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SPEAKER_04: Hey, everybody. It's what it's all about, man. They said money is the root of all evil. What?

SPEAKER_05: Funny how it feeds my people. We ain't gonna live like equals until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you. Money is the root of all evil. Funny how it feeds my people. We ain't gonna live like equals until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you.

SPEAKER_09: Part 2 of Jason's interview with Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

SPEAKER_14: Do you think this work, you say it doesn't feel like it's a grand scheme to take it apart, right? What do you mean? Some people seem to feel like the open web is trying to be reversed.

SPEAKER_15: And clearly Zuckerberg has no interest in being open. Some might say he's a bad actor in that regard. I don't know that you would actually say it, but I would. Like, I think that their system is designed to service only one person. That's them. Not even their users. I mean, it's at their users' cost. You or I would not run a service the way they run it. Ever. On our worst day, we wouldn't run something half as bad. You've never gotten a $30 million penalty from the government for privacy issues, have you? No. No. You'd remember it if you got the largest fine. It's the largest fine for privacy ever given, I think. Wow. I mean, it's big statements. And some people, I mean, why would Facebook not have RSS feeds of your feed, of your own content?

SPEAKER_23: They might, actually. They might have it hidden somewhere, you think?

SPEAKER_24: I think they might. I feel like they were considering it at some point.

SPEAKER_14: But people, I think publishers are no longer putting the resources into publishing the RSS feed.

SPEAKER_25: So this could be a quiet de-emphasis of doing it that then has the whole system come apart.

SPEAKER_27: I think that technology, and the web in particular, goes through cycles of openness and closeness. I mean, you remember AOL keywords on billboards, right? Sure. That seems silly five years later, because they're like, oh, that's a proprietary namespace. Wait, you have to pay AOL to put that there?

SPEAKER_30: And then somebody will also buy it from you two years later? Oh, yeah. I was music for three years, and then somebody else takes music?

SPEAKER_27: Today, people have Twitter usernames and Facebook pages on TV and billboards, and they're sending people to this other thing for convenience, right? Because people have Twitter up on their phone, and they can type this in. It's a namespace. It's easier than typing in a domain. It has a more consistent user experience. The most interesting company, I think, of the past 20, 30 years is Google, because they are web native. They have the technical capacity to eat the whole web and process it and do amazing things with it. And part of the reason that the social networks didn't is because that's a lot harder to spider a thousand sites and create the graph between them. It's much easier just for everyone to put stuff in your database.

SPEAKER_41: Ah, that's a profound insight.

SPEAKER_27: That's just an easier way to do it. So Google is probably one of the companies that could create a good user experience on top of a disaggregated system, which they have done with Search. But even they found that the sort of speed and usability of a centralized social network is hard to match in a decentralized fashion for many easy user reasons.

SPEAKER_43: Are you guys ever going to launch another product outside of WordPress? I mean, you understand the space so well, and you say a complete rewrite is something you'd never want to do.

SPEAKER_45: So WordPress has a trajectory that is not going to change.

SPEAKER_43: But you must think sometimes, like, maybe I could make a Twitter or a YouTube or this. But that did kill movable type. But you have a very stable business. So I do think it's a different situation for you. You have a number of different services.

SPEAKER_46: We already do.

SPEAKER_43: But those aren't necessarily consumer products that would peer or be peers to a Twitter or a YouTube or a Facebook. You must think of this. And you did have a social network, open source product at one point. Gravatar. Gravatar. Or BuddyPress. BuddyPress and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_50: Gravatar is an open avatar system. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: It's actually huge now. It serves over 20 billion Gravitars per day integrated with GitHub and a bunch of other things. But BuddyPress was a way to turn a WordPress install into, like, a little mini social network. Didn't work. Still very popular. Is it? Not something that's, like, as popular as WordPress. Right. But for those people. Like, Ning didn't work as well. Right. But it's still tens of thousands of creations with millions and millions of users on it. Right.

SPEAKER_53: So it didn't work in the huge scale of Facebook. But lots of people got value from it.

SPEAKER_50: Well, by definition, when it works, it's not an aggregated thing. Right.

SPEAKER_27: That's what's tricky about WordPress is that people, I mean, it's a huge part of, like, the dark matter of the web. Right. But it doesn't show up on Comscore the same way that, like, Twitter or Facebook.com does. Pinterest or Tumblr. Yeah.

SPEAKER_45: Do you ever think of making something like that? You clearly understand how open source works, and then you created your own domain.

SPEAKER_43: Why wouldn't Matt Mullenweg work for a year while WordPress is still being worked on by your 170-person team, 150 of which are probably technical, spread out across the globe?

SPEAKER_64: Why wouldn't Matt Mullenweg take six months to make something that was another consumer experience for 10 years into your career? You must think of it.

SPEAKER_32: I think that, I mean, the cool, well, WordPress.com is that.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, WordPress.com is a centralized service. But what about the next one?

