Matt Mullenweg: recommendation

Transcript context

…This is probably influenced by economics and jazz. And economics is all about systems thinking. And what are the incentive structures of how you set something up? And then in jazz is all about collaboration. So, if there's something unique I have for your audience, I would say it's don't just build a product, build a movement. And to the extent that we've been successful, I think it's that we give people something to believe in, a philosophy, a worldview. Even silly things, like we had this tagline in the footer of the WordPress.org when we started, it's still there, it says, "Code is poetry." This idea that we're not just writing code, we're trying to create something that can have elements. We name every WordPress release after a jazz musician for the past 60 releases or so. So, those sorts of things bring a little art and soul and some fun into it as well. It doesn't have to be serious all the time. I think they can give something to believe in and work on and aim towards that's more than just a paycheck or more than just the utility, the base utility of the software. So, it's not just the software, it's also like: how are the meetups? How are people getting together? What events are you running? Are there forums? How do people contribute? Is there office hours or town halls? I do a lot of Q&A. So, what are the things you're doing around the software that's allowing people to get involved, that's inviting contributions, that's allowing people to build on top of it? I've studied platforms quite a bit like Microsoft and others, so our whole ecosystem of plugins and themes is part of what's made WordPress so successful, and the moat that we have. The core features of a CMS, you can kind of write with a few developers in a few weeks or something. It's not... It's basically CRUD operations, but to replicate those 60,000 plugins and themes, gosh, no one's done it. That's a huge moat. And proprietary services can create platforms. Shopify has a third-party ecosystem and things like that, but it's never a true platform. And a true platform, it's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether it was the Facebook platform, I'm putting that in air quotes, or the Shopify platform, companies build on it and then they get the rug pulled out from under them because they're too successful. And then the sort of thing you're building on decides, "Oh, we want that money or we want that growth." And they sort of change the API or remove your access. There's so many examples of this, especially on, I think, Facebook and Shopify and others, where people got too successful and all of a sudden they knock on the door and they say, "Oh, that's a mighty nice app you have there. I'd love to offer you some warrants where we own a bunch of your company or we're going to shut it off," or those sorts of things. And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. love to offer you some warrants where we own a bunch of your company or we're going to shut it off," or those sorts of things. And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. That's why more and more companies and people are choosing... If they're going to build a business on top of something else, if you build it on an open source, you have that guarantee. Even if I grew devil horns and became evil and automatic decided to know whatever, WordPress would still belong just as much to you as it would to me. People can fork the code. They can still own it. They can still build on top of it. So, those things I think are really important. What a segue to all of this drama that's swirling around you these days. I think a lot of people do feel like there's devil horns that have appeared, and so I'm excited to dig into this stuff. I find that every time you go on a podcast these days, if we don't get into this, everyone's just like, "Why is Matt not answering these questions?" Let's get into the hard stuff. So, I'm going to ask you some hard questions. For people that don't know what the hell's going on, they're like, "What are you even talking about?" or just have a sense something is swirling with WordPress and, Matt, I don't know what's going on, what's just like the high level overview of what's going on?…

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