Sep
5
35

Automattic, Forbes, and the Future of Work

Filed under: press

There’s a great article in Forbes today that covers some of the early days of WordPress through Automattic as a business today. I recommend everyone check it out! I wanted to respond to one bit about Automattic’s global nature though, which is actually timely because next week the entirety of Automattic is going to San Diego:

As a legacy of its open-source roots its 120 employees are spread across 26 countries and six continents. Although most work alone at home, each team–usually made up of five or six people–has a generous budget to travel. “All of the money we save on office space, we blow on travel costs,” Mullenweg laughs. Groups have gathered in Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand. Once a year everyone meets for a week at an accessible destination with a solid Internet connection. A distributed workforce means Automattic can hire talent from around the world–without having to offer the perks and pay of Google, Facebook and Apple.

I’d like to counter the last sentence, which implies this is something we do as a cost saving scheme: being distributed is not a legacy, it’s a conscious choice. The people at Automattic are truly world-class — I invest in and advise a number of startups, and spending time in New York and the San Francisco Bay area I would put the caliber of people inside of Automattic on par or higher than anyone I’ve met from Google, Facebook, Apple, or any of the traditional tech giants.

How do we do it? Automattic offers a benefit above and beyond what they ever could: We give people the perk and the luxury of being part of an internet-changing company from anywhere in the world. This mirrors the meritocracy that makes Open Source great and treats people on the quality of their ideas and their work whether they’re in San Francisco or Argentina. (Or if they started in San Francisco and moved to Argentina.)

Even when big companies try to adopt this (sometimes under the lovely moniker “telecommute,” which reminds me of “horseless carriage”) people still face cultural resistance from their managers and teams, or find themselves as a second-tier citizen versus those in headquarters. The same often happens in “remote offices.” For it to really work it has to be part of the DNA of the company from day one. You have to be really committed to keep the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.

I really believe this is the future of work, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Aug
6
30

State of the Word 2012

Filed under: Events

Tags: ,

I had an amazing weekend at WordCamp San Francisco hanging out with hundreds of WordPress users from all over the world at the main event and the dev day afterward. Then on Sunday I was humbled to be featured on the cover of my hometown paper the Houston Chronicle in an article David Kaplan wrote following the 10-year high school reunion I went to (PDF).

If you wanted to catch up on the State of the Word address I gave on Saturday, the video and the slides are now online, or you can watch it embedded below. The slides are on Slideshare.

It was a pleasure meeting so many of you, and I hope it’s not next year before we meet again. Thank you to Michael Pick and Pete Davies for helping me out under tight timelines again.

Jul
30
86

I’m putting together the State of the Word address for the upcoming WordCamp San Francicso, and one thing I like to do every year is highlight some cool WordPress-powered sites, especially ones that show off the power of the platform. I have a few in mind already, but are there any WP sites you’ve seen recently that really blew your mind? Leave links in the comments.   ∞

2

Grid-based design sure is getting popular these days: First map of the human brain reveals a simple, grid-like structure between neurons. Hat tip: Jeff Bowen.   ∞

Jul
27
16

Watching the Olympics parade thing out the corner of my eye, had never heard of Kiribati and found this snippet from their Wikipedia page interesting:

As sea levels continue to rise, the government of Kiribati is negotiating a deal with Fiji to evacuate the entire population to areas of Fiji that the Kiribati government would buy. The area of Fiji proposed for resettlement is the second largest Fijian island of Vanua Levu. The mass migration is expected to include younger, skilled workers first, and then the rest of the population would follow over a period of years.

That’s something you don’t hear every day.   ∞

Jul
21
2
MCM_1332

HSPVA 02 Reunion

This was actually the second night of the reunion, starting at the Archway Gallery, moving to Khon’s, then ending at Whataburger. Was great catching up with so many talented old friends.

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Jul
20
15

From when you leave the gate to takeoff, your phones (and iPads and Kindles) must be off, but when you land you can use your phone before you get to the gate.   ∞

Jul
19
1

Bat-Signal Heralds Launch of Internet Defense League. Proud to be a supporter.   ∞

7

Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”   ∞