Matt Mullenweg WordPress on Mixergy

matt from wordpress

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1. This transcript is raw, so it’s full errors.

2. You can read the cleaned excerpts AND see the video AND download the audio if you click here.

3. I’m putting this here because Mixergy reader Roshan Martin thought you’d want to read this.

The RAW transcrip

Andrew:
Hey everyone, its Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com; home of the AMBITIOUS UPSTART! Umm….made that move a little bit too soon here today! Home of the AMBITIOUS UPSTART; that’s what this is! And, I’ve got to tell you, I get, because of Mixergy, to meet people who I’ve always wanted to get to know. I love that about this; that, if there’s somebody who I’m curious about, if there’s somebody who I admire, who’s work I really respect and I want to get to know; because of Mixergy, I’ve got an opportunity to get to know them, to spend some time on video chat with them, and to ask them the kinds of questions that I would wonder, that I would want to ask them from a distance, if I wasn’t doing Mixergy. And so, one of the people, whose work I especially admire, who’s software I use on a regular basis, on a daily basis, is Matt Mullenwag. He is the founder of Automatic, and the co-founder of WordPress, the blogging platform that Mixergy, and millions of other sites are built on. I invited him here, to Mixergy, to talk about how he built it up, where he started as a blogger, why he decided to write his own software for blogging, why he decided to create a company behind it. You’re going to find out how he promoted it too and, by the way, let me stop on that point. You know, a lot of times when I, as a guy who loves business, when I read stories of how people made it big online, I’ll hear or I’ll read a story about how they created great software, they created a revolutionary idea, and then the story seems to end there. There seems to be an “of course.” If you create something great, OF COURSE the world’s going to use it; OF COURSE, if you create something great, it’s going to change the world! I think that’s kind of a big leap; I think, somewhere between creating that great product and having the world love it, the way people love WordPress, there’s a lot of hard work! And what I want to find out in this interview, and all the programs that I do is, what happened in that? Where’s all that hard work; what did the person do? What I love about what you’re about to hear from Matt is, he talks about how he promoted it; he talks about how he reached out to people and evangelized it. Now he’s not an evangelist the way Guy Kawasaki might be. He’s not an evangelist even the way I might be; he’s more of a techie, but you can see the passion and belief in what he does and the willingness to work hard. That combination get’s the word out about his software, and that’s where I think great technologies make the leap into being revolutions, into being great companies. And so, I got to ask Matt about how he did that, and I think it’s important to hear. You’re also going to find out, what else do we have here in the notes?….why he went open source, his beliefs on open source and the connection between open source and a real business that produces money. You’re going to find out about how his mother felt, when he quit school to go and start in business. You’re going to find out about that big mistake that he made, where he ran the wrong kinds of ads, and he ran afoul of Google, and so much more! This is, I think, a story of a guy who came out of nowhere and built a company that’s literally touching, not just, the millions of people who are blogging, but also the millions beyond who are reading their blogs and who are being influenced by their ideas. You, you, you, as a person, may not ever be blogged, may not ever have any interest in WordPress, I know, are influenced by his work, because you’re watching me here, or listening to me, because it’s all being delivered on WordPress. Alright, so, all that and so much more, with a guy who I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time, Matt! Here’s my interview with Matt Mullenwag.

Andrew:
Alright, hang on! Before we get into the actual program, I’ve got a big announcement to make, and to help me with that announcement, I’ve invited my fiancé, Olivia here; Olivia!

Olivia:
Yes, we have our first sponsor, which is Fresh Books!

Andrew:
FRESH BOOKS! First sponsor on Mixergy! Alright, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to show you how easy it is to create an account on Fresh Books, how fast it is and you’re going to be able to use this account to create your invoices, to organize your billing and so much more. Olivia, can you time me as we do this?

Olivia:
I’ve got it!

Andrew:
Alright, here we go! I’m going to click, “Try It Free.” Alright, let’s do it! I’m going to type in my real company name, put it in as Mixergy. I’m going to type in my real email address, mail-at-awarner.com, as most of you know; and I’m going to hit “Create Account!”

Olivia:
Okay, that was, like, 7 seconds.

Andrew:
Seven seconds to create an account! The account is technically created, but let’s keep going Olivia; keep timing me because I’m going to log into my new account. Yes, I’m going to tell Apple to save my user name and password.

Olivia:
And , you know, while you’re doing this Andrew, let’s tell them that if, you know, they want to find out how much you’re making from this ad, this month, they should sign up for Fresh Books and send you an invoice using it, and you’ll reveal the number!

Andrew:
So, if they go in, create an invoice, and invoice me, I will…. Yeah, good idea; I will absolutely! If you invoice me, using Fresh Books, I will tell you how much money I made from it…

Olivia:
39 seconds.

Andrew:
39 seconds. Very important, before we continue, they have to know to type in my name, or my company name; and “How Did You Hear About Us,” type in Mixergy, so I get some credit here for doing this kind of marketing for them. This is pretty good, don’t you think Olivia? I’m a pretty good pitch-man?

Andrew:
Alright, get started. BOOM! Time me, how much?

Olivia:
49.

Andrew:
49 SECONDS TO CREATE AN ACCOUNT! If you go to Fresh Books, and spend 49 seconds, create an account, and invoice me, you will discover two things: how much money I’m making from Fresh Books, and number two, you’re going to see how easy it is to create invoices, and how easy it is to do billing online, using Fresh Books, and so much more! But that’s the heart of it right there. Alright! Congratulations to Mixergy. Congratulations to me. Congratulations to you.

Olivia:
Let’s go to the program.

Andrew:
Let’s go to the program.

Andrew:
Matt, when did you start blogging?

Matt:
I think in 2002.

Andrew:
What got you to start blogging?

Matt:
I had visited Washington DC as part of, sort of, an Economics summer camp, because I was that cool! And, well, Washington DC was a really cool place.

Andrew:
And so you wanted to show people and tell people about what you were doing.

Matt:
Yeah, it was mostly photos at the time. That’s why my blog was called Photo Matt. It was basically, you know….I had just gotten a little Sony Digital Camera and was taking a million photos and wanted to share them with my friends in Houston.

Andrew:
I see. And, actually, what kind of person does go to an Economics….what was it in Washington DC? What were you like at the time? What were you into?

Matt:
*Chuckles* I was really into Economics. In high school, I was part of a competition called Fed-Challenge, which is an economics challenge run by the Federal Reserve. And we’d actually made it to nationals, so I’d gotten to meet Alan Greenspan. Actually, the current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, was our judge in the competition. And so, we’d met all these people and that’s why I was really into it and wanted to go back.

