Matt Mullenweg: belief

Transcript context

…That makes sense. ... that's happened in a while. So we're kind of trying to do this in a way that's invisible to users on the front end, so changing at the back end while maintaining the APIs and the interface and everything. So it's a fun engineering project. I kind of posted this kind of call to arms, got a lot of fun people applying for Automattic, and we hired a lot of great folks around this sort of audacious project, this big hairy audacious goal. And so that's where it's at now. I've sort of ran it personally for a few years while we're doing turnarounds, but there's a great team there, but still challenged, still not profitable, so we're still subsidizing it from the rest of Automattic's businesses. Fortunately, the rest of our business have done really well, so we were able to do that, but I definitely want to get to a place where it's sustainable. And one of the things we're also experimenting with is can Tumblr have not just an advertising-driven model? I think ultimately the incentives of advertising social networks can lead to the kind of dynamics that you see on the more negative side of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera. And so really trying to create a subscription model or a sort of first-party user-driven advertising, where you promote your blog posts or something like that, or you promote a WooCommerce product or something, where it's not a third-party ad ecosystem, which I think has a lot of weird code and malware and lots of stuff I don't love. Wow, sounds like a lot you took on with this acquisition, and I love that you said you ran it initially. So this is a good segue to maybe my last question. I'm curious where this goes. Just how do you... Well, let me zoom out. There's a lot of people these days that are excited about roll of businesses. I'm going to buy a bunch of companies, make them better, make them awesome, save money, and then just keep building this holding company sort of thing. You guys are doing that, and it's working well. What do you look for? How do you decide a company's right for Automattic? What are the factors that are like, we should buy this, we can turn this around and turn it into a big success?…

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