The head of the WordPress project on the WP Engine lawsuit, Automattic turning 20, and what’s next for the web.
by Nilay Patel – Read this article in its entirety HERE on The Verge’s website
Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and a whole host of other products like the new cross-platform messaging service Beeper.
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This is Matt’s third time on Decoder; back in 2022, we had him on twice, first to talk about Automattic and WordPress broadly and then to talk about Tumblr and the future of social networking. He’s back now because Automattic just turned 20, and I really wanted to talk about how the next 20 years of running one of the most dominant platforms on the web might look as changes to search and AI threaten to change everything else, and various lawsuits threaten to change the nature of WordPress itself.
Make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not the most dominant. Something like 43 percent of websites run on WordPress, in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge — the backend of our website is hosted by WordPress VIP. So this might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, we’re Matt’s customer, and like any good customer, I made feature requests.
A big reason for that is WordPress is open-source, and like so many open-source projects, WordPress has a very complex structure. There’s the nonprofit WordPress Foundation that owns the WordPress trademark. There’s WordPress.org, from which the open-source project is managed by Matt himself. Then there’s Automattic, which is the for-profit company that offers its own site hosting and enterprise services on top of the core WordPress technology, and which contributes an enormous amount of code back to the open-source WordPress project.
Understanding that structure is really important because there has been a lot of drama in the world of WordPress recently. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine that competes with Automattic. Matt felt WP Engine wasn’t operating in the spirit of open-source by contributing very little back to the WordPress code base.
So Matt threatened the company with legal action and revoked its access to core WordPress technologies. Many people felt this was incredibly out of bounds for Matt and a violation of his position as a central steward of the WordPress project, and there has been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.
It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. WP Engine responded with a lawsuit, and Automattic was forced to reverse some of its retaliatory efforts against the company. But the legal battle is far from resolved. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down.
Matt and I talked about the future of the web, too, and how he’s thinking about the changes we’re seeing to search and website sustainability as the generative AI boom continues to upend how people use the internet. Matt is notably a lot more optimistic about this than many of the website owners we hear from regularly here at The Verge, and he’s not convinced AI is going to wreck the web.
We also talked about Beeper, the cross-platform messaging service that Automattic acquired last year. Beeper got into some hot water with Apple when it tried and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android. But Matt is really excited about Beeper’s core product. Automattic has acquired a couple other startups and effectively combined them all to try and supercharge Beeper’s growth in the coming months and years.
There’s a lot in this conversation, and Matt is as candid and sincere as ever. I think you’re going to like it.
Okay: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Matt Mullenweg, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, and many other things. Welcome back to Decoder.
Thank you so much. The world has changed. So much has been going on since I was last on. It’s great to catch up.
I feel like we had you on twice in one year, and that was three years ago, then many things happened, and I’ve been dying to talk to you about updates to the stuff we talked about the last time you were on. And then a bunch of new things, including some very dramatic new things, have occurred since last time.
We have some cool acquisitions and launches coming up. So yeah, a lot to cover.
Let’s start there. People are obviously familiar with WordPress. I imagine people are familiar with Tumblr, which is another thing that you were technically the CEO of, I believe. But since then, you’ve acquired other companies. You’ve acquired companies like Beeper and some others. What do you think of as Automattic today? What’s the thesis of the company?
I know you love talking about org charts and organizational structures, so it’s interesting. The WordPress side of the business we call “Ecosystem,” right? It’s like gardening. There’s a vast number of players, and that’s really kind of what we’re best known for. I’ve been doing WordPress now for 22 years. I started when I was 19, and that’s WordPress.com, it’s WordPress VIP, which we’re very proud to have Vox as a customer.
Oh, wait, I need to disclose this. This is the first-ever reverse disclosure, I think, on The Verge or Decoder. Usually, I disclose when there’s a business relationship, but in this case, we are your client.
[Laughs] Yep, so thank you. We’re honored.The Verge runs on WordPress, so the conflict is the other way. You’ve got to keep me as a customer.
Well, I’ll do my best on this. And no, that’s actually the thrill of it too, is seeing publications you follow and things like that use the software, it’s very rewarding. Now, the other side of Automattic we call Cosmos, and that’s the apps, and that’s been a very exciting place to work in the past few years.
Now, you mentioned Beeper, which is actually doing its big public launch this July in New York, so I hope to get you there. We did two acquisitions, Texts and Beeper. We combined them, and we’re very excited. I was actually just with that team a little bit earlier today. The other one [we added] just last week was Clay. So, if you aren’t familiar, Clay is a personal CRM. One of the top requests we heard from Beeper users is like, “Okay, I’ve got all my messaging apps…”
Actually, I should probably say what Beeper is. You have probably more than one messaging platform you use regularly, right?
