601: Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic) - Defining Your Creed, Hiring Talented Leaders, & Leading in a Remote World

0:00No matter how far away the goal is, the only way they get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that's insurmountable. I am curious about mentors. I think everyone actually has a really interesting story and something they can teach. Four qualities that you can't really train. And that's work ethic, taste, integrity, and curiosity. One of the most sacred things we can do is hiring someone. I think it's really important to stay involved with hiring. There's a lifetime of your company. I personally did the final interview for the first thousand hires.

0:37Why should all companies have a creep? I think people need something to believe in.

0:45Welcome to The Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Tech Hawk, 266-866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text HAWK to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automatic. Automatic is a fully distributed company with 1 ,900 employees.

1:34Matt is known for developing the free and open source web software WordPress. WordPress is used by 44 % of all websites. There are over 810 million WordPress websites, including learningleader.com. Matt is a leader I've been following and cold emailing for a decade. I am very grateful we're finally able to have this conversation. We discussed why all people and all companies should have a personal creed. Matt also shares Automattic's creed and how they work to live it out each day. Then we discussed his goal setting process and some changes he's going to make. Then he shared the four must-have qualities he wants in a leader when making a hiring decision.

2:25And we ended the conversation talking about one piece of useful advice that he learned from the great Tyler Cowen about raising the aspirations of others. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Matt Mullenweg.

2:44you've written that everybody should have a creed like a company creed and i was rereading as the company creed of automatic which essentially starts with i won't read the whole thing but it starts with i will never stop learning i won't just work on things that are assigned to me i know there's no such thing as a status quo i will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers it goes on and on and so that first line caught me so two things. One, I'd love for you to go deeper into Automatic's creed, and secondarily why all companies should write a creed. I'll finish up the rest of it, actually.

3:26Oh, good. Please do. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague. I don't remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible because it's the auction of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint. And no matter how far away the goal is, the only way they get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that's insurmountable. So the vast majority of that, and starting with the I will never start learning, I will, you know, these are I statements.

4:05I, I, I, I, I. And how this came about actually was, I think it was around 2010. So it was a while ago. Someone had CC'd me on an offer letter they had sent to someone we were hiring. And I was flabbergasted. Because we were sending like a doc X file with bad typography. You know, it's a bad word doc. and it's just like legalese thing and the salary's buried like two pages down. And I'm like, what? This is like one of the most important decisions someone's gonna make in their life. And this is also for the company. One of the most sacred things we can do is hiring someone, bringing someone on the team, bringing them on the boat.

4:50And we're doing it through this like really crappy Word document. I'm like, wow, what do we know about design? What do we know about like, you know, how to make this better? so i mean some of it was just basic design stuff like okay let's let's pick up the font a little this thing could be times the roman let's let's have it have our brand let's put our logo on it then like okay let's take some key points out of it like the stock option for the salary and let's put that at the top you know like a little table it's also the legalese and so we sort of got designing this and I had just read the book I think it was called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and he had talked about how it's sort of he's a behavioral economist and they do all these different tests and one of the things was when they had people sign something saying they wouldn't cheat you know they printed that and they had to sign it before turning in the test they cheated less or something but they'd been given an opportunity to cheat easily or something but I forget the exact setup of the experiment.

5:58But this idea of like signing your name under something that you believe in, I was like, oh, that's great. I think I was also reading some Steth Godin at the time. As long as I get fired up and philosophical. And so I was like, all right, well, let's do a creed. What's something we can put above where you sign that will be a set of affirmative statements written in first person that's, if you don't agree with, I don't want you to join the company. And so that's what we did. So our offer letters now, you know, that's the nice stuff. Then the legalese nicely formatted. And then at the end, you know, there'd be the creed.