Andrew:
Oh wow! So, what did you plan for your life? Were you going to be an economist? Were you going to be an entrepreneur?

Matt:
I’ve never made too many plans.

Andrew:
So why were you; was it….when you were exploring Economics, what was the vision for it?

Matt:
I had a really good teacher. And he was very passionate about it. And he kind of got us really into it. I went to an arts high school, where I focused mostly on music, on saxophone. So it was nice to have an academic pursuit as well. And it was also the first academic competition the school had ever run in its 30 year history.

Andrew:
I see. You know, it’s kind of funny that you said that you don’t really make plans. And a lot of the self-improvement books, that I read, say you have to make plans; you have to be very explicit about what you want to do with your life. Do you believe in that? What’s….how does goal setting fit into your life?

Matt:
I don’t know. I guess I do set goals a lot. But they’re usually internal things. It’s usually just… I guess I said I don’t make plans, but that’s probably not true. I often think of things very, very long term; especially with WordPress, because WordPress is now something I expect to be around ten, twenty years from now. So I have to make decisions there with regards to, you know, what is the logical conclusion of this entire endeavor? And what happens? What does it look like, if you take this all the way to its end in ten years?

Andrew:
What do you see it looking like ten, twenty years down the road?

Matt:
*Chuckles* I know what I want it to look like! Which is basically the things that have made WordPress wonderful: the open source community, the sort-of peer driven development, the agility; all of those sorts of things, I don’t want to go anywhere.

Andrew:
When you set plans for yourself are they more concrete than that? Do you say to yourself, you want a specific number of users? Or do you say that you want this to be used in a specific way ten, twenty years from now?

Matt:
I try to focus. Because metrics are, you know, if you focus on the wrong metrics, they can be very harmful. If we wanted a hundred million users, we’d just do like a front system and have it so it imports and spams your address book, you know, whenever you sign up. That would be an easy way to get a hundred million users, but isn’t really part of the underlying goal for me. So I prefer focusing on more impact, so the idea that….that more people publishing every day, engaging, sort of the democratization of publishing. I guess that’s fuzzy, it’s not really measurable. But that’s sort of the underlying goal. In terms of measurable goals, I try to do them in my New Year’s resolutions. I really like New Year’s resolutions. And this year I actually open sourced them; I put them on my blog and let other people make my resolutions. And I picked, I think 25 of them. And it’s going pretty well. And one of them was, like, post 10,000 photos to my blog this year. And that’s actually going pretty well, I think I’m going to make that. Another one was, learn Spanish, and that’s going not so well! *Chuckles*

Andrew:
How are you learning Spanish?

Matt:
I’m not.

Andrew:
You’re not. I see. *Chuckles* So, going back to 2000, I think it was 2002 when you started blogging?

Matt:
Yeah.

Andrew:
Okay, going back to then, you used a software called B2CafeLog; which I never heard of, outside of biographies about you. Why did you pick that, as your blogging platform?

Matt:
Well, it was a very different software world at the time. There was really…. there was Blogger, there was MovableType, there was a B2 text pattern, there were all these different ones, but B2 was the only one that was open source. There was also PHP and MySQL, which was, sort of, my preferred development platform at the time.

Andrew:
I see and so you were by then, from what I understand, already a developer, already an economics geek, as I was; already, I’m assuming, into business, but you didn’t have a vision for your life, down the road? You didn’t say you were going to be an entrepreneur who was building a business?

Matt:
I always, sort of, had like small businesses and, you know, just little silly things….you know, from when I was really young it was cleaning windows, when I got older it was like fixing people computers….fixing people’s computers and building people’s computers for them; nothing that had ever really taken off in a meaningful way.

Andrew:
Okay, alright. And you see B2, it’s not moving the way that you’d like it to move and you, what do you decide to do?

Matt:
Well B2 had actually, through a series of circumstances, essentially become abandoned. So, I blogged about it, which is what, you know, bloggers do. And a fellow left a comment on my blog and said, “Well, if you’re interested in working on this, let’s work together.” That was Mike Little, who’s the co-founder of WordPress, who I actually got a chance to see a few months ago at Word Camp, UK!

Andrew:
I see. And so, at the time you blogged, you said “There’s an issue.” Mike Little responds, and what did you guys decide to do together then?

Matt:
Well, we wanted to continue the development of B2, because it was a good program; we really liked it! And so, we started thinking of what that would look like. I had a number of things I didn’t like about it though. It was very hard to set up; it’s very hard to configure. To modify the code, you essentially had to copy and paste code into different parts of it; things like that. So, we started working. The initial things we really focused on were the ease of installation, and then Mike had written something called a “Links Manager”, which is now sort of the blog “Role Manager” in WordPress. That was a very popular feature, at the time, and so we decided to bring that in to the program actually. This was before plug-ins or themes or anything like that.

Andrew:
I see. Why didn’t you decide to just move on to one of the other platforms that were out there, instead of going under the hood and reworking what was there?

Matt:
Well Blogger was too simplistic. Text Pattern wasn’t open source; it was sort of a closed development model. And, Movable Type was commercial as well, and it was also Pearl and so you had to do things like, when you posted a blog entry, you had to wait like five minutes for all the files to rebuild, and that kind of sucked.

Andrew:
Yeah. What was the motivation behind going in and doing it; beyond working it, beyond improving it for yourself and your own blogging? What was the motivation?

Matt:
There was no motivation. It was just I really wanted better software for my site.

Andrew:
I see. Okay. And then, at some point, CNET invited you in and hired you, to work for them. How did they find you?

Matt:
Through WordPress; they had actually started to use it, on some of their properties. I think it might have been download.com or something. There was a guy there named Mike Tatum, who is very prescient; he sees things coming years before anyone else, and he got in touch with me. I had actually, I had blogged sort of,” I was going to go to San Francisco” and so he reached out and said ‘Hey, while you’re in town, let’s meet up and talk about RSS and blogging and stuff,” and then it was just, it was a weird meeting. There were like some folks from news.com there, and he was there and it was just totally random. But then, when I got back, he said “Hey, would you like to work at CNET?”

Andrew:
As what? What was….what was the job that he offered you?

Matt:
So I think technically, well we went through a couple iterations, and my title ended up being… I was a Senior Products Manager, in the Network Group, which is sort of a big company thing. One of the main things I worked on there, I’m not even sure if it’s still around, but it was help.com.

Andrew:
They own a lot of great domains over there. They own tv.com, help.com, news.com!

