YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Mullenweg

lines on the record: 196
first: 2023-12-29
most recent: 2023-12-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So that's. I think that's nice. So I would say, I think actually I find writing, although it can be unfun at the time, so rewarding afterwards. Type 2 fun.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the very least, this is Which is nice. I love psychoanalyzing Tim. It's one of my pastimes That is a good question. And I think how you laid out how the market changes and becomes crowded is very, very true. So the thoughts that come to mind is first, also just as your friend, like I would love to see you focus on things where it's not just outcome based. Because as you talked about this, you're like, what about the traffic? What about the, you know, those are more outcomes? So where are there things? And I think actually podcasting is true for this, where the journey itself is very rewarding for you. If no one listened to this, this was still a fun afternoon. Absolutely.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He has one on speed. He just published what I consider his magnum opus, apparently worked on it for like a year. I think it's called How to Do Great Work or something like that. That one's really good. That could be a book. It's interesting that there is authors now blogging, essentially, publishing these essays like slate star codex, Scott Alexander, Shane Parrish, a knowledge project. Like there's these writers now that really drive a lot of folks. Your WordPress blog kind of started that genre in a lot of ways, like the longer form, like super essays.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“said Arthur. Just an interesting story of enlightenment and journey. And it's actually my Twitter bio, is I can think I can wait, I can fast.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I appreciated that for someone who I've been so obsessed with for many years, when he passed, I actually had a feeling of wow what a life well lived and so appreciative how much he's published over the years. So even though he hadn't done a lot of these podcasts or modern stuff, he has been doing the meetings and speeches and other things for decades now. So you don't always have to meet your mentors. I think you talk about that as well. Sometimes it's really great to just have the book or the speech or something like that. And it can really live with you. You can grow up with it. You can reread it over the years. Like rereading Siddhartha. I know you have some things that you read. Zorba, the Greek?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do reach out sometimes, which is always nice, but yeah, I guess fundamentally, it's usually just driven by me as a user. Like I'm always trying out new products. Friends recommend it. My colleagues actually, of the people we employ, they tend to be like very early adopters and very digitally savvy. I mean, that's why we launched Bitcoin in 2012 when it was $12. I wish I could say that that was me being brilliant. No, it was one of my colleagues. It was like, oh, this thing's so cool. We can add support. And I think he hacked it over a weekend. And so, all right, cool.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The messaging apps are tops. I think Instagram was pretty good sized with like 13 or 14 when they sold Telegrams actually pretty amazing today. Signal is pretty small team. Not sure the size of the WhatsApp team now, but they were very, very small when they were quirking. It's actually pretty incredible because messaging does not really any user support. It's all a self-serve, you know, they don't really. And so that those businesses can scale quite a bit with very few people. And it also attracts like really amazing engineer. Like the tech team is like incredible. And so their aspiration is to remain like a sub 20, sub 30 team even as they grow to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More and more of this is happening. Also, there's a fun trend where sometimes people who did proprietary companies and then made a ton of money off them. What they do next is often open source. So Jack Dorsey made a ton of money off Twitter, Square. One, he's taken square to a more of a crypto direction. He wants to enable that. And two, what's he funding? Something called Noster and Blue Sky, which are two competing open source Twitters, which is really cool. Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp. What's he doing today? He's running Signal, which is an open source nonprofit messaging app, which is amazing signal very philosophically aligned. Wikipedia, Mozilla, there's a lot out there, both for profit and nonprofit.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one does a lot more open source companies now. GitLab is a really great one led by Sid. They're actually even more open than we are. They publish like everything. And they're a public company now, you know, like $9 or $10 billion. So that's pretty cool to have those examples. I think Elements, which is built on the Matrix ecosystem, open source messaging. Actually, the competitor detects Beaper. Really awesome company. I think philosophically very aligned. So what's cool?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not built on top of WordPress, and it's not part of our publishing kind of thing. But I do believe it is sort of fundamental human right to have private and hopefully in the future open source messaging. And so that's, again, I only want to work on things. I feel like I can work on potentially the rest of my life. So publishing commerce and messaging, that covers a lot of human activity And if you have those things truly free, I think you have a free society And that's also exciting to me because how do we help bend the long arc towards more freedom or liberty across the world? And technology does that better than I think any sort of diplomacy or anything else that at least I could work on.