SPEAKER_43: You've been at this 10 years. You must have an itch sometimes to make something that's a new domain, a new experience. You've withheld yourself from doing that? No, not at all.

SPEAKER_27: I would say the cool thing about the structure of Automatic is it affords easy other projects within it. So we might see that. And so, sure. And there's ones we've done already. I don't think that you know what's going to be YouTube or Facebook before you do it. Right. Of course, it would be great if everything you did. Yeah. Here's a bottle of lightning. Let me pour you a glass. So you just try things. Right. And you do what you're passionate about or that you need or things that you're really excited about. I mean, an acquisition we did end of last year that I found really fun is a company called Symperium that had a product called SimpleNote, which I still use every day. I like to live on it. It's a synchronizing notes app. That's simple. Hence the name. Yeah. But some technology behind it that kind of does what iCloud promised to do, which you can just, if you're a developer, you can drop this in front of your mobile app and it synchronizes all the data. Online, offline, conflict resolution, everything. This is really fun and really cool. A, because I know that for the WordPress mobile apps, for them to work the way that I want them to, sort of seamless online, offline, working, et cetera, speed, they need this. Yeah. And this thing doesn't exist in the world yet. Yeah. It's part of the reason we acquired the company. Right.

SPEAKER_80: And two, just that's a fun problem.

SPEAKER_27: Right. It's a little bit geekier. Sure. That's not a consumer service, which is what you're asking for. Yeah. From a technical point of view, the engineer inside me is as excited about that as anything else. Right. And also, I would have also predicted, if you do ask me, even five years ago, I would have thought I'd be bored with WordPress by now.

SPEAKER_84: Yeah. It's sort of what I'm getting at, in another way, yeah?

SPEAKER_32: Not at all. Not at all. But, well, because every, it's like a world where every mountain you climb, like, reveals a new range. Right. Ten miles down the road. Like, every time we fix one thing, it makes something else glaringly obvious to me.

SPEAKER_27: How ugly or broken or terrible that is. I just want to go over there and fix that, too. And it's like a never-ending problem. It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Right. We're done. Wait. You start right back over. Yeah. And that's the fun of it. I mean, mobile, social, the big trends I've defined in the past five years change how you think about WordPress and how WordPress needs to exist. If it's going to be successful as it has in the past, it's not going to come for free the next 18% of websites or 30% of websites. And so, if we do want to democratize publishing, if we do want to get to a majority of the web running WordPress, you have to adapt and embrace those.

SPEAKER_45: What do you think of the media today?

SPEAKER_15: We have mainstream media really getting smaller. I mean, newspapers shutting down. You have new blogs emerging. And then you have this generalized sense of chaos and despair amongst a contingent in the media business who believe the end is nigh and it's just totally screwed and Reddit is, you know, doing, you know, bounty hunting for the Boston bombers. And, you know, it feels to people, not saying necessarily I agree, but it feels to people like this, it's chaos and there's no budgets and journalism is dying and everything's doing. What do you, what does Matt Mullenweg thinks happening in media when you look at it? Because you are the infrastructure of a lot of these companies.

SPEAKER_94: Yeah, I think bad organizations die.

SPEAKER_32: You know, if your business is moving to the web and you don't have good web developers, you're not going to have a good product.

SPEAKER_27: If your business is moving to WordPress, you don't have good WordPress developers. I mean, you know, even using a great platform, you're still going to struggle if you don't have the developers to really take advantage of it. I've been super excited by New York Times, Wall Street Journal, et cetera, embracing blogs and embracing WordPress as a platform for that. Because that's sort of the things I grew up, like I kind of, you might be the same way. I kind of want to be a writer. Like I want to be a journalist. Yeah. That's why I would love to have an interview show like you. Right. Do it. It would be really exciting.

SPEAKER_102: You want to host this?

SPEAKER_101: I'm going to go on vacation. You want to host four episodes? We'll talk about that. That could be interesting. I could loop in. No, you could rewrite now. Four episodes. I'll send Brandis. She'll go. You find four people you find interesting. You do have a professional setup here.

SPEAKER_61: We'll talk about it. Two? It's incredibly tempting. I just don't want to make a commitment to time. You just interviewed someone.

SPEAKER_110: It's just a conversation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_111: I love it. Okay.

SPEAKER_27: And I love digging. I'm going to do this on stage at a founder's conference. You're going to interview someone? I'm going to interview someone. Who are you interviewing? It's not confirmed yet. Oh. No, but it's not confirmed.

SPEAKER_32: And I just, you know, I've been on stage so many times. I want to ask some of the questions. Yeah, you want to ask the questions.

SPEAKER_115: I want to ask the questions that don't get asked. Me too. That's where I'm at.

SPEAKER_27: That's what I like about it. And so it's been really cool to see some of these organizations that I admire and grew up on using it. Overall, I think that media could be bolder. Like, we're going to, like, paint it with a single brush. I wish that they questioned assumptions more and did wild things more and kind of just, like, try stuff without regard.

