All right, today's episode is special.
We've got Matt Mullenweg.
Matt founded a company called WordPress, which is used by something like 45 % of all websites on the internet.
So it's just huge thing.
And we talked to Matt about a bunch of interesting things.
Sean, what did we talk to him about?
He had an offer to sell his company for $200 million when he was 24 years old.
He turned it down. We asked him what that was like.
We talked to him about some of the recent drama that they've had.
We talked about how they've been acquiring companies.
They bought the small company in South Africa and how it turned out to be a huge thing for their business, like a billion -dollar -plus win.
And he's just a student of the game.
He's been doing it for 20 years.
This guy started this company when he was 19 years old, and is still doing it, and it's become this absolute juggernaut.
So enjoy this episode with Matt Mullingway.
Let's travel never looking back.
Tell me if this is right, because this sounded almost too good to be true.
But I'd read that in 2008, you had an acquisition offer.
I think you were only 24 years old for $200 million.
At that point, I think you'd only raised a million dollars.
And I think you raised a million dollars at 3 million in valuation, something like relatively, you're 24, you're going to be worth nine figures, something crazy like that.
You turn it down. But then you talk about how you didn't have control of the company because you were young and maybe just like made some mistakes with funding, something like that.
What's the conversation like with yourself when you're like, I'm turning down something that might make me worth over a hundred million dollars at the age of 24.
You talked about your name, The First Million.
It's kind of funny, like, I guess technically on paper my first million was that first funding round right in theory I owned like half the company that was now worth four million dollars but as you know like that's paper money I was still you know eating ramen and and Mountain Dew and Beats like living
you know a very broke San Francisco college kid's life but it was in 2008 that we had this acquisition offer and you're right it was about two and a half years in this company someone tried to buy us for 200 million and the investors at the time, did something which now is quite common, but at the time
was pretty forward looking, which is a secondary.
So they said, wow, we're 20 people.
We've been doing this for two and a half years.
A $200 million exit would be pretty amazing.
Like I said, I would walk away personally with a lot of money, but we think this could be actually way bigger.
So let's build that.
And so we took that acquisition, made it a valuation, turned that into a funding round people we put a lot more capital into the company so we could, you know, really build things out.
And I sold some stock myself.
So I, that was my first, that was my first million liquid was kind of in 2008.
I think I was 24. And that was a step change, you know, I was able to like pay off my credit cards and buy my, my house and like, you know, all that sort of stuff that you want to do that you dream up.
And it sort of removed some of those sort of early economic things.
And I was really able to focus on just the business and swinging for the fences, which is what they wanted me to do.
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You know, I hear these stories like suck turns down a billion dollars from Yahoo or whatever.
This story about you at such a young age, turning down the opportunity to exit and have this huge payday.
I think you're a better man than me.
I don't think I would have been able to resist that.
Was that an easy decision for you?
Was that a hard decision?
Like what? And like, you're like, Like, I think this could be bigger.
Let's go for it. Is that just like, not blind faith, but just like an extreme amount of self -confidence and faith?
Like, how do you even?
Or did you even want to do it?
And the investors were like, nah, too bad.
No, it wasn't an easy decision at all.
Of course, you have to really seriously consider these things.
Also, as a fiduciary, you know, like you have a responsibility to your shareholders, consider every acquisition.
And we've had other acquisition offers and people trying to buy automatic.
And as recently as this year, I think you have to ask yourself with any acquisition, like will the mission that we're doing be accelerated by this transaction or will it be ampered?
It's like we acquire a lot of companies or will it be ampered?
It's like we acquire a lot of companies like WooCommerce, I think did a lot better because we acquired it than they would have on their own.
But there's probably other things that we try to buy that that we didn't buy that did really well on their own.
Reddit was one actually.
We looked at Reddit at one point.
Did you look at them in their Conte Ness $10 million valuation days?
I actually really wanted to buy Reddit.
I couldn't convince my board.
They thought it was like too outside of our early stuff.
So we never got that far in the discussions or anything.
But yeah, there was a point when they were like for employees and for sale and kind of in the wired offices on Third Street in San Francisco.
I just thought it was really cool.
So obviously they took it very well.
But when you created WordPress, it seemed like it took off.
within a year. I forget which year you started it, but like I said earlier, I think I was using it starting in like 10 or 11, 2010, 2011, like pretty early on.
And I at the time was like a Tennessee college kid.
So if I had heard about it, then a lot of people had heard about it.
What was the first version of WordPress like?
2003. Oh, wow. Okay.
I wrote a blog post on this called like meaningful overnight success or because basically like what people see as overnight success is often a thousand days of irrelevance or people haven't heard of you you know at one point there was a joke that wordpress had more developers than users the first few
blogs were just ones i set up for my friends in high school you know because no one was using software so i just kind of like would manually set it up for people you know early we used to do these upgrade parties where just i'd say like you know a new version of WordPress would come out.
