I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end.
Maybe it'll take fifty or a hundred years. But what happens just like what happened fairly quickly with like Encyclopedia, Britannica and other encyclopedias and Wikipedia is that the thing which is open to all and gets everyone working together. If it truly gets that sort of like Humanity working together on the same shared resource, you get the opposite of the tragedy of the commons versus like the field being overrun each person operating in their own self-interest sort of kills the environment or kills the share thing you each person operating their own self-interest.
Mixture Sarah thing better and better and in digital world we can do that because we have economists economics of abundance E versus economics of scarcity. That's why open source of will eventually win every Mark of its end.
Welcome to the knowledge project. I'm your host Shane Parish this podcast and our website FS dot blog help sharpen your mind by mastering the best what other people have already figured out if you're hearing this, you're not currently supporting number if you'd like early access to the podcast ad-free episodes.
And other subscriber only content you can join it FS dot blog / podcast check out the show notes for a link. There's no better gas for our 100th episode than Matt mullenweg Matt's the co-founder WordPress the open platform that runs most of the sites you visit as well as the CEO of automatic more than that though. Matt is one of the most kind and thoughtful people I've ever met. We talk a lot about distributed work including the five levels of autonomous organizations. And of course, we dive into decision-making running an organization.
With more than 1300 people integrating Acquisitions and so much more you'll walk away from this episode with better ideas on how to lead and distributed team or effort integrating new teams, when cultures don't match and how to avoid problems before they happen. It's time to listen and learn.
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Tailored solution that you could tweak and maintain all by yourself without the need to hire expensive developers. So if you've got an app or website idea where you're just ready for a change of pace from your current agency let the team at 80/20 show you how no code can accelerate your business check them out at 80/20 dot Inc. That's 8020 dot Inc by I'm so excited to talk to you man.
I'm so excited to be here one of my favorite one my favorite WordPress.
Sites in the
world. Oh, yeah, definitely a what percentage of the internet are you now like 50 60
and no not yet. Not yet. I think we're 38% of the top 10 million websites, which is more than 10 times a
number two. Yeah. Yeah Farm streets, like point zero zero zero zero two percent of that. But
yeah, but it's like 12% of the awesomeness and you have won a very rare to letter that blog
domain. We do one of the only is in the world. Thanks to you that was possible.
I really appreciate that. How did WordPress get started? Like what's the origin story behind
WordPress? Gosh, WordPress came out of sort of a passion. I was blogging and found the software called be to to essentially I found it as like the most customizable blogging software out there but is very small the dominant one was called moveable type which is kind of like a static site publisher probably had 95 percent the market by likely to and I started like volunteering on the forums and writing little code patches for
it and like helping other people and so got involved in that Community, which I've always found the most exciting part of building things or being online. It's being part of community and when the software kind of got abandoned I blog about that and said, I'd love to see something that combined the best. I think it's the Simplicity of bloggers customizability of the power of movable type the Elegance of text pattern and hack ability be to it was or four different blogging platforms at the time. So kind of try to combine all those things in this fellow. I'd never met in the
Okay, and Mike little as I gave you serious about this, let's work on this together. He was another volunteer on the forums and things and also a real developer and I was like a 19 year old kid Houston. He was a professional and so we just started hacking together coding together and that turned into WordPress
and how did that like overtake the world was it just like it was such a better mousetrap or was it a timing thing or like? What was the what would you describe the reasons of that sort of
once at a time and still to this day, you know, I believe in sorcery.
Sort of incentives and environments and markets always Trump, you know, anything one individual or company can do and I think WordPress is a great example of that the competitors others in the market were far better than transfer by funded had hundreds of employees or launching on stage at Ted had kind of every Advantage at this open source thing eventually overtook it and I believe the reason for that was that we had we created a community so it wasn't just people being paid to work on.
People working on something because I love doing it. It was incredibly sort of adaptable. So WordPress could be used for customized for any purpose and it had a philosophy both sort of an aesthetic philosophy, which was largely centered around Jazz both then and now this idea that code could be poetry but the open source philosophy which I believe is the most powerful idea. I've been exposed to in my lifetime and probably one that all of your listeners should incorporate into their lives. I don't think Charlie
Has talked about it yet. So we might have to introduce it here. Can you expand on that a little bit Yeah. So open source is kind of like software with a Bill of Rights attached right like in the United States. I know you're Canadian. So I apologize but you know, the Bill of Rights essentially ensure certain freedoms most famous like freedom of speech being the first amendment for open-source. There's what's called The Four Freedoms attach them particularly the license we build on which is the GPL because they're Geeks. They start counting from zero so Freedom zero
Is the freedom to use the software for any purpose this means no one can tell you what you can or cannot do with the software. If you want to make a WordPress suck site or Shane is awesome or FS double OG or literally anything. No one can tell you what you can or can't do it Freedom one is the ability to see how the software works. So to be able to open up the hood see how it operates which you know, if you're going to operate from first principles or you want to understand how something works you need to see what's under the hood and so much of our Lives now are essentially digital black.
It's like we have no idea what's going on and more and more as more of a more reliable are influenced. You know, who we date when we meditate what we pay attention to what news we read are essentially these black box algorithms. We are losing our agency and sovereignty of ourselves. So being able to see how it works is really important but doesn't matter if you can see how it works if you can't modify its freedom to the ability to modify the software which and this is where you get into why open source almost always wins, so I believe that open source.
This comes to dominate any Market that enters over time and the key word is over time because sometimes it takes many decades and then finally is the freedom to distribute those changes. So, you know, actually our main competitor had a couple of those freedoms. So movable type you could see the software how it works. You could open up the hood you could change it but you weren't allowed to redistribute those changes. So you could just use them for yourself the ability to distribute those changes means that it's not the software takes on like almost like an evolutionary Dynamic where
There's sort of survival functions and like that WordPress itself was actually a fork. So kind of like an evolutionary branch of assistant call for our software copy to when be to died there were like five or six of these different branches and WordPress ended up being the one that was the most fit and survived
that's amazing. I love the concept of being able to sort of look under the hood and see what's going on. How do you commercialize that though? Like what causes people to work on open source projects?
Yeah part of the freedom is the freedom to charge for it or the freedom to
Why's it as a freedom to sell it anyone listening to this could take WordPress and sell it to others? In fact, many many. Do you can get WordPress from Bluehost or GoDaddy or Amazon or million different places in addition to gain from wordpress.com which we run. So that's part of what's built in there and there's different business models around open source. There's some which try to say, like, here's this open source thing, but will give you the same thing under a different license or will put the best features into a paid version. I personally don't like that because
It seems to take what makes open source successful. And essentially you have create the incentives against it right? Because if you played it out 10 20 years from now your very best features are going to go into the paid version and the open source thing will probably Wither on the vine a bit and we've seen some of this happen. So the approach that we take is essentially making all the best stuff and what we call Core, which is a software you can download from WordPress and wordpress.org and used for any purpose and then we create services around it. So the first one we launched was actually a
Anti-spam service called akismet, which just celebrated its 500 billion spam blocked.
I remember I remember that from back in the day back in the day. How amazing was that? Like that's an arms race. They're like blocking spam. Well, it's not like talk to me through that through the comments and trying to figure out if it's like a legitimate person or
yeah, it's actually what the things I'm most proud of today. We call it like a machine learning and AI system that at the time we did and it's now 10 years.
Later still has over five nines of accuracy for blocking spam and keeping and allowing that stuff through so it's essentially like basically again, it's all about markets markets always Trump anything an individual company could do and there were all these solutions to blocking spam on sites. They would only work for that one site. And of course what happened is this Famers between through code and and it would start working. So we created a system that essentially allowed all the kids being bullied on the playground to work together and to gang up and of
That's what makes Humanity great is our ability to collaborate. So we started collaborating against the spammers and so they would adapt very quickly, but the network would adapt in real time. So they're changing tactics and in particularly with web spam typically web spam is trying to direct either a search engine or person to a place so that provided a really great Avenue of but, you know a ton about security of being able to Target these because ultimately they didn't just want to you know, they didn't want to rank first in Google for V1 GR4, right? They want the right.
