
June 6, 2019
Matt Mullenweg: Operating System for the Open Web – North Star Podcast
Check out the North Star Podcast Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- Communication via the internet will accelerate the progress of the human species
- You want to own the direct relationship with your customers
- For this reason, creating a website with WordPress for your business > creating a Facebook page
- “The written word is such a powerful magnet for people, ideas, and opportunities” – David
- “Writing is not the most important thing, thinking is. But writing is probably the best way to improve your thinking.”
- “With great thinking, you can have great actions”
- Good creatives don’t wait for inspiration to strike
- They carve out time every day to work on their craft
- Writing advice:
- Imagine that you’re writing for just ONE particular person
- Think more long-term
- “If the default is that we all think of what’s going on right now – what’s in the moment, what’s in the news, etc. – the most interesting things are going to be created by people who do the opposite”
- Matt uses WeCroak
- It’s an app that sends you periodic quotes/notifications about death, helping users remember their own mortality
Books Mentioned
- Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb
Intro
- Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) is the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic
- He hosts the brand new Distributed Podcast
- Check out his blog
Matt’s Mission to Democratize the Web and Publishing
- How do you measure this? – The percentage of the web that runs on open source code
- “WordPress is just the a means to an end of getting more of the web on open source”
- Why is this important?
- “The web is the most important way for us to increase our rate of evolution as a species” – via communication
- The capitalist tendencies of platforms will tend towards things that look more like Facebook than the web of the 90s/2000s which created an explosion of ideas, connection, and companies
- What about the shift towards mobile?
- Background:
- Android is ~half open source
- iOS is quite closed (not open source)
- “The shift towards mobile has created far more web time than anything else”
- All the podcasts you listen to are built on RSS feeds and open mp3s
- Background:
Let’s Define “The Web”
- “Fundamentally, it’s about communication” – not just about information
- Money and transactions are a form of communication
- And ultimately – communication will accelerate the progress of the human species
How has Matt thought about making WordPress easier for people to use?
- “There’s ‘easy to use’ and ‘easy to learn.’ I think the latter is actually more important.”
- With WordPress – Matt has tried to make something powerful + intuitive
- When creators try to make something “easy to use” – they might dumb down the interface/allow users to do less
- But ultimately this is limiting to the user’s agency and freedom
- Matt acknowledges that at first, WordPress may not seem that “easy to use”
- But with a brief understanding of a few steps/mental models/why it works the way it does – people love it
How does Matt see “scale” differently than the average person?
- He likes to think it terms of numbers:
- There’s 8 billion people in the world
- 3 billion of them are online
- And 1.5 billion of them have devices that “do more advanced things and have a better connection”
- To add – There’s probably <100 million websites that really matter
Own Your Relationships
- In general, you want to own the direct relationship with your customers
- Many small business owners get seduced into making something like a Facebook page (rather than their own website) for their business
- “You need to create something unique for yourself, a direct path to your ocean of customers”
- If that relationship is mediated at all, you want it to be mediated by folks who are aligned with your model of success
- If Facebook’s model (or any advertising driven business) is selling your customers to other people who want to buy them (through advertising) – that’s a misalignment
- Compare this to creating a website with WordPress – you own the direct relationship
- If that relationship is mediated at all, you want it to be mediated by folks who are aligned with your model of success
The Power of Writing
- “The written word is such a powerful magnet for people, ideas, and opportunities” – David
- Matt has hired many people based on their writing ability (found through their online writing/personal blogs)
- Like Ben Thompson, the creator of Stratechery – although he soon left in order to work on Stratechery full-time
- Matt will frequently DM people on Twitter to make the connection if he enjoys someone’s writing
- “Writing is not the most important thing, thinking is. But writing is probably the best way to improve your thinking.”
- “With great thinking, you can have great actions”
- “Clear writing begets clear thinking”
Building Your Personal Monopoly
- David’s advice – develop a personal area of expertise and write like hell about it
- If you’re lucky, and you do it well, you’ll become a world expert on the subject
- What should your personal site look like?
- It depends on your goal – reverse engineer it from there
- If you’re creating a personal website in that hopes that someone like Matt will each out to you with a job offer, here’s what he looks for:
- Taste
- This has to do with the design aspect of the site – Is the site readable? Do the links work? Etc.