I just opened up my apartment, you know, go to Costco, bought some booze, ordered some pizza and said, hey, just come to my apartment and I'll upgrade your site for you.
So, you know, really, you know, the early days were very much bootstrapped, you know, just doing everything.
It looks like overnight success later.
We had some breakout points, you know, when Google type change or license and other things.
I think fortune favors the prepared.
It was because we had put in a lot of grind and a lot of work, a lot of community building a lot of contributions, a lot of code, a lot of everything in the many, many days before that.
But what's crazy to me is I remember like four, six years ago, it said that WordPress was used by something like 30 or 20 % of all the websites on the internet.
Then recently, I went and looked at it.
Now it's like 40%. And like the thing that struck me, I was like, are you the most under monetized business on earth?
How are you not like the biggest company on earth?
Because I used WordPress and I used WooCommerce, which you also own at my old company.
My WooCurrent Commerce license, Sean, I think it was a $300 lifetime or $300 a year.
And the product that I was using it was making many millions of dollars.
And I've got a friend, Sean, you and I both have a friend who made $100 million off of the $300 a year license or whatever it was.
It was like nothing.
You guys have to be like the least monetized company there is.
I think the way I put it is WordPress is almost like kind of the dark matter of the web.
When you build a list of what's the top website, we're not going to show up.
WordPress .com will be in the top 100 or whatever.
The beauty of it is that the ecosystem of WordPress is probably like $10 billion a year, at least, of revenue.
Now, my company, Automatic, is 5 % of that.
But if you add up all the companies and all the people, I'm not even counting all the stuff that you talked about, like people selling things on WooCommerce, which we know I think last year was over 30 billion of goods and services sold through WooCommerce.
But actually more than half of automatic spreader comes from things that aren't just WordPress.
So we have a variety of different businesses, some really cool mobile apps like DayOne or Pocketcast, a new one called Beeper.
What were like the top two acquisitions, right?
Like even Buffett, for example, if you study Buffett's portfolio, it's like a huge amount of the gains came from like a couple of like really key acquisitions at key time.
Seized Candy at a specific time has given them over a billion dollars, I think, of free cash flow over the years.
What's the revenue number that you could say the whole company does?
We've publicly saved we're over half a billion in revenue now.
Okay, got it. All right.
So, yeah, to answer the challenge question, what's been the surprising thing?
What are the crown jewel best acquisitions that you feel proud of?
Our most successful is probably WooCars.
And so this came a lot from WordPress as a platform.
And so I did a lot of study of platforms.
And so that led me to do a lot of deep reading on Microsoft, actually.
And it was funny, like if you look at some of the press around Windows 95 coming out, they talked about how for every dollar, that dollar is made by the Windows ecosystem.
By the way, that ratio is similar to what I talked about earlier, where Automattic makes about 5 % of the money in the WordPress ecosystem.
I sort of found that platforms often do this.
They create a lot more value, a true platform.
Have you heard that story of Bill Gates talking about when he meets Mark Zuckerberg, he talks about the Facebook platform?
Have you heard this?
There's a quote I remember reading, which was Gates was like, this is not a platform.
A platform is when the companies built on top of it generate far more value than the host platform.
Whereas the Facebook platform at the time was like Facebook was this gargantuan thing, all the small things on top, and Facebook was just sucking a lot of the value back in.
And he kind of famously was like, that's not what a platform is.
I would agree with that assessment.
And also, that's not a platform which now a lot of businesses are built on.
And there were some that sort of came up in the early days like Zinc or whatever, or Spotify even.
But it's now not something that like every business is built on because you can get rug pulled.
Like a not true platform, they might give you some distribution early on when you align with their interests, but then they can easily pull the rug on you, which I think Facebook ended up doing to a number of companies.
So, yeah, I wanted to build a true platform.
But, of course, Microsoft famously had Microsoft Office.
So they had an application built on top of Windows, which ended up being very lucrative.
So it was like, what's going to be, you know, I have this platform WordPress, which is now becoming like an operating system for the web.
We were obsessed about backwards compatibility and auto updates and things like that, learning a lot from successful operating systems in the past.
What's our Microsoft Office?
And that ended up being WooCommerce, which was a sort of small company, like I think 40 people based out of South Africa, a plugin for WordPress.
It actually started as a theme company.
It's called WooThemes.
They developed this, actually a fork of another open source e -commerce thing.
And they started doing it just to sell more themes because themes were kind of the big business for WordPress at the time.
And this e -commerce plugin took off a bit.
Actually, we looked at buying it years prior.
You know, candidly, the code was really crappy.
And so we were like, oh, this is like really crappy code.
