#100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, discusses distributed work, the five levels of autonomous organizations, decision-making, and integrating acquisitions. He emphasizes the power of open source and creating environments for human flourishing.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Open Source Philosophy and WordPress Origin Story
WordPress's Growth and Market Dominance
Commercializing Open Source and Automatic's Business Model
Automatic's Acquisition Strategy and Tumblr Turnaround
Influencing Culture and Environmental Impact on Performance
Distinction Between Remote and Distributed Work
The Five Levels of Distributed Autonomy
Challenges and Benefits of Distributed Work
Building Trust and Relationships in Distributed Teams
Asynchronous Decision Making with the P2 System
Preventing Overwork and Organizing Personal Time
Strategic Organizational Changes and Growth Investments
Hardest Phases of Growth and Costly Mistakes
Personal Growth, Coaching, and Communication
Principles of Effective Decision Making
Mental Models and Open Source as a Collaboration Hack
6 Key Concepts
Open Source Four Freedoms
A set of rights for software users: freedom to use for any purpose, see how it works, modify it, and distribute those changes. This framework allows software to evolve and improve collectively, often outcompeting proprietary alternatives.
20 to 1 Platform Ratio
An observed ratio in successful platforms where for every dollar the platform owner makes, $19 or $20 are made by the ecosystem built around it. This indicates a healthy platform that creates significant value for others, rather than monopolizing it.
Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose
A framework for motivating people, where mastery involves being challenged and improving skills, autonomy is the freedom to do work without micromanagement, and purpose is working for something bigger than oneself. These elements are crucial for driving world-changing performance.
Distributed Work (vs. Remote)
Distributed work describes an anti-fragile organization where each individual node is equally weighted and can fully contribute, rather than being 'remote' or isolated from a central hub. This terminology emphasizes equal contribution and resilience across the network.
Clear Writing Represents Clear Thinking
The belief that the clarity of one's written communication directly reflects the clarity of their underlying thought process. This is a key filter in hiring and a focus for internal communication, as it leads to better understanding and decision-making.
Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions
A mental model for decision-making, advocating for making reversible decisions quickly to learn and iterate, while approaching irreversible decisions (those with very high costs to undo, like executive hires or acquisitions) deliberately and with thorough consideration.
8 Questions Answered
WordPress's success is attributed to its open-source nature, fostering a community where people contribute out of passion, its adaptability for any purpose, and a philosophy that allowed it to outcompete better-funded, entrenched proprietary software by getting humanity to work together on a shared resource.
Open-source projects can be commercialized by making all the best features available in the free core software and then creating services around it. For example, Automatic offers services like Akismet (anti-spam) and WordPress.com (hosting) built on the open-source WordPress, allowing the ecosystem to thrive.
Automatic operates like a holding company, allowing acquired products like Tumblr to run largely autonomously while leveraging economies of scale from Automatic's culture, hiring, and technical platform. This involves cross-pollination of people and demonstrating the benefits of shared systems to bridge cultural and technical gaps.
While 'remote' implies being distant or isolated from a central hub, 'distributed' emphasizes an anti-fragile organization where every individual node is equally weighted and can fully contribute. The shift in terminology reflects a focus on equal contribution and resilience rather than isolation.
By embracing asynchronous communication, such as using internal blogging systems (like Automatic's P2) for discussions with time-boxed periods. This allows for thoughtful contributions, creates a permanent record of institutional knowledge, and can lead to higher quality decisions by allowing people to ruminate and bring their best thoughts.
By setting clear expectations for work and actively encouraging breaks and time off. Automatic, for example, tracks 'away from keyboard' (AFK) time to ensure employees take sufficient vacation, even if it's a staycation, recognizing that overwork is a common problem in distributed environments.
The phase from 20 to 50 people is often the hardest because it's when a company loses the ability to brute-force collaboration and needs to establish clear communication methods and effective onboarding for institutional knowledge. This period requires scaling quickly while avoiding the 'Groundhog Day' effect of repeating past discussions.
