Matt Mullenweg: belief

Transcript context

…So ,to set it, you can get WordPress from WordPress.com or us, but also you can get WordPress from dozens of other hosts. The biggest in the world are like GoDaddy, Hostinger, Newfold. It's not the biggest, but it is in the top 10 or something. It has about 700,000 WordPress installs. There's a company called WP Engine. In 2019, WP Engine started as very WordPress oriented and they contributed a lot to the community and everything like that. They were very respectful about distinguishing themselves from core, so people really realized it wasn't officially associated and everything. But in 2019 they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. And anyone who follows business, when private equity buys something, there's some the good ones, but there's also many, many stories about how they can really hollow things out, really optimize our profits, become user hostile. Actually recently read a story where one of the reasons there was a shortage of firetrucks these LA fires was that the fire truck manufacturers have been rolled up by a private equity firm, and they've been raising prices and their supply constraint and things like that. So, there's literally a shortage in firetrucks right now because of private equity. And of course, if you look at healthcare or other things, there's so many examples of where private equity can really, I think, be one of the darker parts of capitalism. So, since 2019, WP Engine has kind of changed a bit, and they really stopped contributing to core and they started using the trademark in a way that was very confusing in the marketplace. And particularly in the past year, year and a half or so, we're just getting lot... I get a lot of support for requests for WP Engine. And when we do surveys, we'd find that 20, 30, 40% of people thought they were officially associated because how they were using our logo and presenting the brand and everything like that was very confusing to people. And as you know, if you don't protect a trademark, you lose it. And also the version of WordPress that they were offering actually wasn't our core vision of the functionality of WordPress. So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So, a cool part about WordPress that... actually one of my favorite features, is every change to every single post or page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So, if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. And of course, as building a great product, that sort of user safety of an undo is so critical. Now, obviously you have to store these revisions, so it takes up more database space. Now, it's trivial, it's megabytes, so on modern databases is not that big a deal. But to save money, they actually turned us off, so they broke the undo feature in WordPress to essentially save money. And so you have this thing where they're offering something called WordPress. I think I refer to it as a bastardized hacked up version of it. e the undo feature in WordPress to essentially save money. And so you have this thing where they're offering something called WordPress. I think I refer to it as a bastardized hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand, and then also people think it's official. So, even close friends of mine were like, "Oh yeah, I signed up for this thing. I thought I was supporting you." And it's came to a head. So, past 18 months they've also... We contacted them and said, "Hey, you need a trademark license or something if you're going to use this or change how you're doing things," and tried to negotiate something and had many different term sheets over the months offered and different things, and they just kept stretching it out. And I was like, "What's going on here?" And I think part of what was going on is last year they tried to sell the company. So, private equity usually holds things for five to seven years, so they were kind of five years into this. They tried to shop it around and sell it. They weren't able to find a buyer. They said, "Well, they don't have any IP, and it feels like they're using your trademark, so they're going to have trouble with you. They don't have a license and things like that." So, while they were negotiating with us, it appears they were also preparing this lawsuit against us. So again, I've been very fortunate in my business career that we've invested in dozens of companies, we've acquired lots of things, by and large, 99% of the time people I've dealt with in business have been ethical, straightforward, honest. I haven't really faced any baldfaced lying or duplicitous behavior. Very, very rarely people who just say one thing and do another or are fraudulent in their behavior, but I think that was happening here. And so I also just wasn't prepared for it. I was thinking I was a little naive and kind of didn't realize what was going on for a while. So, it came to a head, and at WordCamp US in September, I was like, "Okay, well, if you're still not going to even agree to negotiate, I'm going to give this presentation about how I think both private equity has messed up a lot of open source projects in the past, and how in particular, [inaudible 00:44:46] has done some very bad or evil things. " And they were like, "Okay, go for it." So, I did the presentation. I think it was on a Thursday or a Friday. Kind of spicy. People were like, "Oh, can't believe he did that." And then on Monday they launched this with Quinn Emanuel, which is kind of the baddest, nastiest law firm, it's like who Elon uses when he sues people, launched this big multimillion dollar lawsuit against both me personally and WordPress.org, so the WordPress community and Automattic. And also they're spending millions of dollars a month on both lawyers and PR. So, they're doing... If you read... Oh gosh, who was the celebrity that they were recently talking about this, like dark PR stuff where they're boosting things on social networks? Oh, Blake Lively and-…

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