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Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures
- pmlnr 7y agoI genuinely thought Automattic is already profitable, is it not?
- tyingq 7y agoTo me, they seem to have to have a lot of employees (940, soon 1200) for what they do. That probably makes it harder. I'm curious what portion of the employees are development folks.
- ttul 7y ago43% are in engineering, according to LinkedIn.
- photomatt 7y agoI would love for that percentage to go up, and we are hiring! High velocity and high scale backend work, tons of React with Calypso and Gutenberg, the most leveraged systems group I've ever seen, a really lovely-to-work-in native apps team, and of course everything coming in with Tumblr.
- losdos 7y agoSo you officially love React again? :)
- kd3 7y agoWhy are you still pushing Gutenberg though? The reviews continue to be negative: https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/#reviews https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/#reviews
- notatoad 7y agoHave you tried using gutenberg? i love it. granted, i'm not trying to make a business selling wordpress templates, or trying to use wordpress in some way other than just as a blog. but a lot of the gutenberg criticism seems to be of the "i hate this because it's new" variety.
- smpetrey 7y agoAutomattic is profitable. This funding round is less about securing long-term profitability and more about long-term partnerships and scaling their portfolio of products[1] deeper into other third-parties such as Salesforce (and beyond): > “The problem we’re tying to solve is likely multigenerational. It can take the rest of our lives and we need to pass it on to the generation that comes after to continue to work on it. Hopefully for the rest of humanity because I can’t imagine a time when humanity cannot benefit from an open, free, connected web,” Mullenweg told me. > When it comes to today’s funding round, Salesforce Ventures isn’t your traditional investor — and Mullenweg is well aware of that. There could be some partnerships and integrations between Salesforce and Automattic in the future. [1] https://automattic.com/about https://automattic.com/about
- pmart123 7y agoWithout looking heavily into it, it seems like given Wix is trading $6B in public markets, why not try and IPO unless you believe there is a large business synergy with Salesforce?
- maxerickson 7y ago$160 million dollars is a ton of money. WTF.
- notafrog 7y agoEdit: sorry, misunderstood.
- maxerickson 7y agoThe second paragraph of the article says they hadn't raised tons previously, just $160 million.
- AznHisoka 7y agoDoes anyone else see a misalignment between the $3B valuation and the huge impact Wordpress has had on the internet? 1/3 of all websites are powered by Wordpress, yet they seem to be valued low compared to other tech companies.
- helpPeople 7y agoOpen source has massive benefits. WordPress would be nothing if it was closed off. But open source also means users can fork if the company sucks.
- tyingq 7y agoPretty sure the vast majority of those WordPress sites bring them no revenue.
- johnward 7y agoSince when has valuation been based on revenue? :)
- buboard 7y agoau contraire, i bet wordpress users make a lot more revenue than SV combined (not a high bar - most SV startups lose money)
- badrequest 7y agoThey don't make that revenue on behalf of the folks who make Wordpress, necessarily
- lexapro 7y agoI'm sure Apple alone has more revenue than all wordpress sites combined. And you can have a lot of revenue while losing money.
- buboard 7y agoYes of course, i should have said “their competitors in sv” Woocommerce users apparently make $10b in revenue, and i doubt they lose much, after all it s free
- whalesalad 7y ago> “The roadmap is the same. I just think we might be able to do it in five years instead of ten,” Mullenweg said. I tried to hunt for why the investment was taken and this is all the article mentions. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m guessing that competition is heating up and they need marketing fuel to keep people on the platform while they transform it from a duct taped blogging tool to something more flexible. There is no middle ground with WP. You’re either buying a generic theme that doesn’t really fit your business and forcing your content into it... (every small business out there right now) or you’re Rolling Stone and you run big boy WP with major customizations. The middle area is weak. That’s where people like Wix etc... are eating their lunch.
- photomatt 7y agoWhere it's possible, I'll always invest in product and engineering over marketing (specifically external ad spend). The Tumblr acquisition is a good example of that, we actually scaled back WP.com marketing in anticipation of that to give more room to bring on Tumblr's entire 200ish-person team. 90%+ of our growth is organic, and that percentage is going up.
- neom 7y agoWhenever I see valuations like this from corporate VCs, I always wonder if they're trying to protect against someone else buying the company.
- notzuck 7y ago"To that end, as we reviewed our hiring process, we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire." If that's there attitude then fuck them. You can guess which demographic they are talking about.
- codeisawesome 7y agoThis comment isn't in the article anymore..
- notzuck 7y agoIt's on a blog by someone that makes hiring decisions. It's not in the linked article. You can google it.
- human20190310 7y agoI googled the quote, and based on the context here [0], it seems like the demographic being referred to is non-male. What's wrong with reviewing hiring processes to determine if they're excluding a demographic that contains individuals who would have done well in the role? [0] https://cate.blog/2019/05/15/addressing-hiring-gaps-through-user-research/ https://cate.blog/2019/05/15/addressing-hiring-gaps-through-... EDIT: The tl;dr for the article is that they're doing research on "how the people you didn’t hire would have done".
- kd3 7y agoRead all the way to the end.
