Last Saturday marked my fourth anniversary as CEO of Automattic. It’s been an amazing time so far. I think 4 years is the longest I’ve ever been with one company. It’s also the length of an undergraduate college education (!) which gave me the idea to make a list of things I’ve learned during the last few years. The list is getting pretty long and is looking like a good set of suggestions for a series of blog posts about “Lessons learned at Automattic (so far)”. I’m hoping to do a post every week or two, starting with some of the topics I often get asked about:
- Open source business models: How did we structure Automattic as a commercial entity that both benefits from and supports the open source WordPress project?
- Distributed companies: We are a team of 50 people spread across 12 US states and 10 countries. How do we make that work?
- Internet scale services: We run multiple web services that see hundreds of millions of visitors a month. How do you reach an audience the size of Amazon’s and AOL’s with a small startup team?
There’s a lot more. Feel free to suggest what you think would be interesting to hear about (and to nag me if I don’t follow-up!).
Congratulations Toni!
Many Happy Anniversaries. You guys my blog rock!
Congratulations! Wishing you many more years of success.
You started on my birthday — a fantastic present.
Huzzah! Maybe you could write about acquisitions. You guys seem good at identifying opportunities and actually making it work for the larger mission. You guys are swell & are good for the Web. More, please.
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Is it bad that I’m terrible with anniversaries, birthdays and even names, but always remember my Automattic anniversary every year? Here’s to many more!
Nice – congrats Toni! 4 years is a good chunk of time
Would love to hear more about the distributed company model…
Congratulations, Toni.
Thanks, Toni, for your work that makes possible this project, a project that give us so much joy, much more that expected. You have the resposability of keep making sustainable a bussiness which is making history. Do not forget you have the help of many people (like us)