So we're, you know, Automatt is very much like an engineering led, like, technology R &D company.
So we're like, oh, this is, but it just kept taking off because they did such a good job, like, building something people want.
So even though the code wasn't scalable, well organized, you know, they built something, they were really great at that product market fit.
So WooCommerce was taking off.
So that was an early acquisition that we did.
Funnily enough, the competitor there was, there was some private equity that was trying to buy this plugin.
So we kind of won over the private equity because they wanted to join like our culture and everything like that.
And we, you know, like I said, at the time, it was 40 people, pretty small.
They only had like four engineers, by the way.
So a lot of those people were like customer support or other things.
We were able to take what we were really great at, which is like engineering, scalability, all that sort of stuff, and apply it to what they had done really brilliantly, which is like great, this thing that people love to use.
And that's, like I said, I think last year it did over $30 billion of goods and services sold.
So that's definitely one of our best acquisitions that we've done.
But I will say that e -commerce is an incredibly competitive space.
And we're blessed to have an incredible competitor at Shopify, which is a company I have a ton of respect for.
You know, the founders and entrepreneurs and the whole thing.
They're actually a really, really great company.
You know, Toby and I, I think, have a lot of mutual respect for each other.
You know, drive each other to be better.
so do you look at that this is again like we're kind of giving you a compliment and an insult at the same time so the backhanded compliment is in full effect here so on one hand we're saying oh my god there's 43 percent of the internet uses wordpress or you know y 'all's products there's 500 million websites
using wordpress like that is just such a mind -boggling number and so on one hand that's in absolutely incredible and on the other hand sam was saying are you the most like under monetized given that are you the most under monetized because you look at like a shopify shopify alone right now market cap
is 150 billion the ruthless capitalist could say matt you're doing all this work your whole company including woocommerce and all this stuff is going to be worth several billion dollars but the closed source shopify all like variant of of of the of the e -commerce side is worth 150 billion what should i
take away from that and what do you what do you take away from that?
What's what meaning do you put on that?
There's definitely some things that are easier in a proprietary sort of closed ecosystem software model.
You know, it's easier to, you know, Shopify is really great at forcing people to use their payments, for example.
And in WooCommerce, you know, you can use ours, but you can also use a lot of other stuff.
I think there are sort of average revenue per subscribers is like 10x what what WooCommerce is.
How I think about it is very much sort of short term versus long term.
So one, we have this philosophy of open source.
I want all of the work I do, all of my creative output to increase the amount of freedom and liberty in the world.
I just something I believe very morally.
That's why I've dedicated my life to open source.
Because open source software, you sort of have a bill of rights attached to it, right?
The freedom to use this software for any purpose, to see how it works, to modify it, to redistribute its modifications, the four for instance with a GPL?
To me that's a moral decision.
The software I create, I want not to have a proprietary license.
Shopify is amazing.
If Shopify changed their policies tomorrow, their customers are stuck with it.
They have their recourse on their proprietary license.
We're with open source, we could change our policies tomorrow.
I could become evil or whatever and Automatic could sell or be a terrible company.
you would still own all the code.
WordPress and WooCommerce, et cetera, belong just as much to you as they do to me.
And that sort of freedom and liberty is, I think, better in the long term.
So I'd say open source has a slow burn.
So it often is kind of slower to start up, but then over time it builds sort of this compounding momentum that is a bit unstoppable.
And there's two things.
One, it can be very successful on its own, right?
As WordPress has. It's 10x the number two in the market.
but two one great thing it does is it forces the proprietary folks to be a bit more open so i i use proprietary stuff myself and a lot of apple things are proprietary and i you know i really love their products i think apple is probably a bit more open than they would be otherwise because android exists there's
there's an open competitor and which is by the way open source and that it kind of influences the market so even if we don't have make as much money as shopify or don't have the market share shopify in the e -commerce space yet although you know check -in in 10, 20 years, let's see where we are.
We force the proprietary folks to be a bit more open with how they do things.
The short answer there is basically, I do it because that's what I believe.
I believe in open source.
I just believe that the moral decision comes first.
And secondly, in the long run, let's see.
In the long run, we'll see.
Is that a good summary?
It's just as easy to have a failure of a proprietary company as it is an open source was.
Like, so I think, you know, being proprietary open source is a little bit orthogonal or not causal to like whether you're a successful product or not.
People get really attached to it.
But I would say in the short term, it's definitely usually a bit easier to monetize purely proprietary stack.
But over long term, you can create a much, much bigger thing.
If you have this kind of like flywheel of an open source, a community adoption, et cetera, innovation, you know, a ton of innovation happens with open source.
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All right, back to the episode.