SPEAKER_32: Like, take ads off the site for a week.

SPEAKER_27: Like, you can afford it. I know it's, let's say it's $5 million. Yeah. But just see what happens. Like, look at your traffic numbers and see what happens. Yeah. See what people care about. Like, try some, you know, those sorts of things. Do a Kickstarter campaign. Sure. And when people do these, like the snowfall thing.

SPEAKER_24: Right. In New York Times. God, everybody can't shut up about that thing. It was interesting. One thing. One thing. They can't shut up about it.

SPEAKER_14: Everybody loved it. Why was that so important, do you think? Why do you think people have such a huge reaction to that? Is it because the media companies have been so, they've lacked such creativity that when they do something creative, we're just in shock?

SPEAKER_32: Or was it just executed so well? I think it was really well done. It was.

SPEAKER_27: And so, obviously, I think, that's why I don't worry about them long-term. Exceptional product content, content as a product, always have an audience. Whether it's movies, music, writing, anything. The barriers to entry change, and the landscape changes, and the monetization changes. But that's always going to be true. Like, we love stories.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah.

SPEAKER_45: You have Andrew Sullivan raising, whatever he raised, 600 of his 900K goal a year to do his blog. Oh, cool. The Dish for, without advertising.

SPEAKER_32: You know, folks like, who's the Fox News guy who has his own network now?

SPEAKER_70: Yeah, who was that guy? What's his name? Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck.

SPEAKER_32: I wonder if that's working. And Philip Greenspan is the guy I was trying to think of earlier. It wasn't Paul at all. Philip Greenspan did R's Digita and a bunch of this early stuff.

SPEAKER_27: Honestly, the first web communities. Yeah, so he's got his own thing now. And a lot of it, for me, comes back to Kevin Kelly's essay, A Thousand True Fans. Remember that one?

SPEAKER_138: I do, actually, yeah.

SPEAKER_27: He's saying that, like, if you just get 1,000 people who love what you do, like, you're set. Sell them a t-shirt, like Daring Fireball did for a long time. Daring Fireball is actually a cool example. Yeah, boy. Let's look back to that. Sells t-shirts, 15 bucks. Probably, let's say, makes five bucks on them. Sells a lot of them. And does RSS sponsorship, one per week. I think the rate's, whatever it is. Let's say it's five, ten grand.

SPEAKER_32: Done. Done. Quarter million dollars? We're done. He's passionate about it.

SPEAKER_27: He, like, lives his content and answers to no one, isn't scared to piss anyone off. Yeah. There's always another. It's not like Amex is the year-long sponsor. If he pisses off someone, next week there's someone else. Right. That's powerful. And that's why, I think, one thing I think that's cool about what you do is you're also not scared of that. Yeah. Either intrinsically or because you have other things going on in life. Like, you know, just be, like, for better and worse sometimes. Right.

SPEAKER_15: Here's my opinion. You know, this is what I think. I think Google Glass is stupid. Right. This conversation we were having before. Yeah. And I'm like, I just, after I tweeted, like, 15 times, I'm just wondering right now, like, should I have tweeted those things?

SPEAKER_151: Because I have a relationship with Google that's up and down. And, like, God, Sergey really cares about that. And now it's, eventually somebody's going to get back to Sergey and be like, Calacanis thinks Google Glass are stupid.

SPEAKER_153: But I do think they're stupid.

SPEAKER_155: You like them? Or you put them, you've worn them?

SPEAKER_27: I've only tried them on. I haven't worn them for an extended period of time. You've seen people around the conference, which we have. So annoying. A dozen people. Weird, a little bit. But also cool. Like, I was talking to Don from Smug Mug for a good 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_101: He had them on at the poker game last night. I'm sorry, the poker game that doesn't exist. And I told him, you can't wear them at the poker table.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, because that's going to be a big issue.

SPEAKER_61: Casinos have already banned them. So there's that whole thing. But I think they're going to be banned in every restaurant should ban them.

SPEAKER_43: Every bar will ban them. I don't want to be in a bar. I think it's drinking in a nightclub. Like, who wants to go to the club? I don't want to go to a club and have people have Google Glass on. Then I'm on the dance floor and people are like, I'm not a good dancer. I don't want somebody Google Glassing me dancing. Then there's a, you know, like, you ever see that video of.

SPEAKER_159: The answer is the fixer dancing.

SPEAKER_43: Well, that is true. But in the short term, you ever see the WikiLeaks guy dancing?

SPEAKER_159: No.

SPEAKER_43: Brandeson, this part of the video cut to the video of the WikiLeaks guy dancing. Who is that guy? Julian Assange. Such a douche.

SPEAKER_101: Julian Assange dancing like a freak, you know. Anyway, it's just like every time.

