I joined in for the James Altucher podcast in an episode that covered a lot of ground. One clarification was the point of the story about my Dad not making much at his old job was that companies should be thoughtful about compensation especially for the people who stay with them the longest, not that loyalty is a myth or something to be avoided. It just needs to be two-way.
I went back for a Round 2 answering follow-up questions from Tim’s readers on the Tim Ferriss podcast. About an hour long and covered a wide range of topics. One of these days I need to start podcasting more directly. In the meantime, please give it a listen! Already some great tweets and responses have started to come in.
I’m still catching up with things after the Automattic Grand Meetup, but excited today to be included on the Fortune 40 under 40 list, which I’ve graduated to after being termed out of the under 30 lists. I came in at #20 and it’s great to see lots of friends on the list as well.
If you speak Spanish, or know someone who does, check out this video and article that was on the El Pais homepage earlier today.
I was on VentureBeat’s podcast with Dylan Tweeney, talking a bit about how WordPress came to be and geeking out on some of the tech behind our approach.
There’s been some controversy and discussion about the fact that WordPress.com no longer support Bitcoin in our new checkout flow on signup. (It’s still there in some other flows.)
Since there has been a lot of discussion about it, I wanted to share directly some of the answers I had to Grace’s follow-up questions, since I’m not sure if they’ll be published and if they are it probably won’t be in their entirety.
In regards to your future plans for the currency, is bitcoin support definitely returning or is that just a possibility at this point?
We’re big fans of Bitcoin and hope to support it again in the future, for all of the reasons that we originally supported it in 2012, which you can read about here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/
Is there anything that will influence the outcome of this decision?
No, it is simply a matter of development resources, which are especially scarce for us right now as we’re trying to keep up with growth.
You mention that bitcoin has low volume compared to other payment methods, has this always been the case? Has its volume share changed over time?
The volume has been dropping since launch, in 2014 it was only used about twice a week, which is vanishingly small compared to other methods of payment we offer. We supported Bitcoin for philosophical reasons, not commercial ones.
What are the key aims of your checkout process changes?
Our goals are twofold: to refactor the code behind it which has parts that are over five years old and has grown very complex, and to make it faster and easier for people to buy our services.
When you first launched bitcoin payments WordPress’ blog post praised it as an inclusive payment method for those who cannot use PayPal. Do you worry that these people will now be excluded from the platform?
Of course, but either that number of people turned out to be smaller than we expected or they found other ways to pay. Since it’s so few people overall I’m happy to extend people’s subscription for a year, as I offered in your comments section.
What does being a ‘big believer’ in bitcoin mean to you?
I believe Bitcoin or some other blockchain-like system will be the basis of the majority of financial transactions in the future, from small remittances to multi-billion dollar corporate acquisitions. I think transaction costs should follow Moore’s law, and I don’t think we’re going to get there with the centralized gateways that currently account for the overwhelming majority of transactions. I also personally hold Bitcoin, I’m an advisor to Stellar.org, and my friends make fun of me for bringing up Bitcoin and the blockchain in unrelated conversations.
The bitcoin option still appears on the ‘WP Admin’ screen but not on ‘My Upgrades’. Is this part of the phase out, or likely to stay this way?
That’s on the old code base, and will be available for a short while if any current Bitcoin subscribers want to renew while the option is still available.
J. J. Colao, who covered Automattic for Forbes Magazine in 2012 and has a long history and experience with WordPress and Automattic, sat down with me for close to three hours in March and somehow managed to distill it down to just a few thousand words of interview. (“13,500 words down to 2,800.”) I’m sheepish to link it because there are a lot of “I” statements and some nuance lost in the distillation, but JJ asks great questions and we cover a lot of ground that anyone who follows Automattic or the WordPress ecosystem I think will find interesting. You can check it out here.
Brad Stone at BusinessWeek reports Automattic has acquired the great service Longreads, which you can also read about on our blog. See also: Techmeme.
I have a few quotes and thoughts in the WSJD article At Lavish SXSW Festival, Some Avoid Marketing Circus.
The chat I had the other week with Reid Hoffman is now online. Reid is such a thoughtful guy it’s my favorite interview in a while. We cover a lot of ground, including expanding WordPress’ (and Automattic’s) mission from “Democratize publishing” to “Democratize publishing and development.” Give it a watch!
I have a few engagements in the coming week in the San Francisco area and online:
I spoke for about half an hour with Cameron Moll on his Hired podcast about working at Automattic and how we approach recruiting and hiring.
I spoke with Sarah Millstein at the Lean Startup Conference earlier in the week. After a bit of intro we talk about how Automattic iterates, approaches hiring, and management.
Have you seen the famous Automattic / WordPress shuffleboard? That and more in this excellent profile and interview by Debra Winter in SOMA Magazine.
I spoke to Robin Hough at the Guardian about WordPress and Automattic’s mission to democratize publishing.
Rachael Chong has an article on Fast Company Co.exist that includes my thoughts on giving, charity, and impact in the world.
Business Insider has a fun article on Automattic’s Awesome Remote Work Culture. Includes some quotes from me about how we work, including “Rather than being anti-office, we’re more location agnostic” and the top five meetup locations so far (Lisbon, Portugal; Kauai; San Francisco; Amsterdam; Tybee Island, Georgia).
I was interviewed by Fast Company on How To Have A Virtual Meeting, which they turned into a neat article.
Was excited to be named to Forbes 30 Under 30 representing the Media category, alongside some interesting characters from Wiz Khalifa to Hugh Evans. They also did a fun photo shoot with Walter Smith, who also has a WordPress blog, and styled by Joseph De Acetis which you can see a bit of to the right. Check out the entire list to learn about some of the most interesting folks moving and shaking right now.
Last week in Paris I had a twenty minute chat with Om that covered WordPress, Automattic, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and the freedom of the web.