By the way, Sam, isn't it nuts that Matt is clearly like this thoughtful, almost like soulful entrepreneur who has been building this thing since he was literally like a kid 19 19 years old like a guy you'd call wise when he was 21 yeah exactly like oh he's an old soul type of thing works on open source
software like you said it's widely used it's almost free it's like only good all i hear is like only good and then you had this like random villain arc that people tried to paint on you in the last you know year with this like drama that's going on i couldn't believe it I was like if I was gonna put
money on who's like the least drama attracting founder it might have been you so I thought that was nuts Sam quick your reaction to that real quick and then I want to hear Matt's thoughts on it so I didn't follow it too much I'm a WordPress user but I just and I'm friends with Jason Cohen of WP Engine
you guys had a fight but I was actually shocked Matt I thought that some of the stuff that you said I was shot you like people were insulting you and you felt like insulted them back I was like I've read a lot about Matt work.
I don't know Matt. And I've listened to him.
He doesn't seem like someone who would ever insult someone.
And I was actually surprised that you were going as hard as you were.
And I guess your perspective is like, they're coming after everything I made, or they don't contribute, whatever.
But I was actually surprised that you were pissed off, and I didn't think that you would be the type of guy that would come off pissed off.
You know, a failure mode, and a thing that can kill many open source projects, is one that they get taken advantage of.
And so just like a schoolyard bully, like you kind of have to stand up for yourself.
It's kind of funny because you say you don't think of me doing this, but actually if you look at the history of WordPress, there has been maybe four or five times in the history where I had this kind of villain arc.
People were like, we had to fight to protect like our principles and like the sustainability and like the future of WordPress.
Can you give the one minute summary of what happened?
because i even half followed it and i'm sure there's a bunch of people listening that don't even know what we're talking about could you give like the one minute and try to be objective with this like like not not just the your side of the story but what what happened can you explain you know it's an ongoing
legal battle so i can only say so much basically there's a company called wb engine started off like very positive in the community jason cohen i think is awesome by the way but in 2019 they were bought by a private equity firm called silver lake and sort of in subsequent five years started becoming,
I would say, more parasitic of WordPress.
Also creating with how they were marketing themselves and branding themselves, a lot of confusion in the marketplace in a way that was threatening our trademark, the WordPress trademark.
So people would sort of say, oh, it's WordPress Engine, and they wouldn't correct them, and they would think it was official.
I even had very close friends who were WP Engine customers who thought that was my company.
And I would frequently get support requests for WP Engine, like my site's down and things like that.
You know, for a long period of time, and you know, two years prior to this fight started, I was doing our best to partner with them and resolve all these things and resolve the trademark stuff.
They just weren't responding.
And basically, WP Engine is a web hosting service, maybe only for WordPress sites.
And the accusation, I believe, was that you felt they weren't contributing to the project as much as they should have been given that they make like a lot of money and also people confused the two companies on the contribution thing is that like like i guess like what's your leg to stand on on that you
know for example you know like does somebody have to contribute is that like a rule or is that a suggestion right is this like uh you're at church you should put something in the tray but you don't have to technically but it's frowned upon like what what is the take there so wordpress we do have this program
we We call five for the future.
By the way, this is all voluntary.
The open source license, you don't have to do anything.
You do whatever you want.
But we say that if you're building a business on WordPress, you can allocate somewhere between zero, one and five per cents.
Profit or revenue? It doesn't matter.
However you want to define it.
It could be time, it could be hours, it could be whatever.
And put that back into what we call core WordPress, which is something that belongs in the open source project.
So it's accessible to everyone.
It doesn't just benefit your company.
That's part of what's made us so sustainable and allowed us to be an open source project which has really thrived more than some of other great CMSs that were open source that came up at the same time, like Joomla or Drupal or something like that, which haven't had as much success as us.
By the way, I think this is great self -interest as well.
WP Engine is fairly unique in that pretty much every other company in the WordPress ecosystem does this quite a bit.
and in fact if you look at old versions of WB Engine's website they were very supportive of this and actually even say on their website they would dedicate two or four full time people and everything like that.
Fast forward to 2024 they had less than that on core.
So I think that's a whole sustainability health of the ecosystem, health of the product issue.
That's not a legal issue at all the trademark abuse not just a WordPress but also the WooCommerce trademark so you could argue that WordPress WP whatever but like they're also using the WooCommerce trademark which is fully owned by automatic you have to protect that if you don't protect your trademarks
you lose them and so we're having discussions around that we have trademark licenses with other web hosts great relations with every other and they're they're just a web host they're not a tech company They don't really create a lot of IP and their web hosts, which people think is the largest, but they're
actually, you know, probably the sixth or seventh largest WordPress web host.
There's a lot of bigger ones.
They're a single digit percentage of all the WordPresses in the world.
You know, they probably have like 700 ,000, 800 ,000 or something.
So people have made this into a bigger deal than it is.