SPEAKER_162: Please don't cut to a video of me dancing. Yeah, please. It's just as embarrassing.

SPEAKER_14: To all my legions of fans, I would like anybody who sees Matt Malamuk dancing to please send me that video.

SPEAKER_163: I'll make the opening credits of the show.

SPEAKER_164: No, but it's like, they're going to ban these things everywhere.

SPEAKER_32: I think that long term, it's essentially augmented humanity.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. And it's, Google Glass is a version one. You know, the original iPhone was really our original iPod. You know, the present, if you look at Steve Jobs' introduction of it, A, the slides were in like Comic Sans. Which is impossible to, and. Possible to ignore. He talks about how it has, whatever it was, like 10 minutes of skip protection. Skip protection was like the big selling feature of this. A thousand songs in your pocket and skip protection.

SPEAKER_171: Well, because he was competing against. CD players. Which skipped. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: And they had 15 seconds of skip protection.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah, that was the big feature of CD players was five seconds skip protection.

SPEAKER_27: And Sony came out with 60 seconds and you could jog with it or something.

David Friedberg: Yeah, they did. And it would like, yeah, except if you were jogging hard and it would like. Yeah, I never had that problem. You could just stop running for a minute and then have it catch up.

SPEAKER_50: So, I mean, these things, I mean, today we say, oh, it's bulky and it's there.

SPEAKER_27: And, you know, it's very conspicuous. And, you know, all these things are going to, pretty soon it'll be contacts. I won't be able to tell if you have it on or not. Or it'll just be something that sort of speaks in your ear and says, you know, you walk up to someone, you look, and it says, oh, hey. That's Jason. This is Jason. Yeah. His last tweet was X. You ran into him six months ago, ask about his bulldogs. He's really into them. Yeah. This sort of thing. Loathsome.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Loathsome. You hate it.

SPEAKER_32: I think, I mean, there's a cool article the other day. And the guy said, it was a Google guy. And he said, Google effectively makes you about 20 IQ points smarter. Google search.

SPEAKER_179: Okay.

SPEAKER_32: Like, the fact that we can have a conversation. Who's the guy from ours? And look it up in seconds if we want on a show.

SPEAKER_181: Net, net, 20 IQs.

SPEAKER_32: Which is kind of cool.

SPEAKER_181: I kind of like it.

SPEAKER_32: I don't think you can fight that trend. Like, should you say, yes. I'll tell you what it is. Should you not be able to Google in a bar? No.

SPEAKER_184: Here's the thing. Yes, you should. But I object.

SPEAKER_32: But maybe not in trivia shows. Maybe not at the poker table.

SPEAKER_14: It's the covertness of it. Like, I feel like there was a social norm with iPhones.

SPEAKER_15: Like, taking them out during dinner is a little obnoxious. Unless it's like, we're looking up that guy's name from that movie. Sure.

SPEAKER_151: Because we're all buying into that. But with these glasses, or like the ear implant, and it's covert.

SPEAKER_191: There'll be mores that develop.

SPEAKER_192: The mores are going to be, take those glasses off. That's what I think. I'm going to smack those glasses off your head. It's going to be the mores.

SPEAKER_32: You know, what's funny is that every new technology is met with this.

SPEAKER_193: You know, people keep saying that, but maybe some should be met with this.

SPEAKER_27: Some should, and some fail. I mean, you know, it could be a segue. It could be when trains started being, people said the human body was not designed to go that fast. The fastest we can run, or even on a bike, like 15, 20 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_50: You take it to 40, something's going to get messed up. Legitimate concern.

SPEAKER_196: Correct concern when the train hits something.

SPEAKER_50: Sure, but of course now we fly planes at hundreds of miles per hour.

SPEAKER_27: Or it's, we're capable of adapting to things that might seem ridiculous today. And that's also what I love about Google, and one of the best questions I've seen at the conference so far. It was Tim Cook was on stage, and this guy came up and he said, give me a vision. Give me something to believe in. Like, tell me what the next 10 years is going to look like. We can get behind that. Just don't, the surprise thing is getting old. And Google does that, for better and worse. It means they fall on their face sometimes, but I love it.

SPEAKER_184: I do like it, too. It's a great approach.

SPEAKER_32: Like, we're going to be open about it.

SPEAKER_27: They're doing exactly what I wish more media companies would do. Be bold. Be bold and fail hard.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, those glasses are going to fail hard. I think they released those things five years before they're ready. That would be like Steve Jobs coming out with the iPhone when the iPod came out.

SPEAKER_50: He'd be like... It could be like Microsoft doing tablets.

SPEAKER_202: Yeah. Five years before the iPad. That was true, man.

SPEAKER_203: I mean, it was Bill Gates who really said, this is the form factor.

SPEAKER_14: He was here at D in D number 1, 2, and 3 with tablets showing, well, Mossberg, that this was going to be the future.

SPEAKER_204: He's absolutely right.

