Latest / What's Your Problem? / Building an Empire on Free Code

Transcript

Building an Empire on Free Code · What's Your Problem?

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin. Maybe the most valuable thing that corporations create today
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: is software. Just look at Google or Microsoft, two of
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the biggest companies in the history of the world, worth
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: trillions of dollars, and they're built largely on lines of
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: code that tell computers what to do. So maybe one
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: of the most surprising things about the way technology works
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: today is how much code people give away for free.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: In fact, most of the web runs on open source software,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: software that's free for anyone to use, tweak, adapt, and share.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: The Internet maybe the most important engine of twenty first
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: century capitalism is built on top of this hippieish open source,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: free to be you and me dream. I'm Jake Goldstein,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: and this is what's your problem. My guest today is
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Matt mullen Wick. In two thousand and three, Matt co
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: created WordPress, a piece of open source software people could
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: use to publish blogs. Today, WordPress power is more than
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: forty percent of all the websites in the world, hundreds
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: of millions of sites. Matt is also the founder of
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: a for profit company called Automatic. His problem is this,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: how do you build a multi billion dollar for profit
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: company on top of software that anyone can use for free?
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: So what's WordPress? WordPress is an open source operating system
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: for the web. So what's that mean. It means that
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: if you want to have a home on the web,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: a place that you call your own, call a website,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: back in my website, and WordPress can power that. And
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: because it's open source and created by the community, it's
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: constantly getting better, so that when you choose WordPress, you're
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: kind of pitching your wagon to a horse that is
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: like on a really great path, and that a lot
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: of other people are contributing to. You know, we do
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: major new releases of WordPress three times a year, and
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: typically five hundred plus people work on every single release.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: And how many of those people are getting paid to
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: work on the release About five so almost none almost,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: So hundreds of people are doing it for free because
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: they love it, because they believe in it, because it's
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: useful to them. So developers don't like writing the same
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: code twice, right, So often what they'll do is, once
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: they've solved the problem, they'll create what we usually call
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: a library, so that the next time another developer says
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: needs to multiply two numbers together or combine, you take
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: an image and turn it into grayscale as an existing
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: function or library that does that, and you put it
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: out there and you publish it today on the internet.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: You might publish that on repository like GitHub, which is
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: a place where a lot of people put open source code.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: But regardless of how you put it out there, if
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: you're building something, now, a lot of what developers do
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: is Google, So they search, they say, okay, how to
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: turn an image to grayscale in Python, which is a
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: name of a language, or PHP, which is another programming language.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: And then you'll see tutorials and you see code examples,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: and you see all these sorts of things, and so
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: that becomes kind of the shared knowledge that we use
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: to compose larger and larger things. And what's nice is that,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe the first person who had to turn
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: an image from color to grayscale, that took them like
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: five days to figure out, right, because you have to
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: look at all the color codes and then figure out
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: where that maps two on the gradient of zero to
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: one hundred of white the black. But now I could
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: just Google for thirty seconds, have a function, and have
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: that and then I move on to my next problem.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: And so this is basically what all modern technology is
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: built on is people sharing what they've solved already and
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: future people being able to build on top of it.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: I love it. And you know, if you think of
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: the like standing on the shoulders of giants metaphor, it's
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: like the shoulders get higher and higher really fast this way, right,
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: because everybody builds their little block and then puts it
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: out there and everybody can grab the next block. I
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Mean a question I have is if somebody is spending
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: five days to learn how to do this one little thing,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: turn a color image into gray scale, and they're working
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: for a for profit company, Like, why would that for
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: profit company give away the product of that five days
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: of labor that they just paid for. Well, maybe what
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: that company is selling is advertising and they don't really
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: care about you know, turning images from color to gray scale.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: That's just something that was along the way, like a
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Google like like google some code or you know and
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: scram filter. So I think that, Um, what's the motivation
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: for people doing open source? And it's fun again one
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: if you're a coder, by the way, it is so
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: cool to know that code you wrote is running billions
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: of times a day all around the world. That is
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: like actually kind of like characters I typed on my
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: keyboard or now being executed countless times all over the internet. Um,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: that's kind of fun so that I don't know, maybe
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: there's a thrill in that. I don't know what you
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: would call that, like the joy of a crafts persons