Yeah.
So the cool thing about Beeper is that it can bring them all in one. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, all of that. The other cool thing it does is that it can use multiple accounts of those. So you can have multiple Signal accounts and multiple WhatsApp accounts, all in one device, and you can offer it on your desktop, mobile, everything, and it does it all securely. That’s the new stuff. We figured out how to make this all run locally on your device, and so it’s just as secure as using one of these native apps.
But what we heard is people say, “Well, now I’ve got too much stuff going on. Who’s important? What should I do?” That’s where Clay’s CRM comes in. CRM stands for customer relationship management, so usually apps like Salesforce. But this is a personal one that’s pretty slick.
When you say “personal CRM,” what’s interesting is that the throughline for a lot of what you are doing is that small businesses, businesses of all kinds, use WordPress. They’re on the web, and a lot of what the web is used for lately is a small business storefront, or a business storefront, or some commercial enterprise. Things like a CRM, a text messaging platform, all of that stuff — it connects very deeply to just e-commerce in general.
But you’re talking about a personal CRM. What’s the split for you between WordPress as an enterprise e-commerce company and WordPress as a purveyor of consumer products?
I say we’re very lucky to be part of the generation that was… they called it “the consumerization of IT.” It was led by folks like Slack who came in and said, “Hey, we’re just going to make a great user experience and it’s going to be quirky, it’s going to be fun, it’s not going to be boring, it’s going to be colorful and we’re going to build the business features. So it scales and it does that sort of stuff, but we’re going to start from that great user experience.”
There’s some enterprise software historically that didn’t start there. If you’re on an old SAP install or something like that, no one’s waking up being like, “Yeah, I got to get in there.”
Slack, notably now owned by Salesforce, which is fascinating. That’s the two sides of that equation coming together.
Well, I think these companies, including Salesforce, have been doing a lot to reinvest in their interfaces and everything else. So with Clay — and the URL’s clay.earth; unfortunately, there’s another big company called Clay that does more enterprise stuff — so if you go to clay.earth, it’ll be the personal one.
So what makes it personal versus enterprise? We start from things on your computer, like your address book. We hook in social networks, so you can put in all your social networks. We’ll kind of de-dupe it. We emphasize things like birthdays. It brings in your calendar, iMessage, and WhatsApp messages right now. That’s kind of what Clay was doing before, and what we’re going to be building now is that it’ll just plug into Beeper, and then whatever you have plugged into Beeper, however many networks, whatever you’re doing there, it’ll bring all those messages in.
Then it can start to, for example, do fun stuff like sorting your contacts by how close your relationship is, which can do clever things. Like, not just look at how often you contact them, but who’s sending more messages, which way, and is it weekdays or weekends? There’s a lot you can kind of infer once you have communication, and we’re very excited to see where that goes.
I would understand if you were saying this was an enterprise product. I would completely understand why you’ve invested in Beeper and Texts, and why you’ve invested in something like Clay, right? You’re starting a website, you’re going to do some e-commerce, you need an outbound messaging platform, and you need a customer relationship management tool. You want to know who your best customers are. This is all just value-adds to the commerce platform.
What’s the revenue model for these as consumer products? Are you going to charge for them?
Yeah, so we’ll definitely cross-promote this stuff. But what you just said — who are your best customers, that sort of reporting — that’s just all built into WooCommerce and WordPress, so you don’t need to go between apps.
As for the revenue models we’re imagining… Clay already has a Clay for Teams, so your entire team can share contacts, share updates, and you can use it in a team-like fashion. And they’ve got a pricing model there, and they were making revenue. So it was nice to acquire a company that already had a revenue model.
With Beeper, we’re still figuring it out. But what I suspect is there’ll be two things. It’ll be free up to a certain number of accounts, and if you’re a super power user and you want to connect more, there could be a monthly charge. And then the other thing is that there might be certain connections that are always paid. So let’s say you want to connect to a Bloomberg terminal chat, we’re probably going to charge you for that because you’re more of a business user.
Also, a lot of the messaging platforms support business features now, like WhatsApp for business. There’s even iMessage for business. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this?
Yeah.
But famously, iMessage, which previously was like, “No APIs, we’re going to crush Beeper,” in a previous iteration, now has a whole integration system for it. So as we support more and more of these bridges to different networks, I think there are a lot of opportunities there.