SPEAKER_30: And he was right.

SPEAKER_204: I mean, he was criticized for it. He was absolutely right.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. All right, Matt. We could talk forever. Yes. I think I'm... What am I in? An hour, Brandis?

SPEAKER_206: Oh. 75 minutes? 120. Ooh. 120. 120 minutes? 120. Two hours?

SPEAKER_211: I hope someone makes it through this. One hour and 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_206: One hour and 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_30: I can release this one episode, I think.

SPEAKER_15: Took down $50 million in some financial transaction right as the Tumblr, right after the Tumblr jail happened.

SPEAKER_23: Was that a coincidence?

SPEAKER_216: It actually happened the same day. Pure coincidence.

SPEAKER_23: Pure coincidence. Yeah.

SPEAKER_218: But a similar evaluation. But a similar evaluation. Months before. Did you know that Tumblr, honestly, did you have wind of that, that Tumblr was going to get bought? That's a yes.

SPEAKER_224: I don't even need you to answer.

SPEAKER_171: You did. You knew that people were buzzing around.

SPEAKER_27: The transaction we announced was a $50 million secondary transaction. So not money going to the company. But some early investors and shareholders sold to this new investor, Tiger, which I'm actually very excited about. Yeah. You asked a question about timelines. One thing that extends your timeline is a newer investor providing return to an early investor. So everyone's happy.

SPEAKER_230: But a company like Tiger is investing for return. Sure. They believe this is going to grow.

SPEAKER_27: Well, also, I'm working on WordPress because I think it's going to be huge. Right. You work on things because-

SPEAKER_231: It is a huge map. You're saying huger.

SPEAKER_27: Huger. I mean, you work on things because you want them to have an impact. Right. That manifests itself in world impact. It manifests itself in, say, number of employees at the company, quality of the culture, revenue. Sure.

SPEAKER_50: And if you're an investor, the value of that, those shares they hold.

David Friedberg: The return. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: So they're investing at this billion-dollar valuation or something like that. They expect this to become a multi-billion-dollar company.

SPEAKER_27: I think that they think what I do, that this is kind of the first inning of it.

David Friedberg: Do you look at the decade as the first inning?

SPEAKER_27: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I feel like, well, the first five years, you've got to kind of discount, I mean- Yeah.

SPEAKER_57: You're just playing.

SPEAKER_27: There's a couple folks. It's really starting to hit a scale, which to me is very fun to work on. You know, it's 170 people at Automatic now. And that, I love that.

SPEAKER_236: Yeah, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_27: 20 of them we hired in the past two months. Holy cow. I mean, I still interview every person on the choice. I mean, just the things that we're building and the culture. A, I think we're showing people how companies can be built. That's a little bit different. Take on it. The distributed aspect, open source.

SPEAKER_45: You've been very big proponent of distributed workforce, where Marissa shut down the sort of what I would suspect is a dysfunctional mobile work from home force. You have a functional, high-functioning one.

SPEAKER_240: How do you make it high-functioning? Because that's all we are.

SPEAKER_32: I think that I completely understand her decision. If 99% of the company is here and 1% is someplace else and they might be slacking off, maybe it's

SPEAKER_27: good to say they have to go in. For us, 100% of the company, effectively, is on the internet and geographically dispersed. If they're slacking off, it's really, really obvious.

SPEAKER_32: I think it's actually probably... Is it?

SPEAKER_243: Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_32: Because you have good management. I would say that just work, all you see is work. I would worry more about an office where someone comes in and looks busy all day and dresses nicely and is friendly and everyone likes... And they're on Reddit, but you don't see any work product. Exactly.

SPEAKER_245: Then people are getting like, politics comes into play, all kinds of other things come into play, not the objects coming out of the machine.

SPEAKER_27: I think it's actually harder in a physical environment to know who's really kicking butt or not. Where online, really, all you're seeing is the output. You see the code. You see the communication, you see the code, effectively, for whatever job that is. And it removes a lot of... Because as humans, we're kind of programmed to process subconsciously a lot of things. How you look, whether you're there when I'm there or not. How you act, how you dress, all these sorts of things. You're focused, lovely.

SPEAKER_248: Yeah, like physically, you look like you're working.

SPEAKER_27: You can't help to take that into effect. So the only way you can really get beyond it is to not have it there at all.

SPEAKER_15: Matt Mullenweg, an hour and a half in. Continue success. We'll do this again, I guess, in another 300 episodes. So you'll just put this on your bank for 2016. And if the audience wants Matt to host a couple of episodes, what is your Twitter handle?

SPEAKER_252: At Photomat. At Photomat. So tweet us both. And if enough people do it.

SPEAKER_154: At Photomat, like, hey, why don't you guest host when Jason takes a vacation? I'm trying to take a vacation here. You can't step in for me for four episodes for a vacation. Oh, the heartstrings.

SPEAKER_256: What would it kill you?

