was like shortages of fire trucks in la was like the fire truck manufacturers have been like rolled up by private equity and they've been like jacking the prices and that was like huge waiting list for like fire new fire trucks and fire truck repairs and you know there's lots of examples and not all private equity is bad there's good investors and bad investors in every

Shaan Puri

asset class look I I I didn't follow the story in-depth I didn't need to I'm not a lawyer don't need to be it's common sense to me who whose side am I gonna be on the the private equity backed company that's you know sounds almost like it's made by the by you guys but it's not or the founder who's been working on this for like you know twenty + years of his life open sourced it is you know used by everybody it's kind of like a staple of the internet and you know captures like a tiny bit of the value along the way it was it was pretty obvious to me you know which side I was gonna gonna come down on so I think it was it was actually a common sense test I think for most people and I can't believe how many people are like you know on the pe side it actually reminds me a little bit of like the ai stuff right now

Sam Parr

wait sean we did a whole podcast about the founder of this pe firm though and how like fascinate fascinated we were with them

Shaan Puri

we do profiles on ruthless killers and then we're at the end we're like isn't that awesome and we're like yeah do you wanna be that way hell no like that's not me but like I'm glad that these people exist like you need all these people in an ecosystem like it's not they're not all bad and there's impressive things about how I think his name was egan durbin or whatever they like 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 gonna go out there and run until my toenails bleed like I like that he exists that doesn't mean I wanna 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 on your blog it could have been on the tim ferris podcast you wrote about how I think wordpress or automatic has like roughly 2000 people and I think you wrote about how you tried a bunch of different ways to hire people you like did all these tests like Google does like these like brain teasers and you tried a bunch of other stuff and you said 2 interesting things that stood out you said what I found is that the people who are the best writers oftentimes are the best people who we hire not phds not master degrees it was a correlation between your ability to write and communicate via the written word and then the second thing you said that was pretty wild you said you now or you used to hire people just by like emailing or texting like it was like just through chat not ever face to face not phone calls things like that 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 you know obviously it's important to see how someone interacts but basically you know for a lot of our roles you know written communication is gonna be the primary thing but also if like people wanna talk to someone like we're not gonna be like no you can't but yeah a lot of our hiring process can be completely asynchronous and completely text based and for the first thousand or so hires I did a final chat for 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 when slack was invented you know before that I think it was on like skype or abe or something you know in the early days or or irc

Shaan Puri

I think the way you said it was we do auditions not interviews so what 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 albright 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 like a total page turner the story of it for listeners basically ross albright was accused and I think he did it where he started silk road which was ebay for drugs in two years it did like 2,000,000,000 in sales gross sales something like that but what's crazy is like it kinda sucks because this whole business was documented be because he chatted with everyone like he had 12 coworkers and he did 2 things that were interesting that I actually think are gonna be common the first thing is that he obviously because it was an illegal enterprise he never they didn't they didn't know the identity of the workers it was just like their username like 1 guy's name was like chronic pain that was his username so he just didn't know this guy's real name he just knew chronic pain as like the guy

Shaan Puri

ross knew everybody's name they didn't know each other's names or his he he made them send a license so that he could basically have that like you know always have that in his back pocket 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 like interesting merits to that and then the other thing was that they only communicated via messaging and I was reading this book I'm rereading it now and I was like those 2 attributes are kind of interesting for a company which is like like anonymous workers and but you're still oddly friends like he be he developed relationships with his coworkers

Shaan Puri

this is a great linkedin post for you sam like 13 management lessons I learned from the silk road here you go

Sam Parr

I believe that he did murder for hire 4 times he did a lot of bad shit but he was actually an inspiring leader like when you read like some of his like like stuff

Shaan Puri

well he was very idealistic right like he he had certain beliefs that drove him right he he didn't intend like he didn't necessarily intend like 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 and therefore and it's and it and his team was like no no you shouldn't do this this is gonna increase the target on our back like 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 and he was like well no that's not the ethos of what we're doing like we wrote a creed of what we stand for and why we're doing this and therefore we gotta stand by it

Sam Parr

and they called them captain you know it was very much just like like we are revolutionizing thing and that's like a really interesting thing

Shaan Puri

matt has a you you don't get called captain but what is your like benevolent dictator for life right b d bdfl

Matt Mullenweg

it's a term in open source that's applied to like linus at linux or guido or python or something like that david heimer or hanson at rails but it's it's sort of a joking thing and 1 that I think none of us like really attach ourselves to just kinda like an internet lower thing

Shaan Puri

well well you do a couple other interesting things right because you have this like multibillion dollar company used by most of the internet but you run your company in these interesting ways where remote work I think is you're famously were early and heavy into remote work and and you've talked a lot about that but you do a couple other interesting things so we talked about auditions instead of interviews but you also do everybody in the company including yourself works customer support I think one or two weeks out of the year can you talk about that 1