As for Viagra or mesothelioma or whatever the random term that trying to rank is and so that ultimately ended up being one of the weaknesses and still is a weakness is Spam today. They still are trying to spam me to a particular
website. It was a Kismet the start of automatic or was it was there a different origin because you're running automatic now.
Yeah, so I was in college. I ended up dropping out to take a job at CNET which was a digital media company, which was an early adopter WordPress and after a year there. I was like I really want to work on this full-time.
I'm I sort of pitch them wordpress.com and all the things automatically to do is said well, we don't we don't want to do that but will support your own best at you. And so that was kind of that the Genesis akismet funnily enough used to be called automatic spam stopper. So we realize that was an unfortunate acronym naming is usually not my forte and actually my sister I believe came up with that name and that was our very first product and it was a plugin for WordPress. It's also a plug-in for many other systems. So
Some large social networks use it accounting systems like discuss other platforms like Google type Drupal can all use Kismet and that was also one of the
ideas tell me a little bit more about automatic. Like what do you guys do?
So automatic started actually 15 years ago. I just celebrated my 15th anniversary with a company and the idea was to essentially create a company which tried to build and flourish from the open web and open source. So we wanted I wanted to create a place where I could work on open source full time.
And all the other developers of Wordpress and there's could benefit from it. We also wanted to create a company a for-profit that was paired with a non-profit where each one would be stronger than either would be on its own. So if nonprofits can do awesome things I think for votes across some things but when WordPress we have essentially wordpress.org, which is open source software, which is not owned by automatic. We have automatic which creates services for wordpress.org. And then there's a huge ecosystem outside of that, you know, WordPress as you mentioned earlier has some of the most incredible market share
And that's been very rewarding but automatic the company actually has smaller revenues than than other companies that you've probably heard of because we only make a few percentage of the dollars in the workforce ecosystem. So we've always targeted and I got this there seemed to be sort of a law of platforms going all the way back to like dos and windows. If you look at like the launch of Windows 95 one of the things Microsoft will talk about I would you remember that launched there was like people would line up at Best Buy was like a new iPhone or something. I feel like there was like a Rolling Stone.
Own song and you know people can't really answer that. Yeah. Okay. So one of the things Microsoft talk about the time is for every dollar we make from Windows 19 or $20. I made by the windows ecosystem. And so that's kind of like a, you know call it they were about five percent. I kept finding this ratio this like 20 to 1 everywhere in successful platforms. Not in fact platforms. Like it's not in the Facebook platform Facebook made like 90% of the dollars in that ecosystem but in others and so in building automatic, I want to create a company which didn't
take all the oxygen out of the room. So we would try to make about five percent of the revenue in the WordPress ecosystem and then grow The Pie as much as possible.
So that's sort of really the good concept because I guess the theory behind that is if you're you're capturing more value than you create you'll inevitably die. And if you're not capturing enough value, you'll inevitably die. You have to capture a little bit but not too much always less than the value you create for others.
That's the idea. And so the
He's evolved into doing our wordpress.com, which is kind of like our easy hassle free version of Wordpress woocommerce, which is I think what the fastest growing e-commerce Platforms in the world is essentially e-commerce built on top of Wordpress. So you get the best of both and that's doing well over 20 billion of gmv now and growing really quickly how and then Tumblr which actually was an acquisition we did last year, which is a one of our blogging competitors. We were able to acquire it and we're redoing it switching it.
It actually powered by WordPress on the back end and trying to create a sort of like nice social space on the web.
How do you feel about the Tumblr acquisition? It's about a year later now, isn't it? Like over a year or but a year? Yeah, I think it was
13 months ago. Now definitely by far the biggest one we've done in terms of a hundred and eighty people different culture at the time. They were based mostly in an office in Manhattan. So a lot of things to Bridge I suppose I should mention that automatic from the beginning has been distributed. So we always are people working from all around.
In the world today, it's about 1,300 people in 77 countries and almost every US state I think for of the provinces in Canada, but I've only bought Tumblr they were based in this one office. So a lot to bridge about the culture and it's definitely turn around in a tumbler. I believe was bought for a billion dollars by Yahoo in 2012-2013.
Yeah person mayor did that
I think is really smart acquisition by the way, but, you know, they got sort of the had other problems.
You know Yahoo, kind of famously in Yahoo! Merged with AOL became oath and that oath was acquired by Verizon which became rise media and you have this amazing community and like set of things called Tumblr which is just like the smallest fly on the back of a rhino on the back of like, you know a mountain which is Verizon and so we were able to work out a really good deal with Verizon where we were able to acquire a Tumblr for a de minimis amount. I think they were going for the maximum.
Down and then I so take everything on and try to turn it around. I love turnarounds. I don't know if we can only do one every couple of years, but it's Amazin credit regrettably fun to take something which the market has sort of undervalued sort of an unset Jim and I really polish it up and that was honestly most of our most successful products including like woocommerce were I don't think really appreciated are valued by the market at the time when we brought them in and make them part of the automatic family
talked.
Me a little bit more about how you think about turnarounds is the CEO you purchase a company. What are the next steps in your mind? How are you thinking about integrating that are you leaving the culture alone? Or you changing it? Like walk me through everything that's going on in your head at that point in time.
Yeah. So automatic is structured a bit like a holding company. So I like to think of us as like Berkshire Hathaway with a common digital platform is definitely what we aspire to and so we can have these products like Tumblr which run largely autonomously
Then however different from you know, Warren Buffett and Charlie munger's approach we do try to take essentially it kind of is scale and from our culture like are hiring our technical platform our infrastructure, you know, the 30-40 data centers, we built around the world things like that. So we were able to take 25 30 million a year of cost out of Tumblr just by kind of bring it over to our systems which brought them a lot closer.
Being break even in terms of culture. I wouldn't purchase a company that I didn't want to be influenced by and also hope to influence. So I think if you do it, right the automatic culture and the tumbler culture becomes something new together and that's what we've been doing. And we do that as well through lots of rotations. So lots of people from who are at automatic before have rotated on to work on the Tumblr team and vice versa. We've had people from Tumblr either merging with other teams and automatic or sort of
Operating across things and this is a fine balance. Right? Like all organizational structures are a series of trade-offs but allows us to get the benefits of having something that can counter run on its own while still sharing knowledge and expertise and sort of unfair benefits that automatic app might have that other companies don't have access to and Tumblr wouldn't have access to if it were its own independent company.
So the cross pollination is that how you influence the culture like it's not a top-down. We're going to slowly nudge this a little bit differently.
We it's more like we're going to place people at different levels in the organization or is it the same level is at the top is at the bottom. Like
I mean people is by far the most important thing because the people everything else flows from the people. So you definitely want cross-pollination to people in terms of technology. I don't feel like you can force Engineers to do things that they don't want to do. So that's much more like showing the benefits so only places where we'll do something really top down.
If there is a really large Capital impact, I think it probably would have been a little bit easier just to completely recreate in a by the six thousand servers that they had before and buy the exact number. What is a configuration in our data centers. We ended up reducing that to about 800. So going from six thousand servers 800 and part of that was, you know, doing a lot of engineering work to bring things on to sort of what we've learned with best practices and being super duper Frugal with everything we built and so it took a little bit of work, but it just sounds
Saves so much that it made sense to make that kind of like it. No, we're absolutely going to do this decision.
I want to keep going a little bit more on this. Is it run by the same person? It was run by before or is it run by somebody new? Yeah.
So the CEO Jeff is still in place. So he was the CEO before he's a CEO now, so
that's really interesting. Right? Because that sort of leads me to speculate that environment matters a lot to how people perform. Is that something you think
about? I think it's the most important thing by far.
Yeah, so like in running a company and running a community with WordPress. We're obsessing over the environment we're creating and I think there's a microcosm of that like think about the environment around you and your office. So where you're working the smells the temperature the lights the inputs the music everything contributes to how you're operating and companies have equivalence of that and communities have equivalents of that, you know and WordPress we have, you know, five ten thousand people contributing to Wordpress on a
Regular basis now what sort of environment is happening there. We have something happening right now, which I think is fairly unique and exciting for open source, which is WordPress five point six, which is coming out really soon is an all-women release Elite Squad.