- “The spaces we create demonstrate the care and input we put into things”
- Work ethic
- Curiosity
- Is the person curious? What are they writing about?
- Ethics (which you can’t really pick up from someone’s personal website)
- Taste
- What else does Matt look for in a good personal website?
- The rate of improvement – he’ll frequently look back on someone’s archive of posts
What a Time
- A well written blog post can go viral more easily than ever before
- We have resources at our disposal unimaginable 30 years ago
- It’s now easier than ever to publish a book or podcast
Why write online?
- Matt started blogging a few year’s before creating WordPress
- “The acceleration of evolution… we don’t evolve anymore in generations that live and die through genetic mutations, we evolve through through communication and ideas spreading.”
- David adds:
- “The reason why I’m so passionate about getting people to write is because so much information is siloed online or locked into people’s heads”
On Good Content
- Matt likes to think about the ratio of how long it took the author to create a piece of content vs. how long it takes to consume it
- Fooled By Randomness took Nassim Taleb nearly his whole life to write, yet someone can read it in 6-8 hours
- “Expose yourself to more of the high protein, filling content that people really put a lot of work into”
Advice on Creativity and Writing
- Matt says that every good creative he knows doesn’t wait for inspiration to strike
- They carve out time every day to work on their craft
- “Everyone I know makes a habit of it”
- Allow yourself the time, space, and curiosity to go down the rabbit hole
- Then go and create some art out of it
- EVERYONE has doubt
- And when this doubt seeks in – imagine that you’re writing for just ONE person
- Often Matt finds a good conversation with a friend will help him get out of his dead
- Advice from David:
- When you’re having a conversation about a topic and get that “huh, that’s interesting”/surprised look – go write about it!
- First make it a tweet
- Then make it an email to your audience
- Then dive deep via a blog post
- And then – make it a book (if you get this far)
- When you’re having a conversation about a topic and get that “huh, that’s interesting”/surprised look – go write about it!
- “All great things from collaboration”
- Whether it’s a song, a blog post, a book, whatever it is – with everything you do think about how you can work with more people on it
- “Things get better when you work together well”
The Power of Iteration
- “Anything you really enjoy in the world has gone through countless iterations”
- Much of creating good work is about tightening this feedback loop
Blog Comments
- This is an area Matt would love to work on more from a software point of view
- “Blog comments are a mediated conversation space”
- A piece of advice – Make sure you reply to comments on your site (even send people who comment an email, letting them know you replied)
- This rewards a behavior you’d ideally want to see more of
- A piece of advice – Make sure you reply to comments on your site (even send people who comment an email, letting them know you replied)
- “If you do it right, your comments section becomes so much better than the blog post itself”
- Matt gives the example of Fred Wilson’s blog AVC
Think For the Long-Term
- “Most of the problems in the world come from ‘short-termism'”
- “If you can expand your thinking to be over a long enough time frame, it’s such an amazing filter”
- “If the default is that we all think of what’s going on right now – what’s in the moment, what’s in the news, etc. – the most interesting things are going to be created by people who do the opposite”
- Look for ways in daily life where you can remind yourself (and others) to better focus on the long-term
- Matt is a fan of the app WeCroak – 5x a day it sends you a quote/notification about death, helping users remember their own mortality
Why have a personal website? Why not just write on Facebook or Medium?
- Think of it as your online home
- On all those other site, you’re what Matt terms a “digital sharecropper”
- “You’re allowed to farm the land, but ultimately the fruits of your labor belong to someone else, and their interests are not necessarily aligned with yours”
- On all those other site, you’re what Matt terms a “digital sharecropper”
- Another point:
- It’s hard to remember the specific author of specific Medium posts
- Your personal website make YOU unique and allows YOU to stand out from the crowd
- “There’s a lot competing for people’s attention, so make your hook”
Additional Notes
- Both Matt and David are huge fans of Stratechery
- Check out Matt’s interview with Kara Swisher where he talks about why every tech company should have an editorial team
- Matt took part in Rolf Pott’s Paris Writing Workshop a few years back which he highly recommends
- Automattic recently purchased Longreads