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is why people usually call it a journal. But when you think about it, like a notes app. Like the notes app. Typically things are undated. The metadata associated with them is somewhat loose, often the list is ordered by most recently modified. So that's kind of a UI. In a blog, it's reverse chronological. We have a lot of metadata associated. So day one attaches a date, location. We can store the weather when you post it, like all these different things that kind of make it a bit richer. When it's local, we usually call it a journal, just because that's the concept. Apple just launched a built-in journaling app. I call it a blog because it fundamentally, if you kind of look at those principles, it's got all the same ingredients as you post a blog, reverse chronological. Now, why do I really like it? I prefer dated entries because I'm usually taking notes each day, kind of like Benjamin Franklin. You know, he would kind of log everything he does every day. I do that as well. I love the search. I love tagging. I love all those kind of like metadata things help me find stuff. And you can also interlink the notes, which is actually pretty cool.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's some coordination cost there. It's nice to have people employed full-time by a company because then you kind of don't need to rehire them every time. They're not going to be like poached by someone else or maybe you have a gap in the gig and they just take another gig, that sort of thing. So I feel like for us, the common platform of open source, particularly WordPress, allows us to plug things in and do acquisitions in a way that is more set up for success. So we have a set of products that run directly on WordPress or get distribution from WordPress and Tumblr. So that's kind of, I would say, our core area. There are some which are I would call philosophically adjacent. So it's the same philosophy. Day one is a great example. Day one doesn't share any technology, Tumblr or WordPress, but it's a fully encrypted local journaling app, and journaling is another word for blogging. So you can use it like I do as a local blog.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every single company, or Division and Google was incentivized by how much adoption Google Plus got. They really tried to push it into everything. A lot of coordination cost, maybe not as responsive to users. That was ultimately unsuccessful push. Google's another example. All the mesh chain platforms they have. You need text just to work with the five messaging platforms at Google. There's examples like that where you get duplication, you get different incentives of executives. Maybe they're more rewarded for launching new things versus integrating things. Those are coordination costs. And, you know, this comes up in economics terms where like, why shouldn't everyone just be a freelancer?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One criticism of Salesforce or Cisco or even Google sometimes their own products don't integrate with each other as well. Sometimes even external things do. So even with the best acquisitions, and most acquisitions fail, by the way, even when you do a really good one, like maybe say YouTube, sometimes the integrations aren't as strong. Or maybe remember when YouTube tried to do the Google Plus thing?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build on proprietary platforms. They can pull the rug and will pull the rug at any point. So in open source, when the rug can't be pulled, two, typically they're ultra-pluggable. So you can really change every line of WordPress.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In proprietary software, if you want to integrate with something, like if I wanted to add A new feature to macOS or something like that. I can't do that. Now they have APIs, they have operating systems, smart companies like Slack or Shopify will create marketplaces that you can extend them. However, you're subject to their terms, so they can change their mind. Remember, Twitter used to have all this clients. Facebook did too. They were like, oh, we don't want this anymore. You're all kicked off.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what we do with the digital version of that is we lower coordination costs between the different products by open source. So like for WooCommerce to build on top of WordPress, it doesn't need a meeting. Need to talk, doesn't even know the people developing WordPress, this open API is open source, there's a plugin framework, et cetera. So that removes a lot of the coordination costs that you normally get in a multi-division company.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there would be a lot of coordination cost, and they try to optimize for giving the companies under them as much autonomy as possible. They find great leaders, and they also try to find great businesses. I think Warren Buffett said something like we try to find a business a monkey could run because someday they will or something like that, you know? Like what business is so good, it would survive even badly leadership.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“99 years old. Warren Buffett, I don't know exactly, I think up there as well. So I try to think, you know, if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Hackers in the 30s or 40s today, what would they build versus what they built in their time with the opportunities and technology afforded? So I like to think they do some open source because it's obviously the future. So for Adams companies, Adams versus Bits and in their industries they're in,”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Berkshire navigates beautifully in highly regulated industries, including insurance, railways. Yeah, how I think about it. So I like to study these people. I know you love doing that too. Study high performers. That's your thing. I do that sometimes, yeah. Occasionally do that. But also, I mean, Charlie Munger, rest in peace.