How Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg grew Automattic to $710M revenue with a 4037 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is matt mullenweg he is the co-founder of the open source blogging platform wordpress the most popular publishing platform on the web and the founder and ceo of automatic the company behind wordpress.com woocommerce and jetpack additionally matt runs audrey capital investment and research company he's been recognized for his leadership and success by forbes bloomberg businessweek and many many other magazine magazines he's originally from houston texas where he attended the high school for the performing and visual arts and studied jazz saxophone in his spare time he's an avid photographer he splits his time between houston new york and san francisco matt are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready all right very good so i'm excited to chat with you now just to i want to put this out there right away when people think about automatic and they think about wordpress how should they think about the relationship between the two so think of wordpress as an open source project and software that people can run anywhere in the world and automatic both provides some wordpress services and uh contributes a lot to the project so they're separate but closely related i think where people get confused is a lot of the same people are behind each including myself yeah you gave a good analogy on stage which uh it was to kind of think of yourself as the as the proctor and gamble between behind brands that we know and love like wordpress woocommerce jetpack and others right yeah all right so give us the backstory here you you know you were early on at cnet i think doing open source stuff was that right out of college yeah i actually ended up dropping out uh to take this xenon opportunity i had visited san francisco uh kind of in between my sophomore and junior year and ended up connecting with a lot of great companies including google yahoo cnet and then when i returned i started get some job opportunities and i decided that you know it was such an incredible opportunity i could stay in college two more years and hope to get that kind of job or i could just go for it and it didn't seem uh i wasn't too into college at the time but i also wasn't going to like amazing schools going to university of houston which was fine but it wasn't like it was great on the text you weren't going to miss the jazz club or anything that's actually the thing that probably got the worst after i moved because in houston i've been playing jazz since elementary school so um i've played saxophone since elementary school so i had very deep connections to all the the groups here and i would actually gig i would generate a good chunk of my income uh from playing around town and when i moved to san francisco that totally stopped what corner was your favorite in houston where did you get the best tippers i think i only bust maybe once or twice normally i would play um like big band gigs or uh played in you know coffee shops a few times like mostly just stuff with friends around town but the big band ones were the best because they were often union gigs so you'd get kind of like an actual paycheck in the mail that's pretty cool guys listening if you don't know obviously wordpress uh we'll learn more about it today but also with matt we're going to touch a bit on his new project gutenberg which was released earlier this year as part of wordpress he also did some early investments in bitpay and coinbase back in 2013 before it was you know hot and cool and doing what it's doing today he then left and returned as ceo of automatic uh which i want to talk about kind of how he did that and then offer also in 2007 he made a well i don't know how to describe it but he made an important decision to turn down an acquisition offer which i think there's probably some lessons there that i'd love to chat about so matt take us back to year one when did you launch wordpress wordpress started in 2003 and that was uh that was you kind of turned did you have you had other opportunities on the table why decide to go do your own thing oh well wordpress was really just like a hobby and it was something i was doing kind of nights and weekends or instead of my schoolwork which was frequently um and it wasn't until about a year after that is when i took the job at cnn and a year after that is when i started automatic so starting of automatic in 2005 was more where there were different opportunities including continuing at my cnet gig and i decided to really dive in on a startup and how did the open source community uh judge you opening up a company that was clearly meant to to kind of build the ecosystem and also make money to enable you to build further how did you manage those expectations with the open source community oh i think people were highly skeptical but rightly so um regardless of who i am or anything like the history of most companies coming out of open source projects is that the open source project really suffers especially kind of years four to six when the company like starts to maybe feel the grind of fundraising or growth or something like that um we now have you know over a decade of automatic and in wordpress so uh even though today there is still some skepticism on my motives or automatic motives or things like that or just people in the ecosystem who work against automatic very directly we now have a lot of history showing that i very much take a long-term view to these things and that the automatic and wordpress can grow very much together and in fact automatic i think has helped wordpress grow far far beyond what it would have without it e today or at least in your 2016 report you shared almost 595 million posts were in in that year on the platform and 457 million comments had hit what do you think that's going to look like here in 2017 as we close out the year i'm sorry for a second oh no i'll go i'll repeat it matt so uh it looks in 2016 in your report you articulated almost 600 million posts were written on the platform what do you think that number will grow to here as we wrap up 2017 oh i don't know i don't follow the number of posts super closely um simply because it can be kind of a it's a good vanity metric so i'm glad that you picked it up but it's not necessarily vanity right i mean a lot of people will lead interviews or questions like this with revenue numbers but revenue can lie if people aren't addicted to your platform so i like to lead with usage-based questions and really the post is a good one for you yeah um maybe i should be thinking more about posts why don't you wait why don't you this is interesting um well i think because you know what we're trying to do is get more people blogging not necessarily more post uh the post numbers can get kind of thrown off a lot by you know kind of the outliers or major publications which use wordpress quite a bit or i think we we take this out of the number you just quoted but uh some of the numbers i look at internally like when people import like let's say people are leaving tumblr which is actually a pretty popular one to leave like that story don't you wow oh no it's actually a little sad because tumblr is a very vibrant platform yeah we're getting a lot of imports and so someone might import like 10 years of tumblr post into the wordpress so those can throw off some of the posting numbers so a lot of what i'm looking at right now is kind of the monthly active users um so weekly and that ratio to weekly and daily and then another thing i'm thinking about a lot is at that ratio to our mobile active users so people using wordpress on apps and i guess i'm thinking about post from the point of view of gutenberg which i know you want to talk about a little bit later but um with gutenberg it's not so much we're trying to get people to create more posts although hopefully that's a good side effect it's that we're we really want them to be able to realize in their posts and pages you know really rich layouts in their imagination right now people are still kind of in that kind of more text blogging mode take that to the next level this i i don't know if i'm misquoting you on this so correct me but was the new york times piece the snowfall piece written on wordpress oh i don't think it was i think that came out of their uh one of their custom dev teams got it i wasn't sure now are they part of your vps yeah they are vip and that's kind of the idea is that what new york times spent probably tens of thousands of dollars to do a few years ago will be able to enable anyone with wordpress and gutenberg to do just kind of out of the box of course the hard part is writing the story yeah but uh but i'm fine with that being the hard part right now both parts are hard matt i have a lot of cold-hearted capitalists that listen to this along with a lot of developers but i don't want to lose my capitalists so i have to ask the question you know you're you're a guy that just seems hyper-focused and we'll talk about what happened in 2007 or 2005 here in a second but um talk money to me for a second how do you guys make money so we are you know vast vast majority 98 99 uh subscription business so uh the three main things people subscribe to are wordpress.com which is hosting for wordpress and jetpack which is services for wordpress if you host it someplace else like uh it could be bluehost or godaddy or rackspace or anywhere and...