Oh, wow. That's awesome.
It's a result of you know the past decade of trying to make like WordPress or really open inclusive friendly place to be and it wasn't that there was ever a specific gender Target.
Anything like that, or just okay, like why do most open source projects only attract a certain type of person not even like one generally a certain type of person who like loves to fight and be on mailing list and like and then what sort of products is that create over time if we're trying to create products for the world our mission is to democratize publishing and commerce. So if we want to truly democratize it which means everyone has access to it regardless of language technical building anything we need to get as many loads the world involved in building this
and so I think about that for every aspect even language. I want people who don't even have the ability to speak or read English to be able to contribute to Wordpress and have their code included
what go deeper on some of the other differences or not differences, but things that you see as environmentally impacting people's ability to not only contribute but perform at work in work what helps people what unleashes them inside the organization environmentally that we might not see as constraints as somebody who's thought about
This a lot
the best framework I found I believe I got from Dan pink in his book drive, which is Mastery autonomy and purpose Mastery is essentially being challenged and getting good at what you do, you know think of it when you're on the edge of that curve for learning a new skill autonomy is essentially the freedom to be able to do it. So you're not being micromanaged. You're not being you know, so many people in organizations know what the right thing is to do and they can't do it and finally purpose is
working for something bigger than yourself. I think that it's very difficult to drive world-changing performance. If it's just for a paycheck or just for your own personal benefit. You need to be connected to something larger. That's probably the easiest for us because pretty much everything we create is open source. We do have this mission to democratize things that we've had almost in for 17 years now and we take it very seriously and we see the results of that. Yeah, we've been able to get a good chunk of the web. I'm open source.
And I believe we have the ability to create a natural monopoly of 80 85 percent of the world's websites running open source, and if we do that that means I believe that will preserve the open web for another generation of human flourishing. I think it's actually important for like the evolution of society and Humanity for us to accomplish this goal. It's kind of our version of going to Mars for Elon Musk like this is key because it proprietary close web. Doesn't it? Well, we see what happens with that because it's been a lot of the past four years. That's our purpose. So if you get those three things
Is there I find the rest falls into
place? You mentioned something earlier about how you guys are distributed and you didn't use remote you use distributed. What's the distinction there
words create reality and we obsess a lot over what words we use to describe things. I think we used to use remote to describe what we were like Hey, we're remote company or remote first company and I realized I could wants to be remote from their colleagues.
Remote implies that there's like something sensual and you're far away from it. You know, there's a remote mountain or in a remote Town you're isolated. What's a lot closer to what we were trying to create was essentially an anti fragile fully distributed organization that each node on the network was at an equal weight with each other and just like a great Network design with like bgp failover something like that like it the the ordinate the system itself becomes quite resilient because the nose are relatively independent but each able to fully contribute. So for us we
Shifted to being the kind of distributed and really talking about distributed because it's so important that every single person in the company has it equal ability to
contribute sort of like when you were saying that I was thinking about how words matter and we're calling the, you know during covid we call it social distancing but it's really physical distancing because we don't want to be distant socially. We just want to physically have a gap between us for you know spread purposes and I thought that was a really interesting distinction.
That's why it matters in the beginning to write because I have tried to change that I've liked
Like talk about physical distancing of tried using the conversation, but at some point there's so much momentum around to term you're kind of stuck with it. So naming things particularly in the beginning is so important because you know, whatever your code name is or whatever. The the the thing is the internal name, you know, you're going to end up with that almost certainly for a long time and changing names later is is especially if you're successful is almost
impossible. Yeah. I can definitely see that terminology once it gets ahold of you is like so hard to
Get rid of what are the differences between going distributed at this point in time in these circumstances and being distributed by default from the
start in a global pandemic. I think that there's just aspects of Life which are very difficult and challenging that you wouldn't have in a non pandemic scenario. So part of what's I think great about distributed one question we often get is like I want people only because they're you know, they don't have a there.
Friendships at work and things and they could be certainly like if you're only social networks that work you might be lonely if you weren't working with people physically, but then what does that open up? It opens up the opportunity for you to choose people around you geographically to spend time with who you can talk about things other than work you talked about with him work you talk about something else. You can play Ultimate Frisbee you can do Among Us or Settlers of Catan you can go to music you can and part of our model of distributed work also provides a fair amount of autonomy.
And how people get the work done. So, you know, if your customer support you need to be on a few certain hours a week, but you have a lot of time and choosing those hours. If you're an engineer or designer, you did accomplish certain things, but gosh if you could do that in one hour a week good for you. It's really about getting from A to B. We're not tracking, you know, how you do it. So that allows people a lot of flexibility to design their their day around what works best for them. You know, there's folks who wake up every morning start work at
or Thirty a m-- I would never ask someone to do that. But that's that's where they feel more productive to get a couple hours. And before the kids wake up and on pandemic times a lot of automations love dropping their kids off from school and picking them up that's easy to do because you don't have to like leaving office walking to a parking lot. See all your colleagues. See you going somewhere and wonder if you're goofing off like it's just part of your day and I like that it creates a lot more objectivity and focus around what the actual work is because I believe and offices were so
Acted just as I cumin social Animals by all the things around the work how someone dresses whether they're present or not with times are present. Do they appear to be working really hard and these things are you know, they're the map is not the territory,
right? Yeah. Definitely. I had a friend once who worked for an investment bank and he he figured it out very quickly. This was like a FaceTime culture thing. Not necessarily A you're working all the time. Thanks. So he did this sort of I would call it clever. He hired.
Add the janitor who used to come in at like 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. To switch his coat and turn on his computer every day. So it looked like he was the first person in the office and he would stroll in at 10:00 and you know, like he had just come from a meeting or something and everybody had thought he'd been there because his computer monitor was on and his co-head chance like yeah, it's hilarious how he thought about that.
I love that. So I'm going to use that in the future, but it's so much easier. I think it's easier to slack off and office and it is in a distributed environment. I
think it's easier to hide it.
Epic is in distributed. You can just you can you can do dishes you can you know get caught up with all this stuff at home, especially if you've never worked from home before and then but your performance stands out in a way that it doesn't in the office because you can sort of like hide behind these signaling and all these meetings and walking around with a lot of folders and people you can go months before people like clue and that you actually haven't done anything.
Yeah, I like that because ultimately
like we want to be as close to the reality of the work as possible and all these other things are false proxies. So the more we can make it a bit more objective about accomplishing the goal of the business. I think the better that is and also by the way, I believe that's way more
inclusive talk to me about the levels of autonomous
organization. So I think actually one of the reasons I was avoiding coming on this podcast because I was like because the you asked me like very early on it's like I want to get my book out first because I was really convinced. I was going to write this book about distributed.
And in the past few years the company has been growing too fast have prioritized other things. So what I ended up doing was starting a podcast and then so in that for a little bit I was going to make that like the steps of the book is going to do like the Tim Ferriss thing but then add the pandemic happened and I realize that there were so many companies really struggling with the switch to distributed that I could help them and just be a very small way that I contributed and I also start talking to dozens and dozens.
Dozens of them CEOs of top 5 Financial firms with you know hundreds of thousands of employees that I had dinner with just months before the said we could never be distributed and then months later the like 98 percent of our Workforce is his working from home and we're doing great and I so I got to see from the inside lots of it going well going poorly everything. I came up with these five levels. I call them the five levels of The Surety Tommy decided to introduce on Sam Harris has podcast which I recommend checking out that one too. If you haven't essentially what they are are.
How companies evolved through working in a distributed fashion because I'm an engineer we start counting at zero. So there's a secret six levels. So the level 0 is job, which absolutely cannot be done distributed. What's funny is we think a lot of jobs were level 0 and turns out they weren't on the pandemic. So I like to refer to a telemedicine use the think you need to go into the doctor to have them look at that, you know rash on your kid, and now you can do that all night so level it will level 0 think is like construction maybe being
one level 1 is 1 if you weren't in the office or with your other colleagues for a little bit of time you could get by but it's the environment not really suited for so typical and level one is like if you had a family emergency and go pick up your kids from school. Maybe you could hop on a phone call, but maybe you wouldn't have access to like the VPN or internal company resources. It wasn't really designed for that. So you get by for a day, but you're pretty unhappy level two is where most companies went to and at the endemic sellable.