Is the Beeper architecture still running an instance of viewer messaging apps in the cloud on your behalf and relaying them to you, or are you more integrated now?
There are still two cloud bridges, but part of what we’re relaunching is that we’ve re-architected the whole thing with the Texts technology, so it all goes local now.
So iMessage is coming locally to your phone through Beeper?
iMessage is the one that we do not support on mobile. It is supported on desktop, just like TextIt, in this sort of way that Apple said or indicated it was okay with. But yeah, we’re not going to fight that fight again. We’re way, way, way away from it. Not touching that with a 100-foot pole.
Is the goal here that these apps should be revenue-generating consumer products? Or are they good additions to the enterprise stack that also might have consumer elements?
I’m thinking of it 100 percent as creating something consumer-first, actually, that then has paths if you’re a power user to do more team-like collaborative or business-like things on it. But first and foremost, I want to get Beeper to 100 million users. I feel that’s actually sort of the first product from Automattic that has the potential to actually be really, really large because its usage is kind of a superset of every messaging network, and the power users are the most frequent users on each of those.
Right now, it’s relatively small. No one feels that threatened. If you get to 100 million users and the primary interface for WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage is actually Beeper, those apps will feel threatened. There’s nothing keeping those companies from saying, “You’ve taken our customer away, we’re shutting you down.” Have you had those conversations yet?
Well, I think the difference is that we’re not trying to take the customer away. We’re trying to give them an interface where they can use the network even more, connect with more people, and use the business features. If they have any way to monetize, we’re just going to link to it. We’re not trying to avoid that. So we want to support each of these networks, which by the way, we’re investing huge amounts to run everything, so we’re trying to be complementary.
Because they want to be the app on your phone through which you do many, many other things. If the app on the phone is Beeper…
The model that we see people use Beeper is that they don’t get rid of the native app. They keep it. Because it’s always going to be something there, like a functionality or something, that you’re going to want the app for. And Beeper is more for managing lots of messages, getting the local LLMs, giving you intelligence across networks, things that are power user features. But I think there are a lot of power users.
So, a strange thing that is happening with Beeper now is that France is the number one country, and it started to go viral in certain ways, and some of that is people wanting to be able to check their messages without getting too distracted. They call it “Friends without Feeds,” but they still go back to the feeds, don’t worry. They’re doing just fine. It’s just sometimes, if you’re in a meeting or something, you just want to take a quick look, that sort of distraction-free mode is really nice.
That’s really interesting. One of the reasons that I’m pushing on this is that as we’re speaking, I think you’re days away from Automattic turning 20 years old as a company. Automattic, WordPress, and these other apps are all part of the fabric of the web. Broadly speaking, about 43 percent of the web runs on WordPress.
Some of these fights that Beepers has had in the past are like how do we build open architectures out of services that are fundamentally closed, use web technologies to pass that stuff to people, and what kind of fights will we have there. There’s the open source fight and WordPress that I want to talk about in depth.
But it feels like here at 20 years old, the web is changing in meaningful ways. And the web as an enterprise platform might be headed toward ever higher heights, and as a consumer media platform might be headed toward ever lower lows. I’m wondering, as you think about these investments, these tools, and the apps versus the ecosystem, whether you feel that tension playing out?
No. So I’m actually going to ask you to expand a little on what you see as these lower lows, because it feels like as we get more compute at the edge, as the devices become more powerful, broadband becomes ever more ubiquitous — you can’t escape it anywhere now with Starlink — that there’s a bit of a sort of swinging back towards these apps and user-centric things. Even the regulatory environment is very friendly.
And that’s what I would pull it apart. As an application platform, the web is, I think, at its peak and maybe with higher highs to come. Web apps are the most interesting they’ve ever been. Every powerful AI application is mostly expressed as a web app, especially on desktop. Google is literally demonstrating Veo 3 as a web app. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is like, “I’m drawing people to the desktop web to use these applications in Chrome on the web.”
Figma exists, right? It’s one of the most powerful design tools, and it’s a web app. As an application platform, the web is at its highest it’s ever been. Some of the regulatory changes, the Fortnite lawsuit, as a transaction platform, the web is going to hit higher highs because we’re going to see more transactions pushed to the web. That’s something else I want to talk to you about.
I’m saying, as a media platform, as a document viewer, the question I’ve been asking every CEO is, “Why would I start a website today?” I would start a TikTok channel. I would start a YouTube channel. That’s how you reach consumers with media. The web as a media platform seems to be at its most perilous moment, and that’s really the split I’m talking about. Applications, transactions, and the web are very clearly at a peak with potentially higher highs to come. As a media platform, media companies are going out of business on the web basically every day.
