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How cool to have dinner with ma.tt Mullenweg and satisfy my WordPress fanboy moment. BY sheer luck I was seated across form Matt and enjoyed great conversation, he is more down to earth than most CEOs.
The next day I was blessed even more to be the kick off speaker for WordCamp 2.008!
Here's my friend (& roomie on the El camino de Santiago hike from Portugal to Spain!) Matt Mullenweg. He's on Sam Harris podcast this week... love you Matt hang in there!
On the blog: Season 2, Episode 3 of Walking with Matt
www.stuckincustoms.com/2019/02/14/season-2-episode-3-of-w...
Ever have an experience where you take a picture, then suddenly realize what you've just taken a picture of? That was me. I had a short internal argument about whether I should pass out or run. Running won. Fortunately for me, it never fully touched the earth. Needless to say, I didn't take any more pictures on that drive.
OK, this one is too cool for words. You sit on a net suspended halfway up and surrounded by speakers. For a sense of it, check out the video on donor Matt Mullenweg's blog
An interesting panel where these 11 well-known application developers discussed ideas and brainstormed an app in just 40 minutes.
Panelists:
Ryan Carson (FOWA)
Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Blaine Cook (Twitter)
Kevin Hale (Wufoo)
Leah Culver (Pownce)
Alex Bard (Goowy)
Gary Vaynerchuk (WineLibrary.tv)
Kevin Rose (Digg)
Carlos Garcia (ScrapBlog)
Cal Henderson (Flickr)
Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
Matt Mullenweg and Sam Harris are two of my favorite people (a good friend and undergrad classmate) — their new podcast on distributed work is brilliant and timely.
(Not everyone can WFH, but most knowledge workers can. As an aside, I especially like this WFH photo from one of our hard tech companies, bringing the lab bench home.)
As the founder of WordPress— a Level 4/5 fully distributed work organization — Matt has been giving this deep thought since he was 19. WordPress powers 35% of all websites today.
My summary notes:
Happiness at work depends on:
1) Mastery: ability to get better at your job
2) Autonomy: freedom and agency to control the work environment
3) Purpose: working for something greater than the paycheck, intrinsic motivation
Traditional work organizations can do well on 1 and 3, but distributed workplaces can nail 2. So many elements of the office work environment are out of our control: temperature, pets, food availability and smells, desk type, window view, shared restroom, exercise areas, etc. Think “The Office”
Levels of Autonomous Organizations:
Level 1: Unprepared (98% of companies). People can get by remotely, but they are not as effective. Not all work applications are remotely enabled.
Level 2: Heading There. Most recreate the office environment online (in the Marshall McLuhan sense of each new media initially recapitulating its predecessor media). We inherited the 9-5 workday from factory work in the Industrial Revolution. Your contribution clocked closely to your time on the job. In this phase of autonomy, companies often try to track their employees online work time. This Big Brother phase can actually decrease freedom and agency.
Level 3: Leveraging the New Medium. Various new tactics: shared google doc with live note taking. Better equipment like a desk lamp. Better audio equipment: a headset with a proximal microphone and machine learning noise cancellation (for microphone and headphone) can allow for no Muting on calls. Fumbling with mute hinders spontaneity. We mute because we have terrible microphones (here are Matt’s product recommendations). Written communication becomes more important. Companies should screen for written prowess and can hire based entirely on a written evaluation process.
Level 4: Go Asynchronous. Synchronous online work does not boost agency. With asynchronous, the focus shifts to what not how you produce. Managing handoffs, like batons in a relay race, becomes the main point of leverage. Handoffs across time zones enables 24 hours of productivity. You can tap a global talent pool. Decisions can take longer but they are better. Meetings are really terrible. We are finding out now how many could have been an email instead. Meetings are a forcing function to get people’s attention on same topic at same time. But all you get are people’s reactions. You also get biases from gregariousness, gender, and status. You lose a lot of inputs to decision making. Introverts and ESL suffer.
