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Even in the US, when we started, all 50 states have different rules and different counties have different rules and everything. There are companies as well that can manage this for you. How do you manage all that? That’s a lot of overhead to be that distributed. Your compliance cost to do that is very high - you have to register with a government and figure out their tax situation. You want to pay someone in your 92nd country and you only have one person there. I just want to dive into the practice of it real quick. The other unusual thing we do is we pay global pay rates, which also helps for international recruiting, so we pay similar ranges for salaries, regardless of what country you’re in. When we provide opportunity to places where they don’t normally have it, we find really, really amazing people and they tend to be great colleagues that stay for a really long time. We are strong believers that talent is evenly distributed in the world, but opportunity is not. From the very beginning, and especially last year, one of our big advantages is that we’re not really geographically restricted in where we hire people. I think we hired over 700 last year.Īll over the world. It’s really grown a lot, even since the last time we talked.

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We’re about to come up on 2,000 people working full time with Automattic. We provide upgrades and that recurring revenue is what allows us to come to work the next day. Most of our business models are through people paying us, as opposed to advertising or other models.

We’re just relentlessly iterating on it to try to respond to user requests and make it better. It’s very user-centric it’s an independent alternative to the Spotifys and Apples of the world. Pocket Casts is one of the very best podcasting apps. To do that, we both build, buy, or partner with things that make the web more open and fun. We’ve been saying that for a long time, before democratizing was cool. We want to democratize publishing in commerce. For 17 years now, we’ve been trying to make the web a better place. So Automattic has been a fully distributed company since 2005. Start at the beginning: What is Automattic? How do you think about it? What are all of your companies? You acquired Tumblr, bought Pocket Casts, you have WooCommerce. You released a lot of products - started with WordPress, which you obviously founded. Automattic has bought a lot of companies. That was a fascinating conversation, but it was years ago, so there’s lots to follow up on. The last time you and I chatted was right after the Tumblr acquisition.

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the co-founder of WordPress, and the CEO of Tumblr. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

One note: Matt mentions something called “Gutenberg” a few times - that’s the new creation experience in WordPress, the part of the site where people actually make things. Matt and I talked about those challenges. Famously, to get an app on Apple’s app store, it had to ban porn, which users are still upset about. But like every social platform, it has meaningful moderation challenges. I also wanted to talk about Tumblr - it’s Taylor Swift’s favorite social platform, and it is one of those things that users have kept alive no matter how many corporate owners have tried to kill it. It is an absolutely fascinating model that has obviously worked really well, and I wanted to know more about why Matt set it up that way and what the challenges of that structure are. It is officially administered by the WordPress Foundation, but if you don’t want the hassle, you can just go to and pay Automattic to do most of the work for you.

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Around 43 percent of all the websites on the internet run on WordPress, which is a piece of open-source software anyone can download and use for free. That bet is perhaps most pronounced with WordPress itself. Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along. Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the company that owns, which he co-founded, and Tumblr, the irrepressible social network it acquired from the wreckage of AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon.