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Comment by reticulates | Hacker News Reader

I think it is easy to underestimate how big of a deal this is. Matt has a stranglehold on Automattic and Wordpress, it is not possible to remove his control over the ecosystem and he is volatile. Ousting him as CEO is almost certain to cause a major reaction from Matt, so, for Automattic to make this decision is a very big deal. The right decision for the long term but the hard decision. I expect we will see Matt try to punish Automattic’s board, it will get worse for Automattic before it gets better.

Here is Matt talking about his control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150

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I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake

If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?

Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.

Automattic has exclusive commercial rights to the WordPress trademark. That was the self-dealing deal he made when he "gave" the trademark to the WordPress Foundation. He can start a new commercial WP company, but it won't have that trademark so would be limited in the same ways he was trying to force on WP Engine etc.

Laundermatt?

Checkmatte?

But seriously if I had to recommend something, not escalating seems best for everyone involved.

Aftermatt

New-mattic (pneumatic)?

Intimatte - non sequitur.

Matthatter

> He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project

The only thing he has that can't be moved or recreated are the trademarks. In an extremely short span of time everyone went from Xfree for their X server to Xorg, and Xfree limped along for a bit before falling over. This is the beauty of open source.

In most venture-backed companies no, because board seats are one of the things you give major investors in exchange for their money.

In this case? Possibly! Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker look like independents, and he might be able to unilaterally replace either or both of them.

I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.

> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground.

I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty.

IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve.

Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.

Good information, thank you!

> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board?

Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.

If he's lost the confidence of the board and does that, how much is his company worth?

Does it matter? He owns it and doesn't plan to flip it, and they have enough income to go on for a long time.

He is self-described "post-economic" after all.

If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.

While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.

> While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board

This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)

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