SPEAKER_14: You have all these great contacts. You know everybody, everybody respects you. The people who wouldn't sit down and interview me, they would certainly sit with you. You're a good guy. There's people who hate me, who would never sit down for an interview.

SPEAKER_159: I'd be shocked that that's going on at this establishment.

SPEAKER_14: I think there's, like, probably a half dozen people who would rather sit with you than me for an interview. Zuckerberg. Well, maybe not after this interview.

SPEAKER_151: Zuckerberg.

SPEAKER_262: Sergey now. There's got to be people.

SPEAKER_102: I would love to do it. All right. That's it.

SPEAKER_151: I'm going to have the audience now. You need to start getting this week in Startups audience saying, hey, you should do a couple of things. Because you asked me five questions.

SPEAKER_15: We'll let the people. The people will decide. Yeah. If somebody wants to work at WordPress and change the world, what's the best way for them to apply?

SPEAKER_269: And what kind of people are you looking for?

SPEAKER_27: We've got a lot of people in this show. I think we have six, seven positions that are kind of permanently open. So growth engineers, mobile folks, engineers, designers, support folks. So pretty much whatever your skill is. Automatic.com. A-U-T-O-M-A-T-T-I-C.com. And it kind of spells out the company. Like how we work, what to expect, benefits, everything.

SPEAKER_276: But what type of people do you, like, go, that's the person I want on the team?

SPEAKER_184: Like the big glowing neon hire me goes off above their head.

SPEAKER_50: So it's interesting. I still review every incoming application. Okay. Good call.

SPEAKER_27: Well, actually, it's set for one or two positions. Like design position goes directly to a design. But I review them on. I forward them on to the people doing the hiring. And the things that make it stand out to me, surprisingly, are, well, quality of writing. I think it's just a proxy for quality of thought. So good writers are good thinkers. Also just people who put extra care into their application. It's kind of a do I care test almost. Like you're applying for a job. If you take it, it changes your life, right? Like a new career. Do you spend more than five minutes on it?

SPEAKER_282: Yeah, like a drive-by application.

SPEAKER_27: Do you spend five hours on it? Do you spend five days? Like you see people. And we turn down people and we say, you know, perhaps you need more open source experience or do some more. Well, people that come back a year or two later and say, hey, you know, I've been contributing to these open source projects. Here's my GitHub profile now.

SPEAKER_32: Here's the things I've done contributing to WordPress. I mean, those are all, those are the hire me banners.

SPEAKER_134: Got it. All right. So if you want to work at a great place for a great guy, automatic, Matt Mullig, you couldn't do better.

SPEAKER_45: Thank you again to Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg for allowing me to come to the All Things Thee conference and record these great interviews.

SPEAKER_15: It's been fantastic. What a great conference. If you get a chance to go, I highly recommend it. Although you're probably not going to get in because it's sold out every year and it's five times and you can't afford it anyway. This is what my audience, two thirds can't afford it. But when you get to the top third, I highly recommend you apply and get turned down for three years and then get invited in your fourth.

SPEAKER_286: I can't believe you just said that. That's so funny.

SPEAKER_15: But that's pretty much what happens.

SPEAKER_24: You're going to probably have to apply to come to All Things Thee three, four, five times, and then they'll allow you to pay $5,000.

SPEAKER_27: It makes you feel better. This is just my second year and they've been doing it for, what, 11 or 12. Are you speaking this year? No. Why are you not speaking? I've never been on stage either.

SPEAKER_234: Really?

SPEAKER_289: Good interview. Thank you. You're honest. You know what the problem is? Everybody's on, like Tim Cook, he doesn't say anything on stage.

SPEAKER_32: It's tough to, like when you're running an organization that large, when you're public.

SPEAKER_14: Steve Jobs, you know, he said stuff. He may not have said, like, here's a new product, but he would say, yeah, these people don't get it. This product sucks. Like, this is the way products should be made or this is what matters. You know, like, he would take on, like, an industry issue. Like, if you were talking about, like, 4G or 3G or whatever, bandwidth or pricing individual songs, versus albums, he would just go at it.

SPEAKER_32: You know my two favorite guys to watch? Who?

SPEAKER_27: And they've both been a D. Larry Ellison.

SPEAKER_245: Oh, he's great. He don't give a fuck.

SPEAKER_127: And Barry Diller.

SPEAKER_43: He don't give a fuck.

SPEAKER_297: That's why they're great to watch.

SPEAKER_43: See, here's my thesis on that. It's a very astute observation, Matt. There is a point in time when you become so successful that you don't care. Yeah.

SPEAKER_154: And there's some people who, they care, right? Like, they feel like, mm.

SPEAKER_30: And, like, Steve Jobs, he did not care. He's going to say what he's going to say. There's no PR person prepping him for when he goes on stage, right?

