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Category Archives: Automattic
My TED Video on the Future of Work
If companies don’t try it, workers may force them to do it anyway.
Journalism and Newspack
WordPress.com is partnering with Google and news industry leaders on a new platform for small- and medium-sized publishers, called Newspack. The team has raised $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others. We’re also still happy to talk to and engage […]
WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ
Update: On December 6th we released WordPress 5.0. It was definitely the most controversial release in a while, but the usage and adoption metrics are looking similar to previous releases. I’m looking forward to continuing to iterate on the new block editor! We are nearing the release date for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg, one of […]
The Importance of Meeting In-Person
I recently returned from Orlando where Automattic hosted its annual Grand Meetup where nearly all of our 800 employees from around the world, spend a week together in the same place. (And yes, we’re hiring.) Despite being a fully distributed company, I believe it’s still important to meet face-to-face — just not every day, in […]
Automattic’s First New Board Member: General Ann Dunwoody
As Automattic keeps growing we’ve been bringing in a lot of talented people behind the scenes to help expand on our vision as we go from hundreds to thousands of colleagues, and hundreds of millions to billions in revenue. Recently, former New York Times digital executive Kinsey Wilson joined our team as president of WordPress.com, […]
What a Week: WordPress, Maeda, .Blog
I’m still overwhelmed from last week, which was full of major announcements. Get your Instapaper / Pocket ready because I have lots of links! It started with a very smooth WordPress release, version 4.6 “Pepper.” A week later it’s had over 4,200,000 downloads and upgrades are rippling throughout the WP ecosystem with 13% of all known […]
Calypso, 24 Hours Later
The reaction to yesterday’s Calypso announcement has really blown me away.Here’s a tiny selection of of the coverage, analysis, and reactions to Calypso and the new WordPress.com:
Dance to Calypso
One of the hardest things to do in technology is disrupt yourself. But we’re trying our darndest, and have some cool news to introduce today. When I took on the responsibility of CEO of Automattic January of last year, we faced two huge problems: our growth was constrained by lack of capital, and the technological […]
Arthur C. Clarke on Distributed Work
I saw the new Steve Jobs movie a few days ago, which I enjoyed as a movie even though the main elements were fiction and it should have been titled something else. But they had an awesome video interview with the amazing Arthur C. Clarke in 1974, which I’ve embedded above, where he said the following […]
Ten Years of Automattic
Ten years ago the first official Automattician was Donncha O Caoimh, and he had no idea what he was in for. Neither did I, honestly. And it’s been amazing. I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. — The Automattic Creed When you think about it, Donncha was incredibly brave. WordPress had far less than […]
Woo & Automattic
For years, we’ve been working on democratizing publishing, and today more people have independent sites built on open source software than ever before in the history of the web. Now, we want to make it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralized services — to enable freedom of livelihood […]
New Funding for Automattic
I’ll start with the big stuff: Automattic is raising $160M, all primary, and it’s the first investment into the company since 2008. This is obviously a lot of money, especially considering everything we’ve done so far has been built on only about $12M of outside capital over the past 8 years. It was also only […]
Toni Schneider & Automattic CEO
Eight years and one day ago I blogged about Toni Schneider joining Automattic as CEO, as I said then: I first met Toni shortly after I moved to San Francisco and I’ve wanted him to be a part of Automattic pretty much since the idea first entered my mind. We’ve spent many long meals over […]
Automattic + Cloudup
As just written about in TechCrunch, the WordPress.com blog, and Cloudup’s blog, Automattic has acquired Cloudup, a really slick service that makes easy to share every type of media from a very talented team. The service isn’t open to the public, but if you use this link to signup there are a couple hundred invites […]
On the new Simplenote
Last week we relaunched Simplenote, an app Automattic acquired along with Simperium earlier this year. The coverage so far has been really overwhelming with great articles: But, even after my foray into Simplenote alternatives and doing research and trying out other note-taking apps, I’ve stuck with Simplenote as my iOS note-taking app of choice. […] […]
More Tiger Secondary
It’s only been a few months since May when Tiger Global led a round purchasing about $50M of Automattic stock from existing shareholders, but they are back and have led a $75M purchase of Automattic stock, this time entirely from our early investor Polaris. (There were a few individuals in the first round, and ICONIQ […]
Automattic’s Remote Work Culture
Business Insider has a fun article on Automattic’s Awesome Remote Work Culture. Includes some quotes from me about how we work, including “Rather than being anti-office, we’re more location agnostic” and the top five meetup locations so far (Lisbon, Portugal; Kauai; San Francisco; Amsterdam; Tybee Island, Georgia).
Automattic After-Market, Lee Fixel, and Tiger
One of the most striking shifts in entrepreneurship when I started Automattic seven years ago was the rise of the Founder Friendly VCs. The standard operating procedure at the time for VC-backed companies consisted of bringing in “adult supervision,” founders often taking largely-ceremonial roles like “chief architect” after the business had scaled to a certain […]
Automatticians in San Francisco
A wrap party for Automatticians after the WCSF dev day. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.