Two is where you basically try to take the everything you did in the office and recreate it online. And this is like the cargo cult of distributed work right like you you say. Oh, you know, we used to be in six hours of meetings a day. Now, let's be in six hours assumes a day and let's have these ways of reporting and lets you know, maybe you have access to more the tools online a typical if you're in level 2, you might feel totally exhausted at the end of every day.
In a way you never did an office lots of little two organizations have too many meetings, you know, they worry about mod put and selling monitoring software on their employees computers or like, you know, they don't have a good way for people to to have a home office setup or things like that level three is where you start to embrace the benefits of being online. So this is where I think of it like, we like to have a Google doc when we have meetings. You know, we have a Google doc that's open on everyone's computer and we're taking notes in real time and everyone is looking at that.
Next to the zoom and this allows kind of a real time record of whatever is being recorded in the meeting and also that becomes a sense making apparatus. So someone is taking the notes which by the way we can share and they see something written down which wasn't what they thought was said all of a sudden you're reconciling that difference and that's super super powerful because how many times are we going to meetings? We thought we all agree and then a week later you realize like everyone had different definitions of the terminology views and ideas of what successful as and everything. That's just one simple example, which is
is like off-the-shelf Google Docs and zoom that is actually like a major Force multiplier for for success of meetings level 3 start to have fewer meetings to which I like level 3 is still synchronous though. You're still expecting to be able to be the kind of online working together the same time to get worked on level four is where you go from synchronous asynchronous and this one's kind of magical by the way. It's also really really hard. It's much easier to work together. If you're there at the same time and you can kind of ping pong back and forth, but if you're able to
An organization that people popping in and out at whatever time zone or whatever times are able to fully contribute and move forward the goals in a meaningful way. Then you unlock access to the world's Talent you unlock Ultimate flexibility and everyone's day you give people a ton of autonomy and I believe a synchronous interactions can be far richer than synchronous ones you unlock the power of the introverts in your company people for whom in a real-time meeting. They might hang
back a little bit or be shy or they might need to think about things to really contribute their best thoughts. There's a French phrase. I love okay. I'm not going to say the French but essentially means stairway with and it's like the come back you have or the joke you think of when you're when you pass one of the stairs, but you think of it when you're at the bottom of the stairs unlocking that asynchronicity, I think makes organizations far far better. So for example, inside automatic, we have this internal blogging system called P2. You can actually check it out at wordpress.com.
As P2P like pool and then I'm going to and so if we're trying to make a decision for like, you know this widget inside the product, we don't call a bunch of meetings about it. We create a thread and so this internal blogging threat someone else I need to decide on this widget. Let's discuss it for 36 hours. And then we're going to make a decision and then everyone essentially has almost like an internal comment thread that's kind of like a mix between not just like a Blog and comment thread or Forum where they can discuss and they can embed videos.
He owes and gifts and mock-ups and discussions and link to research and everyone's kind of participating in their own time and their writing essentially a little many essays. So instead of just on the cuff responses and reactions to things they're able to like really think about it take around walk around the block take a shower and play with your dog, like think about the problem and really ruminate on it and bring your best answer to and then everyone's doing that back and forth and then at the end of the time period because I cry it's synthesized the best wisdom and knowledge and information from this make this
And so it took a little bit longer maybe from start to finish. I feel like the decision could be ten or a hundred times better. And when the quality of your decisions determine your outcome, this sort of process can be amazing now. Also, let's fast forward each thread that gets created is adding to the institutional knowledge of the organization and a permanent way now ten years later. We're like why on Earth does a widget work like that and what usually happens particularly software is Engineers come in and they say,
So let's rewrite this, you know, and they sort of reinvent it from scratch and then they reinvent all the same problems again and all the same bugs because they didn't really understand why it worked the way it did before but now this is perfect thread which shows the entirety of the thought process of the decision and how that decision came from. And so now I mean we have now at automatic. I feel like it's a it's our biggest asset more than the money in our bank more than a software anything. Is this sort of now, I'm like 15 year record of
Decision every design process everything is in these internal blogs and it's kind of amazing what you can find there course, we built a good search engine for it and everything and you can really mine and I think it allows us to now not recreate the same mistakes particularly one in a tech company fast-growing 20, 30 % of people might be there less than a year. They might be pretty do and so it's allows a fast scaling companies to escape the groundhog effect that often happens when you're growing really quickly
and what was level.
Five a level 5 is nirvana. It's somewhat unattainable but what you always want to Aspire to so I think that we have glimpses of level 5 level 5 is where I believe that the organization in a distributed fashion is outperforming at every single level productivity quality employee happiness everything any in person or organization because you've embraced all the power all the special features of this asynchronous approach.
And everything's better. I think if you if you kind of add up all the things we just talked about for example, The increased autonomy and a synchronicity might allow people to design the interaction between their work and their life a lot better. By the way, then they're going to be happier, right because they have a lot more control over their day. They're able to spend their day and environment which isn't like the lowest common denominator of fluorescent lights and a cold temperature and like terrible food and colleagues. I talked on the phone to let all that sort of terrible environment.
Aunt now, they're in an environment which they design which is creatively charging for them which is filled with things which recharge their day. Like maybe they do a little mini exercises during the day or they they kiss their kids or they walk their dog whatever it is and they bring that creativity to work that work goes so much better because the works going so much better. They're bringing that energy back to their life and family and that 18 hours outside of work
as somebody who's super thoughtful you always think of the drawbacks to everything. What are the drawbacks to distributed and entirely distributive.
First I totally get jealous sometimes when I walk in my friends companies and they just have these amazing offices not so much for the physicality of the office. Although sometimes I do appreciate good design there. But just I love my colleagues. I really enjoy spending time with them it particularly this year. I wish I could do more as Secret Sauce is a magic ingredient of our distributed approach is in normal times. We get people together three or four times a year. So if you joined automatic, it's a Shane.
You know as part of you know deciding whether take this job offer or not expect that you'll be travelling 3 to 4 weeks per year. So you'll be away from home. So, you know, whether that means you need to find like a cat sitter or someone to watch your kids or whatever like you're going to be on the road for weeks out of the year and one week historically we fought the whole company together and then the other two or three weeks you're going to be with your team, which is typically we have lots of cross-functional teams. Typically five to 10 people. We try to have every everything on the team that's needed to ship.
To users and so they can operate in a fairly autonomous fashion. And you know when you're able to as humans, I still think there's something that is.
Impossible to recreate online, which is that breaking bread and how the bottle of wine you I shared whatever the equivalent of that is. It just builds trust in a way that you can get pretty close online. I think you get 85 90 percent of the way, but you can't get 200.
Is there a difference in your mind between people that are switching to remote right? Now? You already have a relationship with people so you don't have to develop it versus developing a new relationship like as this goes on longer and you hire new people. What's the difference between an
Sing relationship that you're building a pond or you can rely upon this establish trust and then this new relationship where now you have to ask that you have to break bread. You have to like establish this level of trust with somebody that you've never met before
you just got to work at it, you know know that that's an issue and say like, how am I going to invest the time to build a relationship with this person by the way people did it hundreds of years ago as when you had to send letters that would take weeks to arrive. They could build very strong relationships with folks on the other.
Other side of the ocean we are blessed with instantaneous audio-visual every type of Technology. Like let's say Shane you and I were like we want to develop our relationship, but we know we're not going to be able to physically see each other for a while what we do can we play some games together if we'd like read a book and then discuss it together and we'd have like a little 10 minutes. We talk every morning just to kind of like talk about our day. Maybe I'd say call me if you're going through something tough. Maybe you know, I'd say like hey, why don't we I bring my friends and family to the
And you bring your friends and family to the zoo. Like we all hang out. There's only virtual. I know what would you add to
that? I don't know. It's just something I've sort of been thinking about a little bit between the difference between because I've had friends talk to me about this and they're always really easy when I know somebody in advance, but it's it's there's more friction when I don't know people which I think is inevitable right? There will be friction when you're developing that relationship a little bit and you have to you know, communicate a little bit more precisely because you might not share the same vocabulary.
