How WordPress Powers 43% of the Internet | Matt Mullenweg, Co-founder and CEO, Automattic

20:24And of course, in the US, we have this concept of copyright inspiring after a certain number of years. So I feel like we're actually entering where the very earliest Mickey Mouse, like the Steamboat Willie stuff, is about to go into the public domain.

20:35Turner Novak:I've seen those, yeah. And of course, classical works like Aesop's Fables or things that are hundreds of years old, Shakespeare's plays, are all in the public domain. So if you look at the incredible stuff that's been built on top of that intellectual property, it's really exciting. And this is not to say that proprietary licensing is wrong. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's just I think there should be an option for folks who want to have the choice to put their creative work under something that's more permissive and allows others to remix and build on top of it. Yeah. So I think it's an important then delineation with some of the stuff that you kind of created and built.

21:12Turner Novak:So WordPress is the open source project. Anyone can use that code to build a product with. And then you created a company called Automatic, which I think we're going to get into some of the different stuff Automatic does, which uses WordPress. So then how does Automatic intersect with WordPress? Yeah, so we sell goods and services on top of WordPress as one of our businesses. And then we also just make other cool open web stuff. Like we have a great podcasting app called Pocket Cast. I've definitely come across it before, yeah. If you love podcasting or listening to podcasts, Pocket Cast is probably one of the best power user ones out there.

21:54It gives you a lot of control over how you listen to things and folders and queues and all sorts of cool stuff there.

21:59Turner Novak:So then with Automatic, what was the thinking around you were working on WordPress? How did you kind of create this different entity automatic? How did that kind of evolve? And what was kind of, how did that go? Because I'm assuming this was, you were younger, right? Were you 19, 20, 21? At what point did you kind of make this separate entity and kind of start building a company? So the first release of WordPress was when I was 19. It started to take off. I was attending the University of Houston, studying political science. And it started to take off. I visited San Francisco and over the summer, just took a week, slept on a friend's couch.

22:38But I went to all the tech companies, Google, etc. So I got job offers from Yahoo, Google. But the most interesting one was a company called CNET, actually.

22:48Turner Novak:Oh, yeah. I remember seeing it. It's the news media, right? They did reviews and stuff? Yeah. So they had download.com and news.com. And it was one of the first big internet media companies i would say actually the first large scale internet media company which also meant they created some of the first cms's in the world content management systems because they're the first to have enough content to need management uh so there's some early cms software called vignette that was really big that was actually spun out of cnet but so the reason i went to cnet versus some of these other companies uh that obviously have gone on to be successful like google was they allowed me to work on open source and keep the copyright to my open source code.

23:29So having studied a lot of like jazz musicians, music history, I learned like when the artist didn't own their masters, sometimes they could be taken advantage of. And so it was very important of me to retain the copyright and be able to work on open source. So as a media company versus a technology company, like when you join a tech company, you sign over all your IP rights for coding to create as an engineer, which is important because they need to be able to license the software and sort of say that this, you know, this thing we're selling you, we actually have rights to. But, yeah, CNET was allowing me to sort of carve off my open source stuff and the proprietary stuff I was creating from them.

24:02And so, yeah, I dropped out of school, moved to San Francisco, and I was there about a year. Of course, as soon as I got to San Francisco, VCs started circling. And WordPress was starting to take off, you know, CNET was using it, a bunch of other people. And so I had this idea that, well, basically, could I get paid for working on WordPress? Because a lot of us were just doing as volunteers, like, what would be a business model or a way we could figure out how to make a little bit of money so that we could work on full time versus kind of nights and weekends. That was really the original idea.

24:36Okay, I've got to say I've been doing it now for like 20 years, but more than full time. The so that it's, it sounds very obvious now, because this is how the internet works, but at the time it was new, which is the software as a service. So to use WordPress in 2003, you would download a zip file, unzip it to your computer, it'd open all these files, PHP files, JavaScript files. You'd FTP that to a server someplace that you'd set up like a Linux server or a Windows server or something like that. You'd sort of configure a database. You'd do all these. You'd basically have to be like a junior your system in to set it all up.

25:14And there were some companies that you could pay for maybe a virtual web hosting account, but they didn't have what was called like a one-click install. That was actually an innovation that we helped introduce to the industry, was this idea of like a very fast and easy install, even though the software is being configured. So I thought, well, what if we could make it just like one-click easy, you know, like signing up for like a Yahoo Mail account or something like that to set up a WordPress. So.

25:41Turner Novak:I think I did do that. At some point back in high school, I did. I used it probably wasn't like the full uploading through FTP. I used cPanel for the website I had in high school. So I think I think there was like a plugin or something with my hosting where you could click a button to set up the WordPress. You still had to do a bunch with it, but you didn't have to actually literally upload it with FTP. It was like halfway in between the manual upload and the one-click creation. Totally. So cPanel was popular control panel software at the time, and that one-click installer that they did, a lot of people used it.

26:21I'm so excited to hear they used that in high school, although it made me feel a little old.

26:26Turner Novak:Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to think of what did I use it for? I know I've done it for family members. like people uploading websites too. I'm trying to remember what else, what else I use. And that was probably like the one big plugin. There's a couple, there's maybe like an analytics one that I use. I just had like a website with friends in high school where we'd like learn to code. We'd like find a script and we'd upload it and play around with it and like learn PHP, learn CSS through stuff like that. Totally. I learned, or one of the big things was I take game requests from friends and I would like rip them from, you know, eBombs World, Albino Black Sheep, upload it on our website that wasn't blocked at school so that people could play their favorite games at school.

27:14Turner Novak:Yeah, that was definitely a flash from the past. You just got this thing up and running. What were you charging for? It was basically like a software as a service. Like you pay us 10 bucks a month and you get your WordPress is up and live. Did you do all the hosting for people too? Yeah, so WordPress.com, well, we created two products. Actually, my first product was a plugin for WordPress called Akismet, which was, now we call it machine learning or AI, but basically an anti-spam system. So, you know, spam comments were a thing then. They're still annoyed now. And Akismet was a service to block them.

27:47And then we created WordPress.com, which is sort of like point and click Fisher Price WordPress. Very easy to get started.

27:53Turner Novak:Fisher Price WordPress. Okay. The very first version, I think, was free. We had an invite system, so you had to get an invite. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know if we did it at the very beginning, but we were ad supported. So we put ads on the website, but people started selling the invites because they really wanted it. So that's when we had our first indicator that we might be onto something. Then we introduced upgrades like customization or turning off the ads. If you didn't want your site to have ads on it, you can upgrade. That's evolved over the years. We're now, it's a full Amazon AWS-like hosting service.

28:31So WordPress.com, you can now use from a command line, you can spin up instances, you can auto-scale across multiple data centers. It's evolved quite a bit. Actually, the multiple data centers is a fun story because we're so broke. When we raised a little bit of money, I ended up spending most of it just buying servers, like physical servers from Dell.