There’s a lot in there, right? Because you kind of hit the creator thing. We hit social networks. I’ll start with your question: why, if I’m popular on TikTok, would I start a website? Well, one, so you’re not a one-hit wonder, and I think we’ve seen even some of the biggest creators on a certain platform will often have trouble getting as popular on another one.
So you need to develop a direct relationship with your audience because as long as your audience is fully mediated by this thing you don’t control — YouTube, TikTok, Reels, whatever it is — you’ll have a run. But these things change generationally sometimes. People move from one to the other. The business models change, and what they emphasize changes. If you’re a creator who was just all-in on Facebook 10 years ago because you thought nothing would ever replace Facebook, you might be facing some of the same things that these media companies are facing that haven’t adapted and really embraced their users.
I think that the media thing is also kind of complex because we had a real degradation of the user experience and sort of the speed of sites, the way advertising would work, and slow down your browser, and everything. Present company excluded, but for some other media sites, you’d load them, and it’s almost like they’re having trouble. It’s hard to read the article because it keeps moving around as the ads load, and so I felt like that was a death spiral for some of these sites that might’ve over-monetized.
I’m going to go all the way now to the local stuff-
Actually, can I just push on over-monetized for one second?
Yeah.
Over-monetized. You can read that in several ways. I think what you mean is they put too much shit on the page and then the user experience was degraded, and nobody ever wants to go to a local news site again.
The other way to read it is that they had no distribution except for Google or maybe Twitter, and every page view was so scarce that they needed to eke out every single penny they possibly could because that visitor was never coming back. And that’s the distribution that’s going away. That’s why I’m saying that as a media platform, the web is at a low because all of the audience is on somebody else’s distribution, which are by and large closed platforms.
I think there’s also an aspect that you’re competing to be the best in the world, as audiences become more discerning, as there’s sort of this global competition to raise the discourse and have the best analysis. I mean, in some places we see single-person newsletters killing it, as well as media organizations and everything like that, but many others have struggled.
That’s why I was going to say the local media, because it’s a great example of where we historically had thousands of local newspapers in the U.S., as a geographic monopoly type of thing, and many of them have gone. But I’m going to go back to the ecosystem side of Automattic.
One of our most exciting mini-companies inside is called Newspack. It’s led by Kinsey Wilson, who used to be chief of digital at The New York Times. He’s sort of taken everything he learned there and is bringing that to these small newspapers with this product called Newspack, which you can think of as distribution for WordPress. So, it’s WordPress plus hosting, plus a bundle of plugins that enable all the things that these small-town papers need, like classifieds and all that sort of stuff. The fun thing about it is they’re learning from all of them and sharing the business best practices. So, porous paywalls, or I mentioned classifieds already, but people really love local news. It’s just that it couldn’t support some of the old business models.
Now, the sad thing is some publications that switch to Newspack actually save hundreds of thousands of dollars. There were some of these legacy software companies that were just charging way too much. It has a whole print component and everything like that, so you can still print it out and distribute it at the local coffee shop and everything. But I’m far more excited about actually growing their revenue through new things that are allowed, like paid newsletters or sports scores. All those sorts of things that, when you go ultra local, you can support three, five, or 10 journalists to cover a small area, which I think is important for democracy.
How are you thinking about the distribution of that? If I were to compare you to, I don’t know, Ghost or Beehiiv or Substack? Fundamentally, what Substack is selling to a large number of its top newsletter authors is growing its audience, right? If you’re Heather Cox Richardson, you’re the most popular Substacker out there. It is crazy that she is paying 10 percent of her revenue to send emails, right? Mathematically, she could get a better deal to send emails than what Substack is offering her based on that cut.
But I think what Substack would say, and what I’ve heard the company say to others, is, “We will generate new subscribers. Our network will provide distribution. That will get you new customers. This is a cheaper way to get new customers than if you move to some other standard email service, and you have to do your own marketing, your own customer acquisition.” That’s the distribution puzzle that they’re solving that appears to be worth it for some people.
As Google goes away and other platforms stop linking, how are you thinking about solving that problem for the Newspack customer? Are you going to move people around an ecosystem? Are you going to build other forms of distribution?
You said it like it was a set thing that Google’s going away and no one’s going to link to websites anymore. I think what we’re seeing aggregate across everything is that there is a lot more traffic being driven by the OpenAIs and the Perplexitys of the world. This also feels like the early days of that.
I don’t know. Maybe if LLMs never hallucinate again, people will stop visiting links, but for now, I actually find myself sometimes clicking on…
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