Matt:
Oh, it drove me crazy too. At one point, because I originally wanted to start WordPress.com there, and like a hosted blogging service. And so, I think it was Mike, got me this giant spreadsheet; it was, like, 18 pages printed out, of all the domains they owned. There were some great ones like online.com, computer.com, etc., and the one I liked was online.com. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could be like, Andrew.online.com? And that could be your blog, or your profile, or anything like that. I’d actually had sort of idea where it’d bring in all your profile stuff from around the web, which was probably too early and, but they never bought it, they were never really into blogs, as for users.

Andrew:
I see, but, you were using WordPress at CNET right? You were, beyond the job title, your responsibility was to implement WordPress, to help them publish using WordPress?

Matt:
It’s kind of funny though; although I was allowed to work on WordPress quite a bit, I wasn’t part of the groups that were actually using it. So, the download group or the ZDNet group, or anything like that. So, mostly, I would sort of serve as an internal evangelist and help out these folks who were using it.

Andrew:
I see, and by the way, we should take a step back and explain, that you took B2 and you forked it and you created WordPress from that, right? And that’s how we….how you created WordPress…. I had nothing to do with it! So, essentially, were they paying you to learn about WordPress, to learn about what users needed, and to be smarter about the way you developed it?

Matt:
I think for them, it was mostly that, I was working on their stuff; and part of the way to get me, was to allow me to work on my own stuff as well.

Andrew:
And how did that work out, when did you work on WordPress? When did you work on your development?

Matt: Every free moment. *Chuckles*

Andrew:
So, you could just go over to your desk and you could sit there, and you could start coding up WordPress?

Matt:
Yeah, I think. It was, probably of work time, probably maybe just about 20% of my time, because there was a lot of work otherwise. But, especially after work, every free moment I had at that point of my life, was spent on WordPress.

Andrew:
I see. Now, I know that you were in school, at the time, when CNET offered you this job, and you left school to go work there. How did you explain that to your parents?

Matt:
Very carefully! It was sort of…. it was a fantastic job. One that I would have hoped to have gotten after I graduated, so I was kind of, “Well, I could stay in school for another two years and hope to get this job, or I could take it now.” And I talked my parents into it by….CNET was a public company, they had health care and all those sorts of things and it, sort of, convinced them. My mom was very worried though, because I had moved out already; but, I had just moved five minutes down the road, so I was still pretty close, and I’m also the youngest. So, by leaving Houston, it was….I think it was harder on my mom than anybody.

Andrew:
I see. At what point did she feel re-assured? I know that, as an entrepreneur, years after we were actually making money with our business, years after we actually had a track record, my parents were still nervous about me being an entrepreneur.

Matt:
*Chuckles* I think she probably started to get re-assured about 8 or 9 months into the job, and then at 10 months, I told her I was leaving. So, it was, you know…..*Chuckles*

Andrew:
Leaving to do what?

Matt:
Found Automattic.

Andrew:
And what was Automatic going to be, back then?

Matt:
So the idea behind Automatic was, mostly, to create an umbrella group that would support lots of open source developers, working on open source things. But, it wouldn’t be a non-profit because I felt like you could have more impact on the world actually as a for-profit, because you don’t have the same number of restrictions or anything. And so, but something….I wanted to be a virtuous for-profit, so something where, the way it made money was completely in line with its users and its community.

Andrew:
How did that work out? I mean, what would that look like in the early days?

Matt:
Well, so there’s a couple ways to make money from open source. The most typical one is, to do what’s called a ‘duel license.’ So, it’s basically for those who aren’t familiar with open source, and there’s the GPL license, which WordPress uses. And, it has a number of freedoms and restrictions. One of those freedoms is that….it says that, if something is derived from the software, it can’t take away any rights. So, everything that WordPress does, so WordPress being open source, you can’t create something non-open source from the WordPress code. Now, this scares some businesses, and so, what a lot of companies do is, they create a dual license where the code is on the GPL; but, you can also get it under a proprietary license that says, “Do whatever you want with it.” And, companies like MySQL, sell this. I personally disagree with this, because I believe that GPL is the right license for all software, regardless of whether it’s proprietary or commercial or, you know, whatever; and, at that point, the model really becomes around services. Typically, with open source, historically, because open source has been more about server site stuff, meaning database web servers, and operating systems like Linux…so, the services around that, were things like consulting, and other stuff that’s inherently not terribly scalable, because to make more money doing it, you need more people, and I wanted the company to be small; as small as possible. So, for a consumer web application, you can obviously do web services. So, the first one of those that I wrote, after leaving CNET, was actually called ‘Akismet.’ And it was a plug-in for WordPress that you’d drop in and it would stop all spam from coming in. But it would do this using a centralized service that could adapt to new types of spam as fast as the spammers are creating it. So it maintained a high level of effectiveness over a long period of time, which no spam plug-ins, prior to it, had done. So that was the first ever service. And the idea behind it was, what’s now called ‘Freemium’. So it would be free for personal use, and then, for businesses, we’d charge money; sort of like a commercial Robin Hood. And that worked out really well. That was our first service, and the second service was WordPress.com, which is the big one now. That now, today, I think it gets over 200 million visitors per month. That idea was saying “Well, here’s the WordPress software. What will happen if we make it available to a really wide array of people, with the push of a button?”

Andrew:
I see. And, then the revenue from that would come from letting them get their own domain, revenue would come from extra bandwidth, extra hard drive space; right?

Matt:
Yep.

Andrew:
When did you buy the domains WordPress.org and WordPress.com? At what point in the development?

Matt:
I don’t know. WordPress.org was actually probably the same time that WordPress started, because before that, it didn’t have a name. My friend who thought of the name, Christine, actually checked the domain before she called me. So, she was very, very web savvy. It was actually a friend….she didn’t even use B2 or WordPress, she was a Movable Type user. But in Houston, I got involved with a bloggers group, which is a really…. still is a really great group of people. It was also very small. There weren’t that many bloggers; maybe a couple hundred thousand.

Andrew:
So you were….so she bought the….she told you that WordPress.org was available. You bought it. Did you jump on WordPress.com at the same time? Did you buy that?

Matt:
No, I think it was registered at the time. I did get WordPress.net later. Also, cost was a concern to me, to be honest, even for like a 10 buck domain. And, WordPress.com ended up being an issue later, when we did start the business.

Andrew:
What kind of issue?

Matt:
Someone else owned it, and there ended up being sort of a legal thing to get it, which I actually cannot talk about.

Andrew:
Okay, alright. So you had to get into it, and you eventually got it from him. So you were….so, did you need WordPress.com when you decided that you were going to do the self hosting, or were you going after it before then?

Matt:
I don’t remember.