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: seeing their work used. Yeah, so okay, So that's an
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: example of a thing that should be open source. Is
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: there any setting you can think of where it makes
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: sense for an visual or a company, for whatever reason,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: to not make their software open source. Well, companies might
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: say that this is my secret sauce reasonably, so right,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Like that seems like a like a software company is
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: in the business of selling software in some instances, yea
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: or no? I mean, I don't know. Is it reasonable
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: to say it's their secret saucer? Do you think it's
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: always a bad idea? I hold no judgment for how
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: people choose to license their code, whether they choose to
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: make it proprietary or open. I have personally chosen to
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: devote my life like the past, you know, twenties on
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: the nears and however long I'm still able to produce
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: useful code to creating open things because I want to
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: be part of upgrading humanity. I want to be a
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: good ancestor. I want to make it so that the
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: generations after can benefit from the code I've read, the
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: things I've learned, the work I've done, and build on
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: it in a way that takes us to ever greater
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: heights versus having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: So okay, so that's the open source piece of it.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: You've also built a big company that is for profit
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: that is adjacent, right, tell me about that. Yeah, So
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: I was having so much fun doing open source, I
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: had a question, maybe similar to what you said earlier,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: which is like, how can I make a living doing this? Like,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: you know, I love working with people and collaborating and
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: making this shared resource for humanity, but I still have
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: prosaic needs. I need to pay bills. So I started
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: to think of what could be a business around this.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: So I found it a company called Automatic And basically,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: we make add ons for WordPress. So we could sell
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: a plugin that enhances your WordPress, but that costs extra money.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: We make it easy to run WordPress. So WordPress is
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: code that you can run yourself, but we can run
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: it for you and make it really easy. So we
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: charge for that, and then we've expanded into other services,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: you know, around sort of creating more freedom on the
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: web and trying to allow people to express themselves, something
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: I personally get really jazzed about working on. And so
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: we have apps for podcasting in podcast we have apps
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: for journaling in day one, you know, for private encrypted
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: journals for publishing, and Tumblr and WordPress. So we're kind
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: of a little bit of a conglomerate now that makes
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: lots of software that we hope we can fill up
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: your home screen and more or less, how big is
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: the business? How big is automatic at this point? Way
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: bigger than I ever expected. Yeah, what started with me
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: and a couple of other folks just want to get
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: paid to work on WordPress. We're now about two thousand people.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: And because we had this open source background of collaborating online,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: we've actually been fully distributed from the very beginning. So
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: those two thousand people are actually in ninety seven countries.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: You were remote forever for fifteen years, and then the
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: pandemic cam alogue in the world, for a very unfortunate reason,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: sort of caught up with you. Yeah. So there's one
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: piece of it, when I've heard you talk about it
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: that is particularly interesting to me. You tell me if
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: I get it wrong. But it's this basic idea that
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: when you really get to a high level of this
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: remote or distributed work, people are mostly working asynchronous lee
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: so they don't have to be working at the same time.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: And you talk about this idea of moving from a
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: sort of you know, synchronous conversation based work culture to
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: an asynchronous writing based work culture, and that seems like
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: a big hard leap to me. Like, I write for
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: a living, I wrote a book, I wrote for newspapers,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: like I know how to write. But the idea of having,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: you know, a fundamentally writing based relationship with my colleagues
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: rather than a fundamentally conversation synchronous conversation based relationship with
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: my colleague seems super hard. Like that leap seems giant
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: to me. So I'm curious how you've done it. There's
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: so much opportunity in the world just from taking something
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: that people take for granted and just take it off
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: the shelf and use it exactly as it is and
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: really breaking it down and questioning the assumptions. Yeah, I
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: know we've done it this way for one hundred years,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: but what are we really trying to accomplish and is
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: there a different way we could accomplish the same thing
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: first principles they call that. Yeah, it's how we arrive
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: todays synchronous work. So, by the way, this is kind
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: of how open source works because right when there's people
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: all over the world working on a shared code base,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: right the code exists on the Internet. Anyone can go
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: see it and make a change to it or propose
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: a change to it, and I don't need to be
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: there while they're doing that. So I think that's so
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: much of our particularly how we did information work kind
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: of inherited a corporate mentality from factories and you kind
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: of do it need everyone in the same building working
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: on the same car to like build the car. But