You know, some of these previous controversies that got mainstream media coverage, you know, CNN.
And I had this hot nacho scandal in the first couple of years of WordPress or a thesis fight or the Easter massacre of themes, like all these things I'm mentioning you probably haven't heard of.
It used to be like half my Wikipedia page.
Now it's not. Today, if you go to my Wikipedia page, your PR firm has the whole paragraph about this.
I think in five years, maybe it'll be a sentence or not even out there at all.
So it's not my first rodeo.
Sometimes you have to fight to protect your open source ideals and the community and your trademark, by the way.
I expect this to resolve in the next few months.
Although it's easy to find like you're on Reddit or Twitter, I get a lot of hate.
A lot of people were pissed at you.
I tweeted out that you were coming on to the pod yesterday.
There was a lot of angry people and I was a little surprised by that, to be honest.
Yeah. And some of the people are uncomfortable with us having to fight, protect ourselves.
WP Engine took some very aggressive legal action.
So it turned out when we thought we were sort of good -faced negotiating, they were preparing a legal case to attack us because, you know, three days after I gave this presentation, they launched this huge lawsuit with Quinn Emanuel.
It's kind of like the one of the biggest, nastiest law firms.
And, you know, private equity is so famously like goes in, hollows out businesses, extracts all the value, kind of kills it.
There's this crazy story, I don't know if you saw it recently, where like one of the reason there was like shortages of firetrucks in L .A.
was like the firetruck manufacturers have been like rolled up by private equity and they've been like jacking the prices.
And that was like huge waiting list for like fire new firetrucks and firetruck repairs.
And there's lots of examples.
Not all private equity is bad.
There's good investors and bad investors in every asset class.
Look, I didn't follow the story in depth.
I didn't need to. I'm not a lawyer.
Don't need to be. It's common sense to me.
Whose side am I going to be on?
The private equity backed company that sounds almost like it's made by you guys, but it's not.
Or the founder who's been working on this for 20 plus years of his life, open sourced it, is used by everybody.
It's a staple of the internet and captures a tiny bit of the value along the way.
It's pretty obvious to me uh you know which side i was gonna gonna come down on so i think it was it was actually a common sense test i think for most people and i can't believe how many people are like you know on the pe side it actually reminds me a little bit of like the ai stuff right now wait shod
we did a whole podcast about the founder of this pe firm though and how like fascinated we were with him we do profiles on ruthless killers and then we're at the end we're like isn't that awesome oh yeah do you want to be that way hell no like that's not me but like i'm glad that these people exist
like you need all these people in an ecosystem like it's not they're not all bad and there's impressive things about how i think what egan durbin or whatever they like i think that's the guy that we talked about you know it's impressive in the same way that david goggins is impressive but i'm not going
to go out there and run until my toenails bleed like i like that he exists that doesn't mean i want to be like him or even that i think that's the right thing for most people to do i think it was on uh on your blog it could have been on the tim Ferris podcast, you wrote about how I think WordPress or Automatic
has like roughly 2000 people.
And I think you wrote about how you tried a bunch of different ways to hire people.
You're like, did all these tests, like Google does, like these like brain teasers, and you tried a bunch of other stuff.
And you said two interesting things that stood out.
You said, what I found is that the people who are the best writers, oftentimes are the best people who we hire, not PhDs, not master degrees, it was a correlation between your ability to write and communicate communicate be the written word.
And then the second thing you said that was pretty wild.
You used to hire people just by like emailing or texting, like it was like, just through chat, not ever face to face, not phone calls, things like that.
Do you still hire people strictly through text communication?
You know, for some roles, we might do a zoom if it's a sales role or something like that.
You know, obviously, it's important to see how someone interacts.
But basically, you know, for a lot of our roles, you know, written communication is going to be the primary thing but also like people communication is going to be the primary thing but also like people want to talk to someone like we're not going to be like no you can't yeah a lot of our hiring process
can be completely asynchronous and completely text -based and for the first thousand or so hires i did a final chat for every single person is your chat like slacking or g chatting or something yeah it ended up being on slack when when slack was invented you know before that i think it was on like skype
or aim or something you know in the early days or irc i I think the way you said it was, we do auditions, not interviews.
So what does that mean?
How do you do auditions?
Well, we do a trial project.
So we actually hire people on a standard sort of 25 -an -hour contract.
And so we pay them to do, we have screens with resumes and a little interview and stuff.
But then we say, let's actually do some work together.
And there's various versions of this for different roles.
We've done sandbox versions.
We've also done it where they were actually talking to real customers.
You know, like a support person was actually like answering real tickets.
We've always been smaller than a lot of the big tech, but we compete with them.
And so we need to have like the same caliber or better of talent.