Andrew: Okay. Alright, you talked about Akismet, and revenue coming from there. Where else were you bringing in revenue in the early days?

Matt:
The ways we’re making revenue now, pretty much is the same way as it was then. There was WordPress.com, hosting partnerships, so partnerships with web hosts, advertising on WordPress.com, and Akismet were still sort of our main ones. The only thing we’ve added to that mix is… oh, companies we acquired, like Polldaddy, and our VIP service, which is basically high-end, bulletproof WordPress.com hosting for the biggest blogs in the world.

Andrew:
I see. When did you become… you know the term ramen-profitable, right? I think it was Paul Graham, the investor, who created that term. It’s the idea that, you live really cheaply, but you’re profitable enough just to cover that cheap, ramen-eating lifestyle. When did you become ramen-profitable?

Matt:
Almost from day one.

Andrew:
How?

Matt:
Basically, from all the stuff I was doing around WordPress; and some of the early things. So, Akismet started to get licenses. Actually one of the first things we ever announced, shortly after the creation of Automattic, was Yahoo! was licensing Akismet for the entire company, which was a really big deal for us. We also did a partnership with them on the Yahoo! Small Business side. And, so, deals like that really made us profitable, almost from day one.

Andrew:
I see. And before that, were you running any ads on WordPress.org and bringing in any revenue?

Matt:
I had had some good and bad attempts at that. It never really generated a significant amount of revenue though. I think at most, it would have been about maybe $1,000 a month.

Andrew:
So it wasn’t until Akismet that you were making any real money?

Matt:
Sure.

Andrew:
And from the advertising, were you ramen-profitable?

Matt:
No.

Andrew:
You weren’t. Wow.

Matt:
There was no advertising on WordPress.com at the time. That was introduced about a year and a half later.

Andrew:
I see. But the ads on WordPress.org, did that make enough money that you able to… no?

Matt:
No, not at all!

Andrew:
Okay, alright. And yeah, there was a little bit of controversy; I saw it when I was… actually, I’ve seen it online. It was back before we understood what you were allowed to put on your site, and what you weren’t. You guys paid for some content that came with advertising…

Matt:
That was a bad idea! *Chuckles*

Andrew:
It was a bad idea. We all live and learn. Google doesn’t like it when you buy content, just to take advantage of the search results. I’ll let people go and search for it themselves. Or, do you want to say something about that?

Matt:
Sure. It was one of those things where I was really trying to figure out what to do, how we could make this a sustainable thing. It was six months before Automatic got started and everything like that. And, it was becoming a little bit more of a personal crunch at that time, because the cost of WordPress.org was going up. It moved, like, from a shared host to a dedicated server. This would now cost me a couple of hundred bucks per month, and things like that. Which again in hindsight this seems like such small amounts of money, but it’s all relative, I guess. And it was actually…. the way it was framed was as an advertisement. The guy came to us and said, “All my websites, people in China and Russia are stealing all my website content and republishing it and ranking higher than I am. Could I have links on your domain? That would help me.” It was a good story. And actually, it was not very much money, but we experimented with it and it ended up being, as you described, a big, big, big mistake! The bright side of it was that, beforehand, I’d never really thought of spam as something that affected search engines. No one really had, at that point. It wasn’t….the whole search engine optimization and search engine spam, was a very nascent industry. So, now thinking of spam as not just something that came in my inbox, but something that affected the Web as a whole, was actually sort of the fundamental basis for what became Akismet, not even six months later. So, it sort of allowed me to think about the problem in a different way, because Akismet approaches spam very differently than say Email Spam Stopper does.

Andrew:
So that’s where you came up with the idea for Akismet! I didn’t know that.

Matt:
It was definitely one of the inspirations. That, and my mom.

Andrew:
What do you mean?

Matt:
My mom wanted to start a blog. *Chuckles* You’ve gotten spam, it’s really gross stuff. I didn’t want my mom to think this was what I looked at all day, so it’s like, “Wow. I’ve got to figure this out before she starts.”

Andrew:
I see. How is it different from all the other approaches to spam that came before it?

Matt:
It works.

Andrew:
Could you talk about why it works?

Matt:
I can’t, actually. That’s secret sauce! It’s super secret.

Andrew:
Okay.

Matt:
In general terms, basically, there’s millions and millions of people who use Akismet every day. And, the collective intelligence of their feedback on the system, allows us to adapt fairly quickly to new types of spam. So it’s kind of like everyone teaming up and working together against the spammers.

Andrew:
So when I get spam on my side and I hit the spam button, that’s what you’re collecting and figuring out what’s spam.

Matt:
Yeah it feeds into like a collective intelligence. And the nice thing is that, when you do that, you’re sort of protecting the entire network. So, it’s actually…. you’re kind of like in the Wild, Wild West, you know, protecting everyone. You’re one of the pioneers. You’re one of the…. what are they called, you know the things on the Oregon Trail – the wagons; you’re one of the wagons on the edge!

Andrew:
I see. By the way, let me go back and explain to people and to you, why I wasn’t going to push the question of the search engine spam that was coming off of WordPress.org. It’s been covered online a lot. And, I want to make sure that you and every other entrepreneur who I interview here, knows that my goal isn’t to beat you to death with shocking news and try to get you to justify your existence, but to really give you a comfortable, safe place to talk about your entrepreneurial experience; because, that’s the way we could really learn from you. If I’m just here to hammer you I’m going to excite people for a moment, but I’m not going to take away anything useful for myself and for anyone who is listening.

Matt:
It’s no big deal. It was, I think, six years ago now and….and it’s been sort of… it’s been done. *Chuckles*

Andrew:
I’ve got to tell you, you’re a very chill guy. Is it just here in this interview with me, or is that the way you are?

Matt:
It’s kind of early in the morning.

Andrew:
I see. Alright. Are you the kind of person who’s like go-go; I’ve got to rule the world, I’ve got to leave my mark on the world, I’ve got to let everybody know that WordPress is THE company? Or are you more like what I’m seeing here in this interview? What’s your personality like?

Matt:
I’m probably more like what you see here in the interview.

Andrew:
Yeah?

Matt:
I’m very impatient, and I’m definitely very driven, but I prefer, if anything, to let sort of results speak for themselves. I’m really opposed to hype and, you know, announcing things before they’re done, and things like that; more of an Apple philosophy I think.

Andrew:
I see. How did you get people in the early days to know about your work on WordPress, if you’re not a hyper?

Matt:
Well, I’ve always…. I’ve never been shy about promoting things, I think are better. So a lot of early WordPress users, was personal evangelism; and me, sort of, talking to people one by one, getting them to switch over.

