Just listened to:
Some things that stood out:
Automatic is very much a written communication culture, and I believe clear writing represents clear thinking, and we filter for this when we’re hiring.
One of the best advice I got early at Automattic. I actually hired a CEO, I consider him like a co-founder, Tony Schneider. He’s like my business soulmate. One of the things he taught me early on was make reversible decisions quickly and irreversible ones deliberately, and I still return to that on a weekly basis. If it’s a reversible decision we’ll probably learn a lot more by doing it.
I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end. Maybe it’ll take 50 or 100 years, but what happens, just like what happened fairly quickly with 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 humanity working together on the same shared resource, you get the opposite of the tragedy of the commons, versus the field being overrun, each person operating in their own self-interest kills the environment or kills the shared thing, and in digital world, we can do that because we have economics of abundancy versus economics of scarcity. That’s why open source will eventually win every market it’s in.
Matt runs Automattic, which is the company behind Wordpress. I’ve used Wordpress for years – one of the best software projects I’ve ever used.