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: when I would walk through offices and just see rows
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: and rows of people with headphones on looking at their computers, Like,
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: why do they need to be in the same room
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: to do this? Yes, And what is the advantage of
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: them being in the same room. Well, there's a difference
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: between the same room and the same time, right, Like
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: I think I'm bought in on don't need to be
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: in the same room, But I'm struggling to make the
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: leap of not at the same time for a lot
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: of complicated communication. I really like to talk to people.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: I could tell you're the right job. I suppose I'm
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: not a good right Literally, my job is talking to
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: people's syncreticy So maybe I'm the wrong person to evaluate.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: So let me ask you this in terms of you know,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: you've been doing this. You've been running a distributed company
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: for what fifteen years now more right, for a long
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: time time, So you know, I think you must know
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: things that would be useful for lots of people to learn.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Right now, lots of people are trying to figure out
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: things that you've spent seventeen years figuring out, right, So
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: is there some you know to be a little bit
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: reductive or didactic, just things you've learned that you want
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: to tell people who are just trying to figure out
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: how to do distribute at work that you learned the
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: hard way. I'll say one two things. One is a
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: subset of the other. So the first thing is, there
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: is so much benefit to invest in improving your writing.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Clarity of written communication as a superpower will multiply everything
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: you do. And you know written communication is and everything. Yeah,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: but if you can you know, read a book about writing,
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: or edit your own writing as someone else to edit it. Whatever,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: the processes that improves the quality of your your written
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: communication will pay back many fold. Just just to contextualize,
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, presumably the ideas written communication becomes profoundly more
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: important when you're working asynchronously, Right when you can't just
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: have a conversation with your colleague and you have to
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: write them a message. Yeah, the written word is really sticky.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: We obviously have lots of options now, and there's still
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: something about the written word that can you know, move society.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: You know, it can inspire you know a thousand, build
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: millions of people. It can you know, call people to
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: the ocean. It can call people to work, and call people,
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: you know, make them imagine a world beyond and live
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: their life in a totally different way just words on
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: a page. And yet I find the hardest written communications
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: for me in a work context. The place where I
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: most want to have a synchronous conversation is where there
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: emotional issues at play, when somebody's mad at somebody else
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Like,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: That's when I really want a synchronous conversation because the
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: tone and the subtext is what I find hardest to
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: get in written communication, the sort of emotional subtext and
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: like power dynamics, those are the things that I find
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: really hard in writing at work totally. Yeah. So, yeah,
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: that's a that's a good time to talk to someone.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm not gonna argue against that, and it
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: could be very valuable to see. You know. One thing
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: that's common for us is if we find we're typing
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: to each other a lot and you know, just getting
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: more and more worked up, it's a good time to
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: pick up the phone. Yeah. But writing is just a
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: upset of communication, and fundamentally, all all human problems are
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: are usually a function of communication. Yeah, right, the myth
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: of separation, this idea that we're not all connected, and
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: failures of communication are I think the source of all
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: human suffering. After the break, how Automatic competes against giant
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: for profit companies that also build on WordPress and Matt's
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: plans for Tumblr, the old social media platform that Automatic
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: bought back in twenty nineteen. That's the end of the ads.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Now we're going back to the show. So I'm curious.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: I find it interesting in general to talk to people
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: about things they haven't figured out yet, the things they're
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: working on now but don't quite know. I'll say our
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: big problem. Yeah, you know, we talked a lot about
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: open source and the fun of contributing now, and you
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: said companies might not want to do that because they
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: want to keep their secret sauce or something. There's another
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: problem that happens, so open source can fail when it's
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: successful through something called a free rider problem. So imagine
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: if people got a lot of benefit from this open
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: source code, but they didn't improve it, they didn't give
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: back their improvements, and then the people who were working
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: on improving it, you know, didn't get any of the
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: benefit or money from it, and so they eventually just
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: gave up and worked on other things. Then that sort
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: of core would die. So I would say the big
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: problem of open source is how to close the loop
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: of people using it and contributing to it. So in WordPress,
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: for example, you can get WordPress from my automatic at
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: WordPress dot com. You could also get it from go Daddy,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: or from blue host, or from Amazon or Google or
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: a lot of other places. And these companies will take