28:51Turner Novak:That was pretty common back in the mid-2000s, right? Like it was just, you'd spend, you'd raise a million bucks and 750K went on like buying some servers. You literally just described what we did. And so like went down to San Diego, plugged them in manually, screwed them in, configured it, everything. But we ended up outgrowing them pretty quickly. So I was like, well, what do I do now? I can't buy anymore. And they were just starting to be some of these services that would let you rent a server for like 99 bucks a month on a credit card. Sort of a proto AWS, like before virtualization and everything like that.

29:27And a lot of them are based in Texas. Texas. Because Texas had these big data centers because the Enron build out actually, there's some fun history there.

29:35Turner Novak:Oh, really? Okay. So we started just getting on credit cards, like additional servers, like Server Beach in San Antonio, or EV1 servers in Houston, these are all gone now. But they would also give you a lot of bandwidth with every server, which was really useful because bandwidth was very scarce but because we essentially had to become multi-data center from the very beginning because I had like the servers we had bought in San Diego that we were stuck with, they were kind of like the main ones. And I was spinning up these little ones, you know, these different hosting providers all over the world to handle the demand and scale.

30:11And so we wrote some, it turned out to be very robust and anti-fragile multi-data center failover code, I love for both replication and sort of failover because Because kind of similar to Google at the time, we get just a bunch of really cheap servers and assume they were going to fail versus like spending a ton of money on like a really expensive thing that was never supposed to fail. And of course it did anyway, like a net app or these big file servers and things like that. So we had this kind of, we stumbled in because of necessity and lack of money, this highly distributed fault tolerant system.

30:44Turner Novak:And so this was, how soon before or soon after this did you have AWS? And did you have like 10 different providers you were kind of working with and balancing? And I'm interested in just like that era of the internet, like as somebody running a business, I was a big user of the internet this time. But like, what was it like then? Like, did you have like 10 different providers? I think we were mostly in two, like some of these texts is like$99 a month type things, where you get a whole server. It looks like Amazon S3, which was the first AWS service, launched in 2006. So it was about a year after we did, or a little over a year, and it was just storage.

31:26It was just file storage. So their EC2 would come later, which was their sort of server platform. We actually still to this day don't run on any of the hyperclouds.

31:37Turner Novak:Oh, interesting. You have your own at this point? or? Yeah, so we have about 20, presence in 23 or 25 data centers all over the world. Sort of some primary ones in the US and in Europe that are sort of like the big data centers. But like if a meteor hits one of them, like if a meteor hits Dallas, the others will step up to fill. WordPress.com's uptime is like pretty unmatched, which was a big deal at the time because there used to be things like the dig effect, you know, where if you were featured on dig, which is coming back now, or one of these websites or Oprah mentions you maybe to make a more mainstream example, like the sites would always go down.

32:17So we started to build in like caching and fault tolerance to make it so that we could scale for those big bursts of traffic, which ended up being sort of our next business, which was what we called VIP hosting. So this was for originally some bloggers. So TechCrunch started on WordPress.com. There was a blogger called Robert Scoble, had a really popular tech blog at the time. And they started to gain a lot of traffic, more traffic than the big, you know, sort of like CNET publications that they were starting to replace. And the blogs were out competing like the sort of traditional media. But then it turned out that that platform was really useful for other folks too, like the NFL, who like it's a ton of traffic, very spiky traffic on certain days of the week, or certain parts of the the year, like the Super Bowl.

33:05So that enterprise platform is still one of our big businesses today. So WordPress VIP. You know, fast forward now runs like whitehouse.gov, a lot of major websites, a lot of major media like time.com. And so as you can imagine, security is really important with that. There's a lot of governments and people in the world who would love to hack whitehouse.gov.

33:26Turner Novak:Yeah, for sure. Knock on wood, that's never happened. With our systems, I hope it's very resistant to that. And of course, for scale, like traffic, everything like that. So then how did you get all these people to start using it? Like you kind of alluded to, and we talked about essentially almost half the internet is run on WordPress at this point. What were some of the big things that you did in the early days? So like, it sounds like maybe the first one was you kind of intercepted that moment of the, um, I forget the name word, uh, Reed Hoffman. Movable type. Yeah. Movable type. So movable type, you kind of intercepted their upgrade.

33:58Turner Novak:Like, were there any other big things that you did that really like unlocked like a whole new level of growth over time? I have to be honest here, and it speaks to one of our biggest weaknesses even today, which is we're really bad at marketing. So most of our competitors have like Super Bowl ads and like really slick commercials and like, you know, they sponsor like Squarespace sponsors every podcast in the world and everything like that. So and we've been really word of mouth and community based. So word of mouth, you know, So we try to teach people. We have something to believe in. So I like to say, don't just build a product, build a movement.

34:35So the fact that we're open source, we have this philosophy, a way we want the web to work. And then I guess the final thing is events. So we started doing these things called WordCamps, which were like these super low-cost events that anyone could spin up, almost like a TEDx or something. And these started to be hosted all over the world, universities and cities and meetups. Meetup.com, which we're still active with today. So hundreds of cities around the world, WordPress users, you get together once a month and talk about it. So that kind of community building grounds up has very much always been at least what we've been most successful at.

35:09We'd love to get better at some more traditional marketing because I think we could probably be even bigger, but it's just never been something we've cracked.

35:16Turner Novak:What do you think you did right on the community side? Because I think that's kind of something that I hear a lot of people talk about nowadays is build a community around your product. Maybe the same things you did wouldn't necessarily work today, or maybe they would, but if somebody were like, oh, how do I build a community around my product? How would you kind of talk somebody through thinking through the things that usually work best? That's a good question. Number one, I would say is lead by example. So when you build a community, you got to show up and you got to exemplify the behavior that you want the community to do.

35:48So what were you doing? I used to, for these work camps, like when they started, if you organized one and got like 100 people to sign up, I would fly anywhere in the world.

35:59Turner Novak:Really? Okay. And so I ended up in some very strange places. Like what's the craziest place? I had no writer or anything. I'd just be like, hey, if you can find me a place to sleep with some air conditioning, I'm good. I'll get the plane ticket and just host me. And I'll speak at your events or your university or whatever. So I would just kind of go everywhere. And it's funny now, even 10, 15 years later, how many folks who are now sometimes have built huge businesses in the WordPress. like be tens of millions of dollars per year. Tell me a story when I meet them about like, you know, being on some small island in the Philippines, you know, 12 years ago.

36:34And I went to their little town and spoke about open source and spoke about WordPress. I think you need something to believe in that's bigger than, you know, just sort of self-interest. So giving people a shared mission and purpose and being consistent with it, you know, over the years and decades, I think people really respect that. And being based on open source, that's kind of built into the foundation or constitution, if you will, that sort of ensures that. The other thing I say is, yeah, this is community norms. So from the very beginning, being global and everything, we want to be like a space where everyone felt comfortable.