Level 5 Nirvana. Doing better work than is possible in a traditional centralized office organization. It may seem unobtainable, but we can get a taste of it. We can integrate health and wellness into our work flow. We focus on output not time spent in office. This can remove implicit biases. Companies can be more antifragile, like cities – cities give up elements of control to persist and thrive, and productivity per capita grows as they scale (Ref. Geoffrey West from SFI: public companies have a 10-year half-life wheras cities can survive nuclear attack)
Tools: Zoom, Slack or Matrix, some kind of email replacement. Email is private and locked up. We use an asynchronous blogging system instead. Very few work emails remain (<5/month). Communication should be flat and accessible. See headphones and noise filtering software link above.
What do we lose? Those who practice management by walking around; we lose the ambient intimacy and information gathering from being together. Address with: Synchronizing time zones on team allocations. Paying closer attention to visual cues on zoom. Experiments with auto-allocated company meetups.
Fundraising without an office was hard. Matt raised $450M last year and kept a physical office location just for investor meetings!
Sensitivity: there is good woke and bad woke. API: Assume Positive Intent (reminds me of the Bain principle to Presume Trust). Given the ambiguity of emotional overlays to messaging: as a recipient, assume the best intentions by the sender. As the sender, be conservative in what you say. If things get heated, jump to audio to deescalate. And deescalate yourself with exercise.
Inspiring book recommendations: 1) Daniel Pink’s Drive 2) Geoffrey West’s Scale and 3) Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (I agree with 2 and 3; they are awesome. Have not read 1 yet.)
“I hope there can be a silver lining to this crisis, which we all hope is over as soon as possible, that enables people to reexamine how they work and how they interact and improve it. I’m happy to spread the gospel wherever possible for distributed work. I think it’s better for companies, employees, the environment and the world. There are very few downsides.”
Some other gems from the Automattic Gospel:
“Every problem can get a lot better if you think really long term” — Auto Matt
“Don’t play with bats” — Sam Harris
Many of the non-Apple laptops were otherwise stylin': Sony Vaios, Tablet PCs, micro-laptops -- generally techie bling bling. Check out the similar 2006 version that's a panorama.
they even arranged a firework show directly overhead, filling our visual field, a prelude to New Year's Eve and new beginnings!
See the blog post for more info: ETech 2007
This photo is licensed under a Creative Commons license. If you use this photo, please list the photo credit as "Scott Beale / Laughing Squid" and link the credit to laughingsquid.com.
Isn't it pretty!!!
I got it for Jordan from my bonus money a while back.
I love this design, very clever & efficient I think. I hate those USB sticks that have the flimsy cover [that you'll inevitably lose].
Now I just have 2 more things I want. The YouTube socks and an Android shirt. (I think the robot is so cute!) (≋^‿‿^≋)
I got this from the official Wordpress shop, but it looks like it's being upgraded at the moment. Maybe that means new pretty products!
Matt Mullenweg ftw! v(^_^)v
WordPress daddy Matt Mullenweg says the editor supplied by means of drag-and-drop website-builder Wix.Com “explicitly contravenes the GPL” (GNU Popular Public License) and “is constructed with stolen code, so your whole app is now in violation of the license.”
Mullenweg made that accusation, and ...
pagedesignweb.com/wordpress-daddy-matt-mullenweg-says-wix...
Such a setting of awe... for the magic of our tribe
This photo by Marcus Koppen involved a 20 ft. tall light-bouncing structure bathing us in a warm diffuse light.
Ryan King, Matt "WordPress" Mullenweg, Om Malik & Nicole Lee
laughingsquid.com/wordpress-san-francisco-meetup-january-...
This is the very first photo I ever uploaded to Flickr.
laughingsquid.com/first-flickr-photo-in-honor-of-flickrs-...
Matt Mullwenweg, co-founder of WordPress, during WordCamp SF 2009. I did a video interview with Matt during the event.
www.youngentrepreneur.com/profiles/entrepreneurs-take-on-...
Editor’s Note: This post marks the first in a short series we’re featuring on the Unreasonable at Sea program. Stay tuned to YoungEntrepreneur.com for more updates.
In today’s ever-changing tech landscape, accelerator programs are a dime a dozen — but few allow its participants to circumnavigate the globe while learning from some of the sharpest minds in their respective fields.