And there's all these byproducts to it, but it requires this investment and that investment is really strange right now because people feel like they're working harder than ever a lot of people but they're not as productive as they are. So they're feeling more strain I guess on their hours and so what's happening or what? I hear anecdotally anyways, like everything is becoming or not everything a lot of things are becoming transactional.
And that'll erode trust with people that you've already established it with and it makes it really hard to establish trust with people if it's a very transactional relationship. So I just wonder about these Investments that you should be making in your colleagues and the people that you're closest to you including, you know, wine and cheese or something or sharing a show or you know doing something that just makes it feel more Europe partly cuz it to your point earlier. There's a human psychological desire to feel part of something larger than
Yourself you're contributing to something meaningful you're doing something and I think that establishing that on a one-to-one basis. Like we're in this together. We're contributing to this thing together. We're fighting for each other. We're in the trenches together. I think that's a really important thing to establish, especially when you think of this as maybe a marathon and not a Sprint and maybe the world doesn't go back to the way that we thought it was before and maybe you're a lot more flexible with your work and learning to adapt now is just going to be exponentially more valuable than
Learning to adopt later,
you know if your friends were here and here are also my good friend. I would shake your shoulders and say like wake up, you
know. Yeah,
it's you think of trust as like a function of communication times time, you know, maybe when you're in an office of someone you got some of those things just by default. They didn't really think about it. But if you were to actually think about it invest in it, I bet you could create an incredibly close relationship when much more intentional and deliberate than you would just maybe cohabitating with someone by default to who's kind like a
Ships. Yeah, you
can live with someone every day and not develop a relationship and you can see someone a few times a year and in develop an incredibly deep relationship. So it's the same with with your work colleagues. So I would say like, you know, really talk and by we talk about that say like hey Shane, like I feel like I fell in like a little more disconnected from you because we haven't we haven't seen each other in a while. Like what can we do and make it a conversation by the way, that's also how we solve like most of our company problems. I get lots of questions like well,
What do you do if the team isn't brainstorming, you know the way they used to because they do have a white board and it's like I don't know. Why don't you get the team together and talk about it and say like hey we used to do this thing. That was really magical around the Whiteboard. What are some things we can try to recreate that and then just try different stuff. It's gonna be different for different teams. But if you don't talk about it with everyone you're not ever going to develop that relationship so that communication times time I think is a really good formula to keep in mind
just to add to that a little bit one of the things that I did end up going back.
Saying is like oh my God, we do this at our event. I never even thought of this and like the context of this week. We take complete strangers and we sort of like get to a base level of trust and how do we do it? We had that game based on the 35 questions to fall in love where we have these increasing like intimacy level questions was like try this with people like create your own version of it, but sort of like have this level of conversation with people and see where it goes and I think that was really effective. I want to go back to decision making a little bit with the
the the Pichu program and having this distributed sort of like record of decision making which seems awesome because you'll be able to pick out people who are consistently right and might not be as heard or recognized as right because you'll be able like eventually computers will be able to say well this person is more consistently accurate than perhaps that they're they're waiting in the decision happens. But like how do you frame that is everything time box? Like you said at the start? We have 36 hours to make this decision. Like what are the
Letters that you put along that so that it doesn't just spiral out of control and how do you differentiate between decisions that need to be made as soon as possible and maybe larger strategic decisions that can be as late as possible. I
think sometimes we do this poorly by the way, so there's definitely threads that get started which don't have a clear goal or outcome or time limit and they can just Meander on for days or weeks and then you come to it later like oh my goodness. What is this? It's like 15 20 thousand words. Like how do I decide?
Seifer this I'd say that very much automatic is a written communication culture and I believe clear writing represents clear thinking and we filter for this in our hiring and we talked about writing a lot. So we like invite writers and we talk about books like on writing well or words that work did I get people to be clear written communicators some of the things I'd recommend other companies try that we've come to you. Let's say there's there's a DOT a post which is presenting an idea a very common pattern is
Is a tldr at the Top If you're not familiar with that acronym, it's TL semicolon Dr. And it stands for too long didn't read. And so essentially often times people put like a little tweet late summary of whatever they posted at the very very top actually so some way, you know, you asked about Tumblr culture influencing us. They introduced a new acronym to this so they'd have the tldr then like a chunk of text and then they had like it's escaping me right now, but I feel like it's like
GS G m-- like good stuff give me more and think of that like almost like an appendix where that it could be like another 5,000 words. If you really want to dive deep into this whatever the post is about you could but if you didn't you just skip that section don't feel like you're required to read it another really good practice. Our best internal threats have is the time boxing. I think that's usually pretty good. But then also someone who's summarizes it at the end. So again, it can be kind of
Intimidating to come on this really long conversation thread and harsher sorted out. So one thing I see some of the best particularly leaders doing the company is at the very end. They'll just make a comment that summarizes everything including the outcome. And so if I come across a really long thread often, what I'll do is scroll to the very bottom and see if there's one of those summaries because that can be like at synthesis and to synthesizing is incredible contribution to the institutional knowledge that's great there and if I wanted to dive into a particular
a thread or mine a thread on how something was decided I could but I don't need to so I think a lot about that efficiency of time and think one downside of synchronous communication is its kind of one to one. So the time that it's taking the communicate the information is also what it takes to consume it and that's kind of inefficient on the other end of the spectrum is maybe like a book that someone took a lifetime to write and it can take you a few hours to read like wow, that's a multiple thousands to one ratio. So that's really
A dense invaluable and then probably the worst is like things that take people a short amount of time to create and you a long time to consume if that's Twitter.
Yeah. Definitely. I mean a lot of these hand grenades that people throw out take a lot of time to refute but like eight seconds to like tweet out and yeah, it's an interesting. I wouldn't imagine you'd have that as much inside the company, especially when it's visible because there'd be a like a shaming element to it as well.
But well, that's it.
Is also one thing that at the superpower of asynchronous, so we do these monthly Town Halls every month and where anyone can ask any question and I just answer them in real time or someone else in the company answers them in real time. You can watch that real time and it's about an hour long, but we post a recording. So if you want to watch It sped up later that hour-long meeting you can get through in 30 minutes. So hey, you just you literally just create a time out of nothing. And so this is why we always want really good notes out of meetings.
The way if every meeting is transparent and has really good notes or recording people. Don't feel the need to be there. And so the meeting can be smaller, which also means it's more effective where it's like, you know, not everyone is like I'm not in this meeting. I'll have no idea what happened and like my voice won't be heard. So when you start to unlock all the pieces of the stuff we talked about in the five levels one thing then like leads to a cornucopia of like other benefits that you wouldn't have until you went to the earlier levels.
How do you prevent people from sort of or encourage them not to I guess is probably a better way to word it but like not getting caught up in slack all day or reading P2 all day or catching up on all these meetings that they weren't really a part of and just sort of like acquiring all this organizational knowledge that they never put to use
S Voice clear expectations. I mean ultimately by the way, I've had this week with these weeks where I like I spent a lot of time very busy. I worked maybe 60 or 80 hours, but I didn't really get my most important.
Things done. So when you have clear expectations, either for yourself or for others, that is the best filter because at some point, you know, there's going to be that conversation like either with yourself or with someone else like I didn't does accountability. I didn't meet the thing that was expected of this role or this job or that other people are depending on me on and then you start to say well what happens did I I play Nintendo all week. Okay. Well, that's an issue. Did I work really hard but on the wrong things that's far more common. Actually the problem we
Have actually in distributed work. So to get to another downside is not under work. It's over work. So we have developed a lot of internal systems to be used to backtrack any vacation or we call AFK away from keyboard time because we have a completely open policy there take what you want, but the problem was people want to take you so we started tracking it to encourage people to take it which is kind of funny. So we do you know, that is a report that HR team leads will look at it's like oh Shane hasn't taken a single.