So part of I think Automatic's advantage is we've created an environment and also sort of a way of hiring that finds people who might be overlooked by sort of a Meta or Google or something like that.
And we give them an opportunity not just to be hired, but also to participate in a company in a way that they can still be just as influential and have as much impact.
Because even like, you know, there's other companies that might have remote workers.
But if you're not at headquarters, you're not going to be close to the sun.
You're not going to be next to the CEO.
You're not going to be able to grow or have an impact.
But we've tried to create it where our center of gravity, our headquarters is really on the Internet.
And, you know, I have colleagues in 90 countries.
90. Even though we're only, you know, 750 people.
and another sort of innovative thing we do we didn't do this in the beginning but we moved to it probably like 2012 2013 is we pay people the same salaries regardless of location so it's kind of funny because all the like that quality DEI stuff whatever so much of it I feel like is virtue signaling
because if you ask these companies and say like hey you know I'm not going to call anyone out by name but let's say a big tech company do you pay someone in Pakistan the same that you pay them in California usually the answer is no If they're doing the same job, you know, the same like code wrangler,
engineer or whatever like that.
And they usually say no.
And they usually have some reason like cost of living or local markets or whatever.
But we sort of moved to where we said, hey, same work, same pay.
You know, it's kind of something that, you know, the past hundred years, that wasn't always true for men and women even, you know, or racial things or something like that.
So I think the same more reasons where I say like same work for same pay of, you know, people of different skin colors or something like that within a country.
I think you should do that globally.
And I think that's the future of work actually, because to the extent that you can be equally as valuable and generate as much value for a customer wherever you are, you should receive the equal pay for equal work.
Hey, can I tell you a Steve Jobs story real quick?
So Jobs once said that design is not just how something looks, it's how it works.
And a great example of that is my new partner, Mercury.
Mercury has made a banking product that just works beautifully.
I use it for not just one, but all six of my companies right now.
It is my default. If I start a company, it's a no brainer.
I go and I open up a Mercury account.
The design is great.
It's got all the features that you need.
And you can just tell it was made by a founder like me, not a banker somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool.
So if you want to be like me and 200 ,000 other ambitious founders, head over to mercury .com and open up an account in minutes.
And here's the fine print.
Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
Have you guys read American Kingpin?
The story of Ross Albright, The Silk Road.
Have you read that, Matt?
I think I've read some of the Long Form Wild articles, but I've never read the whole book.
Yeah. Oh, you got to read this book, man.
I'm rereading it now because it just got released and it's like the best book I've ever read.
It's like a total page turner.
The story of it for listeners, basically Ross Albright was accused, and I think he did it, where he started Silk Road, which was eBay for drugs.
In two years, it did $2 billion in sales, gross sales, something like that.
But what's crazy is it kind of sucks because this whole business was documented because he chatted with everyone.
He had 12 co -workers, and he did two things that were interesting that I actually think are going to be common.
The first thing is that he obviously because it was an illegal enterprise, but what's crazy is, it kind of sucks because this whole business was documented because he chatted with everyone like he had 12 co workers.
And he did two things that were interesting that I actually think are going to be common.
The first thing is that he, obviously, because it was an illegal enterprise, they didn't know the identity of the workers.
It was just their username.
One guy's name was ChronicPain.
That was his username.
So he didn't know this guy's real name.
He just knew ChronicPain as the guy.
Ross knew everybody's name.
They didn't know each other's names or his.
He made them send a license so that he could basically have that, always have that in his back pocket, have leverage.
But ChronicPain didn't know Ross's...
Sorry, I forgot. That was actually an important detail.
That's actually very similar to like early hacker culture.
You know, everyone was sort of known by their username.
There's like interesting merits to that.
And then the other thing was that they only communicated via messaging.
I was reading this book.
I'm rereading it now.
And I was like, those two attributes are kind of interesting for a company, which is like anonymous workers.
But you're still oddly friends.
Like he developed relationships with his co -workers.
This is a great LinkedIn post for you, Sam.
Like 13 management lessons I learned from the Silk Road.
Here you go. i believe that he did murder for hire four times he did a lot of bad shit but he was actually an inspiring leader like when you read like some of his like like stuff well he was very idealistic right like he he had certain beliefs that drove right he didn't intend like he didn't necessarily
intend like for example he wasn't super interested in selling guns on the platform but he believed that people should be able to sell what they want and his team was like no no you shouldn't do this this is going to increase the target on our back like you're cool with the drug side, but you don't care about this,
so let's just ban it, it's going to cause problems.
And he's like, well, no, that's not the ethos of what we're doing.
We wrote a creed of what we stand for and why we're doing this, and therefore, we've got to stand by it.
And they called them captain.
It was very much just like, we are a revolutionizing thing.
And that's a really interesting thing.
You don't get called captain, but what is your benevolent dictator for life, BDFL?
