Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
How dare you be a valley CEO with such an attitude? ;) /s
Also, congrats on the raise! *Coughs in IPO...
I have yet to see a single ads on Wordpress.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but now whenever I think of doing a simple website my brains clicks on Wix or SqaureSpace instead of thinking about Wordpress.com
This is an often overlooked strategy from small to to big businesses, but one that pays off long term. We're a 3 people SASS having the same philosophy, and it's starting to pays off (we're 100% organic :)). Nice to hear Wordpress has the same.
Secondary: money from the financing that goes to employees, founders, or other existing shareholders.
Companies often use part of a financing to “take out” existing shareholders. Many larger financings are actually to a large extent a “secondary”.
Example: We use Divi (the theme), which is what we call a theme "framework" (not like Genesis) that allows almost any design & layout. This differs from most themes that typically have 1 or a handful of layouts that you must not stray too far from. While Divi offers pre-baked layouts, you're free as a designer to create something custom and then use the Divi toolset to build. We used to build every WP theme by hand, but Divi allows us to focus on design, and not the intricacies of WP theme development which is not core to our business (client solutions)
There are a number of fantastic visual website builders for WordPress that allow you to generally build whatever you want without writing any code.
If you have custom data needs you can use plugins to visually generate and present complex custom data, without writing any code.
If those don't meet your needs, you can write code to generate even more complex custom data structures.
If writing code isn't your thing, there is an absolutely massive market of WordPress developers ranging from pennies on the dollar to expert teams that charge $100+ an hour.
There are hosting platforms ranging from $5/mo to $100/mo to enterprise level. (And free options, but I wouldn't recommend any of them.)
Small businesses can go on just about any freelance or job site and get your site customized or a completely custom site built for hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars. You get what you pay for, but saying the options aren't there I just don't understand?
It’s the laser focus of a proprietary platform vs open source. Since wix and company are now adding market places and other functionality to there core it should be interesting.
I think they’re moving in the right direction, but it’s hard with all the legacy cruft. I’m in the process of learning WP modules (my goal is to move an open studios over as a plug in)
I know there are a million visual designer plugins/themes for WP - but I've tried them all and WebFlow makes them look like kid's toys.
There's some limitations with WebFlow, but I'm making it my 1a option going forward.
Adobe Experience Manager can be mentioned as an inferior product tech stack wise, but strong marketing including targeting the C level with PowerPoint presentations let’s it win customers.
Feature wise Wordpress needs to do something at the analytics level. It does not make sense to host everything via Wordpress however everything data related is done via third party analytics. This is also Adobe’s selling proposition (marketing cloud) and they have a point here, however weak, since for example Adobe Target is some very basic “if then” rule system. But it might impresses C level noobs. ;)
I work for a company (Human Made) which is pushing heavily on this, and our WordPress-based DXP shipped in-house analytics in our last major version. I can’t see consumers using this stuff, but in the space we’re operating, we need it.
Private venture-baked companies that have been around as long as Automattic and are profitable or have favorable financials are going public right now. Automattic doesn't have the numbers or potential to IPO so they must raise.
But open source also means users can fork if the company sucks.
And you can have a lot of revenue while losing money.
Woocommerce users apparently make $10b in revenue, and i doubt they lose much, after all it s free
All of those servers run on Intel chips. Maybe some AMD. Even combined, companies like Google and Amazon, who would be nothing without those chips, are worth more than the companies that make their chips.
And electricity! Our electric companies aren't worth a penny compared to these huge tech companies. That's strange. They wouldn't even be able to see, let alone run their computers, without the electric company.
IBM paid billions of dollars for Red Hat.
i.e: You can be in Automattic business and make a dev team larger than them that develop the core WordPress. They don't rule WordPress the open source product but just are a company that made it.
God help us all.
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.
> “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/1174702952411303936
> "Yes. Monoculture in open source is scarcely better than monoculture in closed source. Monopolies of all stripes are bad for the web."
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"
In other words, he is very much Anti - Silicon Valley.
I bet the funding is going into these two fronts especially wooCommerce (the top ecommerce platform on wordpress and also owned by Automattic.
I'm curious what portion of the employees are development folks.
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.
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.
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
WP is a full-featured CMS and has been for over a decade.
Source: I'm on the mobile team at Automattic and just spent a week hanging out with the people working on it :)
The horror, it would be a worse disaster than npm. God no
So the question is - how does it fit together?
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.
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
https://www.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/bn5gse/what_happene...
If that's there attitude then fuck them. You can guess which demographic they are talking about.
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-...
EDIT: The tl;dr for the article is that they're doing research on "how the people you didn’t hire would have done".
That's not what was said. Nothing in that quote implies "we will hire zero men".
I already quoted....
Nevertheless, if the demographic profile of their hires doesn't correspond to the demographics of the population they're embedded in, it's reasonable to question whether 1) they're unfairly excluding people and 2) the extent to which the people they're excluding could have contributed.
That's why they're doing the survey? To find out if that's true, and if so, why it's true?
> Do we need to match the population in the first place?
If trans folks have statistically similar job abilities to non-trans folks, a disparity in hiring may indicate some other discriminatory / disparate factors that can be fixed. They might even be entirely unintentional.
That's why you do the research.
The extent to which things don't match is worth looking into. Historically such mismatches have more often been due to unequal opportunity than to other causes.
"We'd like a more diverse pool of applicants" does not mean "we'd like a pool of applicants with zero of <over-represented demographic> in it".
It doesn't even mean they want less of that demographic at all. It can (and likely should) be read as wanting a larger applicant pool overall, adding in folks from demographics who simply aren't applying currently.
Are you sure about that? I don't think this is about equality at all. It's about her and her agenda. Forcing people into your pipeline to meet a soft quota is silly.
Yes.
If I look at my garden, and I say "gee, it's all yellow flowers... I'd like some red and purple ones, too", it's kinda nutty to think I'm saying "I'm going to rip out all the yellow flowers and burn them".