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have the people on your side, I feel like that's what truly matters in long term. And people are what short-term, you know, lobbying, et cetera, but like long term in the US, functioning democracy, politics is accountable to its people.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it doesn't take a lot of friction for people to move away, especially in messaging. So the regulatory framework, both with the EU, doing a lot of. Sometimes misguided, but also sometimes really smart. They have an act coming in called the DMA that requires some interop between messaging services. We'll talk about USB-C, which I'm very excited about. Thank you, EU, for forcing Apple to finally... Drop lightning and give us USB-C. And then in the US, I think there is, bipartisan, this I actually don't agree with, but it is a reality, like some extra scrutiny on big tech. And so I think it's actually good for them. Again, what are their incentives I think it's actually really good for them to show that they're open right now. So again, I don't want to fight these folks. They've got more money than most countries.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet happened last week there was another one called Beaper that supported iMessage and Apple decided to just shut it down. They broke it all, and people that actually charge its users. They had to refund everyone. There's also more subtle things they could do. Like they could just subtly degrade. If they make it so your messages don't go through 5% of the time, it's not blocking you. But you're going to stop using it”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot about environment and incentives. So, you know, the reason there used to be these multi-messaging apps 15 years ago, and they all stopped working was the networks all blocked them. And there is a political environment now, which I think is more conducive to being more customer and user-centric. This is our data, right? This is our messages. It's all secure. It's not breaking security or anything. So why shouldn't we be able to run this?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think about it for a long time. So we've been thinking about messaging and actually making investments in the space for four or five years?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're going to explore some different pricing as well, maybe making it free for one or two networks, paid for more. That's some very exciting stuff there.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go on desktop and it's a paid product right now, $15 a month, five bucks a month if you're a student, or pretend to be a student. But we're also going to explore some different things. Mobile app is coming out next year in the early part.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's all ultra secure. So it doesn't break any encryption or run anything in the cloud. It's all on your device, which is, I think, very, very important. Like engineers, you have like a code of ethics. I think we need to build things Extra secure now and brings them all together. It's really nice. I often acquire apps or invest in things to make up for my own deficiencies. So like investing calm in like 2012 or whatever it was because I felt like I need to meditate. So I was so behind on messages. I'm like, okay, we got to buy this company and make it available.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mentioned messaging. So, if you look at automatics history, it was like 2005 logging, CMS, 2016, commerce, blue commerce. It's grown to over $30 billion of sales or GMV. And we entered our third major area this year, which was messaging. So we acquire this company called Text. You might remember these sorts of programs, but we all have 20 different messaging apps. Text currently takes 10 of them. It will take more in the future. So Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, Twitter DMs, all these sorts of things, some of which have terrible interfaces. It brings them into one Power User app. Right now, desktop”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's. It really adds up, but it does take more of a toll than it used to, I gotta be totally honest. There were years I did well over four hundred thousand miles, and looking back I was like I don't know if maybe I still have some of the energy or maybe I'm getting more radiation in the plane. I don't know maybe I'm just getting older.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then for WordPress, there's like three major work camps per year that have thousands of people. There's all these different, just a state of the word in Madrid. So you just take those. You're traveling a week out of the month already. And then you got adding some fun.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, currently. So why do I go into it? Well, it's a global community. So one of a global company and a global community. So our hack for automatic, because we're apart most of the year, is the teams get together a couple times a year. So if you're an individual contributor, you might travel two or three times a year. But as CEO, this means that every week there's like a couple of meetups happening. And I try to hit the bigger ones, sometimes the small ones too, but mostly the really big ones where there's a couple hundred people there. But that's happening at least once a month.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I talk to the executive at Salesforce. I was really impressed. They were saying they spend 50% of their time with customers. This was a top executive running an organization of thousands of people. Like, wow, that's inspiring to me. I'm probably 25 or 30 percent right now. So it really made me think am I spinning enough time customers and also like we might have some executives that were spending closer to 0%. So like how do we make this like a cultural thing throughout the company?