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: your money, but they won't put any of that back
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: into developing WordPress and just To be clear, GoDaddy is
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: using WordPress. They're taking the WordPress software that is created
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: by everyone in the world all the time, and they're
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: using it because it's open source and they can. But
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: they're not sort of part of this open source community.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: They're just taking the software and selling it to me,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: which is totally fine, allowed by the license, by the community,
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: by everything, and they're not breaking the rules. But but
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: so why is it a problem? What's the problem? I
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: guess another way they framed a problem would be that
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the companies who are only motivated by profits, yeah, could
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: out come peat the companies that also can shibute back, right, Like,
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: at some point they could outcompete automatic. And so you've
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: built this thing and you are dedicating your life to
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: the open weab and open source, but they might I
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: don't know, execute better, be better capitalized and put you
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: out of business and sort of shut down the openness.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: But one example is like by taking some of those
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: profits and investing in advertising, so now of a sudden,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: they're buying Super Bowl commercials or buying ads on Google,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: so that when you search for WordPress, you know, the
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: first four or five results aren't like actually the community,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: they're so in paying to be at the top, and
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: so capital that gets capital that is happening, right, Like
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: go Toady had a Super Bowl ad. Yeah, so what
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: do you do about that? Well, I thought I could
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: go on podcasts and tell people about it and that
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: might help. Here we are, it's about a Super Bowl
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: at but it's what I got. Well, I think that
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: I think that people really care. So if they knew
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: about the philosophy and the community and kind of what
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: we're trying to create over the long term, that we're
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: trying to build software that's going to be around in
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: one hundred years, people would be excited to be a
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: part of that. And luckily, money can't buy love, right,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: So there's forces in the universe and even in capitalism
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: far far stronger than dollars. And so essentially what we're
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: betting on is that those forces win in the long term.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: But we also have to do a good job at
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: telling our story, at being out there, at sort of
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: making it easy for people who contribute and get involved.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: If we don't do a good job there, WordPress will
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: fail and it will die and it will just be
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: you know, one of the thousands of open source projects
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: that have withered on the vine and died. But if
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: we get this right, it could be something that, you know,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: a thousand years from now, they were running WordPress on
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Mars or in other galaxies. That is good, big that's
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: a good big frame a word press in another galaxy,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: like not even another solar system. Just go all the way.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Let's talk briefly about Tumbler. How's Tumbler going? You bought it.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: I downloaded it for this conversation. I don't quite get it, Like,
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: can you help me get it? Help me love Tumbler.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Tumbler is a blogging system. It's a social network. It
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: was one of the original ones. It was quite good
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: under after it got bought for a billion dollars by
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: Yahoo in like twenty twelve, it was kind of mismanaged
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: and withered a bit on the vine. We bought it
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: to revive it, and part of why we bought it
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: was it turned out the kids are still there. So
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: Tumbler's primary demographic is thirteen to twenty four. So I
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: think always youth has wanted a place where their parents weren't,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: someplace that was maybe a little even harder to figure
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: out it, kind of like Snap was in their early days.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: So like not supposed to get it. The fact that
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: I don't get it as a feature not a bug.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: I'd buy that. Well. I would say that the fact
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: that you don't get it right now is probably why
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: kids love it, ye or younger folks really like having
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: their own space. So essentially, by anchoring Tumbler on art
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: and artists, which was always kind of the core of it,
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: like people sharing their creativity, we're creating like a third space,
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: like a place that's not like you need to be
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: professional like LinkedIn, or be fancy like Instagram, but someplace
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: you can just go like, be weird, be creative, be yourself.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: And it turns out the Internet wants that and needs
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: it now. Our challenge is running a social network is
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: both technically and shistically very difficult to make the algorithms
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: that show people what they want but don't inflame things,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: to garden and curate the community so that it has
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: positive interactions but not like hate speech or violence or
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: anything like that. Is you know, you'll never here recriticize
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: Facebook for that because it is a really really hard
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: problem to do. Its scale. Tell me, so, you know,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: tell me about the well, I assume I saw what
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: you said before that Tumbler is open source, I mean
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: sort of fitting into your broader galactic worldview, and what
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: does that mean? Right, So what does it mean to
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: have an open source social network and in what important
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: ways is it different from other big social networks along
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: that time? Tumbler was and is proprietary software when we
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: bought it. But what we're doing is we're actually switching