It's a term in open source that's applied to Linus and Linux or Guido of Python or something like that.
David Heimer, Hanson at Rails.
It's sort of a joking thing and one that I think none of us like really attach ourselves to, just kind of like an internet lore thing.
Well, you do a couple of other interesting things, right?
Because you got this like multi -billion dollar company used by most of the internet, but you run your company in these interesting ways where remote work, I think you're famously, we're early and heavy into remote work and you've talked a lot about that.
But you do a couple of other interesting things.
So we talked about auditions instead of interviews, But you also do, everybody in the company, including yourself, works customer support, I think, one or two weeks out of the year.
Can you talk about that one?
Yeah, part of our hiring process is your first two weeks are doing customer support for every single hire.
Whether you're like our new CFO or chief legal officer or whatever role it is.
And then once a week a year, you rotate back into doing customer support.
By the way, lots of companies have versions of this.
So it's definitely not, you know, we're the first to do this or anything like that.
Why should a company do that?
If you look at every successful business, the closer they are to customers, generally the more successful they are.
And so it's very easy, especially when you're running something on the internet and distributed for people to become numbers or stats or something on your Looker dashboard or something like that.
And so, you know, getting back to like every individual, every number of your signups, you might have 5 ,000 signups in a day, but each one of those people is like has a story.
You just learn a lot about your product.
and it's i think the best way to sort of do iterative customer developments i think eric reese talked about this or steve blank you know the kind of like get out of the office and go meet the customers and i'm very inspired by like leaders at salesforce talked to mark biannhor or someone like that they'll
typically spend a quarter to a third of their time with customers even at that scale is there a story or any epiphany you had from doing this you've probably done this now you know for for decades so is there like an insight that came from this just the other day a few days ago i spent like 30 45 minutes
with the gentleman who kind of checks expenses at the company you know because we have like these ramp cards and people who expense things and stuff like that you know sometimes we like say you need a receipt for this or question an expense i just call it to understand more about this and also make
sure that the way we were doing this was the most hated man at the company by the way like oh well i had gotten some feedback from folks they felt you know some of the questions they were getting felt a little aggressive and said and stuff like that so some of that was just shadowing so i was like okay
because i want to understand the interfaces this was also really helpful like going through support i realized that some of our internal tools like don't represent you know best practices in design or usability you know sometimes you know so the internal stuff doesn't get the love that your external
stuff does but then also you know we just sort of talked about like the culture of automatic bedside manner if you will like how can we like you know hold these principles like we need to really enforce our policies and make sure we do you know we get audited and everything so like we need to have these
things from like a good accounting principles point of view but also doing it a way that like when we have these conversations we're talking about the principles of it and the reason why so it's not just like I'm giving you Sean a hard time because you didn't have a receipt but like hey if we don't have now,
if this receipts, a certain art of firm might question this, and then that might create an issue for XYZ or something like that.
When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I came to work with this guy, Michael Birch, and he represented everything I wanted.
He had already built successful tech companies, and he had made it.
And I was a 23 -year -old kid who wanted to make it.
And so I'm super excited to go into work the first day.
And I'm like, I'm going to learn so much from this guy, because he'd not just done it one time.
He's built like four successful companies i'm ready for him to teach me kind of like the dark arts i'm like what's the strategies the growth hacks what this like super like high level strategic thinking and the very first week he puts me on not the new shit like the oldest company that he had started
something he started back in 2001 it's like birthday calendar or something yeah birthday alarm is that still going birthday alarm still going and so i as like 25 year old company now so i at the time i was like oh man like i gotta do this like whatever and he tells me the story so i actually learned
this really valuable lesson in it i go so what's the i got curious because instead of just like being bored at doing like birthday alarm which you know seemed like this old outdated product at the time i got a little curious so i started asking him like where did this come from like how did you even
come up with this idea why did you build this product and what he told me was he goes my very first startup i had quit my job i wanted to like build a successful tech company like do an internet company.
The internet was like the new thing back in 99, 2000.
And he quit a high paying insurance job while his wife was pregnant and was like, I'm going to make it.
So he tried to create something really fancy.
So he's like, oh, with the internet, he tried to create something that many people have tried, like Sean Parker tried to create this, a self updating address book, which is like, you know, I have your information, I have your name, your address, but you move, Matt.
Now, I don't know that you moved.
So wouldn't it be cool if you could just update your info in one place, and it updated in all your friends address books.
So we now have your latest and greatest address.
So that's what he wanted to build.
And he's spending like nine months heads down, doesn't leave the bedroom coding this thing.
And it's not really going anywhere.
But because he was a one -man show, he was also doing...
He was the designer.
He was the developer.
He was the ops guy.
He was the customer service guy.
He did all of it. And he was like, it's the customer service that was actually the key because he was answering support tickets.
