Ben Thompson: evaluation

Transcript context

…You just felt like you couldn't do it yet. Yeah, I had a family. I had business school debt. I needed to have a job that paid the bills. I wanted to find a job that will let me continue to do this. Automattic worked out. It actually worked out even better because I was hired as a growth engineer or whatever, which I didn't really know anything about, but then the team I was on pivoted shortly after I was there, to building a new back end of WordPress. There was nothing for me to do. We didn't have a product out. But fortunately, there was a little bit of pushback internally, because I was becoming this very visible blogger. It's like, what the hell? This guy's working for us? I thought we were just to have, because back then Automattic was one of the few distributed companies. He could live where he wanted to. As soon as I got the job, we moved back to Taiwan. You weren't supposed to have a second job for obvious reasons. I think Matt did run some interference for me, where he's like, no, don't worry, he's good. One thing I did do for Automattic is I went through a lot of the company and what they were doing. I wrote this big strategy document about where they're at, what they should do. It had some impact, I think on where they end up going. You guys should buy Tumblr.…

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