Meeting with WordPress Founder

Our first visit in San Francisco was a meeting with Matt Mullenweb (pictured above), founder of WordPress and Automattic. WordPress is a small sized IT software company. They developed a blogging software used by thousands of people in the world. Matt is only 23 year old and he never completed his undergraduate degree. His background is in Political Science and Philosophy. He is one of the two executives at WordPress.

WordPress now have 23 full time employees from all around the world and they all work from home! Their headquarters are located in San Francisco, CA because it is where most of the Information Technology companies are located and they wanted to be close by to that area. Where a company is located is an important part of global strategy. Other important aspects of global strategy includes organizational structure, design and innovation and management.

Matt's other strategies include assigning one problem to multiple (one or two) developers and they work on them individually. His motto is that everyone works on everything. This way, there will be many different solutions for the same problem. Developers argue with team over choosing what to do or how to design a solution. However, this can be perceived as a waste of money.

In addition, WordPress uses online chat, blogging and twitter to communicate with each other instead of using emails. Projects are tracked via blog sites so that they can see the history of the blogs much more easier. Matt believes that emails are a distracter for developers because then they cannot concentrate on coding/developing. One reason that emails are considered a distracter is because people check and respond to emails multiple times in one day. Therefore, at WordPress, emails are turned off and employees only check once or twice per day.

WordPress' Human Resources – Recruitment Strategy

1) Find the best people wherever they are:

• Matt's first strategy is to find the best people wherever they are (i.e. Ireland, France, etc..) and keep those best people where they are.


• Matt has a couple of employees in Ireland and United Kingdom. He wanted to keep them where they are because he did not want to make them pick up and move their whole family.


• Everyone works from home. It keeps morale up and keeps his employees motivated.


• All of the employees get together twice per year. Once in San Francisco for a company meeting and once for fun (i.e. Mexico).


• The advantages of working from home includes the ease of working online and employees are happier and more motivated.


• However, the disadvantages of working from home include language barrier and it is not easy to socialize online.

2) Hire people who are dissatisfied all of the time and who are curious or easily annoyed

• These people usually have the greatest ideas


• Developers love to argue


• These people create innovation
  

Matt also gave us the following tips on designing or managing design:

1) Start building for yourself (just like PeopleSoft and WordPress did, built software to be used for themselves and it became big). Matt said that if you build it, people will use it. WordPress was originally built as a blog site for themselves for fun. They didn’t think that people would use it.

2) Uncertainty - In design, there's a limit of uncertainty. You are not certain whether it will be successful.

3) Anticipate the market and identify what you think is going to be big next. For example, a plug-in system was not popular before, but now it is.

4) Criticisms - You will receive lots of criticisms, don't let them get to you and don't listen to them.

5) Add to the Core - Add new product to the core of your business.

6) Laisez fair attitude - Let developers develop it and see if users will use it. Use a "Develop and See" attitude

7) Can’t satisfy everyone because nothing in life is perfect. There will always be at least one person who is not satisfied and want something different. There will always be at least one person who finds something wrong with your product.

8) Ask for forgiveness, not permission. The worst that can happen is getting fired.

9) Listen to the customers and observe people and market users

Originally, WordPress blog is an application but now WordPress has evolved and is now doing things as platforms, not applications. Companies change and evolve as it grows whether they are aware of it or not.