37:15And particularly, I think, for me, being a kid with no college degree, no one knew, like originally, like early contributions I would make were actually on the pseudonym because I was worried no one would take me seriously if they like knew who I really was. So a lot of my early activity on the internet was pseudonymous. So we've always tried to be someplace that anyone feels comfortable and including we still have some anonymous contributors today. But like, you know, just kind of, and this is now a little more standard, but in the 2000s, it was perhaps a bit more progressive, just like, whoever you are, whatever you are, however you want to show up, however you want to dress however you want like you're one of us we're combined with a shared mission this thing we believe in and we don't want geographic borders or language borders or anything and so you know our early tagline was we wanted to democratize publishing and to us what that meant is making it radically accessible to anyone regardless of economic ability what language they spoke anything so another thing was translation of wordpress you know that internationalization of the software which was totally community driven, was really big for growth then and still to this day.

38:25Turner Novak:So you mentioned something, you said people building companies on top of and around WordPress. So I know there's one that it's kind of been a little bit more in the new cycle lately. You've been a little bit more vocal about some of the things going on. Can you just kind of explain the kind of the backstory and what's going on with WP Engine? Sure. Yeah. So there's a company called WP Engine. A lot of people think it's officially WordPress, but it's not. They just have a sort of similar name. And they offer WordPress hosting, just like many other companies. They've done a really good job, I think, appealing to developers and agencies.

39:02And I think they've also, you know, a lot of people believe that some of their naming and branding, how they presented themselves, is some portion of their customers thought they were like official WordPress. us. So the beef or drama that people have probably heard is, we started talking about the trademark use. WP Engine a few years ago was bought by a private equity firm called Silver Lake, which is a really large$100 billion plus private equity firm. I was going to say, they're like one of the biggest asset management, like private market

39:37Turner Novak:asset management firms. Yeah, talk about who you don't want to pick a fight with. You know, people whose bank account is numbered in the Bs. Yeah, multiple Bs. Multiple Bs. But we've always, in the history of WordPress, even when it was very unpopular, sort of tried to stand up for our beliefs and what we believe is right. So long story short, there's become a legal battle with WP Engine over their trademark use. And we end up blocking them from some WordPress community events because we said, you're not kind of a member of good standing anymore. And they've started a huge smear campaign against me and Automatic, and they're suing us.

40:18Both sides are now spending millions of dollars in legal fees, sometimes per month. So it's been a huge distraction to the WordPress community. In some ways, I think it also illustrates that what Dries, who's the founder of Drupal, another great open source project, calls the maker versus taker problem. So one beautiful thing about open source is that, again, you can use it for whatever, and there's no requirement to give anything back or contribute to it or pay anything or something like that. But sort of going back to, we talked about artists earlier. Like you said you love Avicii. Imagine if everyone who loved Vici never bought his music or never went to any of his concerts.

40:59He couldn't have continued doing it. So there's some balance there. Now, some small percentage will always be a pirate or a taker. But you sort of rely on the better angels of people's nature to think long term and say, okay, maybe that makes sense in the short term. But the long term, if I do that, if everyone does that, guess what? It's not going to work. Actually, it goes to one of my favorite philosophers, John Rawls. This idea of, okay, I want to build up rules in a system that even if I spawned a new entity and I couldn't predict who I was going to be, that I would want those rules to apply to me, not just my current instantation or my current life.

41:43Luckily, in WordPress's history, although there's been a ton of commercial success, companies have participated really well in the community. And so that's, the exceptions have been very, very rare, sort of, but every sort of five to seven years, something will flare up, where someone goes like outside of the community norms, and there's usually like a bit of drama for like, six to 18 months, and then it all comes down. And then five years in the future, no one talks about it. But we're in the mix of one of those sort of six to 18 month periods right now. It's been about actually, I think, five months.

42:15Turner Novak:Oh, so you think you might have another year to go, just if you take historical? I hope it's another month to go, to be honest. Because honestly, it's in everyone's incentives for this not to happen. So sometimes you can think short term. And I think one criticism of capitalism or private equity often is sometimes they optimize for a short term. But the balance of forces, I think, is very much that in the long term, by working together, by sort of contributing back, by creating this healthy commons that we all benefit from, everyone to do a lot, lot better in the future. So a WP Engine that fully participates in the WordPress community and everything like that, I think is a wildly successful company 10 years from now.

42:58And I'd love to get to that point.

43:00Turner Novak:I'm curious then, how should somebody in open source think about, like if I'm a founder in open source and there's people that are maybe overstepping some of the boundaries of the common principles of open source, are there ways I should maybe think about how to approach the situation? Like if I'm in a similar boat as Matt, whether I'm automatic scale or whether I'm just early on, early day scale. Any advice for approaching some of these situations? You know, we talked about how to build community before. I think a good thing to start with is leading by example. So there's a WordPress foundation, a nonprofit foundation.

43:39And one thing we've always done is our excess money, you know, we grant out to other like-minded foundations at the end of each year. And for my company, Automatic, we do periodic audits and any engineer can suggest, hey, we're using this library or this thing that's really important for software. And so it's like, okay, we go to the website and say, do they have a way to donate? And so we're, I think, one of the largest sponsors of the PHP Foundation. I support a lot of stuff on the GitHub patrons and other things like that. So just like, how do you sort of pay it forward? And a little goes a long way.

44:18You know, so it's you'd be surprised how many folks don't think about that. Even at the very early days of WordPress, like one of the things that sort of started our first business model was I got this like$500 donation when it was still just kind of me. It wasn't like an official business or anything like that. And it was someone who took the money they would have paid to upgrade Google Type and decided to donate it to the developers of WordPress. And so that, again, kind of shocked me. And it was like, whoa, maybe this could actually be something that we could, if we create a way for people to do that easier, perhaps that could be a model.

45:04And I do think that for open source companies, it's good to have something commercial that people can buy, whether that's support or provide some value that sort of fits in people's minds in addition to just pure donations. So it's kind of like how Patreons often will have little gifts or even NPR will send you a little tote bag when you donate. No, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, just have something. It could be a T-shirt. It could be whatever. It doesn't even have to be something attached to the software. but something to sort of thank people for their support. And yeah, we're always looking for ways to do that.

45:38Now at scale, this can get into, it can become big. So actually in WordPress, we have this program called Five for the Future, which is something we introduced more formally a few years ago, which basically said, hey, think of a way to support the commons. So whatever 5 % means to you. So maybe if you're like a full-time freelancer building WordPress sites for people, you look for two hours a week, two hours out of your 40-hour work week that you kind of contribute back, volunteer. For Automatic, that scaled to being basically 100 full-time people. When we were like 2 ,000 folks, 5 % is 100 full-time.

46:18So over the years, we've contributed countless, at this point, tens or maybe over$100 million worth of sort of investment into the volunteer part of WordPress, That's the part that's available to everyone, not just us. Yeah, I think you're not bringing this up.

46:38Turner Novak:This is me bringing this up. But you had a blog post on your website where you specifically, I think you laid out public charitable contributions that you made over time. I was like, wow, that's a lot of money that it looks like you're donating every single year. But that's kind of like a pretty bold move to just put that out publicly, especially when you probably didn't need to necessarily. But it seems like it's pretty important to you. This was in kind of the height of the battle. And I was getting attacked a lot personally. And I've always just tried to have a personal philanthropy program.