They often six months first. I'm gonna have a conversation with you about why at that by the way, this has happened a lot in pandemic people are like I can't go anywhere. I'm locked down. Why would I take a few days off and then like, well, I've tried anyway do a staycation. Yeah just don't go in your office at all that day and do everything else or you know, talk about how that recharge time because I do believe it is important for high performance how to build that
in how do you think about your day and organizing it to make sure that you're working on the most important things
I've learned.
Roughly think of my time in three buckets. I try to spend about a third of my time on people. So that's either hiring or internal HR think this is the environment work creating the environment for people to thrive and do the best work of their lives and their career.
It's been about a third of my time to go right now on product. So I'm sure temporarily running our largest product which is wordpress.com. And so I'm a lot more in the in the weeds there in terms of you know, working with the leaders and engineers and everything to make sure that's an excellent experience but more normally I might float a little bit more between the different products across the company and then finally that final third I just try to reserve for whatever is the same urgency of the week.
Do you think about sort of like your day the night before do you have blocks of time where you're guaranteed to be free? Like, how how do you do that? And how much email do you get? You don't get a lot right P2 takes care of most of it
internally. I get almost zero email. So inside the company, we basically don't use email maybe like some HR stuff or something. You might get the email if it's truly private, but everything else happens on the blocks. I also met a point right now where I have
Almost no meetings in my schedule. So kind of no regular recurring ones. Everything is a bit more opportunistic or on the Fly. I would say that a lesser version of this is throughout the company. Most of our teams do have regular recurring meetings. But automatic probably has 80% fewer meetings the most other companies. I'm familiar with their internal workings. This is also really powerful what happens when you have your meetings and if you need to have a meeting you can do it immediately. It's not like I was I'll meet with friends.
Google and like there's this like Tetris of their calendar and you're like alright next Friday at 2 p.m. I've got 15 minutes then or something like that or like. Hey, let's meet at 7 p.m. Because then I'll be done with things and they're working un and like a crazy off time. But when everyone's counter is open, it's kind of like, all right, that's a let's hop on. Let's do that right now so decreases the velocity which you can solve the problems what you were doing the meeting of great. So that's that's where I am right now.
By the way, I'm not always like this and I'm not advocating this for everyone all the time. There are times when I was a lot more like weekly one-on-ones with 15 20 people week or something like that. But for where we are right now, my biggest value is in taking information synthesizing it writing and making some very very subtle but large changes to how the organization works that need to be planned and thought through and so there's a lot of
Conversations around these and come to a conclusion. I would like to have as much reading in a day as possible.
I want to come back to the reading here in a second about what are some of those subtle changes that you're talking about that you're you're thinking of,
you know, this has been a year of incredible acceleration for our business because as the world economy and everything shifts online our e-commerce business with woocommerce the blogging side to side Creation with wordpress.com even uses our Tumblr grew and so
thing was up at a time one. I would say are my colleagues were are impacted. So I feel like we were operating probably even still a like a seventy percent efficiency of what we were preparing dimmick. And that is largely, you know, the it's everything that you can think of people are literally getting sick sometimes or they have loved ones that are that they need to care from the impact on folks who care for either elderly or children.
First, you know, it's been really disproportionate. I think in this this year and so I've seen a big impact for folks like four kids at home trying to home school them like, you know, this is really challenging. So we're not operating at our Peak what's funny is other organizations. I've been switching to distributed haven't talked about how they've gained 15 or 20% So my theory is that we were at like a hundred percent and we came down to 70 they were like 50 percent and they went up to 70.
Yeah it all especially if you had kids.
And you had elementary school children, like myself sent home and it's like try working with, you know, a ten and eleven year old at home. It's good luck.
It's different. So that has been a challenge. We're also though at the precipice of a even far more growth. So if you look at the percentage of e-commerce, we have the percentage of websites or anything like that. There's several doublings in our future. And so we need to make sure that we have the
Organizational structures in place to support that and we've shifted to the kind of this like digital Berkshire Hathaway. We've prioritized some longer infrastructure product Investments, you know sort of using the opportunity this year to say. Okay, let's let's do this five-year Investments and really started now and really make lots of progress on it and then just in hiring scaling are hiring and training it's kind of my other Obsession which
You and I have talked about before like if we can make our people 10% more effective that's equivalent of hiring a hundred thirty new folks. And so how can we invest by the way one side effect of being distributed and having the Mastery time we purpose we have incredible retention. So our regretted churn is something like 4% per year three percent three and a half percent. And so if people stay more than a year or two, they'll probably be here a very very long time. So you have to train them like they're going to be around forever settled.
Joke, like whatever I train my people and leave and like what if you don't and they say I got we've got some examples of this but to be completely candid like we were a little bit relying on in person as a crutch. So a lot of our previous learning and training would happen. We were together in person. So we are much like many children in the world trying to learn how to do this in a distributed fashion, really really effectively and just invest as much as possible and coaching one-on-one and programs and Concepts.
Be like like radical Candor and how do we get that distributed throughout the whole organization? So all of this is probably the most important thing we're doing is organization right now.
I want to talk a little bit about the differences between public and private you just mentioned doing this five-year big infrastructure investment. Is that something that you get an advantage of being a private company where you might have more scrutiny if you're a public company, how do you think of it? Then? I think
it's about clear communication and expectations. So we run things internally like we're a public company.
And you know, I could see a future at some point when maybe all of automatic or maybe one of these like subsidiaries one of these like Subs could go public on its own but I actually don't buy the thing that that public markets don't reward long-term investment. And I think there's some amazing cat or examples of that Amazon. Perhaps be the best one where if you're clearly communicate and x and do what you're going to say over the long term. These long-term Investments can really pay off and you know, what's the thing in the short?
Term voting machine long-term weighing machine.
Yeah and the short term the markets are a voting machine, but the long-term they're weighing machine. Yeah. Yeah, we
have as a private company had incredible swings and valuation. So I feel like we've experienced the capriciousness of mr. Market already internally and to the point where literally like, you know, we turn down an investor who wants to invest in the company at a maximum of 500 million Enterprise Value and like a week or two later. Someone invested a three billion dollar valuation. Like there's wild wild swings at
Happened. That's that's fine. You just gotta get used to it. And you say like well what actually matters to our business and is that growing and sometimes the marker will understand that sometimes it won't sometimes by the way. I've been better or worse at explaining what we do. Sometimes we had the wrong people around the table talking to investors like all those things. But when you get them right over the long term, I think you you have both the access to all the capital you need and the ability to make Fair long-term
Investments. You get really 1200 people know, right?
Hey, give me a 1013 1300. What was the hardest phase of growth from 0 to 1300 and y22 50y
and at by the way, this is always happening. So I try to design automatic to be a fractal organization. So as you zoom in our out it is self-similar and so across functional 10-person team at automatic looks a lot like what all of automatic look like when the whole company was 10 people.