Andrew:
How would you reach those people?

Matt:
Blogs.

Andrew:
You’d find their blog, and then you’d reach out to them?

Matt:
Well, I read a ton of blogs; then and now. And so, it was sort of, it wasn’t random people. It was more people who I admired and followed and often had some sort of online relationship with. Where I was a commentator on their blog or vice-versa. And so when it got to the point where WordPress actually was better than the competition, I wasn’t shy about reaching out and saying, here are the reasons you should check it out. Or if they ever had trouble with their blogging software, I’d say, well, this doesn’t have that problem. Actually, one of the things that actually helped out a ton was spam. Spam was a huge, huge problem on blogs and it would take sites down, which is really bad. And so WordPress having a really strong spam solution helped a ton.

Andrew:
I remember when TechCrunch first wrote about Akismet. Man, was Michael Arrington excited about what you were able to do for him! And I’m sure that got other people excited too. Do you have an example of a blogger who you evangelized to, maybe you were commenting on their blog, and sent an email and told them about how WordPress is better. I want to see how that process played itself out.

Matt:
Sure. There’s a ton of examples. There was Scoble. He had been switching from, I think, UserLand and I just left a comment on his blog and said, “Hey, you should really check out WordPress.com.” One of the earliest users of WordPress was actually Om Malik. The journalist, now of fame in the GigaOm Network; he was probably one of the first couple of thousand users of WordPress. Yet, he came to me. But once he contacted me, I helped him in every way possible.

Andrew:
He contacted you, but Robert Scoble, you contacted directly. Robert Scoble is a major blogger, right? He’s a big influencer. Can you talk about, can you describe that relationship? You were reading his blog, and then what happened? Did you comment for awhile?

Matt:
I think, well, I had read his blog probably for a year or two. And he blogged that, he was going to try out new blogging software; and the first people to comment, he would try out. And so, luckily, I happened to be online. And there were two people that commented actually, myself, and a system named DABU, which stood for Dylan’s Awesome Blogging thing or something like that. And so, he tried out both of them. He used both for awhile, but he ended up sort of settling with WordPress.

Andrew:
Okay. How do you make the….a lot of people see issues that bloggers are blogging about and they try to promote their own services and their own software, but it sometimes comes across as spammy. How do you keep it from coming across as spammy? How do you do it right?

Matt:
I don’t really do it too much anymore. I don’t know, because it is a lot more spammy now. I think that, if you compare the comments, to things that I did then, to what sort of turns people off now, they are probably almost exactly the same, but the environment was very different. It was also, I think part of it, when I get comments, often they’re promoting. When I get sort of borderline spam comments, often they are promoting or selling something or something like that. And I wasn’t selling anything with WordPress. And also, I was sort of working on it full time. So it was kind of like my own creation, that was non commercial that I was trying to just let people know about, versus a commercial thing I was trying to promote or would make money off. I think that might have been part of the difference. Like, you never see like anyone getting mad at a charity, or like Kiva, or someone like that going to comments.

Andrew:
I see. So having a non-profit arm, having an open source community really helps in promotion?

Matt:
Yeah, well. Yeah.

Andrew:
And credibility….Alright, you talked to us about how you met Mike Little, the first developer other than you, working on WordPress. How did you bring in other developers?

Matt:
So I think we were lucky in that, oh, most of the developers from B2 came over, including eventually the original developer of B2. Actually, he came over and started working on WordPress. The other thing is that, when I made the website for WordPress, there were a number of things about it. It was very simple. We had adherence to web standards. And there was a tagline at the bottom that said,”Code is Poetry.” Now, that sort of appealed to a lot of folks and appealed to the type of folks that share the WordPress philosophy. So the same things that I’m passionate, like web standards, they would be passionate. And that was sort of the initial developers.

Andrew:
So just by seeing that line and just by seeing you take on a blogging…. an open source blogging platform that was…. exists, that was already there, they gravitated toward you?

Matt:
Well I should also clarify that every developer of WordPress is a blogger as well. So everyone was using the software themselves which I think is really important for all types of developments. You have to be a user of what you’re doing.

Andrew:
What kind of evangelism did you do in the development community in the early days? How did you reach out to them and let them know that you were working on this, and ask for their help?

Matt:
I don’t know, to be honest.

Andrew:
Was it mostly that, you spent your time on code?

Matt:
If I have to think back it’s probably just leading by example. Just I was really passionate about it, I would spend every waking hour on it. And so, other folks…. it was fun to be involved. You know, it’s kind of weird because…. and I don’t think like, dentists go home at night and like want to do more dentistry for fun, but engineers do! You know, it’s what we love and what we’re passionate about. And so, after a full day of work I would go home and spend another 8 or 10 hours on the computer, you know, programming more and talking to people more and those sorts of things. And, it didn’t really feel like work to me, and it doesn’t really feel like work to me now.

Andrew:
I hear that a lot; passion as a business model, almost. How much of what you were doing on WordPress, came from the idea that there was a real business here and how much came from the passion?

Matt:
Well, the first couple years there was no business. In fact, it was definitely more of a cost than anything.

Andrew:
And there was no vision, even, for a business then?

Matt:
No, because no one really knew how you made money off open source, particularly consumer open source, particularly web scripts. So no it wasn’t really an option. Even with Automatic, I felt like through commercial means we could bring the software to a much, much, much wider audience; which is an experiment which fortunately has proven successful. That has always had kind of, a broader view. More fundamentally I believe that the web, as a whole, should be published with open-source software. Whether that’s WordPress or Drupal or Joomla, whatever. You know, the vast majority of web should go through open source software.

Andrew:
What do you say to people who ask you what your exit strategy is?

Matt:
I don’t know. That implies that I want to exit; which, I’m not really in a big hurry to.

Andrew:
How much of that comes from the fact that, you love this project and you want to see it through to the end and how much from the fact that, you took some cash out of the business, so don’t have the urgency to sell?

Matt:
I’ve always been fortunate, in that, I’ve had safety nets. In the beginning, it was probably my parents; in that, no matter what happened I could always go back home. That would suck but, you know it was always sort of there and my parents have always been very supportive. So, moving back home would suck but wouldn’t be terrible. Later, it was the job at CNET, which provided another safety net and job security. Also, just as an engineer you kind of always know that, worst case scenario, you can get a pretty good job working somewhere; which is good to know and isn’t true for all industries. And then, now, Automatic. Automatic has been very successful as a business. And, they were profitable and we now employee over 50 people. So that’s a huge net as well. And taking venture funding, one of the main reasons for that was, I was really with the first couple employees. I, like I said, could go back and live with my parents if I had to. The other folks I was working with, couldn’t. And some of them were leaving jobs, where they made 2 or 3 times as much, at say Cisco or something, to work for Automatic. And they had families and mortgages. And that sort of, actually, weighed pretty heavy on me. I thought this is more than just me now; I’m responsible for families. If you think about it, you know, all the families involved with Automatic, its several hundred people that sort of directly or indirectly…. my actions will affect in a serious way. And I think that’s one of the most, that’s one of the biggest responsibilities you could have, right, because this is now not just software, it’s not just fun; it’s people’s lives.