47:14And part of the point I was trying to make, I don't know if I would do this again, but I was like, I think I'm donating personally more to nonprofits than this WP Engine company, which makes$400 million per year, is donating to anything. And they list one of their company values as being like, we give back. And so I was like, well, I don't know. I'm not an individual. Like an individual that's unwell, but I'm donating a double-digit percentage of my income every year to nonprofits. Like 5013C, check it with the IRS, you know, sort of things. And that's on top of everything that we've talked about.

47:46Like all these contributions, by the way, are not like when you volunteer for WordPress, it's not tax deductible. Right? It's not like an official 5013C. so that's on top of all that other stuff that we've talked about so far but it's been fun like uh you know the bay lights in san francisco is a project i've been proud to be a supporter of um the innocence project which does dna's generations of people who've been wrongfully convicted for crimes moms decades later you know dna will say like hey this person who's been on death row didn't actually commit this crime so it's just fun stuff um these days i'm also really excited about supporting science you know nat friedman's project which was a the Vesuvius project, which is decoding these ancient scrolls using MRI.

48:27They basically scanned them and machine learned to decode the text of these charred scrolls that were buried in a volcano. So just stuff like that. I like looking for things that are a little obscure or maybe not mainstream causes, and almost like a venture capital philanthropy model where I'm like, what's the weird thing that probably isn't going to work, probably going to fail, but no one else is doing? And maybe that'll turn into something big.

48:52Turner Novak:yeah or like the thing he's doing with the plastic list i think is super interesting oh that's not me that's not free but that's incredible yeah well i mean that's another one of those projects where it's like i i don't know how you make money from that like you you start a new plastic chemical company that's like that like it's not it's not bad for you or something like i'm not sure how you commercialize that but that's kind of why you need somebody just kind of have this i'm just doing this i'm putting all this information out there oh by the way all these different products are not that healthy for you i'm not doing anything with them just putting it out there and you just make it kind of public for people uh it's like we kind of need people to be doing stuff like that and it's kind of like that's one of the things when i first thought i was like wow that's super cool like i've it's been a problem that me and my wife have been thinking a lot about like we've used glass containers in our house for years like trying to avoid plastic wherever you can and it's like this is genius just you know just study do the research on measuring the levels and all this stuff and just put it out there.

49:51Turner Novak:People can see it and then let them do something with it. And this was probably influenced by like the idea of tithing a church or something like that that I was supposed to pretty young. But like, don't wait until you're old to start giving back. And it's incredible, this cohort. You know, we've mentioned Nat Friedman a few times. I find him a big inspiration. And it's not probably not a coincidence that he was CEO of GitHub at one point, right? The largest open source hosting place. But you also look at folks like Patrick Collison with the Arc Institute or Guillermo Roche from, I might have mispronounced that, but from Vercel.

50:24Actually, alumni of Automatic. We bought one of his previous startups.

50:27Turner Novak:Oh, interesting. You know, these folks aren't waiting until they're old and retired to get back. They're doing it as they go. And I think that's nice because you can also contribute your time and maybe your expertise to these different causes. Yeah, it's kind of one of the things that I feel like I wish the world was a little bit different where, like, let's say, for example, there's this giving back, like the 99 % pledge, I think that Warren Buffett is really big on. So you say, you know, on paper, Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world, he says he's going to donate 99 % of his wealth.

51:04And I don't know what that number is as of today, but it's probably, you know,$100 billion.

51:09Turner Novak:But he's not doing anything with it today. Like, he could be doing something. And then I think the thing that is the most kind of in my mind, I'm like, you could be doing so much is like he owns a large percentage of some companies where you might say some of your business practices are probably not good for the world. And, you know, let's say we fast forward, you know, whatever period of time you pass away, you donate the wealth and you try to fix all these issues. But it's like you can influence those companies today. Like you can change so many things positively in the world. You don't even have to donate your money.

51:41Turner Novak:Like you can still keep it all if you want. I would say yes and. So, well, one, you know, the giving pledge and other things, a common misperception. You know, entrepreneurs know this, like the idea of net worth for a lot of these folks who we say are the richest people in the world, it's not truly liquid. It's not like Elon Musk has$200 billion in a bank account he could spend on anything. No, it's stock in his company. And if you try to sell it all, by the way, that would crash. If he truly liquidated everything, it's probably like 30 % of what it actually is or something like that. If that, because what would the signal be to like, national shareholders that Elon's selling all his stock?

52:17Like that would probably freak everyone out. Could go down 95 % or something. So there is that sort of, I think, misperception of income versus like net worth. But I think you really nailed it. That's I think in addition to finding causes to support and sort of this idea for five for the future, like if you can build it in like now, like take 5 % of your post-tax income or pre-tax income and just kind of put it in a DAF. You know, Adam Nash has this great new thing called DAFI that makes it very easy to make a donor advised fund. Set that up, you can donate appreciated stock, you can donate cash.

52:56You know, there's all these sorts of things. And then that encourages you to start, even if it's small, even if it's just a hundred bucks, you know, a month or something, you'd be surprised how much that can mean, especially to some smaller local organizations. And if people are wondering where to start, I would encourage people to look local first. You know, so find things in your neighborhood, schools, arts programs. At Houston, I support a lot of sort of music programs because I got so much from sort of the public education and music programs growing up there. So buying instruments, you know, a couple thousand dollars worth of instruments can sort of transform an elementary school.

53:32And you'd be surprised, like a little can really go a long way. But you also talked about like, how do you build your company? I love this idea of conscious capitalism. It's kind of a word I use for it, but just kind of like building a company in a way that, you know, you'd want your children or grandchildren to work there. You know, how are you giving back to the world? For us, the big thing that we really took a risk on there and has now become a lot more mainstream is remote or distributed work. So kind of looking at the balance of things is I wanted to create an economic opportunity and an opportunity to work for Automatic for people all over the world.

54:12And I wanted them to be able to have a lot more control over their schedule or their lives when they did it. So that sort of led us, by the way, a lot of open source works in a distributed fashion. So we're like, okay. Yeah, fair.

54:22Turner Novak:You're probably inspired in a way. Yeah. In 2005, 90 % of investors I spoke to wouldn't invest in us because we didn't have headquarters and everyone in the office. Rightly so. A very, very smart investor, one of the probably top five in the world, said to me, like, hey, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, name every super successful tech company. All of them have had headquarters, especially in the early days. We're all physically co-located with each other. Why do it differently? We know this works. You literally don't have a headquarters, or do you now at this point? Well, we have a mailing address, and our office will do events and meetups and board meetings.

