Matt Mullenweg: commitment

Transcript context

…I love this book concept about maintenance. My sister's partner has this quote that I've always come back to, "Life is maintenance." You basically... Everything you acquire and deal with... You get a generator for your house, you have to maintain that forever now. You get this backpack, okay, now you have to maintain this thing, keep it nice, nice jacket. Everything is maintenance. Everything in your life is just maintenance. And I wonder if that's what the book's about. Well, that's why I think technical debt is one of the most interesting concepts. There's so many companies as well that maybe have big market caps, but I feel like they might have billions or tens of billions of dollars of technical debt. You can see in the interface or how their products integrate with themselves through things. And I think about that a lot in our own company. We definitely have some products, almost a little embarrassed coming on because you have such great product people. And we have some variable quality around some of our things right now. If you check out Gravatar right now, I'm actually really proud of it. It's I think a really great user experience, very slick. But there's parts of... Well, I always say, "I'm the unhappiest WordPress user in the world," so there's parts of WordPress and WordPress.com that I'm a little embarrassed and ashamed of. We have a really large surface area that we cover with relatively few people, and so there's some parts we haven't looked at in a little while that we need to get around to. And it's a big focus for us this year, is actually kind of going back to basics, back to core, and improving all of those kind of nooks and crannies of the user experience, and also ruthlessly editing and cutting as much as possible, because we just launched a lot of stuff over the past 21 years that maybe is not as relevant today or it doesn't need to be there. That sounds like excellent work for this AI agent of the future that's coming soon. There's one other area I want to mine and that's community, community building, building this ecosystem that you've created around WordPress. It might be one of the most successful, biggest communities on the internet. I'm curious just what lessons you've learned about what it takes to build a successful community, online especially.…

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