Andrew:
Well once you take investment like that, aren’t you committing yourself to eventually selling your business; to giving them the exit that they’re looking for?

Matt:
Over a long term, you know 7-12 years, yeah; there’s some sort of liquidity event. That’s not necessarily selling your business though. And who knows what that’ll look like. You know, part of it’s around when you raise money. You can do it in different ways. You can do it where investors control the company. You can do it where you control the company. You can do it, you know, there’s any sort of number of things. But sort of the reason for taking the investment was partly, like I said, we were profitable. It was kind of a month-to-month thing. If all revenue had gone away, was maybe like a month and a half worth of salaries and costs in the bank, which is not a ton of wiggle room. So we didn’t raise a ton of money. I think our first round was a million dollars. And it was mostly just having that buffer there. And also, the other big thing that I’ve always been passionate about was investing in the infrastructure. At the time, you know, websites going down was a pretty common occurrence and even successful websites like Friendster were having a ton of scalability problems. And I never wanted that to be something with WordPress. I wanted it to be always something rock solid, that you could trust and know that it would always be there and be fast and be available. So we’ve always invested in infrastructure ahead of time. For example, WordPress.com runs live in three data centers. So, even if a meteor hits Dallas, you know, you can still blog about it on WordPress.com from the two other data centers. And so, that sort of reliability has been very important. It’s also been…. made it a lot easier to get, sort of, enterprise customers like CNN and folks like that, because sometimes they don’t even have that type of reliability on their own websites, so for them to have it on the blog is a big deal.

Andrew:
Guys, if anyone has a question, please ask it and I’ll do my best to ask your questions. Matt, the rumor was at one point that, you wanted to sell WordPress. Your investors wanted you to hang on, because they saw more upside. So they said, “Matt, we’ll give you some cash from the business. Well, obviously in exchange for something, but we’ll let you cash out a little bit from the business.” Were those rumors true?

Matt:
Not entirely. I can’t really comment on rumors, but there have been offers to buy Automatic before.

Andrew:
But would you have wanted to sell before, I think, is the big question?

Matt:
No.

Andrew:
No.

Matt:
Is it one of those things I considered? I mean, you have to, but ultimately came to the decision that wasn’t the best outcome. There was still, I guess, a longer road ahead with Automatic, than there was behind it.

Andrew:
Because your investors convinced you of that, or did you go into that deal with that assumption?

Matt:
Ultimately, I think, as an investor, you really defer to the founder and the entrepreneur stance.

Andrew:
Really? That’s not what I’m hearing here. A lot of times I’m hearing, especially, well from a Dale Ressie specifically, but from others also that, investors will force them to sell when they need to; force them to hang onto the business when they’re not ready to sell. And that’s why from a distance, it seemed like that’s what was happening with you. You were being told, don’t sell.

Interviewee:
There’s some crappy investors. Fortunately, we’ve been involved to be involved. We’ve been fortunate to be involved with very good ones. Our main investors are True and Polaris; and True in particular is known for being extraordinarily entrepreneur-friendly. And I’m an investor now as well, and think about it from this point of view. If someone doesn’t want to work on something anymore, you can’t pay them to keep working on it, right? It’s not something, and you wouldn’t want to. Right? Because their passion is fundamentally, what’s driving the company at an early stage. And so, you know, if they don’t want to keep working on it, you don’t want them to. That’s just sort of how it works I think, from a smart investor point of view. Now for companies that raise, let’s say, a slide, and it raised 15 million dollars over several rounds or something like that, I think the situation might be different. I think it also depends a lot upon your investors. Now I think what’s changing is that, venture capital has become much, much more friendly. And places like True don’t just think of one deal. They want to work with these entrepreneurs over the next 10 or 20 years. So they’re also going to think of things long-term and not do anything to alienate that relationship. So I think that’s getting better and I was very fortunate to come in because, you know, I was a 90’s kid from Houston and I totally could’ve been taken advantage of. I was fortunate to have folks around me, like Om, like Tony Conrad, like Tony Schneider, who eventually became the CEO of Automatic. They steered me in the right direction and to work with the right people which I think is a big part of the success of Automatic; because, Automatic has never been forced to grow at an artificial pace or to spend money faster than we should or any of these things that you sometimes hear about, in what sounds like dysfunctional investor-company relationships.

Andrew:
How’d you get those advisors?

Matt:
It was mostly through Om, actually. So, like I said, Om, was an early user of WordPress and when I came out to San Francisco, I met with him. And, we just sort of instantly hit it off and we’re very, very good friends to this day; probably one of my closest friends in San Francisco. And he is a journalist *Chuckles* so, he is cynical and as curmudgeonly as they come. And he’s on all sides of everything. He’s been in the Tech industry for twenty, twenty-five years. So, you couldn’t ask for a better person to be sort of looking out for you.

Andrew:
Is he an official adviser? Does he have shares in the business?

Matt:
No, he’s more of a…. just a very good friend.

Andrew:
No? Just a good friend. Wow. I’ve heard that he’s that way with entrepreneurs. That he can be extremely, you said, curmudgeonly and he’s suspicious, the way all reporters need to be, but he also can take you and help you out. What was the breakout…?

Matt:
He’s now part of True Ventures, and does investments. I think one of his first ones was Social Cast, which was a sort of cool sort of internal Twitter for the enterprise tech company.

Andrew:
What was the breakout success of…thanks, by the way, for pointing that out… What was the breakout success for WordPress? Was there one version that, it hit the streets and everything changed?

Matt:
No, it’s always been iterative. The growth of WordPress has always been pretty organic, even WordPress.com. It’s 100 users a day this month, and 150 the next month then 180 the next month, and eventually it builds and builds and builds and builds. When I think of significant things in WordPress’s history, I would say it was 1.0, which has importers; so, it allowed people to move from other systems, particularly importer for Movable Type, which was by far and away the most dominant blogging system at the time. 1.2 introduced the plug-in system, so previously, to add functionality you would copy and paste code into parts of the program, which, could you even imagine that now? It created the blogging system as we know it today. And then 1.5 introduced the theme system, which is, basically the same idea applied to the designs. And when you look at it now, the principle draw of WordPress is the plug-in and themes. I mean, there’s probably over ten thousand of both available and just as many developers, and they create what’s really most compelling about the platform, because you might have a very niche need, something maybe only twenty other people in the world care about, but one of them has written a plug-in, and it’s available for WordPress and you can use that for your website.