55:06But it's de minimis. I think average daily attendance is probably a dozen per month out of the thousands of people we have. So, yeah, you need an address. But you can also get a PO box or something. We've always tried to build it where the center of gravity was not in a physical location, because I want people to be able to participate equally. There's another thing that happens. Google now has offices all over the world, but talk to executives in London or Zurich or one of their offices that isn't Mountain View, and they're far away from the sun. The opportunities to advance or influence the future of the company is probably less than if they were in Mountain View.

55:49So they typically end up going to wherever the sun is, CEO is, wherever the center of gravity is, a big part of the year, just to stay relevant. And I wanted to create an environment where people could be influential no matter where they were in the world or what time zone they worked in. It turns out you do this for reasons that I talked about, because you access the best talents and other things. But you also end up allowing people to contribute who might not otherwise work at a normal company, like a lot of parents, particularly mom. who often have a larger portion of the sort of caregiving for both young or elder ones can sort of design their schedule where they can still like rock a job and contribute just as much as anyone else, but maybe at some different hours than the sort of nine to five office hours.

56:41Turner Novak:Yeah, I think moms are probably like the most slept on and underappreciated. Teachers also, I say, are very underappreciated, but I feel like moms, like parents in general, but moms is like, they, you just think about like the skill that it takes. So you have two kids, three kids, you're like raising these things that don't even know how to speak or communicate with you. And you're like, you're like bringing them up and like making them a member of society. Like that is so difficult. And like, you're basically like a boss for employees that don't want to listen to you. And you get them to do what you want.

57:16And then it's like, that is extremely difficult.

57:19Turner Novak:And then you just go work with some people in an office and like build a product or whatever, like maybe slightly different skill set, but like so much easier also at the same time. Yeah, definitely. I think probably the most challenging and I'm told the most rewarding job in the world is being a parent. But yeah, talk about project management, motivation, dealing with wild scenarios and things going wrong and, you know, handling it with calm and aplomb. Yeah. It's fun, though. I mean, we have two kids. I mean, I love it. I love having kids, but it's definitely, it's not easy. Like I think if you think having kids is easy, you're, you're, that's not what you're signing up for.

57:57Turner Novak:Um, I think you have to learn how to not be selfish also. Like for me, just as like a, like, you know, all of a sudden you have these two kids where you've got to do certain things that you might not want to do. Like you might personally not be that interested in, but, but you kind of learn to get joy from, you know, just spending time with your kids, watching them grow up, teaching them things. We had a kind of a fun moment the past couple of weeks. We started playing Minecraft together and they're like four and eight. So I can kind of start to get it. And I had played Minecraft back in college when it first came out.

58:31Turner Novak:And so it was like, it was kind of cool to like go back and play this with them. And I felt like I was actually like pretty good at it because I was just, you know, I knew I knew how to play it. And it's just kind of fun, like exploring, building stuff. And I think the other crazy moment is the first time I texted my oldest daughter when she was like texting me back. It was just kind of this surreal like like it kind of it was like a chat GPT moment where like you talk to chat GPT. It says something back. And like when my daughter was texting me, we're going back and forth. I was like, this is kind of why it's like I we created this thing.

59:05Turner Novak:And this this person that we made is like now, you know, she's she's like coherent. like when they talk to you, it's definitely like one of those moments. But for some reason, it hit me really hard. I think it's just growing up on the internet as a kid, like, you know, texting and back and forth is like, was a big channel or like a big communication channel. So I don't know, that one just blew my mind. We now have contributors to WordPress that are younger than WordPress itself. Really? And, you know, I was just in Ireland and actually the very first employee of Automatic is based in Blurne, Ireland.

59:37So I was in the area. I was able to have a nice lunch with him and his wife. And I remember his daughter was born while he was working. It's like the first baby that anyone had at the company. And now she's 18. She's like an adult and going out into the world and all these sorts of things. It's kind of wild. Very rewarding.

59:57Turner Novak:One question I want to ask is you kind of hit on this. When you talk about fundraising, you said 90 % of investors were just, you know, this is a non-negotiable with the remote work. Open source probably. And open source. By the way, we were weird in so many ways. And I was a kid and all these sorts of things. Yeah. And, and, and. Lots of reasons not to invest. So what was that like then back in, it sounds like early 2000s or mid, mid 2000s? Like, what was that process like just trying to raise money? How did you kind of figure all that out? How did you land it? Just take us inside those couple instances.

1:00:31Turner Novak:You know, I call it a great filter. And I talk about the folks who said no. I'd also just like to give huge kudos to the folks who said yes, took a chance on this. And, you know, Phil Black from True Ventures. Like, yeah, so these folks, now that have gone on to some really amazing careers, sort of looked at not just sort of the pattern matching for things that have been successful before. But, you know, perhaps there was a new model that was being created. And I would say, the advice I'd give is that, you know, because you said you had an audience of entrepreneurs, I think it's fine and actually important to have these principles and ways you want to build things.

1:01:22However, if you fail as a business, you'll become a story for why businesses shouldn't do that in the future. So it's actually really important to be commercially successful as well. I'd say doubly so if you're doing something a little unusual, because otherwise you could set back things a generation. And so I always go back to this Walt Disney quote, we don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies. If I want to keep working on open source, and I want to keep, I want more companies to be distributed and everything like that. Like, we need to build a successful business and people can point to us as a positive example, not a negative example.

1:02:00And, you know, people, there was a lot of worry in the early days that, oh, maybe this is going to be a lifestyle business or like a Craigslist where, you know, it's a ton of usage and a ton of value or Wikipedia, like a nonprofit, like maybe it works for that, but not like a successful commercial thing. So it's actually been really motivating sometimes because, you know, I would say in our employee base, you know, a lot of people are far more motivated by some of these open source ideals than necessarily building a business. So we always go back to say like, hey, let's be as successful as possible as a business because then one, we'll put more money into open source, both ourselves and supporting other companies.

1:02:39But two, we're going to inspire a lot more companies to build this way and a lot more investors to feel safe investing in a company that has these ideals and things like that. It's counterintuitive. Some capitalists think I'm a raging hippie, and some raging hippies think I'm an unredeemable capitalist. I think that's probably a good middle ground. The middle ground, I think, is the right way, where you can build something that contributes a lot back to society by how you operate as a business that you put so eloquently earlier. And, you know, experiment with some new ideals or some beliefs that principles that you hold true.

1:03:17And that I think is what fuels you through the downsides, through the tough times, and also attracts a level of talent to you that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise.

1:03:27Turner Novak:Yeah, I like thinking about it that way. I think one thought it reminded me of, are you familiar with Palantir? They do this thing called the forward deployed engineers. Basically, you have a technical person that goes and sits with the customer and just make sure that the product is implemented. It's kind of a sales role. It's kind of a product role. It's kind of troubleshooting customer support engineering. It's really like you're doing a lot, but the concept is a forward deployed engineer. That's kind of how they describe it. And there's definitely a time, just speaking about Palantir as what should the company be valued at, right?