For this seafaring session, young-tech entrepreneurs can participate in Unreasonable at Sea, a 100-day business accelerator program that involves traversing 12 different countries while gaining keen startup advice from mentors the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.
The inaugural program, which is a joint venture between the Unreasonable Institute and Stanford’s d.school, set sail from Ensenada, Mexico on Jan. 9. The 11 startups, comprised of 26 entrepreneurs, along with 627 Semester at Sea college students will visit Hawaii, Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore, Burma, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Ghana and Morocco. And though the voyage will end in Spain on April 25, we’ll bring you updates from onboard, as we check in periodically with three startups along the way. (See below for a write up of each startup we’re following.)
Related: How Silicon Valley’s Glow Shines Beyond Its Borders
The brainchild of 27-year-old Daniel Epstein, founder of the Unreasonable Institute, a startup accelerator in Boulder, Colo., Unreasonable at Sea endeavors to solve intractable social and environmental challenges.
“It’s a wonderful mixture of insanity and incredible. I have no set expectations,” says Pascal Finette, director of the innovation group at Mozilla, who will serve as a mentor in the program. “There are some amazing companies aboard and I’m mostly curious to hear the craziness Daniel can come up with.”
The idea for the journey came to Epstein by way of his own collegiate voyage at sea. In 2007, Epstein enrolled in Semester at Sea, a study abroad program sponsored by the University of Virginia that is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Related: Crisscrossing the Globe In the Name of Entrepreneurship
The premise of the program held that college students living side-by-side on a ship for the duration of an academic term would then be better equipped to learn in a “Jeffersonian” environment. Participants took classes for school credit while at sea with professors from a plethora of universities across the globe. Then they apply what they’ve learned to field labs while in various international ports. (Stops range anywhere from one day to one week.)
“When you go into port, you see the same thing happening in every single country—a lack of access to clean water, malnutrition, whatever it might be,” Epstein explains. “And [Semester at Sea] gave me a desperate desire to do something about it.”
Unreasonable at Sea’s route will span 106 days, 16 cities, 12 countries and 24,000 nautical miles. For the next four months, here are the three startups we’ll be regularly checking in on:
Deepak Ravindran, Innoz
What Innoz does: According to the 24-year-old Ravindran, his company functions much in the way that Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button does — only, users can find out the answer to whatever ails them in a matter of seconds via their non-smartphones. “Seventy percent of the world’s population use mobile phones, but only 21 percent of those have internet access on their devices,” he says. Innoz utilizes SMS technology as a “channel of information” to provide internet service to people all over the world, both one-time queries and regular subscribers. Currently, the India-based tech company has 120 million users across the world and answers anywhere from five to 10 million queries per day.
What he’s most excited about: “Visiting Ghana and South Africa. I would like to own the African mobile market — that’s a place that has a lot of people using mobile phones.”
Cesar Harada, Protei
Why Protei is relevant: This open source, shape-shifting sailing robot, or drone, is in the prototype phase and has the potential to revolutionize ocean science by cleaning up oil spills, plastic and radioactivity. Throughout the voyage, Harada, 29, will be collecting various instruments to make measurements at the sea, as well as developing his own. “We are starting a new company from scratch and so for us, we have a blank page,” says Harada. “The way I see it is to really think innovation for the environment.”
Why he’s a good fit: “Normally, a company’s priority is to make money. The people are just a workforce and the environment is secondary. We want to prioritize environmental groups and our environmental return.”
Mouhsine Serrar, Prakti Design
What Prakti is all about: The first efficient cookstove enterprise is designed for women in developing countries who currently pay for fuels such as charcoal and wood. Prakti’s products aim to help reduce these consumers’ fuel costs. And since the company’s products claim to reduce harmful gas emissions by 60 to 100 percent, Serrar, 39, hopes to contribute to a greener global environment, as well as trim the number of deaths and diseases spawned by smoke inhalation.
Why he’s participating: “I want to figure out the best way to do marketing, the best way to do distribution. We will more or less have five days to prepare for a country, then five days in the country. I’m focusing on what can I learn from these countries.”
Read More Stories About: Incubators, Mentors, Social Entrepreneurship, Starting A Business, Tech Startups, Unreasonable At Sea