- human20190310 7y agoI did. It's a call for women and non-binary people to participate in a survey, not get a job. They're trying to assess the people that are under-represented in their hiring, not hire them preferentially.
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- calimac 7y agoMatt has been a special founder. He has integrity and a his compass is aligned with a strong vision for product and the open internet. The battle for an open internet is multigenerational Here a quote from the article “The problem we’re tying to solve is likely multigenerational. It can take the rest of our lives and we need to pass it on to the generation that comes after to continue to work on it. Hopefully for the rest of humanity because I can’t imagine a time when humanity cannot benefit from an open, free, connected web,” Mullenweg told me
- rblion 7y agoDHH isn't too thrilled about this. > “We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is a nasty, monopolistic goal. Listening to Matt muse about 85% marketshare dreams is a real downer. But $300m is a down payment on monopoly dreams. full thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174695189090308096 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174695189090308096
- buboard 7y agodoes he know WP is open source?
- nacs 7y agoHe does: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174702952411303936 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174702952411303936 > "Yes. Monoculture in open source is scarcely better than monoculture in closed source. Monopolies of all stripes are bad for the web."
- buboard 7y agoMonopoly and open source dont mix. I can't think of an open source project that became monopoly by itself, without the continuous backing and pushing of its parent company. And there were/are plenty of monocultures in open source (apache / mysql / nodejs / Linux) that was rather a good thing than bad.
- neom 7y agoGuess he must hate Acquia is well? Not sure why DHH always has to be such a... downer.
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- wp381640 7y agobecause he has witnessed dozens of companies overtake his own in achieving mega-valuations and success without following his cargo cult advice that was born from a halo effect his entire m.o today is to beat down anything that doesn't fit the poor and loose thesis he built a brand on -- everything from "surveillance capitalism" to "open source monopoly bad"
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- puranjay 7y agoAround three years back, if you were to ask me to build a website, I would straight up choose WordPress. Not because it was the best at it, but because it was the easiest and the cheapest way to do it. Now, I'm not so sure. Blogging itself is in decline and the kind of blogging experience WordPress offers is, frankly, too bloated for the average blogger
- tomnipotent 7y ago> Blogging WP is a full-featured CMS and has been for over a decade.
- cft 7y agoAs they get more and more funding, their content moderation is converging with Facebook. This is from May: https://www.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/bn5gse/what_happened_to_heartistewordpresscom/ https://www.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/bn5gse/what_happene...
- ravivyas 7y agoThe keyword in the post is "e-commerce"
- hazelnut 7y ago“e-commerce” does not directly come to my mind when I hear WP. Different story with Salesforce. So the question is - how does it fit together?
- leviathant 7y agoSalesforce bought Demandware, which was built on Intershop, and while a dominant force in ecommerce, it's also a stagnant one, sorely lacking on the content front. There have been several attempts to fix this, and none are keeping up with modern alternatives. The admin for Demandware hasn't changed in years. Woo is nowhere near where SFCC is in terms of functionality, but with this kind of investment, the folks involved on the Automattic side are likely far more personally invested in building out an ecommerce platform around WP, certainly compared to anyone who's hired on to go spelunking in the Demandware codebase. Look for a hosted, enterprisey take on WooCommerce in a couple of years.
- mwexler 7y agoHopefully this means Simplenote will continue to be supported!
- massel 7y agoI think Matt mentioned it on the Vergecast recently, so it's not a secret – we have a team of top folks working on Simplenote and are continuing to invest in it. Source: I'm on the mobile team at Automattic and just spent a week hanging out with the people working on it :)
- erikpukinskis 7y agoSimplenote is incredible. I really hope they don’t add too many features, as its glory is in its simplicity.
- pX0r 7y agoWill things like WP (not in particular) die out eventually because of poor developer experience ? Corollary: frameworks liked by developers will eventually stick even if currently they have a modest userbase.
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- njx 7y agoI am surprised nobody here mentioned wooCommerce and Gutenberg. Prior to Gutenberg, I was sold on Elementor but now with the upgrade have been using Gutenberg quite often and love it. I bet the funding is going into these two fronts especially wooCommerce (the top ecommerce platform on wordpress and also owned by Automattic.
- nshntarora 7y agoAwesome! @photomatt would also love to know the company's plans with HappyTools (https://happy.tools/ https://happy.tools/), what's coming next?
- nathan-io 7y ago“What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web. We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress." God help us all.
- shawnlower2 7y agoBetter than Medium. Kanye West of the online publishing platforms. 'Pardon the interruption, imma let you read this blog, but...'
- nathan-io 7y agoThe article didn't mention the lack of version control, which AFAIK is impractical due to the sheer amount of HTML and layout-defining configuration WP stores in the db. In spite of WP's revision history feature on Posts and other models, I've always found this to be a major issue on WP sites. Obviously there are numerous other problems with WP, that's just one I didn't see the author touch on. I try to talk clients out of WP whenever possible, and most let me build using a proper MVC framework. I like to think I'm making the Internet a little better, one not-another-WordPress-site at a time.
- Aperocky 7y ago> We want all website to be ran on WordPress The horror, it would be a worse disaster than npm. God no