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: it to WordPress. So one of the projects, and it's
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: going to take years because it's it's big, is over
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: half a million blogs on Tumblr that we've got to
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: migrate over. So it's just a lot of data, a
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: lot of things support, but we're actually switching those all
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: to be power my WordPress underneath, and so those will
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: all be part of the open web as we do it.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: So like in terms of whatever algorithms there are that
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: you know shows you content or serves you ads, like,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: are those open or it will be Yeah, So that's
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: that's what that's what we're grading. We're relutely building that
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: right now. So you'll be able to see like why
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: am I getting served these certain things. You'll be able
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: to see exactly the code that's choosing which posts they're
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: served at the top for you and you'll be able
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: to choose other algorithms if you want, maybe create your
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: own and put it up there. That feels big and
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: exciting to me? Is it? And if so, why we'll
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: see you know. I mean, honestly, this hasn't been done before.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: It's kind of new in society. But fundamentally, I want
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: people to have freedom and autonomy. And right now you
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: you know, you get whatever algorithm TikTok, Facebook, Instagram decide
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: to serve you, and that aligns with your interests to
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: an extent. It also aligns with their interests to an extent.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Like what will happen if we allow people to have
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: complete autonomy and choice there? Maybe it fails because people
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: say they just want to you know, see MPR New
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Yorker articles. But you know, when TikTok serves them, you know,
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: the more like carbohydrates of information or entertainment, that's what
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: they actually choose. So they say they want to eat healthy,
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: but they really choose something, but don't plausible When you
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: put it that way, it seems plausible. Yeah, yeah, But
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: I mean naturally I could put you know, a thousand
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: candies in front of you and at some point you'd
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: stop eating them in a minute. The Lightning Round, including
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: a couple of things Matt thinks shouldn't be open sourced,
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: and his favorite feature on a very high end toilet. Now,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: let's get back to the show. Let's do the Lightning round.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: Given that you've been sort of, you know, building the
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: web in a pretty significant way for twenty years or so,
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: what do you think you understand about the Web that
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: most people don't. Something I understand about the Web that
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: most people don't is that we don't have to accept
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: things the way things are. It is eminently possible to
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: change it and modified, especially on the web, and it
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: can be so incredibly freeing. What's your favorite feature on
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: a total neores toilet? Definitely the heated seats nice. What's
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: something in the world that should not be open sourced?
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: Doesn't have to be software? Anything to me open source
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: you want to see more of. So if there were
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: technology for harming people, I wouldn't want that shared or
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: open source weapons, viruses, etc. Is right? Do you play
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: jazz saxophone? Is that right? Right? I did? Who do
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: you think is a particularly underrated jazz musician? Particularly underrated
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: jazz musician? Oh, give me a moment Jacob Collier. He's
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: actually seen as a little bit of pop musician. He
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: came up on YouTube and everything, but I think he's
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: one of the most talented instrumentalists alive today. Wow. Interesting good.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: I've also read that you can type really fast using
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: the Is that the divor jack keyboard like the other keyboard?
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: That's like better basically? And I'm curious, are there other
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: sort of optimizations life hacks like that that you've done,
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: or there are other things where you've just done the
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: better way thing that most people don't do. Yeah, typing
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: is definitely a different Typing layout is something I'm glad
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: I invested in many years ago. You know. The other
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: thing is it just and technology. It really does benefit
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: you to update as frequently as possible, and so I'm
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: always surprised when I see people with an older phone
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: or computer or who have a ton of app updates
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: they haven't applied, especially when you think of how many
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: times you look at your phone and how much time
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: you spend on these tools. Assuming you do, I think
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: it is worthwhile to always invest in the latest and
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: greatest good. Okay, two more, what's one piece of advice
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: you'd give to somebody trying to solve a hard problem.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: Unplug So just force yourself to be bored and sit
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: with it, Meditate, take a walk, but like remove yourself
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: from distractions. If everything goes well, what problem will you
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: be trying to solve in five years? I think how
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: to to manage and scale at ten thousand person plus organization?
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: How big is it now? Two thousand? So that's a
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: lot of growth getting from two to ten. It's a
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: big leap already. Dan Matt Mullinweg is the co creator
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: of WordPress and the founder of Automatic. Today's show was
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Woldstin, and I would
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: love to know what you think of the show, what
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: you want us to do differently, What guests do you
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: think we should book? Please really please email us at
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: problem at pushkin dot fm. Once again, that's problem at
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me on Twitter
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: at Jacob Wildstein. We'll be back next week with another
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: episode of What's Your Problem.