SPEAKER_154: The PR person is standing next to him, but they're not going to tell him what to say. Larry Ellison, Mark Cuban, Barry Diller. But Tim Cook? He's got to be on message a little bit, you know? DiCostla? Probably going to be on a little bit on message, you know? Like, okay, I've got to make sure I don't, you know.

SPEAKER_88: I actually, I think I'm the only person who loved Tim Cook's interview.

SPEAKER_56: What did you like about him? What did you like about him?

SPEAKER_88: I like him a lot.

SPEAKER_56: I like him a lot. I think he's brilliant. What do you like about him?

SPEAKER_191: Um, I think he says a lot between the lines. He, yeah, he, okay, that's astute.

SPEAKER_157: That's astute. What did he say? What did you take? What was your major takeaway between the lines?

SPEAKER_32: He talked about how they could develop apps for other platforms, which outside of iTunes, they've never done, and they have never done iTunes for Android.

SPEAKER_88: He talked about.

SPEAKER_23: They could develop apps for other platforms, which means? iTunes for Android. iPhoto for Android. FaceTime opening up.

SPEAKER_27: Cross-platform iCloud support.

David Friedberg: Would never have happened under Steve Jobs.

SPEAKER_27: I think that's, yeah, profoundly different. Uh, and he talked about services a ton. He actually, three times, he said the three things that matter to Apple.

SPEAKER_32: Hardware, software, services. I've never heard services emphasized like that. And to me, it was interesting because they were so bad at it. They're terrible. Terrible. Compared to Google, especially. Like, has iCloud? MobileMe didn't work.

SPEAKER_202: That was a three or four year disaster. Still going, yeah. It's still a disaster. So it's trademark. But then they do iCloud. That doesn't work.

SPEAKER_32: Well, it's just MobileMe rebranded. It still doesn't work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: They do some things that you don't, I think, appreciate that are amazing. Like, for example, iCloud backups of iDevices.

SPEAKER_304: Okay, that's true.

SPEAKER_154: I did have an iPhoto go out, and I turned it on in Lake Tahoe. And it took a while over the Wi-Fi.

SPEAKER_30: It took like 12 hours to reinstall 32 gigs or whatever. But it did it. And that was impressive. And you think every... The thing was burning up, though. It felt like it was on fire.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, how many... How many... They sold, let's say, 100 million iPhones past two years or whatever. We'll make up the number.

SPEAKER_307: And they've re-backed up, what, a third of them? I think all of them, because it's the defaults. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_32: If you're on Wi-Fi and you have an iCloud account, which you really need, it backs it up. That's amazing. I mean, and think how much data that is.

SPEAKER_56: It's a lot. You're right. It's a lot. Okay, so that is seamlessly work. But when you try to get other things, like the photos and the notes... Notes is really bad.

SPEAKER_27: That's why I like Simple Notes. So a lot of that, again, mediocre.

SPEAKER_184: Don't you think they should buy Evernote? Just get it done with?

SPEAKER_14: Do you think they'll become a buyer of the apps in the ecosystem, like Waze, Evernote, that kind of stuff? Dropbox, they tried to buy?

SPEAKER_43: I think they should, absolutely. Do you still have the balls to do it? Or, like, we didn't invent a culture?

SPEAKER_27: I can't speak to it, the culture. I do think that, you know, given the treasure chest, the war chest they have...

SPEAKER_32: $140 billion? They could make some very interesting moves, including, you know, overpaying for Dropbox, Waze... Dropbox, Waze... What would you do? Us. You're a Tim Cook. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_313: You know, just get, like, the five, six top services.

SPEAKER_45: That would be your favorite to get bought by, right? Getting bought by Apple feels like it would be the coolest thing an entrepreneur could do.

SPEAKER_27: Well, you know, they have a mixed history with acquisitions as well. That's true. I think that, you know, as an entrepreneur, joining another culture is a big decision. So, although I respect Apple a lot, I don't know if I'd be happy there.

SPEAKER_43: I kind of feel like WordPress is so large and unique. Like, it reminds me of other services that it's hard for another big company to buy. You're like software as a service.

SPEAKER_88: And that's what you try to do as a company. You try to get so big that even if you get bought, you're still kind of your own thing.

SPEAKER_321: Right. Skype.

SPEAKER_27: Skype, Instagram, YouTube. There's examples of this working. And it's often when the company has so much traction already that they can kind of just keep it going.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, so that's what, if Google bought you guys, it'd be like, okay, people could turn on ads if they wanted to on their control panel.

SPEAKER_15: They have that huge ad thing. Then they have the huge infrastructure. And it could be part of, like, they could just replace Google Sites. What do they call that? Like Google Apps Sites or whatever?

SPEAKER_134: Yeah, I mean. Or they could just add it. It's like, if you have a Google Apps account, you could get all your WordPress hosted as well.

SPEAKER_27: Again, those things also work. Like, I think actually a brilliant acquisition was Microsoft of Groove.

