Matt Mullenweg: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wow. Okay, I get why it's complicated. I get why people would be confused. This makes me think about OpenAI had a really strange structure and that got them in a lot of trouble, and it feels like when you're 21 you're like, "Oh, this makes a lot of sense. What a great concept we've come up here," and then all this complexity just adds to a lot of confusion around what's going on. So thank you for addressing that. Another, there's a kind of related question I've seen a couple of times is just why don't you let that .org be run by a community. Why not just give that up to someone else and not just you that's there? Yeah, and the frame of that question is kind of interesting because it implies I'm the only person making WordPress which is obviously not true. If you look at the daily commits and activity and everything, it is run by the community. So it's hundreds of volunteers every day that are actually doing the day-to-day work and making the daily decisions and everything happens. So there has been a radical delegation. However, there's ultimately a hierarchy, and I'm the CEO, so I'm like the final final decision-maker. And so I think what people advocate for around this governance point of view is like, okay, well, install a board on top of you that ultimately makes decisions for the product or things like that. And there are other open source projects that have this structure. None of them have been successful as WordPress. So I think your audience in particular, is great software ever created by committee or does it more often reflects a vision of a leader or something that can allow us to... and I think particularly WordPress not just remaining relevant but actually accelerating growth over huge technological shifts over the past two decades. When we started there was dynamic web apps or DHTML or JavaScript wasn't really a thing, and then the social web and then iPhones and then all this sort of stuff that's changed over time, and we've surfed a lot of these technological changes which is very, very hard to do. Most products do not remain relevant over multiple generational changes like that, and that's been because sometimes we've had to make very unpopular decisions. Gutenberg is a huge part of why WordPress is relevant today, and it's actually an open source project we do. It's the block editor. It's actually bigger than WordPress because it's not just used on WordPress, it's used on every WordPress site, but also like Tumblr, other people. I would actually love if Squarespace or Wix adopted Gutenberg. It's meant to be like a really open source framework. But anyway, if we had voted for whether we should do that or not, everyone would've voted against it or the majority would have. It was really a few core people of us in the community, Matias, myself, other core contributors, Ella, Andrew Ozz, that said, "Hey, this is the future and it's going to take 10 years to do and it's going to be a long bet. It's going to suck for the first three or four years, and so everyone's going to hate it in the beginning." But then later with iteration, we've had I think now 200 releases of Gutenberg. We do sort of a very strict every two weeks release schedule since it started. It's going to get pretty good, and it's at that point now where it's actually getting pretty darn good. And the next phase of it, actually I'm so excited about, it's going to be collaboration. So all the real time co-editing like Google Docs and Notion has, it's coming out to this open source thing, and with the technological changes, we're actually able to do it peer-to-peer. ollaboration. So all the real time co-editing like Google Docs and Notion has, it's coming out to this open source thing, and with the technological changes, we're actually able to do it peer-to-peer. So we don't need a centralized server. We can use WebRTC and other cool technologies. I mean, anyway, I'm going sidelining, but I think that sort of more... and if you look at a lot of great companies, there's a board or whatever but ultimately there's an executive, and some of the most iconic companies of our generations are ones where the executive retains some majority of voting control or other things like that which I've been able to do with Automattic and with WordPress. And I definitely think about succession planning and everything like that, but if or when I'm gone I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can have a role similar to mine and really sort of try to be a steward. There ultimately is a check and balance on that because, again, the community could leave. They could fork the software. People could change. And so you're "in charge" quote, unquote, but you're also at surface. So it's a lot more being like a mayor than a CEO and that you ultimately are accountable to the folks who are contributing and new users and everything like that. So I do feel like there is a balance there. Some of this as well is that there's some people who aren't part of leadership who feel like they should be. So if you look at the Yoast or Korean things, these are folks who actually don't have commit status. They haven't contributed WordPress over the years and serve our normal hierarchy of the meritocracy of how you get the ability to commit code or things like that. They're like, "Hey, I want to lead a release." That's cool, dude, but there's a process. We have different people lead releases over the years, but they kind of worked their way up to it.…

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