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter the job you're hired for it automatic, you start with two weeks of sport, and then every single person rotates back in one week per year. And I'm running out of year. So I'm actually squeezing my nin at the very end here. So if you go to wordpress.com support in the next two weeks, you might get me.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably does, but I'm a big believer in especially executives going and doing the work themselves. Engaging with the customers, doing customer support, trying out the product, building a website, whatever it is that your thing is. I think that's so key.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One to experience the hiring process Is difficult for me to debug except by secondhand accounts to see if I, you know, how my code still is”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing I have considered is secret shopping, like seeing if I could get hired by my own company under a fake identity.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know so many on the spectrum engineers that would totally do that. It's like a beautiful hat, right? For like, oh, I just got to get this fixed. They won't. There's actually companies I would do that.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because it actually belongs to people. So sometimes people come in and just fix one bug that's annoying them. Or sometimes you have the pride of knowing that Koji wrote is running on a third of all websites in the world, which is actually like a real thrill as an engineer, developer. And that's just a lot of fun.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On my literary references. Yeah, but you know, we should both know that. Wow, I'm embarrassed for both of us. Tom Sawyer, and it'll be the first thing in the comments.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It used to be really bad. Ricardo Encyclopedia of Britannica were way better. But then over time, lots of people working together made it better and better. And why did they work on it? For free, for fun. And also because it belongs to them. So WordPress has many thousands, maybe tens of thousands of contributors at this point. Why do they do that? Is it Tom Sawyer painting the fence or is it the other guy?”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes you're not even allowed to look at the thing and see how it works. There's a whole right to repair movement right now where you can buy things that you're not even allowed to repair yourself. Open source is the opposite. It's all about almost like a bill of rights for you as a user. WordPress belongs just as much to Tim Ferris as it does to me, which is kind of amazing. There's rights and freedoms you have to use it for any purpose, to modify it, to see how it works, all these sorts of things that no one can take away from you. Even myself as a co-founder, or even if all the other developers got together, we all agreed to become evil. We couldn't take it away from you. It's that Bill of Wrights, those inalienable rights is the core of open source. And there's lots of examples. So Wikipedia is open source applied to an encyclopedia.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Normally when you sign up for software, you click through that license that no one ever reads. Ours actually has Easter eggs in it just to see if anyone will find them. But yeah, most of those licenses are about all the rights you don't have.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's because the open source freedom and liberty somewhat abstract so there could be lots of things under that. I just mentioned probably too many things. Some people call me very unfocused. But deal with that too. We talked about it on the last podcast around like teaching, learning, education, like lifelong, that's the rest of your life. And so I think if you can find those principles, you can keep them. And then the job might change, other things might change. I'm lucky to. In 97 countries. We were fully remote and distributed since 2005. So we've been kind of early on a few of those trends, open source, distributed, et cetera.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's like any egotistical founder. I snuck my name into the company. And we started with just sort of a kismet anti-spam and wordpress.com, kind of easy ways to get going with WordPress. But since have expanded to e-commerce with WooCommerce, one I'll talk about with messaging. We've done a number over like 25 acquisitions. So we're trying to be like a digital Berkshire pathway, like a buyer of first resort for amazing things on the internet. Pretty much everything we do is open source or open web. So we bought Tumblr. Someone running Tumblr for the last few years, basically trying to, yeah, I would like future generations to grow up with a web that is more open, more free, gives more liberty. And so open source is really my life's work, even above WordPress and anything else. And yeah, I hope to work on it the rest of my life.”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Matt Mullenwick, domain MA. Just brief funds.ma.tt sometimes. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, a few hours from here in Austin. And at the age of 19, I co-founded open source software called WordPress. Which is a blogging content management system fast forward twenty years, it's been twenty years now, and runs over a third of all websites in the world. A few years after that, I founded a company called Automatic, which is kind of like the for-profit side of commercializing things around WordPress”
2023-12-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #713: Matt Mullenweg — The Art of Crafting a Sabbatical, Tips for Defending Against Hackers, Leveraging Open Source, Thriving in an AI World, and Tips for Life’s Darkest Hours · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT