More than 15 years ago, I started WordPress with some friends from the internet who believed in the idea of democratizing publishing on the open web. I was 19.
The funny thing is, I’d never even met most of the people I was working with. I was based in Houston, and others were scattered all over the world. We had a shared passion, and we were connected on the internet. What else did we need? Now WordPress powers more than 39% of all sites on the web.
WordPress was my first introduction to the idea of distributed work — we didn’t need to live in the same place or work in the same office to build something that changes the world. So when I started building Automattic in 2005, we took the exact same approach. All you needed was good WiFi and a dream. 🙂
Fast forward to 2020, and Automattic remains a fully distributed company, with over 1,300 employees working from 76 countries, speaking 95 different languages, and no central office. Now that we’ve been working this way for over a decade, I wanted to create a podcast to tell the story of distributed work — not just sharing everything we’ve learned at Automattic, but speaking with other companies, executives, and creators who are pioneering the future of work. We’re going to learn about the practical application of distributed work in our daily lives, but also answer the bigger questions about why it’s important.
For an initial primer, check out my TED video on distributed work, then subscribe to the podcast. Thanks for listening.
-Matt Mullenweg, Dec 2020