1:04:02Turner Novak:Like there's probably a period of time in Silicon Valley where a lot of people's like, that's a fake company. Like that's not real. It should be a zero. I think maybe that's changed today. But a lot of people thought this forward deployed engineer concept was just dumb because Palantir is worth nothing. It's a zero. So that thing that they're doing doesn't work. Versus I think if you look at it today, if you just pull up the stock price, you're like, okay, I guess it is a good business model. I guess it does work. So okay, what do they do? It's this forward deployed engineer thing. So like now it's kind of leaned in the opposite direction where people think like, oh, this must be if you just have four deployed engineers, you'll be a hundred billion dollar company like Palantir.

1:04:42Turner Novak:So it's probably something a little bit in the middle. I think the general concept is pretty interesting. It probably works with Palantir because they have these massive they sign these massive contracts with the government. And you're just making sure that, you know, the customers sticks and they keep paying and like they probably have certain entities that are paying them 50 million dollars or whatever. like these massive contracts. So you can justify paying a couple hundred grand salary of like on-site, you know, part of your customer acquisition or implementation costs. That's like one of the most interesting examples, I think, when you just think about like the, like proving that something actually works and like proving that a certain model is actually a way to doing it by like, by being successful.

1:05:23Turner Novak:And then just other people say like, oh, this must work. You almost give the other people the ability to do something hard because you've proven that it works and they like get a little bit of, they get a little bit of slack, like try something that might, you know, might be hard or might not quite be the smartest way to do it or something or you make it so that is the way to do it. Make that is the kind of the best practice or the standard, so. It's, you know, one of my favorite sort of newsletters, Twitter accounts, it's called the Pessimist Archive. Oh yeah, I think I've seen some stuff from that account.

1:05:59It's fun because they go way back, like 100 years sometimes.

1:06:02Turner Novak:Yeah. It's all like newspaper headlines. Yeah. Look at cover articles predicting the death of Apple or saying how Google was never going to work because they didn't have enough advertisements or YouTube was going to fail or I wish if I had a nickel for every time people said WordPress was dead or blogging was dead. It's kind of easier to be a pessimist in the world. and also sometimes pessimists are right but it doesn't mean that they're right the next time and there's so many examples of people who are like right once and they predict doom the rest of their career and you know miss it uh uh was the joke that the economist correctly predicted uh 20 of the last five recessions or something something like that yeah yeah or there's a joke there but um there's that one guy um robert kawasaki he wrote one of those books are you familiar with him no he's just this guy that like every month he has this new tweet that he puts out saying it's like the stock market's going to collapse and like it's the end of the western world and like it'll be right eventually yeah he will be right eventually and he was right in 2007 but he does it every month basically for a decade uh it's like yeah i guess a broken clock is right you know once a decade there was this fun hack people used to do in the early days of twitter where they would create a prediction account that wasn't very popular.

1:07:26And they, you know, I forget, I'll just give an example and make it up, like predict the winner of the Super Bowl and the exact score. But what they did is they published like a thousand tweets with all possible permutations and they deleted all the ones that were correct. And then they pointed to the one that was correct afterwards. And look, it's timestamped, it's old, et cetera.

1:07:42Turner Novak:I'm a genius. You know, since you have an audience of entrepreneurs, it takes far more bravery and courage to be optimistic. And I just encourage folks to keep that flame alive, the optimism, the principles and the things that sort of like inspire you to build because you really need that. And I would say one of the hardest things in creative work, whether you're an artist, whether you're an engineer, whether you're a product person, is keeping that childlike flame alive because so much of society is sort of almost designed to extinguish it. So whatever it is that you have to do to kind of keep that flame alive in the face of however much criticism or people believing no or whatever it is, is really, really important.

1:08:27Turner Novak:Do you have any advice for doing that or anything that worked best for you? Oh, for me, there were some personal practices. So meditation has been really big in my life. Sort of it took me a long time, probably until like I was almost 30. But just exercise is so good for your mood and your brain. It's actually a thing that got me started exercising. I read this book by John Medina called Brain Rules. And I was like, oh, great. I use my brain all the time. This is kind of my meal ticket. So how can I make my brain better? And rule number one was exercise. I was like, oh, darn it. I don't like that at all.

1:09:02But it turns out even just going for walks. And if you look at so many great thinkers over the years, sometimes just go for walks. It can be really, really powerful. And actually gets you like 80 % of the calorie burn or jogging or something. You know, it's kind of annoying how much walking is, is, is effective.

1:09:17Turner Novak:It's just so effective. But it's like annoying knowing that like, man, I'm not walking enough, and I just need to do it more. Do walking meetings, listening to podcasts, walking calls, like there's so many ways you can kind of add in walking a treadmill desk, you know, to your daily things. As some colleagues who like, had incredible like, body transformations just by getting a treadmill desk, you know, and kind of that sort of, you have to walk fast, walk like a mile and a half a mile per hour or something like it, just that little bit of movement is really helpful. You know, there's that saying that like sitting is like the new smoking and how tough it is, how much time we spend sitting every day.

1:09:52Then the, so that's kind of like the, so, you know, that kind of idea of putting your oxygen mask on first, I think is really important. And that sort of, uh, uh, self including self love, I think is then once you, uh, get better at that and practice more of that, then you can expand that circle. to be more of a support to others, to be more loving to others. I forget the name of the poet, but it was something like, I'll paraphrase, love yourself so fiercely that others see how to do it.

1:10:24Turner Novak:Oh, I've never heard that before. We'll find that actual attribution there. It's always been one that's spoken to me. And then earlier, you talked about forward deployed engineers. And I would say, to me, something that's always sort of relit the flame is going to WordCamps and meeting members of the WordPress community. And so many people will come up to me and talk about how they learned the code from installing WordPress on a cPanel server. Or they built a business. It was an amazing story of a teacher in northern India. And he told me, our family couldn't even afford a full meal per day. We were often hungry.

1:11:02But at his school, he had an internet connection. And he said, every day I tried to learn something. And he'd stay like 30 minutes, 45 minutes extra. And he learned the code and started building WordPress sites. And all of a sudden, you know, just a little bit there, even a couple hundred dollars was like a huge deal with him and his family.

1:11:18Turner Novak:That's a lot in India. Yeah. Now he works for one of the top agencies there. He has a totally different life. You know, he's transformed not just his life, but the life of his family and been able to send money back and everything like that. Like that kind of story, like, like you couldn't make it up. I would hire like a PR firm and say, please like find me the best. But this person just came up to me at the most recent work camp, Asia. And it was a time, you know, I was probably a little tired. I was jet lagged. I was like, okay, I'll have this conversation. And it gave me so much inspiration.

1:11:50And so I try to remind myself of those stories when I'm feeling, you know, down or anything. And I do want to say that, like, all the things I said, sometimes you still feel terrible. So if you're feeling terrible, don't worry. Every entrepreneur you admire has had those sort of dark nights of the soul or things where you feel like everything's going the wrong way. But if you get up to fight another day, that's sometimes all it takes. And so much of I think our success has just been persistence. And so many of our competitors are the things I think just kind of gave up along the way.