Matt Mullenweg

yeah part of our hiring process is your first two weeks of doing customer support for every single hire whether you're like our new cfo or chief legal officer or or whatever role it is so and then once a week a year you rotate back into doing customer support gosh by the way lots of companies have versions of this so it's definitely not you weren't the first to do this 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 and so it's very easy especially when you're running something on the internet and distributed for you know people that become numbers or stats or something on your looker dashboard or something like that and so you know getting back to like every individual you know every every number of your signups you might have like 5000 signups in a day but each 1 of those people is like has a story you've just learned a lot about your product and it's I think the best way to sort of do iterative customer developments I think eric reis talked about this or steve blank you know they kind of like get out of the office and go meet the customers and I'm very inspired by like leaders at salesforce talk to marc benioff or something like that they'll typically spend a quarter to a third of the time with customers even at that scale

Shaan Puri

is there a story or any epiphany you had from doing this you've probably done this now you know for for decades so is there like an insight that came from this

Matt Mullenweg

just the other day a few days ago I spent like thirty forty five minutes with the gentleman who kind of checks expenses at the company you and because we have like these ramp cars and people that expense things and stuff like that you know sometimes we like say you need a receipt for this or you question an expense and I just call it to understand more about this and also 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 you know some of the questions they were getting felt a little aggressive and so you know we we wanna talk about 1 I just kinda wanna see like the tools they used and how the work did and stuff like that so some of that was just shadowing so I was like okay because I wanted to understand the interfaces this was also really helpful like going through support I I realized that some of our internal tools like don't represent you know best practices and design or usability use some you know sometimes you know so the internal stuff doesn't get the love that your external stuff does but then also you know we just sort of talked about like the culture of automatic you know bedside manner if you will like how how can we like you know hold these principles like we need to really enforce our policies and make sure we do you know we get audited and and everything so like we we need to have these things from like a good accounting principles. Of view but also doing it a way that like when we have these conversations we're talking about the principles of it and the reason why so it's not just like I'm giving you sean a hard time because you didn't have a receipt but like hey if we don't have this receipts you know our our you know a certain art of our might question this and then you know that might create an issue for x y z or something like that

Shaan Puri

when I first moved to silicon valley I I came to work with this guy michael birch and he was he represented everything I wanted he had already built like successful tech companies and he had made it and I was a 23 year old kid who wanted to make it and so I'm super excited to go into the work the first day and I'm like I'm gonna learn so much from this guy cause he had not just done it 1 time he's built like 4 successful companies and so I I'm ready for him to teach me to kind of like the dark arts I'm like what's the strategies the growth hacks what this like super like high level strategic thinking and the very first week he puts me on not the new shit like the oldest company that he had started something he started back in 02/1

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 1 last question for you and it's on ai so there's a lot of stuff you could talk about with ai but I just am curious on your quick take about deepseek because it's also you know they came out with this open source thing and there's a lot of people on either side of of you know how much they believe about the story but like what's your quick reaction to what you saw with deepseq

Matt Mullenweg

deepseq's a a really cool model so you know every model has like kind of a vibe with the way it's tuned and everything like that and and so it's a really fun 1 to play with and I would say you know the thing I I tell people with all this ai stuff just like use it play with it you know because it's such early days and there's kind of a you know the way to prompt it the way to interact with it there's there's a a skill there that you'll learn and the vibes of the deep seek model are very cool I think what's I'm most excited about as an open source guy is that they actually open source the model were really amazing papers about how they built it and they'd open weights so like for example at my company I would say don't use like deepseep.com you know for various reasons that's hosted in china and stuff like that but like we can run the model ourselves you know locally and that's pretty cool or you can get it through perplexity which hosted in the us so like there's there's lots of ways to access it and it's it's a really fun model so all these models have are like good at different things they have a coding version they just released a cool image thing and so like think of these as like little entities that you can interact with and run and spin up and boot and you should just learn the nuances and and kind of flavors of each 1

Sam Parr

matt do you guys actually believe that they've only taken the amount of funding that they've said do didn't they say something like 5 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 like some something but obviously like I'm sure they've spent invested a ton in in in other things so and I know there's kind of this theory that maybe that's like a a pr or sci op or whatever like that

Sam Parr

when I started reading about them I got fearful it was pretty insane right that the market reacted the way it did that you know it wiped out a trillion dollars of of value in twenty four hours it it it was pretty wild how big that announcement was I didn't think I didn't think that was gonna happen and I think you called it matt didn't you like tweet about this during christmas time

Matt Mullenweg

well andre capathy you know so full credit like tweeted about this like the day after christmas and I I saw his tweet and retweeted it so that's when I first learned about deepseek and started playing with it but yeah I think that with all these things there there's some you can verify all the things they they made some amazing advancements in like how they train things and how they run things and how they did memory interconnects and and working within constraints there are some really cool engineering breakthroughs and they shared it and this is stuff that I think openai had also figured out but they hadn't like shared it publicly and so what I love about the deep sea guys is they they're open sourcing at all so and it's all available under like a true open source license it's not like the lama license where it's free until you have 700000000 users or something or or I think quinn alibaba one which is also a really great model that people are sleeping on so check out quinn and some of these other models coming out of china they're really really good but it's 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 thanks for sharing everything you did about about wordpress

Matt Mullenweg

it's been a pleasure

Sam Parr

yeah we appreciate you man alright that's the pod