And then as they grow there's like a mitosis when a cell splits like a team will get too big then we'll split the two and then they'll be start to be some coordination. So when a division and we have several of these going through this it's kind of in that got like 20 30 million dollars of Revenue and going from 20 to 50 people you lose that ability to brute force that collaboration and getting everyone on the same page and you really need to start communicating in a way which is
Well understood across the existing people, but also at that point you're probably scaling pretty quickly. And so you need to be able to arm board people. So this institutional knowledge that was built up by a lot of people working closely together for many years and bring that new person and really effectively and get them to understanding a lot of what happens at that phase is you bring in new people and you get that Groundhog Day thing where like new people come in and they start that discussion or debate that has happened five times already because you know,
He
first look at wordpress.com. You say well, what if we just like made it Ultra simple and only have like five buttons like Tumblr when that be way bigger and you're like, okay. Well, here's what happens when you do that. Right? And here's three times. We've done that and why it worked and what we learned from it and like how are using that to inform our next version. So there's that that onboarding when you're scaling the sort of the boot loading of institutional knowledge, you know, if you could imagine your aspiration being like when Neo gets plugged,
Been to the matrices like I know Kung Fu, you know, you're not going to get quite there. But if you could get that and someone's first couple weeks, I think you're ahead of 99 percent of companies and particularly when you're in that sort of point when you're growing above 50% people wise
is there a costly mistake that you've made recently or while you were growing automatic that you think other people would benefit from knowing to
avoid so many
what comes to mind instantly when I say that
Comes to mind instantly. We were having a lot of essentially like people issues with the very earliest team and we were probably 20 25 people some really good fights happening with folks is very very close to and so it felt like a personal thing. We don't offer that time to sell the company for about 200 million and it was absolutely the right answer not to do it, but I
I was very close to it was partially because I was like, okay that will resolve these people issues. I won't have to deal with them anymore. But I was like what is going on here? Why would I make this cycle life decision to sell this thing which could be a hundred times bigger and I believe will be because of like an interpersonal conflict. And so that conflict avoidance is definitely something that particularly on as a lead. I think let's a ton of dysfunction within organization. Another one that came to mind was you know, we've been
Very inspired by the way, a lot of remote distribute stuff was pioneered by base camp at the time called 37signals, but they also were really into like keeping the company as small as possible. And so I really kept us sub 50 probably two or three years longer than we should have been and so that meant that we got really spread thin and we under invested in things like customer service because of trying to keep the company really small because in my head I equated big with bad I thought
Thought you know, the larger organization gets the worse it gets the more bureaucratic and that was just a limiting belief I held and I'd never really truly interrogated or questioned or challenged. Why can't when you get more amazing people in an organization, it can't actually get better. Why can't the specialization that comes or the ability to attract and retain Talent or the ability to pay a lot more as your business scales? Why can't those things make the organization far better as you get better? And so just buy a cow?
Look asking the opposite and trying the opposite was able to get company that we have today which you know, I skip to work in the morning that the number one thing that motivates me is the quality of the Care compassion the kindness the intelligence of my colleagues and I consider myself like one of the luckiest people in the world to work with people I do and I work with a coach that I just start doing that this year. It was like, okay. I want to talk to the direct report. Who is your your least favorite or something like that? There's some version of that.
That we want to interview other person has the most trouble with and I kind of looked around the virtual room. There's no one I was like, wow, I was like so estatic. It was like a moment of pure joy because you know for a lot of the history of automatic has often been something in that room or as I call it how this person and by the way doesn't mean it was a bad person it often met. I was not communicating clearly with that person or setting expectations or avoiding certain things.
I found a lot of ways as I have sort of invested in self work and just trying to get better at the work of interacting with other human beings and not just a computer all the time. Like I used to that the company has benefited and then when other people do the same work, you know, it's just like any relationship and people invest into improving the relationship that multiplies and I like to think that maybe not all 1300, but we've got maybe 12
Adore 1250 folks investing in improving the relationships at the folks they work with and that's going to lead to a much better product over time faster iteration
or some of the blind spots even covered working with a coach this year.
How limiting my communication can be sometimes even sometimes how ask a question from a place of perfectly good intention can put the other person in like a at a victim mentality, but it like our mentality where I'm solving things for someone like I can play the Savior role so and they can be very very
Subtle, it's like is there anything I can do to help you first is what do you need for this to be a success one is like putting the power with me to help you and the other is putting the power with you to Define what you need and then I can support that but ultimately you have the agency Which is far more empowering. I've been learning and working on by the way nonviolent communication is an amazing book and VC which has a terrible name but is really valuable. That was not what this coach.
But was a game changer for me for years ago. The other is like I feel like for most of my life I kind of treated myself as like a brain in a jar. So like this disconnected intelligence that you know, I'd invest a lot in exercising my brain but not anything else but also not really listening to my body. And so something I've been working on a lot is trying to listen to you two ever. I'm speaking to also listen with awareness of what's going on during my whole body.
And that's been kind of amazing, you know, just this idea that maybe you can name a Feeling by the way naming feelings is also hard. I'm feeling anxious about going on with Shane and I can Define that because gosh front of streets like one of my favorite sites and the podcast is so good and his other guests are so amazed. I don't know how I'm going to hold a candle to them and like man. I hope this helped this gets lots of listens and it's not, you know, all these sorts of things going I can to find that but what's really interesting is I saying like, well, where do I feel that?
Is that the pit of my stomach is it kind of in my throat? This is my chest. Is it like where is it showing up? My shoulders tense and identifying that for me is just been really really powerful for allowing the feeling to pass through versus being kind of kicked up inside me and causing disharmony versus I apologize for these words to their so an exact but like sort of somatic experiencing and working through difficult things.
Where before I would try to intellectualize it and I think my way through problems and now trying to physically feel my way through them as well. And also listen to what my body is telling me which often contains like maybe some on verbalize double
wisdom. I like that a lot of that
make any sense at all.
I think there's definitely something there. I mean, we're taught that everything should be rational but there's a huge component of that that is like your body has this pattern recognition. Sometimes like you look at somebody and
The door and you instantly recognize this person has malicious intent, but when you're talking to somebody you feel all these other things like stress or anxiety and you're not going to move that relationship forward or get to really good rational Solutions. If you don't sort of figure out what it is, you're feeling and why you're feeling that way and I think that we sort of were often taught to gloss over that and suppress it. And then when you suppress it, it keeps coming up over and over again, and I think that there's a lot to be said for just being
with that feeling recognizing the feeling labeling the feeling exploring it exploring what's going on in your body with it and staying with it instead of just like tossing it away. And I think that there's a ton of value not only to your personal happiness and sleep and sort of like heart rate but also to the quality of thinking and decisions and relationship, right? Like if you're trying to grow the pie with somebody it's really hard to do that when you're feeling anxious around them and one of the better ways to get out of that and to come up to with
In is like why am I feeling anxious? Let's let's chat about this for a
second as a quote. I love from Jesse's fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better
conditions. I like that. This is really powerful. You
can also everyone listening to this can feel it. Like if we were to take 10 seconds and try to breathe through your belly like where you take a breath in.
And really like stick your belly out almost comically and then let it go back in that'll instantly have an effect on you and it's like okay what just happened and why I'm not just a brain image are your whole nervous system is connected to every part of you and yeah, that's a fascinating thing. I'm starting to explore some of this stuff. I think I've avoided before because I felt a little Wu and a very skeptical person. I like challenging things. I love the scientific method and process.
But when I discover something like the harmonic series like as a musician, like when I started learning the math of the harmonic series and where it's show up and the history of like just versus even intonation and all these sorts of things. I was like, wow, there's an entire universe here that actually mad at that shows up in like physical laws and so very scientific things that that just a million different places. I wouldn't think of how plants or how pedals form on a flower these things are pretty cool.
And so I love kind of like maybe starting with the rule of mystery side and then kind of like it's flooring it from a more scientific basis of you know, first principles and things that are axioms which are fully definable versus even if it started at a place that felt a little amorphous to me.
I look forward to learning more about this from your experiences and how you grow with this. I think that is a really interesting place to be I want to switch gears a little bit back to you just decision making a little bit. What are the patterns?
As of people that make really good decisions. Like what do you see in these people? And how do they think about things in a way that is transferable to other
people and one of the best advice I got early which is from early at automatic. I actually hired a CEO considering like a co-founder Tony Schneider. It's like my business soul, mate and one of the things he taught me early on was make reversible decisions quickly and are reversible ones deliberately and I still return to that unlike a weekly basis if it's a reversible decision. Yeah, we'll probably
learn a lot more by doing it. I find it so funny and software especially like let's just build the first version and build it to throw away maybe but let's get that prototype out there and we could debate it for weeks or months or do a million mock-ups. I have this old. Sa 1.0 is the Loneliest Number like the oxygen of usage is is required for any idea to survive. And so you want to get to that first version as fast as possible and that learning is really really viable. So the speed of iteration so
Like smaller reversible decisions that happen frequently quickly and without being too attached to them a lot. Now, you know, you all famously Advocate and I appoint people all the time to the decision Journal our internal Locking System essentially becomes that for both small and large decisions and particularly for large decisions. We try to really gather, you know, I think Netflix calls it farming for descent like try to gather as much contrarian or challenging.