And he's like, over and over again, he's like, I spent like seven hours a day banging my head against the trying to figure out why nobody wants to use our product.
I think it's so cool, but nobody wants it.
And then in the hour I was doing customer support, he's like, I noticed that a bunch of people kept thanking me for the birthday reminder feature I had built in.
Just the one feature, which was like a throwaway idea, which was just, forget the address.
If it was someone's birthday, I would just tell you, hey, it's their birthday today.
Remember that. This is before Facebook existed, right?
So you didn't have Facebook or a bunch of other ways that people could do this.
So he just threw away the whole product and renamed the company birthdayalarm .com and he's like, I expected to go nowhere and that was the thing that took off.
And at that time, Birthday Alarm had generated for him and his wife personally like probably $20 million of pure profit by that time because it was just every year was just generating a few million dollars of profit and it's still to this day generating a few million dollars a year of profit.
It's this incredible business.
This is the gift that keeps on giving that only came because he was answering the support tickets and he got curious like huh like why do they keep talking about this birthday reminder thing is that is that actually maybe i should do that and he did it on a on a whim and then in two days had built the product
that actually people wanted you know that's awesome i have one last question for you and it's on ai so there's a lot of stuff you could talk about with ai but i just i'm curious on your quick take about deep seek because it's also you know they came out with this open source thing that there's a lot
of people on either side of of you know how much they believe about the story, but because it's also, you know, they came out with this open source thing that there's a lot of people on either side of how much they believe about the story.
But like, what's your quick reaction to what you saw with DeepSeq?
DeepSeq's a really cool model.
So, you know, every model has like kind of a vibe of the way it's tuned and everything like that.
And so it's a really fun one to play with.
And I would say, you know, the thing I tell people with all this AI stuff, just like use it, play with it, you know, because it's such early days.
And there's kind of a, you know, the way to prompt it, the way to interact with it.
There's a skill there that you'll learn.
And the vibes of the DeepSeq model are very cool.
I think what I'm most excited about as an open source guy is that they actually open source the model, wrote really amazing papers about how they built it, and it opened weights.
Like, for example, at my company, I would say, don't use like deepseek .com, you know, for various reasons that's hosted in China and stuff like that.
But like, we can run the model ourselves, you know, locally.
And that's pretty cool.
Or you can get it through Perplexity, which hosts it in the US.
So like, there's lots of ways to access it.
It's a really fun model.
So all these models have are like good at different things.
They have a coding version, they just released a cool image thing.
And so think of these as like little entities that you can interact with and run and spin up and boot and you should just learn the nuances and kind of flavors of each one.
Matt do you guys actually believe that they've only taken the amount of funding that they've said didn't they say something like five or ten million dollars they said that's what it cost to run the final training.
That might be true for like some something but obviously like I'm sure they've spent invested a ton in other things.
And I know there's kind of this theory that maybe that's like a PR or psyop or whatever like that.
When I started reading about them, I got fearful.
It was pretty insane, right, that the market reacted the way it did, that it wiped out a trillion dollars of value in 24 hours.
It was pretty wild how big that announcement was.
I didn't think that was going to happen.
And I think you called it, Matt.
Didn't you tweet about this during Christmas time?
Well, Andre Kapathy, you know, so full credit, like tweeted about this like the day after Christmas and I saw his tweet and retweeted it.
So that's when I first learned about Deep Seek and started playing with it.
Yeah, I think that with all these things, there's some, you can verify all things.
They made some amazing advancements in like how they train things and how they run things and how they did memory interconnects and working within constraints.
There's some really cool engineering breakthroughs and they shared it.
and this is stuff that I think OpenAI had also figured out but they hadn't like shared it publicly and so what I love about the deep seed guys is they're open sourcing it all so and it's all available under like a true open source license it's not like the llama license where it's free and so you have 700
million users or something or I think Quinn Alibaba which is also a really great model that people are sleeping on so check out Quinn some of these other models coming out of China they're really really good but it's a true open source license so that's awesome Matt, thanks for coming on Matt, it's
good to see you again and thanks for sharing everything you did about WordPress, it's been a pleasure yeah we appreciate you man, alright that's the pod I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like no days on on a road, let's travel never looking back hey
Sean here, a quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story, he started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for a hundred million dollars.
And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man?
How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses?
And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years.
And then you just use modern technology to take out steps, just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want.
And that is what my partner Mercury does.
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations.
And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades, No more clunky interfaces, no more 10 tabs to get something done, no more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer.
They made it fast. They made it easy.
You can actually just get back to running your business.
You don't have to worry about the rest of it.
I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now, and it's used by also 200 ,000 other ambitious founders.
So if you want to be like me, head to Mercury .com, open up an account in minutes, and remember Mercury.
