"if you're really open and open source sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals please put your hands together for Matt Mullen Matt Mullen wig..."

"going on there's a company called WP engine by 2018 they got bought out by a private Equity Firm called Silver Lake you know since 2019 WP engine has kind of changed a bit they started using the trade..."

"Matt is the co-creator of Wordpress which Powers 40% of websites on the internet today including white house.gov he's also the CEO of automatic which has valued at over7 billion and owns products like..."

"that means for the future and his approach for deciding what companies to acquire within automatic if you enjoy this episode don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or ..."

"already powered by work OS including ones you probably know like versel webflow and Loom work OS also recently acquired warrant the fine grain authorization service Warren's product is based on a grou..."

"check it out at work os.com to learn more that's [Music] work.com this episode is brought to you by vanta and I am very excited to have Christina Copo CEO and co-founder vant joining me for this very ..."

"Security reviews that is awesome I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources and nobody wants to spend time doing this that is very much our experience both befo..."

"here welcome to the podcast thanks it's a you know big fan uh longtime listener so happy to be on I'm a longtime fan I've been wanting to get you on this podcast for so long and this is such an intere..."

"fall and uh and also that that turned into a nonprofit called illuminate which I'm on the board of run by Ben Davis who I mentioned previously that does cool public art stuff around the city so they'r..."

"Arts so I like that barbell approach to philantropy Elon has a great quote along those lines you can't just work on solving problems all day you need something inspiring to think about and to work tow..."

"chapter right now like going from like the Doom Loop to the boom Loop yeah um I'm a big believer in the city so much innovation has come here from like food you know like the burrito fortune cookies a..."

"here I a so back as they say on Twitter okay someone very close to you told me that you're uh an excellent rapper I'm not going to ask you to rap but if you ever want to answer any questions in rap fo..."

"was very fortunate to go to some of the best s of Arts programs including my high school called the high school for performing Visual Arts where um Beyonce went Robert Glasper a lot of like of amazing..."

"you combined that with that you know music lessons were expensive so we couldn't really afford them so I I would barter and trade i' build websites for local musicians and change for lessons and um so..."

"or not the terms of service is you to do whatever you want with it uh the freedom to see how the software works you know open up the hood see how it works see every line of code you can audit it you f..."

"the time I thought it was the Tony Schneider and I were sort of fundraising and uh Mark really like grilled us he's like how can you build a business on open source uh how can you be like remote and d..."

"talk about how meta talks about llama as an open source project but it's you called it a false false profit uh what is what is it about llama that isn't open source what are people missing when they s..."

"my creative output is useful to society and if you fast forward like 50 or 100 years I do believe that the utility for prioritary software eventually approaches zero so like when we're sending people ..."

"think really really special and uh sort of the thrill for me of of like knowing that code I wrote is now executing you know millions of times per second in millions of servers around the world that ki..."

"with some of the best developers in others in the world this also made me think about AI agents are coming around Devon all these AI driven B uh coding agents uh you have a prediction when most of the..."

"Source the other thing that's really exciting is like right now you know you see people building apps and stuff and it's just sort of custom generated code um but I think the next generation of these ..."

"Concepts you know there's so many companies as well that maybe have like big market caps but I feel like they might have billions or tens of billions of dollars of technical debt you can cast see in t..."

"for this AI agent of 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 migh..."

"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 uh change to..."

"that so um while they were negotiating with us it appears they were also like preparing this lawsuit against us so uh again I've been very fortunate in my business career that um you know we've invest..."

"lawsuit against both me personally and wordpress.org so like the WordPress community and automatic and um and also you know they're spending millions of dollars a month on both lawyers and PR so they'..."

"has decided I'm the main character or or or really evil and um the previous ones we don't remember anymore it's hot nacho or the Easter Massacre of themes or like these other things that that aren't e..."

"nervous to give this talk and I and obviously you can see why just like what what finally convinced you this was time was it just to go uh as you described scorched to Earth nuclear uh was it like wor..."

"more in Revenue than WP engine um is collaborative and so like if there's a trademark violation usually it's not even lawyers get involved it's just like there's an email we have a conversation we do ..."

