Automattic anniversary

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!).


Comments

9 responses to “Automattic anniversary”

  1. Congratulations Toni!

  2. Many Happy Anniversaries. You guys my blog rock!

  3. Congratulations! Wishing you many more years of success.

  4. You started on my birthday — a fantastic present. 🙂

  5. 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.

  6. […] Schneider has been CEO of Automattic (almost?) as long as that company has existed: that’s four years, plus a few days. Happy anniversary to Toni, Matt, and the rest of […]

  7. 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! 🙂

  8. Nice – congrats Toni! 4 years is a good chunk of time 🙂 Would love to hear more about the distributed company model…

  9. 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)

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