A key principle is to make reversible decisions quickly and irreversible ones deliberately. This encourages rapid iteration and learning for low-cost decisions, while ensuring thorough consideration and 'farming for dissent' for high-cost, difficult-to-undo choices like executive hires or major acquisitions.
24 Actionable Insights
1. Embrace Open Source Philosophy
Incorporate the open source philosophy into your life and work, understanding its four freedoms (use, see, modify, distribute). This approach fosters evolutionary dynamics and collective improvement, leading to long-term success by getting everyone working together on shared resources.
2. Prioritize Environment for Performance
Obsess over creating an optimal environment for your team and community, considering factors like mastery, autonomy, and purpose. A positive environment, where individuals are challenged, have freedom, and work for something bigger, unleashes contribution and drives world-changing performance.
3. Cultivate Distributed Organization
Shift from ‘remote’ to ‘distributed’ to foster an anti-fragile network where every team member has an equal ability to contribute, regardless of location. This mindset promotes resilience and equal contribution among all nodes.
4. Embrace Asynchronous Communication
Design your organization for asynchronous communication to unlock global talent, ultimate flexibility, and richer interactions. Use internal blogging systems (like P2) for discussions, allowing people to contribute their best thoughts at their own pace, thereby building institutional knowledge and improving decision quality.
5. Decide Reversible Quickly, Irreversible Deliberately
Distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions. Make reversible decisions quickly to learn through action, prioritizing prototypes and usage. Approach irreversible decisions (e.g., major hires, acquisitions, investor partnerships) with thorough deliberation due to their high cost of unwinding.
6. Farm for Dissent
For significant decisions, actively seek out and gather contrarian or challenging ideas. This practice ensures decisions are rigorously defended, deeply informed, and less prone to groupthink, even if it means challenging experts.
7. Invest in Intentional Relationships
In distributed settings, actively invest time and effort into building strong relationships with colleagues. Engage in activities beyond work-related tasks (e.g., games, shared discussions, virtual social events) to foster trust and connection, especially when physical interaction is limited.
8. Set Clear Expectations
Establish clear expectations for individual and team output to prevent unproductive busyness and overwork. This clarity acts as a filter, ensuring focus on important tasks and providing accountability.
9. Encourage and Track Time Off
Actively encourage and track vacation or ‘away from keyboard’ time for employees. Distributed work often leads to overwork, and ensuring regular breaks is crucial for high performance, well-being, and preventing burnout.
10. Foster Clear Written Communication
Cultivate an organizational culture that values clear written communication, recognizing it as a proxy for clear thinking. Filter for this skill in hiring and provide resources (e.g., books like ‘On Writing Well’) to help people become better written communicators.
11. Use Shared Docs for Meetings
Implement the practice of using shared Google Docs for real-time note-taking during meetings. This creates a transparent, live record, helps reconcile differing understandings, and serves as a powerful tool for effective meetings.
12. Reduce Meeting Frequency
Strive to significantly reduce the number of recurring meetings in your organization. This frees up calendars, increases the velocity at which problems can be solved, and allows for more opportunistic, immediate meetings when truly necessary.
13. Provide TLDRs and Summaries
For lengthy internal communications (e.g., P2 posts), include a ‘TLDR’ (Too Long; Didn’t Read) summary at the top and a final summary comment at the end. This improves efficiency by allowing quick comprehension while still providing depth for those who need it.
14. Edit Your Writing Diligently
Embrace the editing process for all written communication, recognizing that first drafts are rarely the best. This practice improves clarity and quality, encouraging more effective communication throughout the organization.
15. Address Disconnection Directly
If you or a colleague feel disconnected in a distributed environment, initiate an open conversation about it. Collaboratively brainstorm and try different approaches to strengthen relationships and foster a sense of shared purpose.
16. Practice Somatic Awareness
Develop the habit of listening to your body and identifying where feelings manifest physically (e.g., pit of stomach, tense shoulders). This somatic awareness helps process emotions, prevents them from causing internal disharmony, and can provide non-verbalizable wisdom for better decisions and relationships.
17. Use Empowering Language
Be mindful of your language to empower others. Instead of offering to ‘help,’ ask ‘What do you need for this to be a success?’ to shift agency and responsibility to the individual.