6:37And then you signed underneath it. So is the creed the same today as it was when you originally wrote it? Disappointingly so, actually. Oh, you want to update it? When I first published it, I said this was like the 2011 version of the creed. I imagined it would be much more of a living document. Now, I don't think that Creed is all inclusive. There's probably a lot of things that are important to us that are included. And there's been arguments about what to add to it and how to change it. And we still might in the future, but nothing has yet met the bar. Also, it needs to be like kind of catchy and punchy, you know?

7:17So it can't just be like, we value all people equally, which we do. It's very important to us. That's his core philosophy. But also, I want the creed to be things that we might say that another company wouldn't say, you know. So, of course, like all of those things we have and we try to live. But what's some things that make us different from any other company you might join? And maybe let's make that the creed. And so there's some things in there that other companies would say. But I don't know if like, you know, Amazon would say I'm more motivated by impact than money. or that open source is the most powerful idea of the generation.

7:56I don't think Apple would say open source is the most powerful idea of the generation. So it's a good, the Cree is actually open source itself. It's a creative commas license. So if you want to steal it, you can take it whole cloth or you can, you know, modify it or anything. It's, you can have it. But it's interesting that it's not that many other companies that would fit really well. So maybe, but I would love if someone just took a sentence or two and made it one of the, added it to their Cree. It would be kind of cool. why should all companies have a creed? I think people need something to believe in.

8:28You know, I think people do their best work when they're surrounded by people who are also trying to do their best work. And when they're working for something for more than just a paycheck, you know, paycheck is a necessary condition and it should be fair and competitive and everything. You know, we all aspire to something higher in our souls and our beings. So I think you have to articulate that. It should be audacious. It should be big. And, you know, every successful organization has a version of this, you know, whether it's Google trying to organize the world's information. Wow, that's pretty ballsy.

9:10You know, like, wow, all of the world's, yeah, they were serious. That's why they started scanning every book. That's why they started, like, mapping every street. Like, they're really serious about it. So it can be vague, it can be misused, but it can also be applied well and really drive an organization when you come up with a good one. I feel like too, I want to follow a leader who stands for something and I want to know what they stand for. And if you stand for something, that means you don't try to stand for everything. And that's why it's good to have values, why it's good to have a creed.

9:42And I think it's good to document them and share them with other people. Because if you try again, to be for everything, you end up being for nothing. and from a leadership perspective, Matt, I feel like that's something you've done a really good job of, of documenting your thoughts and beliefs. So it can, it can, it actually acts probably as a great recruiting tool because some will say, okay, that company's not for me. And that is good for you guys, right? That is great for you to know who is not for you as well as who could potentially be for you. So how is a creed and how is you being a prolific writer and documenting your thoughts, giving speeches that are on.

10:18Anybody can watch them. They're all over. The videos are all over the place. How has that helped you, you'd say, attracting talent as well as potentially keeping the people away that maybe wouldn't be a good fit? It definitely does attract talent. And it also keeps you honest because by the way, I'm wrong all the time. And I'm sure that 10 years from now, there's some things I'll say in this interview that I would no longer agree with. but one of the things that all companies like to say we like to treat everyone equally and we value everyone and everything blah blah blah we did too and at the early stages of automatic we did what almost every other company in the world does today which is we paid people in different countries different wages for doing the same job and guess what because we have a lot of principles and we talk about them and we have these discussions and everything the people in those other countries started saying, wait, I'm doing the same work.

11:14What about same work, same pay? And that's an uncomfortable conversation. I've had that conversation with some other tech CEOs. And, you know, it's like, okay, you wouldn't discriminate against the Indian person and your company, right? Why are you discriminating against all the people in India who work for your company, who are making 60 % of what your California people do? You know, something like that. And that's a very uncomfortable conversation. Because once you start to put it that way, people are like, oh, yep, that is not actually doesn't feel right. You can justify it. You can say cost of living.

11:49You can say like, that's what they do. And you kind of have these veneers. But for us, we're not asking you to do your work from any particular place. You know, I think cost of living is totally fair. If I needed you to live in San Francisco, and your job requires you to be in San Francisco. Sure. I got to pay some San Francisco local wages. But for us being a fully distributed open source company, you can work wherever you want. So where you live is your choice. And the value you create for me is determined by what you're creating for our customers, not by where you live, where you, you know, rest your head every night.