Andrew:
I love that about WordPress, and that is one of the reasons why I moved over. What am I looking here in my notes for? BB Press. Why did you decide to get into the forums business, instead of focusing on WordPress?

Matt:
I’ve never been good at focusing. *Chuckles*

Andrew:
Really?

Matt:
I guess, and part of what I think I might end up doing eventually is, there’s a lot of things about software that really frustrate me…I guess I’m a very impatient or unforgiving user, and I want to see that I want to make it better. And WordPress had forums and I was really unhappy with them, and I wanted to make them better, and so that was sort of the genesis of BB Press. The other thing was, I had stupidly decided that I couldn’t pay for a ticket to go home, but I didn’t want to tell my parents this because then they’d worry; so, I told them I really wanted to spend Christmas in San Francisco. And, I don’t know if you know San Francisco, but it’s a horrible place to spend the winter *Chuckles* It was cold and rainy and depressing and horrible! It was also the only Christmas, in my lifetime, that it snowed in Houston and I missed it. But, while I was home, I started working on BB Press! There was not much else to do. I think the first version, I wrote, in something like three or four days, from the database schema to the first version. It’s ended up being… well, BB Press doesn’t have the same widespread usage that WordPress does, but it’s really, really flexible and useful for the people who use it; so, it’s a core part of our infrastructure. For example, our entire plug-in’s directory, and the plug-in update system and everything, was built on BB Press. Most of the work on WordPress.org was built on BB Press, not WordPress.

Andrew:
I didn’t know that. That was an idea that, I can see how it came from your own personal frustration. The plug-in’s and the themes, where did the idea to develop those come from?

Matt:
It was the same thing, it was just you know, it was silly. You get something, they called them hacks or mods, at the time, and it was like ‘go to line 247 and copy and paste this code’, ‘go to line 403 and copy and paste this code’ and you know what, you could only do one of them, because by the time you had copied and pasted the code, you changed all of the other line numbers, so it sucked. And then, when a new version of the software came out, you couldn’t upgrade, because you’d override all your changes. And so it became really obvious that there was just a need there, for persistent changes that you could upgrade with. It’s funny, but a lot of the improvement to WordPress has been around the installation and upgrade procedure and sort of making that easy, has made a lot of other things easy.

Andrew:
Are those your personal pains, or did they come from forum complaints, or did they come from developer requests? I want to know, if I say the vast improvement, or the ideas for improvement, I want to know who do I attribute them to. Do I say, “Matt’s personal frustrations are what led to the biggest leaps” or do I say, “Matt observed these frustrations in other people”, where do they come from?

Matt:
All of the above. So, another thing I believe strongly in is that, when you’re the developer of the project, you should do support for it. And so, I was doing all the support on the WordPress forums, at the time. And so, I still have ten thousand posts or something. And so, you’d see very immediately what people were having trouble with. And, I think one, it keeps you close to your users, it gives you empathy and also helps you prioritize development. The problem has never been ideas. Everything around WordPress and everything I’ve done, I’ve always had a million ideas a minute. There are a thousand directions you can go. It’s really, just choosing which one is the next best thing to do. And that’s hard, if you’re just sort of thinking about it in the abstract. But if you’re in there, everyday, talking to users and listening to them and watching them and helping them, it actually is often very obvious.

Andrew:
I’ve heard that from Eric Stevens, who does listening labs, where he brings in users and he watches them use the website. And I asked him, “How many people do you have to watch, in order to know what’s the real problem?” And he said, “You watch one or two and you get to see where the big pains are.” Sounds like you have to go Will. Let’s spend just a few more minutes, if it’s okay or do you need to rush? Monocat who’s watching us live is asking, “how do you go from being ‘an economist, photographer’ to being a programmer?”

Matt:
I’ve always been an amateur of all those. I would not have called myself any of those things, even a photographer today. It’s, just, I’ve always done the things that I found fun, or interesting or passionate in. And when I stop finding them interesting, I stop. It got to a point, in my economic studies, where it just wasn’t really fun anymore and I was getting pretty bored. So I kind of stopped working on it. I shifted all my classes to be philosophy classes and I found that way more interesting and fun. And that’s what I did, until I dropped out. So, fortunately at times, that has aligned with things that are commercially successful. If they hadn’t, that’s okay right, because at least I had fun along the way.

Andrew:
So you would just do whatever you’re passionate about regardless of where it led to?

Matt:
Yeah.

Andrew:
Alright. Two more questions that I’m getting from people: motivation from other entrepreneurs. How do you stay motivated, when you’ve got, when you’re running your own business?

Matt:
It’s everything, right? I’m a big believer in, sort of, the beauty in everyday things and finding small pockets of goodness and pleasure in everything you do. Because definitely creating a business, competing with a company that was 200 people, all the things, competing with Google, all these things can actually be a downer at times. Because they’re hard! But while you’re doing that remember that all things worth doing are hard. That’s the reason that not everyone does it. If you’re doing something unique by definition it’s often going to be something other people wouldn’t want to do. And then I guess a big part for me as well is feedback from WordPress users. They probably don’t know this, but they’re times that people would say, “Oh, thank you for WordPress.” I go to Word Camps now and sometimes people will tell me, actually a lot of people will tell me that, they make their living from WordPress. That they now work at home and spend more time with their kids. These sorts of things, you start to see how it really impacts people’s lives for the better. And I just think on a moral level, you didn’t start to coach every decision with well how will this help people’s lives for the better. And I feel that’s a pretty sustainable way to build a business. Because, as long as you have those people, I mean they’re now probably 40 or 50,000 people make their living directly from WordPress. So even if every business that Automattic did today went away tomorrow, I could talk to those people…Well, what’s a sustainable thing for us to do? What do you need? What is the pain point? I mean, those sorts of relationships and that sort of trust, and I guess that system, is invaluable. And in some way, those are our customers. Every user of WordPress, every developer of WordPress is a customer, and so, all the customer development stuff you read about for our sales books and other things like that, I mean apply that to other people who aren’t giving you any money, maybe never will give money, or who don’t use your product, and things like that, and you just learn as much as possible.

Andrew:
Finally, what advice do you give to an entrepreneur who is starting today? Who’s looked up to you, who says I want to build something that’s that meaningful?