18. Collaborate with Competitors
Actively seek opportunities to collaborate with competitors or parallel projects. By working together, you can create something greater than individual efforts, as seen in WordPress’s success by merging with other software branches.
19. Aim for Small Ecosystem Share
Design your business model to capture only a small percentage (e.g., 5%) of the total value created in your ecosystem. This approach fosters a thriving ecosystem and ensures long-term sustainability by not monopolizing value.
20. Invest in Long-Term Infrastructure
Prioritize and make significant long-term infrastructure investments, even if immediate returns aren’t apparent. This foundational work is crucial for future growth, scalability, and adapting to evolving needs.
21. Overcome Conflict Avoidance
As a leader, directly address interpersonal conflicts rather than avoiding them. Early conflict avoidance can lead to significant organizational dysfunction and hinder growth.
22. Challenge Limiting Beliefs
Regularly interrogate and challenge your own limiting beliefs (e.g., equating ‘big’ with ‘bad’ in organizational growth). Questioning these assumptions can unlock new strategies and lead to a more effective and thriving organization.
23. Minimize Internal Email
Drastically reduce or eliminate the use of internal email for most communications within the company. Utilize internal blogging systems or other collaborative platforms for discussions and information sharing.
24. Practice Belly Breathing
Incorporate belly breathing into your routine. This simple physical technique can instantly calm your nervous system and improve your overall state.
7 Key Quotes
I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end.
Matt Mullenweg
I love turnarounds. So I don't know if we can only do one every couple of years. But to me, it's incredibly, incredibly fun to take something which the market has sort of undervalued, sort of an unset gem, and really polish it up.
Matt Mullenweg
Words create reality, and we obsess a lot over what words we use to describe things.
Matt Mullenweg
Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.
Hafiz (quoted by Matt Mullenweg)
If it's a reversible decision, you know, we'll probably learn a lot more by doing it.
Matt Mullenweg
The oxygen of usage is required for any idea to survive.
Matt Mullenweg
You need to know the rules to break them.
Matt Mullenweg
3 Protocols
Five Levels of Distributed Autonomy
Matt Mullenweg- Level 0: Cannot be done distributed - Jobs that absolutely require physical presence (though many previously thought to be Level 0 were proven otherwise during the pandemic).
- Level 1: Getting by - Can work remotely for a short time (e.g., a day for an emergency) but the environment isn't suited for it, lacking access to full tools or resources.
- Level 2: Recreating the office online - Attempting to replicate office routines (e.g., long meetings) online, often leading to exhaustion and inefficient practices like monitoring software.
- Level 3: Embracing online benefits (synchronous) - Utilizing tools like shared Google Docs for real-time note-taking in meetings to create a shared record and reconcile differences, leading to fewer and more effective meetings.
- Level 4: Asynchronous organization - Designing the organization so people can contribute fully regardless of time zone or work hours, unlocking global talent, ultimate flexibility, and richer contributions from introverts through thoughtful, written communication (e.g., internal blogging).
- Level 5: Nirvana (Outperforming in-person) - The aspirational state where the distributed organization outperforms any in-person organization in productivity, quality, and happiness by fully embracing asynchronous power and allowing employees to design their work-life integration.
Asynchronous Decision Making (P2 System)
Matt Mullenweg- Create a thread on an internal blogging system (like P2) for the decision to be made.
- Clearly state the decision needed and set a timebox for discussion (e.g., 36 hours).
- Participants discuss by writing 'mini-essays' in their own time, embedding videos, GIFs, mock-ups, and linking to research.
- At the end of the time period, synthesize the best wisdom, knowledge, and information from the discussion to make a decision.
- A leader or designated person summarizes the entire thread, including the outcome, to add to the organization's institutional knowledge.
Organizing Matt Mullenweg's Day
Matt Mullenweg- Spend approximately one-third of time on people (hiring, internal HR, creating a thriving environment).
- Spend approximately one-third of time on product (working closely with leaders and engineers to ensure an excellent product experience).
- Reserve the final third of time for whatever is the emergency or most pressing issue of the week.