12:27I don't even know or care. There's some rare exceptions for like North Korea or some other things. So that's a good example of where like sometimes it can't bite you because by the way when this happened this was pointed out to me i was like oh yeah yeah i was like huh and the cognitive dissonance in my own head is it took me a while to come around to it and it took the company a little while to true it up because you can't well we couldn't at least we didn't have the the margins and the finances to change that overnight it wasn't like we just flip a switch but this is pointed out, I realized it.

13:04I realized the error of my ways. And we started moving towards that. And over the next couple of years, I can now say we are at global ranges for things. And not everyone likes that, particularly sometimes people in higher paid areas, but that's the market for what we do. How many employees you have now? We're right around 1900. 1900. Could you have imagined at the beginning of this thing of the crazy statistics. So WordPress, which is part of Automatic, is used, I read these stats, update these if these are wrong, by 43.4 % of all websites, including mine, learningleader.com, there are over 810 million WordPress websites.

13:51This, again, may be out of date. Like 1 ,900 employees. You're taking care of probably 1 ,900 families. That's insane to think about. Could you have imagined that at the beginning of this thing? Did you have that type of ambition? Did you want to do something to this magnitude and this scale? Yeah, well, this is where it's also important to point out that my company, Automatic, is separate from WordPress. So WordPress started before Automatic. It was an open source project. It still is. And so Automatic contributes a great deal to it, or probably the largest contributor. However, don't own it.

14:30WordPress belongs just as much to you as it does to me. And starting off, I can say absolutely not. I could have never. And honestly, I don't think I would have started if I was trying to do something as big as WordPress is today. Really, I was trying to solve a very small set of problems for myself and a few of my friends. And sort of built up from there. And I think that's, there's a lot, the name is escaping me right now, but it's basically a complex system that works, always started as a simple system that worked. You never, it's very hard, almost impossible to design a very, very complex thing from scratch, de novo, that works.

15:10So it's better to start from something simple, iterate, build, expand, and then you get to something much bigger and more ambitious. now we had pretty i would say you know this that's the starting but like a year or two in we sure we got delusions of grandeur we're like wow let's take over the web you know let's let's be the operating system for the open internet and that's when we started talking when we started talking about the market share percentage of all websites it was one we were 0.8 percent because google did a survey of the web and they released some of the things they found when they crawled all the websites and from their engine and they were like we found this weird it's obscure but it's like we found this weird bit of protocol or something on 0.8 percent of the websites and at the time me and the other wordpress developers were like whoa like we're not 100 of that but we're like 95 of the people who have that thing is a ping back header and so it's like so that means we might be like 0.7 or 0.8 percent of the internet right now and that was just so shocking because to go from just a couple of websites or a couple hundred or watching download numbers to be like a percentage of a whole thing was pretty exciting.

16:25And so, yeah, we still talk about that number. The number, you know, it can go up and down and it's not a goal per se, but I think it is a trailing indicator of how well we're serving our community and our customers and our users and how well we're adapting WordPress to the times is whether we continue to earn that number. You just mentioned the word goal. I'm fascinated by goals, goal setting, different types of goals. I found leaders are all over the spectrum when it comes to results-based versus process-based versus no goals versus a million goals. And you've written about this a bit. My goals in life are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging, what is your overall framework and philosophy around goal setting?

17:19Huh. That's a good question. So some, like the Democratize Publishing, Commerce, and Messaging, are, I think, as live goals, you know, and generational, and that it will continue long after I'm gone. I hope people will carry that flame forward. So I'm holding some of those torches for now, but I won't. And it's really kind of a humanity, a goal for humanity. What does that mean though? What does that mean to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging? It's a great question. So what it means to me is that we create a quality of opportunity and access to the core technology. So meaning anyone all over the world, regardless of what language they speak, their economic ability, whatever ability they have, has access to the very best publishing software in the world, which is WordPress.