Ideas as possible one thing sometimes new Executives struggle with when they come to automatic is the fact that everyone including me might really challenge them on the things that they're doing. And now I've had people say to me before like hey, you hired I'm an expert. I've been really successful. Why don't you just let me do my thing and it's like yes, and we should be able to defend her ideas. Not just telling me as the CEO but to like the brand-new brand-new person at the company.
And now you should hope one of my favorite things. I prefer to finish it all the time the work required to have an opinion.
Yeah, it's one of my
favorite to you should really be able to defend your idea vigorously and even better. I want you to be able to argue the opposite even better than a person challenging you can and unless you really understand that you haven't really and we probably are not making the decision in the most informed way and especially if we're making the decision it seems like everyone agrees.
Talk to me it look what do you
think of it? If I reversible like do you actually Define that literally or is it just hard to get out of because a lot of people get stuck on this, you know, there's almost nothing that is literally irreversible. It's all a matter of costs like you get your NBA general manager, you could trade somebody away but you could always trade back for them and you end up in this sort of the circular argument about thinking about decisions. How do you how do you think of it? Then? It's true
that probably almost every
Is reversible but some of them the cost is so high that it's unattainable. I'll start naming things are things actually people think is reversible that are actually far harder the reverse especially when you're successful taking an investor on
So who you choose to partner with? Hmm? It might be reversible but it might blow up on the way out. So it might actually be existential so fundraising Acquisitions, both on both sides of the table are very very hard to unwind and sometimes existential, you know, not totally reversible. But you know, it's something you want to deliberately is particularly executive hires because an executive needs 6 to 12 months to ramp up so and then, you know kind of a year to do their thing. So if you make the wrong higher there
You kind of lost two years this system. So there's a lot of these that I think are worth approaching deliberately or just having a few turns on like writing there's almost no writing that they can get better from some amount of editing. I'm sure there's a diminishing marginal return at some point. But you know, this is a very crisp writer like how often is that first draft like the best thing you've ever
written? Oh God never
and the the idea that it is.
Is or should be is keep so many people with amazing thoughts from writing more because I like all my first drive is terrible. I'm trouble getting out long congratulations u1l, like every great writer in history and it's really about that that process that happens after that first draft, which is where the magic is
talk to me a little bit about mental models and the mental models you use most commonly when you're making decisions for yourself or for automatic. I
think I'm struggling with this one because I'm such a fan boy.
Well, I mean this is worth pointing out right like
Our physical books that great mental model series are direct result of you and your support of what we're doing. I mean, they wouldn't be possible. The physical copies wouldn't be possible without you and automatic. So thank you. That's
very kind. Although I believe I believe someone would have sponsored if we didn't but yeah, I was falling over myself to do. So, by the way, if you haven't gotten a physical book, I encourage people to do it because it's gorgeous the mental models. I think that you know, we all operate on pattern.
Recognition and most of these patterns are subconscious and there's been great books written on this like thinking fast and slow all of the an area Lee's work around behavioral economics all the great conversations of happened this year round bias conscious and subconscious. Like these are just patterns that we have and I think far too often do we truly invest in creating deliberate patterns ones that have don't just happen by accident but that we truly challenged and choose to adopt their life and actually practice much
Like an athlete would practice a certain move or musician which practices scale these can become the sort of raw technique of I think operating particularly under pressure under duress or on high, you know time sensitive situations when you can fall back to this training, so these mental models it is really really powerful and that you know stronger says the latticework of that creates. I actually love think about a musical terms. Yeah. There's 12 notes in the western scale. There's a million scales between them.
I mean, I'm literally but there's all these combinations but I play jazz and so it's all about improvisation. If you put someone who doesn't know all of the underlying technique and theory and just say improvise. It's not going to be great. All right, because they you need to know the rules to break them.
And maybe that's a mental model.
Well, there's a saying that young man knows the rules the old man knows the
exceptions. Hahaha. I like that. I you know, I heard a lot of these from music actually. So before I start consciously thinking and discovered probably through your blog like Charlie Munger and all those things that the rules of music and learning music and delivered practice and Performing and breathing and all these sorts of things. I got from being a saxophone player, I think
We're a huge huge benefit for me just being like I was finally engineer. I was like a coder but I could get in front room and talk to people and so it's like leading a band. I could off the cuff, you know respond to things and like sort of like improvisation. I knew that the best things are created in a team and so even though a lot of my early days were was more that solo coding and you know crazy 12-hour days with pizza and not to do and I call those things like
And I it was always trying to get other people involved to it was actually funny. Remember we talked about the multiple evolutionary branches that came off of be too. Yeah. We're Tres is one of them whether things to happen was I actually reached out to the the people who started all the other branches said hey, if we work together, I vote we create something better than if we were each recreating the wheel on her own and I think out of the five branches like four of them joined up with WordPress.
That's also the leaders of those other
things emerged because they had done really cool stuff like one of them.
It's called b 2 plus plus and it created a multi-site version of Wordpress. So where you could run like multiple instances on the one code base that thing got merged in the WordPress became Walter WordPress multi-site and then that became wordpress.com which allows us to host hundreds of millions of sites on the same code base same databases and as super scalable way where each incremental site only cost us like a penny per year. So that was part of that beauty of like taking these multiple evolutionary branches and being able to adopt the best from different ones so idea meritocracy,
I think probably got that from Ray dalio and principles just if you dig into a lot of the most successful people they often have the rule book and I loved it as well when they say like this rule book doesn't need to be your rule book or guidelines. And so I'm always hesitant about that to be too prescriptive. It's actually one of my my mental block was wrong writing book because everything I've just said, I hope that five years from now. I'm like we figured out a much much better way to do it. I hope you do fall.
Oh up to some of these conversations like five or ten years down the road where you can kind of revisit some of the ideas and see what changed because to me that Delta. It's actually pretty pretty interesting. We're talking about a snapshot a moment of time of what I believe is the best practices the best thing but if I'm still growing hopefully I discover far better methods are better ways of approaching almost everything we've talked about.
Well, it's book it now will will follow up on this for sure and come back to it. And one of the things I love about you is that you're you're not only one of the kindest and most thought
People I know but you're always trying to grow the pie with other people and you're always trying to make something larger through going with other people instead of just going really fast on your own. I think that's a really unique attribute for you. Yeah, I think it's awesome. Thank you.
I would also say that's why everyone should ask for open source open source has a hack that gets competitors to work together. And when you think of you read sapiens what made humans who are weaker slower Etc out-compete from an evolutionary point of view all the other
Animals, and it was working together. It was story it was collaboration and I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end.
Maybe it'll take fifty or a hundred years. But what happens just like what happened fairly quickly with like Encyclopedia, Britannica and other encyclopedias and Wikipedia is that the thing which is open to all and gets everyone working together. If it truly gets that sort of like Humanity working together on the same shared resource, you get the opposite of the tragedy of the commons versus like the the field being overrun each person operating in their own self-interest sort of kills the environment or kills the share thing you each person operating their own self-interest.
Mixture Sarah thing better and better and in digital world we can do that because we have economists economics of abundance E versus economics of scarcity and open. So that's why open source will eventually win every Market its end. It's you know, there were lots of competitors to Wordpress in the blogging and CMS space which is essentially bet on you know, if we make all the money and have all the revenue and everything will be able to create something better than this unprofessional group of volunteers working in this prayer time.
And they really have lost on better for the past 17 years. It's happening with e-commerce now, and I believe it's going to happen with every area that open source when there's a really great project in a project, which is truly inclusive responsive Vols and has the economic incentives in line for collaboration versus
balkanization. Hey, that's a great place to end this conversation together we go a lot farther than we go alone Matt. Thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation. Thank you, Shane.
Hey one more thing before we say goodbye. The knowledge project is produced by the team at Farnam Street. I want to make this the best podcast you listen to and I'd love to get your feedback. If you have comments ideas for future shows or topics or just feedback in general. You can email me at Shane and Fs dot blog or follow me on Twitter at Shane a parish. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at f-- s dot blog / podcast. If you want to transcript of this episode go to heh.
FS dot blogspot