1:12:27Turner Novak:I know this is a slightly different topic, but I really wanted to talk about this. So I've heard you mention that you are still like one of the primary developers of WordPress. Like you're still coding. You're very hands-on with it. We got to talk a little bit about AI. How are you kind of seeing that change coding? How do you think that's going to change the internet, open source? Pretty open-ended, but I'm just curious your thoughts on it. Yeah, so I'll clarify. I'm still the lead developer of WordPress, but I do a lot more directing of code. Now, I do love to code. So I code a lot for personal projects and sort of different things.

1:13:02And AI has completely transformed that for me, at least, especially as someone who I'm often trying to find hours in the early morning or late night to hack on something. Transformative. Things that used to, I think, would have taken me, you know, eight hours or days when I was in my fully locked in 20-something-year-old coding. You could lock in for a weekend and just commit the 20 hours. I can now do that stuff in like 30 minutes. And that's with the version that was six months ago. I haven't even tried out the cloud code stuff yet. So I've been really encouraging every couple of years. It's happened kind of twice in WordPress's history where I've gone to the community and said, Hey, there's this new technology.

1:13:43I need you to learn it deeply. And people kind of make fun of that because I said, learn deeply. And so the first time that happens was with JavaScript, because at the time, 95 % of WordPress's code was PHP. and I was like, hey, there's this new model. We need to become more of an application, not just reloading the page type of thing. It was around the same time we were starting Gutenberg. So I went to the community and said, learn JavaScript deeply. And if you fast forward today, actually a majority of new code in WordPress is JavaScript. So it's really transformed. And again, kind of obvious now, but in 2016, that was a big ask.

1:14:17And 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT, I said, learn AI deeply.

1:14:24and just feel very, very strongly that it's going to be an incredibly democratizing technology. And folks, even if you have an idea and good product sense or good design or whatever your skill set is, but maybe code was not accessible to you. Or if you're an engineer already, that's kind of like the best is you'll be able to work with these tools. So just be way more productive. Now, even saying that, I would say the adoption, both in WordPress and even within my own company has been uneven. But the folks who are doing it, including some of the founders of startups that we bought, are now having some amazing outcomes.

1:15:00And I don't think it's this idea of a 10X engineer I used to make fun of. I would think a lot more of 10X teams or something like that. But now I'm actually seeing 10X engineers. Really? Because they have a team of AI agents or something assisting them that allows them to multiply their creativity, their talent, their time. So it's still early days, these tools are clunky, like there's a bunch of different ones, there's new stuff all the time, like for a while, it was cursor was the best kind of AI assisted ID now, like a lot of my colleagues are using something called windsurf. So like, you know, but just play with it.

1:15:35So I would say, like, make a portion of your week, kind of, where you just like turn off all notifications, turn off social media, and just like play with these different tools. And if you follow me on Twitter, I'm at Photomat, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T. I actually share a lot of this stuff on Twitter, even though sometimes I feel like Twitter is my biggest vice and a big distraction. There's so much good AI stuff on there. It kind of keeps me on there. And funny accounts like yours. So those are things that keep me on Twitter.

1:16:02Turner Novak:Yeah. Okay, that's good to know that I'm on the... You're on the good side. So one other question that I have is, I know that Atomic, you do this kind of unique, kind of secondary buyback slash giving shares to employees. It's kind of like this liquidity marketplace. I just had a listener ask me, he specifically said, can you please just have Matt talk about this and how it works? Because I'm just interested in seeing if I can somehow implement it in my company. So I'm just curious if you could kind of explain what you do and just kind of how it works. Yeah. And I will say this is on our to-do list to open source.

1:16:36So, but in the meantime, I'll just describe it really briefly. You know, typically how you create more ownership in the company is stock options or RSUs. And typically RSUs kind of later.

1:16:51Turner Novak:Yeah, stock options, they have the right to purchase. They use their money to purchase the shares and they get a certain price in the future. RSUs are you give them the stock. Essentially, they're granted and then they need to do certain things need to happen, but they get the stock. I'll describe just super quickly. These are very deep topics, but just to say some of the downsides of these options expire. So they have to be exercised within a certain amount of time. Now, I think that, you know, we said 10 years and companies used to go public or something in five to seven years. You know, VCs used to optimize their exits there.

1:17:25I think now the time that companies stay private and grow to very, very huge valuations like Uber, before its IPO or Stripe today, like could be in the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars with something like a SpaceX. So this means that, this actually happened to me recently, where I had some options that were granted in 2013 that were inspiring. And then you have to exercise them. You can end up with a huge tax bill, all this sort of stuff. And so the other thing is that options, so the pricing, I think they're really nice at the very early stages of a company, when the options are valued in the pennies.

1:18:00But as soon as you start fundraising other things, you have this thing called a 409A evaluation that can change it. And it always felt unfair to me that someone who could be hired weeks apart from someone else, really, it's just sort of a function of when the board meeting was that approved the 401k valuation or something like that, could have a wildly different economic outcome. RSUs stands for restricted stock unit. And I'd say the main downside there is if I grant you 100 grand in RSUs, you now owe taxes on that immediately. And if you're not able to sell that RSU or exercise it, again, that might be tough.

1:18:40Again, if you're a public company and it's totally liquid, this isn't a big deal. But for private companies, this can create burdens, actually, on people. So I was like, well, what if we could do something that was kind of like an option, kind of like an RSU, gave some benefits to employees, but also wasn't necessarily required so they could choose if they wanted to participate in it or not? So fast forward, again, I'll try to get the TLDR. With Automatic, we move to a model where we don't grant stock by default or send offer letters with options or anything like that. Really since like 2013, I think we removed that as kind of a default thing we were doing.

1:19:17But what we did was we sort of went up on the cash compensation, right? Because cash is fully fungible and you could choose it to invest it in Automatic or you could invest in an S &P 500. By the way, probably should do both.

1:19:32Now, one thing that sophisticated investors have, like when a VC invests in a company, they typically have what's called like a liquidation preference or a 1x liquidation preference. It's fairly standard, which basically means like no matter what happens, they get their at least 1x of their money. So they're downside protected. This is huge for returns, right? Because as Warren Buffett or they say, just don't lose money.

1:19:52Turner Novak:That's the number one rule. So like, there you go. You're you're sold for that. A big part of the way there. So it's like, could I give everyday employees a 1x liquidation preference? And then also a good entry price, essentially. So we created this new class of stock we call A12 stock. It can only be bought and sold by the company. Employees can buy it at the 401a price, essentially, which is typically a pretty good discount to what the open market trading value of automatic might be, or the sort of intrinsic terminal value if we were sold or went public or something like that. Especially if we haven't done a fundraise in a while.

1:20:31So usually when you do a fundraise, the foreign aid will spike. So whatever the fundraise is, but as the time goes on, it will typically come down, often below what the fundraise was at. So, you know, they say don't time the market, but it's actually pretty easy to time, you know, good times to buy this A12 stock or something like that. And the company provides a one-inch liquidation preference. We also, another restriction is you have to hold it for one year. But then there's sort of removes the short term versus long term capital gains issue that can come up for people. And it's just an internal market.

