Automattic announced another round of funding today, a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures, giving the company a $3 billion valuation post-funding. The last time Automattic raised money was $160 million in a Series C round in 2014. Since that time the company has grown to more than 950 employees and made strategic…
Automattic has acquired Zero BS CRM, a free plugin with more than 30 commercial extensions that provide deeper integrations with third-party services. Zero BS was co-founded by a two-person team that includes Mike Stott and Woody Hayday. The team marketed the plugin as a “no-nonsense CRM” and have been operating it with a successful subscription-based…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss Joost de Valk’s decision to step down as WordPress’ Marketing Lead. I shared my recent encounter with food poisoning and some of the lifestyle changes I’m making to improve my health. We also talk about a new experimental plugin by Automattic that aims to provide full…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss Panethon’s acquisition of StagingPilot and why regression visual testing will likely become a standard feature across managed WordPress hosts if it’s not already. I rant about the size of text on so many sites being too large and having to shrink the site down to 80-90%…
Automattic has released Happy Schedule, the first in a new line of products called “Happy Tools,” created to solve problems for distributed teams. The products have grown out of internal tools that Automattic uses with its distributed team of more than 850 employees in 68 countries. Most employee scheduling tools are designed for more traditional…
Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web: As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, lots of honking traffic, people…
WordPress.com is kicking off 2019 with a new national marketing campaign that features 14 entrepreneurs, writers, and non-profit organizations who are using the platform to make a big difference for their communities. The campaign is focused around the question: “What Would You Do If You Could Do Anything?” WordPress.com published its inaugural ‘Anything Is Possible’…
If your site is hosted on WordPress.com and you are trying out the new Gutenberg editor, there are currently 24 themes with full Gutenberg support available and more on the way. In response to questions about how to find Gutenberg themes on WordPress.com, Automattic’s Theme Team has given an update about the status of the…
Polldaddy was founded in 2006 by David Lenehan in Sligo, Ireland and was acquired by Automattic in 2008. Polldaddy is a platform agnostic service providing users with the ability to create polls and surveys. Today, 12 years later, Automattic is retiring the Polldaddy name and replacing it with Crowdsignal. Outside of some minor color changes, and…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss what’s new in the world of WordPress. First, we talk about Syed Balkhi’s growth accelerator fund and learn that Jacoby pitched a similar idea to Balkhi at WordCamp Miami 2017. We discuss the new feedback surrounding Gutenberg thanks to the call out in WordPress 4.9.8. Near…
In this episode, John James Jacoby recaps his trip to WordCamp Grand Rapids and shares his experience. WordCamp Grand Rapids had a strong focus on tools, plugins, and themes and by all accounts, was a successful event. We discussed Matt Mullenweg’s Summertime update, the roadmap for merging Gutenberg into core, and what comes after Gutenberg.…
In this episode, I’m joined by Alberto Medina, Developer Advocate working with the Web Content Ecosystems Team at Google, and Weston Ruter, CTO of XWP. We have a candid conversation about Google’s AMP Project. We start by learning why the project was created, what its main goal is, and the technology behind it. We also dive into…
In this episode, John James Jacoby joins me live from Hutchinson, KS, to talk about the news of the week. We started off the show discussing the GDPR and the number of things that need to be considered surrounding the right to be forgotten. We also have a lengthy conversation about AMP, the open web,…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of the WordPress project and CEO of Automattic. We discussed a wide range of topics including, his role on the board of directors at GitLab, Telemetry or data-usage gathering in WordPress, and the WordPress Growth Council. We learned what’s happening with…
Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project is two years old today and the company published data demonstrating its growing adoption across the web. More than 4 billion AMP pages have been published by 25 million domains. AMP performance has also increased and Google reports that the median time for loading AMP pages from its search…