When I was about ten years old, I asked my parents for a printing press.
I don’t know what kind of conversation this precocious request triggered between my parents, but I ended up having to settle for using my mom’s electric typewriter, which I used to peck out stories—letter by letter—for a fishing newsletter I published for my neighborhood friends.
My printer was my dad, who would use his company’s photocopier to make a stack of copies for me. At night, I would load up my bicycle with my hot-off-the-press publication and slip copies into my friends’ mailboxes.
Total circulation? About 20 copies per issue.
Today, decades after that childhood foray into “self-publishing”, I now use WordPress, the free, open source content management software that enables me to publish blog posts, ebooks, and even my own on-demand radio program — my podcast — to tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries around the world.
Best of all, I can do all of this without having to go through any of the traditional gatekeepers like agents or editors or publishers or producers. And just think of all the trees that I’ve saved!
Even if you aren’t familiar with what WordPress is or use it to publish content, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve visited a website that runs on it — and probably just within the past few days (or hours). That’s because WordPress powers an astonishing 24% of all websites on the internet today.
I recently met with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the company that develops WordPress and offers a range of products and services for WordPress users both large and small. Automattic is valued today at over $1 billion.
Matt joined me for a wide-ranging conversation on my podcast, during which he shared his aspiration to capture the other 76% of the internet that WordPress doesn’t already manage, and how his 400-person team works largely from home or in co-located offices, and relies almost entirely on an internal blogging platform for communication and collaboration—while avoiding the use of email.
The following are a few excerpts from my conversation with Matt, which you can listen to in full on my podcast:
Automattic’s mission is to democratize publishing. Where do you think you are today in terms of achieving that?
It’s probably a lifelong mission, to be honest. The idea is to give everyone regardless of what language you speak or how much money you have or not, the ability to have a voice online using the best software in the world.
You or I can download and publish using the exact same software that The New Yorker uses
You or I can download and publish using the exact same software that The New Yorker does for their newyorker.com. And I think that is relatively unique in the history of the world. You know, you or I wouldn’t have access to the same printing press as The New York Times, but in the digital world you or I can have the same software as The New Yorker.
You’ve been a fierce advocate for the open source movement. What’s the state of play today with the movement?
Right now we power about 24% of all websites as of this recording: that is the largest of any of the content management systems. The number two has around 3%. But we are not happy that we have just 24%, and we see a lot of work to get the remaining 76%. Certainly, our near term goal for WordPress is to try to get to a majority because I feel when a majority of the web is driven by open source software, that will drive the web to be a better place. It’ll be more open, more inclusive, with fewer closed gardens and silos, and it will drive as well the proprietary folks to be more open.
When a majority of the web is driven by open source software, that will drive the web to be a better place
I believe as more and more of our lives are dictated and influenced by the software that we use, open source becomes more important than ever, because we want to be in control of our digital lives, and be able to open the hood and see how everything works.
You’ve got a tremendously decentralized, dispersed workforce spanning the globe. People working from home and for the most part, never stepping foot in an office.
Automattic is a totally distributed company, so everyone works from wherever they are in the world, wherever they want to. It could be a coffee shop, it could be their home, it could be a co-working space, and we hire people regardless of where they are. We now have folks in just over 40 countries. This has been amazing for the company in that we can attract and retain the best talent without them having to be in New York or San Francisco or one of the traditional tech enters.
Everyone works from wherever they are in the world
So far this model has worked extraordinarily well, and we plan to continue it. And my hope is that five years from now there will be dozens of companies that are doing the same because I think it’s a much much better way to work.
The Automattic creed states that communication is the “oxygen” for a distributed company. For a long time you’ve used an internal blog called P2 for internal communication and collaboration. And for the most part, you avoid using email for communication inside Automattic. This is pretty much the polar opposite of just about every company out there.
I think email is definitely on its way out, between things like P2 and also Slack, which is a workplace chat tool. Email just has so many things wrong with it. I’ve never heard anyone who’ve said they love email, I want more of it, have you?
Imagine if in your company, instead of email, everyone could post on a blog, and comment on the blog, and everything defaulted to public, and different groups or teams could have their own space on it, but fundamentally everything was tagged and traceable and transparent. That’s kind of what P2 looks like.
Email just has so many things wrong with it
P2 also has its own sort of internal Google alerts, so you can keep up with everyone without having to read everything that goes by. And if you’re a new person joining, you don’t have to read everyone’s email history to catch up with where the team is and what they’ve been doing. You can just read through the archives and search for things that are relevant and be instantly caught up.
It’s free actually, so go check out p2theme.com. I invite anyone to try it out.
You started out as a coder and now you’re the CEO of a company that controls one-quarter of the web. I coded as a kid and I have a 15 year-old that I’m trying to encourage to learn how to code. What advice would you tell him, should he learn to code?
Absolutely! I actually believe that coding is like the new literacy and it’s going to be as important to code in the future as it is to be able to read and write today. Even if you don’t decide to do development as a career, the ability to think like an engineer and understand code is hugely valuable, including for managing other developers.
Coding is like the new literacy
Pretty much anything you’re going to do in a modern information society, if it’s connected to a computer, knowing how that computer works and being able to modify it is just invaluable.
I understand you’ve been reading books on writing these days, like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.
Skill in writing is one of the things I look for the most in hiring, because I feel that clear writing represents clear thinking, regardless of someone’s background or whether they’re going to be a designer or coder or whatever. The ability to communicate effectively and clearly in written form is not only super important in a distributed company, but I think reflects well on how they approach life in general.
Clear writing represents clear thinking
For me the process of writing is incredibly cathartic. I love writing—part of the reason I started blogging and started working on WordPress was because I love writing. And it’s also one of the hardest things I do every day.
If I can become a better writer, perhaps I can become a better thinker.
If you had one piece of advice for writers who have a blog or are thinking of starting one, what would that be?
One of the most common mistakes I see is people spend a ton of time tweaking things to get it just right, and not a lot of actual time writing. An ugly blog with incredible content will win over a beautiful blog with crappy content. It’s just the truth of the matter. So spend the most time on the things that matter the most, which is obviously easy to say and hard to do.
How do you use WordPress? Tell me about it in the comments!
Thanks for reading! If you're interested in conversations with great writers who talk about their craft, check out my podcast, Write With Impact (powered by WordPress) and subscribe for free on iTunes. Connect with me here on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter @glennleibowitz.