Matt:
It’s hard. I don’t like giving too much entrepreneurial advice specifically, and even do I advised a lot of companies, I guess, let me decide how to say that, because I don’t like it but I do it. I only like speaking the things that I have done, and, my realm of experience is actually relatively small and narrow, so of it is not something I had specifically done before, I’m not really sure if my experiences apply. Or if it is just overgeneralization, a combination of overgeneralization and naivety, and that is making me think that this is universal and can be applied to anything and so, think of everything I said so far in that light. The things I’ve never found, the things I have found relatively universal, are I guess what you could call the moral underpinnings, of what I’ve chosen to work on which we sort of covered already, you know, always working on something that, in some way makes the world a better place and that you’re really passionate about, cause then it doesn’t really feel like work. And two is open source. And I really feel like the idea of free software, the GPL, the four freedoms of the GPL. These are the most powerful ideas I’ve come across in my lifetime, and of everything I’ve read, everything I’ve been exposed to, anything. And so I believe really, really strongly about, and everything I do is sort of, coached in this open source philosophy. And it’s harder than doing things in a preparatory way, it’s harder to make money, it’s harder to do everything. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, so I don’t hesitate for a second recommending people to base their
efforts in an open source manner. And even applying the ideas of open source to non-software, you know, you apply the idea of open source to information and you get the Wikipedia. Now, there’s a lot of spaces in the world where I think you could apply the idea of open source. I think you could apply it to politics, I think you could apply it to hardware, I think you could apply it..I just read about a company the other day who’s applying it to sales contacts, so the idea that you get a bunch of contacts information, I guess it’s like a sales force thing or something, and you then you add your own to it, right, you give a little you take a little. It’s like the penny jar at the 7-11, give a penny take a penny. The worlds kind of like that, and the web enables these, you know, previously you didn’t have economies of scale where these things could work on a large level but now you do. So it’s fundamentally the very way to build everything.

Andrew:
Well thank you, Let’s leave it there, I’m really grateful for you coming on Mixergy and doing this interview with me.

Matt:
No problem.

Andrew:
Alright, thanks. Thanks, Matt! I’ll edit this, I’ll post it and send you a link, and I’ll be sure to thank Greg for introducing us.

Matt:
No problem, Bye everybody!

Andrew:
Bye, everyone! Thanks for watching!

Andrew:
And there it is. Before I get into the things that I usually ask you to do, at the end of the interview, I’ve got to tell you that this interview only came about because Greg Spiridalus, the co-founder of JibJab who I interviewed here on Mixergy, said, “Andrew, who do you want to meet? Who do you want to interview?” And I gave him Matt’s name! And he said, “I’ll make it happen!” And sure enough, Greg put me in touch with Matt; Matt returned Greg’s email quickly, because Greg is still someone here that I’m trying to build up . I don’t know if Matt knew me before this, So, thank you Greg for making this interview happen, and again, as always, I’ve got to tell you that more and more of my interviews, here at Mixergy, are happening because of people like Greg, people whom I’ve interviewed in the past, who say, “Let me introduce you to some of my friends, and have you interview them.” Or people like you, who are listening to this and saying to themselves, “You know, there’s someone who I think Andrew should meet. There’s someone who I think Andrew should interview. There’s someone who I would like to get to know better, and so I will ask Andrew to interview him, so that Andrew can find out more information for me.” And, by the way, if there’s somebody you know so-so, introduce them to me, as a way of getting to know them! Send me an email, find out if it’s an appropriate fit; if it is, I think it’s a great opportunity for you to reach out to somebody and say, “Hey, I think so highly of you that, I think others need to find out your story, that I think others need to hear your interview!” So, make that connection and I will work like mad to get you as much information and to get their word out to the world. Okay, so, that’s the first thing that I want to say here; thank you Greg and thank you to you, who I know you are going to introduce me to somebody great soon by email, all my contact info is on Mixergy.com. And next, as always, give me feedback; what you think of the quality of this interview, the audio, the video, more importantly, the ideas behind this. Did I, beyond my passion for this subject….did I deliver the goods on this interview? Did I get you information that you could use? Will you, 5, 10, 20 years from now, look back on your life and say, “I was influenced by this interview that I saw Andrew do?” If you were, then great; I’ve accomplished my mission. Come back and let me know, so that I can feel good about the work that I’m doing here. If you weren’t, come back to Mixergy and tell me, “Hey Andrew, you know what? Here’s a piece that you missed. We talked about this area right there, we missed this other area and you could have been way better if you would have gone in this direction!” I get emails like that all the time, I get comments like that on the website all the time; and those are the comments, and emails and input that I appreciate the most. So I hope you’ve got some of that for me. Alright, number 2, I’m going to link you over to Matt’s website. Usually, linking over to the person’s website is your first connection to their work, but my guess is that you’ve already gotten to know Matt’s website. You know that its ma.tt. Or you know about his WordPress.org, WordPress.com and all his other websites, so I don’t think I’m going to be introducing you for the first time. But it’s still worth getting to know Matt; and it’s still worth going over to his website and seeing what’s on his mind and what he’s created. Alright, what else do I have here? Last thing, click around Mixergy.com, where you know what you’re going to find right? Business tips from a mix of the most experienced, most successful, most helpful entrepreneurs out on the internet. And how do I know that? Because, you still haven’t told me that I don’t have it! And if I don’t have the best list, the best mix, the most helpful and influential list of entrepreneurs, come back to Mixergy and call me on it! Come back to Mixergy and help round out my list or come back to Mixergy and say, Hey Andrew, I’m not here to do your job for you. Go out there and get this person over there; go out there and reach out to that entrepreneur and that business person. And all I want is, to make this the best damn site out on the internet…not the best damn site, that’s probably Google or WordPress, but I want to make this the one that’s going to be the most meaningful to you, the one that’s really going to help shape the way that you think about business. You see the books behind me when I do my interviews right? A lot of them, I will remember for the rest of my life and will be influenced for the rest of my life! Now, those are books and that’s the power that a book can have. But I believe, if you spend about an hour, or so, with an entrepreneur, if you spend about an hour, or so, with anyone in business who is willing to share with you what they’ve learned over the years, then I think that could be just as meaningful, just as memorable, just as life changing. And if it’s not, then it’s because I haven’t done my job right and I hope you call me on it, so I can learn how to do my job better. Man! Usually, these “out-shows”, as I’m calling them, are about a minute and a half; this one, I don’t know how long it is, but it’s definitely not a minute and a half! So, I’m going to end it right here.

Thank you for watching and as always, I’m going to say, “I’m Andrew, and I’ll see you in the comments.”