18:13You can use the same software that some of the largest websites in the world do. You can download that for free and run it on your iPhone. So, I mean, that's, to me, democratizing. And so that's how we use that word. And it gets used different ways. And how it applies to commerce is a little different how it applies to publishing and messaging. And so, and our strategies there can vary. So for example, for messaging, we're starting off with this thing called Beeper, which takes all the different messaging apps and brings them into one. Instead of opening 10 different apps to see our messages, you can see them all in one place, see all your unreads, all your archive.

18:49Think of a power user tool for messaging across Signal, Telegram, LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now that's kind of step one is to create this all-in-one thing. Step two is we hope to actually start routing some of those messages over open source networks. So if like you and I both are Beeper users, like we probably both have five things. We have WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Beeper. And if we use Beeper, maybe you and I might start to route over the matrix protocol when we message each other. Because what we care about is communicating with each other, not necessarily what's going underneath it.

19:25So it could be a way to sort of radically decentralize and open up communication platforms, which right now are really a choke point of humanity's freedom. But we'll see. That's very, very long-term. We still have to... Beeper has not that many users right now. So this doesn't really even get interesting to get to the hundreds of millions and billions of users. Got you. So we see those goals. They're like life goals or goals that will live on beyond you. You want to be a force for good. You want to help us get in that direction. As a CEO, as a leader of a company, though, usually you stand up, maybe it's at the state of the word or maybe a different meeting that you would stand up and say, we are headed in this direction or we want to achieve this.

20:11And I've worked for CEOs in the past who they clearly state revenue targets or whatever the numbers are, and then we're going to go get it. Do you do that type of thing? Do you set those types of goals for your company? Or if so, I'm curious to hear more about that strategy. Or if not, what do you do instead? We do and we have. And that's actually something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Because we had a tough couple of months the past few months with one of our products. And it missed a lot of its goals. and I was also thinking about the motivational impact of like saying we need to grow 30 percent what does that mean and I think those are really important to have from like a financial point of view and a forecasting and everything like that so it's good business practice to do those but it's probably more motivating if you're the craftsperson the person making or supporting the software or whatever the product is to have something that feels a little bit more in your control.

21:14So I have been thinking about how we make more goals that are, we're going to be the best XYZ, or, you know, we're going to serve this many users of this language, or, you know, something like that feels a little more concrete than just a year over year percentage, which I personally like, like, I have a business side as well. And I get it. And I love compounding and everything like that. But it can be a little abstract or feel like a bit of a treadmill to many people. Yes. And what about for you personally? Do you set personal type goals, whether it's for health, fitness, family, fun, friends?

21:55Is that a thing that you do? I know you travel constantly, right? You just took a sabbatical, which I'm curious to learn more about. What about when it comes to how you are leading yourself first, long before you're leading anybody else yeah um i don't have anything too fancy there like i have little note cards i write things on yeah i have i make a one of our products is called simple notes i make a new simple note every year that has sort of my goals for the year and i also track some things i did or weddings i went to or things like that i journal using our product day one which is in this fully encrypted journaling system that I really love.

22:36So that's also really great for seeing where you were this time last year, seeing how you're feeling, more of that introspective side of things. I find journaling a very, very powerful tool for development and progress, which is kind of what Goldstein is. What type of things are on those note cards or the simple note? You know, I do make New Year's resolutions as well. and uh and so i will set some goals there sometimes they're silly like once i try to want to run a 5k and seven continents in seven months it was one i had a few years ago wow and so yeah you gotta plan that out yeah it's really hard to get to yeah so you gotta that's kind of like the anchor right and then you're kind of like oh you kind of get south america for free on the way?