SPEAKER_327: Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: You know, because they didn't just buy it. They said, okay, Ray Ozzy, run a bunch of stuff.

SPEAKER_328: Ray Ozzy, brilliant. Lotus Notes, Groove.

SPEAKER_27: Amazing.

SPEAKER_329: That guy's underappreciated. I gotta, hey, take a memo, Brandis. I need to get Ray Ozzy on the program.

SPEAKER_61: Sanoski as well, who's here.

SPEAKER_27: Steven Sanoski, who ran, you should get him as well, ran Office and Windows. Yeah. Those guys have some stories. But anyway, the, you know, don't just buy Dropbox. Buy Dropbox and put Drew in charge of all services for Apple or something.

SPEAKER_331: Can you imagine? He turned him down. Drew turned down Steve Jobs.

SPEAKER_332: Nah, I think.

SPEAKER_56: Personally, could you sit there and Steve Jobs tries to tell you to sell, and you think you could withstand the power of Steve Jobs?

SPEAKER_340: I don't know.

SPEAKER_56: What do you think your chances are? 50-50?

SPEAKER_344: See, you answer questions. This is why you're a great interviewer. They gotta get you on the stage at D. It's because you'll actually answer a question. You'll be like, hmm, I think there's a 50% chance he would convince me. You met Steve Jobs?

SPEAKER_27: Never met him. Never met Steve. Met lots of people who've spent a lot of time with him. So I've gotten some amazing stories.

SPEAKER_349: Who do you respect most?

SPEAKER_27: Bezos? Bezos is incredible. I have gotten to meet him a few times.

SPEAKER_349: Yeah. He's the best. Why is he the best?

SPEAKER_27: Long term.

SPEAKER_349: That guy's long.

SPEAKER_50: He is long. People guys are doing that, too.

SPEAKER_351: I respect Larry and Sergey, man. They're just going long. Their moonshot stuff is cray. It's just cray. Good.

SPEAKER_289: Like Google Fiber, four cities now? Yeah. That's going to 40 cities.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: You want it, right?

SPEAKER_32: Oh, yeah. I would die for that.

SPEAKER_27: And even if they don't do it to every city, it's going to force AT&T and Comcast and everyone to up there.

SPEAKER_185: That is like them dropping nuclear bombs. Not nuclear bombs.

SPEAKER_14: That's like them dropping nuclear bombs, like with a parachute with no nuclear warhead in it. Just like Charlotte.

SPEAKER_354: Oh, yeah. See that thing going down there and dropping in the ocean?

SPEAKER_151: That's a Google nuclear bomb. Yes. That could have had a bomb in it, and I could take the parachute off Verizon. And they did it in Austin and these other four cities.

SPEAKER_165: Austin was interesting.

SPEAKER_159: I mean, that's a big market. That's a statement, too. It's not Kansas City or Provo. It's like, it's Austin.

SPEAKER_344: And?

SPEAKER_159: South by Southwest.

SPEAKER_344: It's a statement for South. I guarantee you, next year at South by Southwest, that place is fiber central.

SPEAKER_88: And the Wi-Fi will work the whole time. It'll be amazing.

SPEAKER_24: I think that their move is they're going to just, if you want Google Fiber for free, just put up a Wi-Fi router that any Google user can authenticate with any Google account. That'd be cool. Fawn did that. Remember Fawn? They invested in Fawn. See, you know the space. See, that's, you're a smart guy. This way you could actually host a show. You could host a show. I'll take that as a compliment.

SPEAKER_30: You could host this week in Startups because you would know the Fawn reference. Fawn is a company that lets you share your Wi-Fi from Spain and Google invested in it. It's never went anywhere.

SPEAKER_362: Marjan Varsovsky.

SPEAKER_15: Marjan Varsovsky was here. He's a smart guy, too. Oh, cool. No. He was an investor in the company I interviewed recently. Simple. Anyway. Matt Mullenweg, hour and 40 minutes of the program.

SPEAKER_154: Now we should be done. If this is not really at an hour and 40, you really should. I'm going to make an executive decision here. I want it to be a two-part episode. But the advertisers get both ads for free because it's going to be a big five. So the advertisers get double the ads. Just put the ads twice in or something if you can, Brandis.

SPEAKER_30: And I want it to be a double episode. The Matt Mullenweg double episode. But we don't have to charge the advertisers twice. All right, Matt Mullenweg. You rocked it. Great job, brother. Thank you. That could be – you could be like my Joan Rivers.

SPEAKER_151: You could be like my Joan Rivers to my Johnny Carson.

SPEAKER_204: When I grew up.

SPEAKER_154: You know that Joan Rivers would sit in for him when he was like take to his two-week vacation. Joan Rivers would –

SPEAKER_204: I never saw it. Guest host.

SPEAKER_154: You can look it up on YouTube. I know the reference. We'll see you next time on This Week of Startups.

SPEAKER_370: We'll see you next time on This Week of Startups.