1:21:06So as an employee, you get to choose how much of your compensation you want to put into this. There's a limit for how much you can buy because we don't want like obviously this could be really exploited by someone who is very smart. But it's a pretty high limit. And you have to trust that the company is going to be able to meet these obligations in the future. So maybe not great if a company is in the very early stages. But once you get into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, solid customer base, I think this could be a good thing for an employee to consider as part of their overall financial plan.

1:21:41And that liquidity is really nice. Just that sort of knowing that there's going to be regular intervals is huge, which you don't necessarily have if you have common stock, which might happen in a secondary. The other cool thing is it's yours. You bought it and it's yours. Whether you're an employee of the company or not, you have the same options to sell it. You can't buy it anymore, but you can always have those selling windows. And I think that's also really good because sometimes companies sort of famously will give secondary opportunities to current employees, but not former employees. And I wanted to create something that was very fair to everyone.

1:22:13Turner Novak:Oh, so even former employees can participate in this too if they still own the shares? Yeah. Which also means that like, if, you know, again, when you think very long term, what if someone passes away? All of a sudden, whoever they pass these shares to also now has that right to sell them at these sort of liquidity windows. So there's a lot of cool things built into this program that we sort of implemented. And yeah, I'd encourage people to consider something like it. You know, some other companies have implemented versions of this. And it's an honor to do to sort of open source the legal docs and serve like some of the technical implementations so that almost like a safe note other companies could copy and paste this we've done this for a lot of our things so like our terms of service that we talked about earlier is available under the creative commons so you can copy and paste that terms of service if you wanted our creed is under the same a lot of our documentation is open source so again what's stuff that we had to pay for or do a lot of work for that we can now open source and allow other entrepreneurs just copy and paste and then build something cool on top of it i'm always thinking about that uh sort remix.

1:23:14And if they build something really cool, maybe we can copy it back and incorporate that upstream. So it's kind of like applying open source to legal docs, to everything. And if there's something we end on, I would say like, this thing we've talked about for open source, like think about how you can apply it to areas that aren't just software. And what does it look like to share and allow to remix other creative works or other academic papers or whatever. And if you apply open source to different areas, we already talked about software with things like WordPress and MySQL encyclopedias with Wikipedia, but you apply open source to finance and you get things like Bitcoin.

1:23:50Yeah, there you go. Ethereum, which is open source. So people don't realize open source is now starting to transform society in so many ways. And I think it's really cool for people, whatever stage you are in your career, to really investigate and try to embrace it. See how you can be part of, because you become part of building the building blocks for humanity's future versus a proprietary product that could be very successful, but it might not be around 100 years from now. In fact, likely it will not, if you look at sort of the survival rates of commercial companies, even that were, you know, at the very top of their game.

1:24:20Turner Novak:Yeah, if you look at like, what are some of the longest standing? It's like GE, which I think went bankrupt. Ford, which is worth less than some of the humanoid robotics company, like startups now. Yeah, I think Ford went bankrupt. No, GM went bankrupt. So like, yeah, it's like some of these companies. You're probably getting like the European chemical companies. I feel like some of those have been around for over 100 years. A foundation I love, a nonprofit, is called the Long Now Foundation. And they actually study longstanding institutions. And there's some very cool examples. There's temples in Japan that have been around for 1 ,000 plus years.

1:24:59There's some pretty cool examples of longstanding institutions. And so if you study those, you see what might be the ingredients. One, it turns out, is maintenance, which actually is the topic of Stuart Brand's new book, who was one of the founders of the Long Now Foundation. I'd encourage people to check it out.

1:25:14Turner Novak:Maintenance? Yeah, just Google Stuart Brand maintenance. Also check out, there's an incredible documentary, I think Stripe Press actually funded. Oh, really? Called We Are As Gods or something. And it's Stuart Brand, it turns out, it's one of these characters who is kind of at the center of five or six different technological revolutions, going back to the Grateful Dead and psychedelics and the first computers and the first internet stuff. He did the whole Earth catalog and all these amazing things. He was an inspiration to Steve Jobs. So, you know, we talked about Palantir earlier. Like, I think it's cool to study the contemporary examples, but also go back to like what inspired Alex Karp and the founders of Palantir to build the way they did.

1:25:50You know, study Apple, but also study like who influenced Steve Jobs. That's a cool way to learn. And if you want to build something, because the next thing, you're not going to get it just by copying whoever's popular now. You kind of have to build on the foundations of what influenced them and then create something new on top of it.

1:26:06Turner Novak:Yeah, maybe we'll end. I just have one last question. Do you have any favorite classical thinkers? Oh, we mentioned John Rawls earlier and John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism. I love studying economic thinkers, so Frederick Hayek, Adam Smith. And then more contemporary, folks like Richard Feynman or Tyler Cohen, I think will look back as super influential and super amazing. So, yeah, as they have living folks, Tyler Cohen would be one of the best to follow. He has blogged like almost every day for the past like 20 something years. Powered by WordPress, blogs called Marginal Revolutions. And I guarantee if you read it, you will get smarter.

1:26:45So check it out.

1:26:47Turner Novak:I know I do. I do know of him and I follow his kind of sphere. But I didn't realize that he blogs every single day. That's crazy. I know he does this. He does kind of a media grant program. I know a couple people that he's given money to, to like, was just work on kind of a artistic creative pursuit that maybe it's a commercial project, maybe it's not, but it's just they want to create something and put it in the world. And he just kind of, I think he just gives grants and there's like no strings attached. It's like, here's a hundred thousand bucks and just blog or make videos for a year and see what happens.

1:27:18There was a great profile of him in 1842, The Economist's magazine. Sort of a long form profile just came out a few weeks ago. And he's definitely a polymath. There's a lot of folks like that. It's also interesting how many are prolific bloggers. So like a Seth Godin, who also has like a multi-year publishing streak. Some of the greatest thinkers get that way by sharing their ideas, not like staying in a cave and working for 40 years. It's all about that engagement that sort of helps it grow.

1:27:47Turner Novak:Well, this has been an awesome conversation. Thanks for taking the time to chat. It's been a pleasure. And I'm looking forward to hanging out in the future. And thank you for listening. And thanks to Ramp for saving us all time and money. Head to ramp.com slash the appeal to get$250 on your first corporate card. If you missed it, make sure to check out last week's episode with Grant Lee at Gamma and how they grew to 50 million in ARR with only 30 employees. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with Garrett Lord, the founder of Handshake, the college recruiting platform that's emerged as a leader filling the massive opportunity in AI data labeling and Owen McCabe on Intercom's impressive turnaround from SaaS to AI native customer service platform.

1:28:25Turner Novak:If you don't want to miss any of these, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. And finally, if you like this episode, please leave a quick review or comment wherever you're listening or watching. Let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts on this or any other episode. Thanks again for listening. See you in the next episode.

1:28:55See you next time.