"of Wordpress that's a great summer yeah awesome I'm curious just like which which of those three or is it something even else that most bothered you about this like what's just like this is the thing ..."

"actually when we introduced a visual editor people hated it these are huge controversies in in the WordPress history and when you know actually hasn't been a fork WordPress around all this latest stuf..."

"like if you read a thread and it's all like super negative it's hard to uh to not be influenced by that because we're social creatures so 100% now the good news is I've had lots of you know sort of li..."

"so I've seen white papers I've seen all sorts of things where people talk about this we actually in the next couple days going to publish something really cool on the WordPress out our blog though tha..."

"forward press doing educational stuff we sponsor a lot of like learn to code or uh you know running workshops in other countries we have this cool thing called do action where we'll do like you know a..."

"purpose wow okay I get why it's complicated I get why people would be confused this makes me think about open AI had a really strange structure and that got him in a lot of trouble and it feels like w..."

"successful as WordPress so you know I think your audience in particular like is great software ever created by committee or does it more often reflect um a vision of a leader or you know something tha..."

"mean I'm I'm going sidelighting but I think that um you know that's sort of more and if you look at a lot of great companies like you know there's a board or whatever but like ultimately there's an ex..."

"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 like the yosta crew and things these are folks who actually aren't like don't have Comm..."

"like really really cool like open source like cal.com for open source cund or so much cool stuff out there and that I actually you know there's a whole generation of like younger entrepreneurs that I ..."

"maybe just the last question we talked about just like a lot of people see you with devil horns these days they think you you're doing a lot of you're doing bad things and they don't like uh approach ..."

"most controversial things and uh I think that's not a novel perception like there's a lot of discussion around how social media might be creating more fragmentation in society and I think this is just..."

"think you can get a a version of all this that that is uh both I think not entirely true and also like pretty more negative yeah I imagine people are going to be like Lenny you didn't ask him this thi..."

"back and and it's hard it's hard to do that is there anything else along this thread before we move on to a different topic anything else you want to share before we close out this chapter well if peo..."

"the story I remember at the end of your word cam talk you're like any questions after this big controversial talk and I'm curious how it felt like every all the questions initially were nothing to do ..."

"Tumblr what is the story there oh Tumbl is so interesting I mean you know at the time I think it was one of our best competitors you they created this really amazing sort of hybrid of like blogging an..."

"Acquisitions now subsequently obviously we know how Instagram went I think you know people were like I can't believe you bought this for a billion dollars and obviously now it's worth hundreds of bill..."

"for a DI minimouse three million so but obviously that represented a lot of uh value destru destruction over the years temp had some tough times you they actually were banned from the App Store at one..."

"users so really sort of active core and one of the things that's so fascinating is over half of that user base was under the age of 25 and actually had a huge I think it was like 25 or 30% LGBT uh plu..."

"a like beer yeah yeah and a pretty big team I think 185 people I was you know we're taking a lot of burn was burning a ton of cash um and yeah that was 2019 and so it's been I think a humbling experie..."

"like first-party user-driven advertising where like you promote your blog post or something like that um or you promote a wo Commerce product or something where it's like not a third party ad ecosyste..."

"Tumblr again or at least not for many many years you know it's definitely a different thing the vast majority of things we acquire um it's tyly something that's done well and we want to accelerate it ..."

"Commerce is majority of that speaking of that actually you haven't sh the revenue number I know it's public just like give people a sense of automatics Revenue can you just share those numbers because..."

"investment or a control investment and with WP engine silver L controls the company uh now when they control the company I think there's a spectrum of actions you know obviously being more efficient i..."

"come Matt we covered so much everything I asked you all the hard questions and more before we wrap up is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with any last thoughts comments insights s..."

"yeah this feels like a reason to be doing your approach to Burkshire hathway is just like stay active in early stage stuff and not just optimize established things uh says beer.com by the way domain n..."

"uh I will Point people to one my my favorite uh ritual you have on your blog which is uh you share what's in your bag you talk about how you travel all this and I think every year you're like here's t..."