23:28How do you kind of map it out? Yeah, it just, they can be silly, they can be big. I've published them before. One year I published at the beginning of the year like a bunch of acronyms that I knew the meaning of but I was going to announce what they actually were at the end of the year. So it was kind of like shooting my shot. These are the things I want to do this year. But I wasn't pre-announcing them. I was kind of going to be able to go back. So I think those are all different strategies. I've done lots of different ones. I myself I'm a little more jazz, a little more improvisational. I kind of change from year to year based on sort of what the biggest things that are going on or what the biggest priorities are, what my approach to tackling it might be.

24:11Interesting. I remember seeing this years ago and I've been wanting to ask you about it for years. I can think, I can wait, I can fast. It comes from Siddhartha about thinking, waiting, and fasting. If you can do these things, you can practically do anything. of all the sayings in the world and all the quotes in the world, that's the one on your Twitter bio that you've had for a bit now. What is it about that one that made you leave it there after all these years? I can think, I can wait, I can fast. Well, I mean, Herman Hesse, Siddhartha, it's one of the great books. And so I feel, and it's short too, so I don't feel bad recommending it.

24:49It's not like I'm recommending a 900 page thing. Everyone should read that book, honestly. And so I think if you read the book, you'll see why I like the quote and why it inspires me. And I do those three things. How do you do those three? Yeah. How do you do those three things? I did get into fasting, intermittent fasting, kind of early on, like the 2012 or 2013 or something. I had a buddy, actually John Vecchie of PopCap Games turned me on to it. And then I started spending some longer fasts. And you sort of get into this. Of course, nothing is new. It turns out every major religion has some form of fasting, some form of prayer or meditation.

25:29Humans have known this for a long time. But the core concept there, the mental model, which I think is good, is just cycling. Cycling on and off, whatever it is that you're doing. Even I take a lot of vitamins and supplements, but I try to stop taking them sometimes just to say like, okay, go take a few weeks off. Just because. So that fasting for that is kind of a version of that. it's peter at here talks really well about some of the health benefits of it and i encourage anyone interested in it to check that out and there's a cool app called zero which also has like all the health information how to do it well and you know the one tip i'll give is have electrolytes so sodium magnesium and potassium makes it so much easier so just a little bit of that doesn't really break your fast you put it in your water and you'll feel way better on days two three four i've done seven day fast water fast wow how do you feel at the end of that amazing actually really yeah so this is weird thing where you know first day don't feel anything just maybe feel hungry a second day for me like kind of days two and three you definitely feel lower energy like your body is switching over but if your body switches over to use burn fat ketosis burn ketones for energy and then you'll get incredible mental clarity incredible energy, you can work out, you can do a ton of stuff.

26:47Now, when you get to day's six, seven, yeah, you're, you're, you are running a little bit lower. Also depends on your body fat composition, et cetera. But you actually have a lot of clarity, great sleep. You know, it could be really, it's a nice thing to experiment with. Interesting. One of the things about you, I've watched a number of your keynote speeches and I can tell you, you work at it to do a really good job. And I think that's super important for a leader in any company, especially one, if you're going to regularly communicate with your team, you're going to get up and take all of their time to be focused on you.

27:23I think you should be really good at it or do whatever you can to get good at it. And it's obvious that you have, what is your overall process to prepare for your keynotes to your team or just keynotes in general? And then how do you think about your message, the execution of that message, whether you use slides or not. I'm really into the communication with team and I want to hear how you think about this. Public speaking is a multiplier for anything else you do. So being able to communicate effectively, it's just a force multiplier for all your other skills. So it's really worth investing in as Toastmasters groups and other things.

28:02For me, part of the things that I was lucky with were I played saxophone from second grade. My dad played saxophone, so I wanted to be like him. So that's performing and things like that. My sister was in theater, so I did some theater stuff too. And those just were just good early experiences of standing in front of a group of other humans. And as an adult, I've invested a lot of time. I've taken courses. I've read books. I've done trainings. One of the hardest things to do is just watch yourself. So like watch a recording yourself. It's really painful because we don't sound to her ears like we do when we're talking.