before

we get to the show. I just want to remind everyone that we're gearing up

for another one of our mailbag episodes, where listeners just like you can call in and ask questions of base camp cofounders Jason Freed and David, Heidi Meyer, Hanson or, heck, anyone here at base camp. So if you have a question you'd like answered on the air,

you can leave us a voicemail

at 70 86 to 87850 all right onto the show. Welcome to rework a podcast

by base camp about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Whalen Wong, and I'm Sean Hill near You know, Base Camp as a company has always been opinionated. That's the entire premise for rework the book and this podcast. Well, it turns out that when you have strong opinions, some folks don't always agree with them, and that's healthy. On today's show, we're trying something. A little novel, a civil discussion

between two people with differing viewpoints. One of those people is base

camp co founder David Hunter Meyer Hanson, whose voice you know pretty well by now, and the other is Matt Mullen wig the founder of WordPress and Automatic. Possibly the most surprising part of this whole thing is that this discussion started in the most uncivil environment. Twitter. Thankfully, David and Matt agreed to move the conversation to the phone, and they have a lot of mutual respect for one another.

They spoke for just over an hour

about tech monopolies, accountability and power dynamics and open source software. This is a super sized episode for us, but we wanted to present the call as unedited as possible. So we'll get out of the way and leave it to David Highmore Hanson and Matt Mullen. Wig, huh? My name is Matt Mullen Wake. I am the co founder of WordPress on 2003. And if years after that I started a for profit company called Automatic that I've been the CEO of for the past five years. And then finally last week and what kick this office, we announced an investment where sales force, which is a large enterprise C around company, bought 10% of business for $300 million David I start going back on back and forth on Twitter, and I felt like Twitter was not enough to actually have a good conversation of Rather. So I'm glad we're able to hop on and I'll discuss it with a bit more nuance.

Absolutely well, First of all, thanks for coming on. The rework podcast were talking about before we started recording. It's just so great when you can have a conversation that can start on something like online. You can jump on a higher band with medium in such a short period of time. So thanks again for coming on and having a chat. I know that sort of. I should say, Twitter, you're putting it very diplomatically. I think isn't always the best place to have a good conversation. I'd say it's pretty much never used to have a good conversation. It's a great place to lobby sniper tweets and get things going. I'm a longtime fan off starting enquiries through snot between, um, I fell for it.

You got me hook and sinker here, so I think What? What sort of to give a little more context? What started it from my end was seeing you guys announced the funding round. This was serious d round.

I think I did an interview around it. Yeah, there's a quote in the

interview. Exactly. It was the quote in the interview that really sort of just fell into all my prejudice about venture capital and about what's going wrong in the online world today, which was We want every website weather, it's e commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress and then following it up with kind of flick. Well, there's no reason what press couldn't have an 85% market share off. Well, I guess everything of the Internet, which just sort of just instantly sent the shockwaves through my system going what the fuck and what

what did that sort of bring up for you? Like, What did you imagine there?

What's going wrong right now online for me is that the Internet has been captured and has been captured by what, 10 companies, maybe fewer than that, like five really that sits so heavily on so much of the Internet that first of all, they get to dictate everything, and then there's scraps left for everyone else. And when I think about the work that I try to do with the Web and I guess also why this kind of rankled me was because I thought also the kind of work did you guys been doing for a long time for the Web is to promote this open, free Web, the open, free Internet, which, to me is in direct opposition to an Internet that's dominated by just a handful of players who sit on vast monopolies that allow them to do basically whatever the hell they want.

So in your idea, like an open and free Internet would have, like five players or 20% each are like more,

more like 5000 players with 1% each. Well, maybe that's an overstatement. That's right. That's a VC math, right? But to have just like a very large, rich ecosystem of providers of tools and of service isn't doing because if you think about the Web today, if you want to say something sort of live right, like Twitter pretty much dominates that right. If you wantto share photos online and kind of ah, broad approach, Instagram is very dominant on that. If you want to engage with a general purpose social network, I mean Facebook. It's primitive, dominant net,

and when you think about all those domains when I think of sort of what's left right, Like what hasn't been captured in this way. I think about blogging. I think about podcasting. Those are probably the two main media that haven't been captured in this way. So to think that like, hey, this blocking thing, that's kind of like having been captured yet seeing that as a gold to be captured just like you. I hope that's not what he actually means.

Well, I wonder what for? Podcasting, for example, What percentage of podcast go through apples

to fall podcasting out? It's probably a high percentage, but I think Pakistan is an interesting example because even if Apple perhaps has a high sliced, their first of all, the platform is open in the sense that, like anyone, can use anything else. I used overcast, for example, for podcast. Me, too, and also that that apple

spilt on our SS and enclosures and some really cool software that's that's very open Web by default. Other. A lot of the newer ones, like even Spotify, are same uploaded to our platform,

which, which I think again, spot If I was the only one that sort of tickled me when they were like, Oh, we're gonna have these exclusives. We're gonna basically closed down podcasting to mean like, we want to own podcasting. And I think that that's the same thing I'm sort of fearing with an announcement like that from WordPress is like what? We wanna own blogging when I go like fuck that no one should own blocking. And when I say, Oh, no, I think you bring up a good point here about like, R S s and, um and even if some Allen's on, there's a lot of these open standards that this thing is built on that it perhaps a different from like the proprietary protocols of Facebook or Twitter. But I don't think for me that's not enough.

I would say it's not just protocols. I mean, when you talk about those service is they have network effects of having everyone kind of on the same domain, same database, and none of them are open source, which is interesting. I'll say in my response. Well, first, let me say the exact quote said, I think there's potential to get to similar market shares. Android, which I believe now is 85% of all hands. It's when you think about it, Open source has a virtuous cycle of adoption, people building on the platform and more adoption eso where I think that you can have, I would say good growth of a platform.

Actually, I wonder if if rails is a good example of that, like what percentage of frameworks built on Ruby, Would you say, like rails? Has a market share off terms of users sort of APS built on

very high. But I'd also say that defining the space for frameworks just to Ruby would be kind of defining, like blogging. Just two things built on WordPress, right? Like for example, like for me, I don't really I don't care that WordPress is built on PHP, right? Whatever dominance the WordPress might have in terms of it's slice of the Web, whether that means like it's number one on Peach P. I don't know that doesn't feel like it has, like a huge influence on kind of like the future of the Internet, in much the same ways that, like whether rails dominates ruby or not, doesn't feel like it has an influence on the future of the unit versus WordPress having an 85% slice of the Internet. I mean, pretty big influence on the future of the Internet,

right? Yeah. I mean, you know, by that definition, you're also excluding some things from blogging. So you're not calling Twitter microblogging or people publishing texting pictures on instagram or Facebook as blogging. Although, you know, in terms of a job to be done or user interface, these things have a lot of overlap. So if you were to include those, maybe like number of post per day, I bet our market share it Go

wait out. True. But also, doesn't that sound like a little bit like sucker Berg saying, Well, I mean, Facebook doesn't have a monopoly like we compete against things like sleep. And we competed against things like eating lunch because these were all sort of just a competition for attention. I think Netflix that the same thing, right? Like we're not competing against whatever we're competing against. Sleep Well, I've heard the same argument from Facebook basically saying the reason they don't have a monopoly is that they're in the sort of attention marketplace, right? And as long as they don't have a full 8 to 10 hours slice of your attention every day. Well, all those things are taking your attention,

so I mean, I I mean, I still hear the argument. I just I find that right now we're we're in a in a space where the pendulum has swung so far into the era of consolidation and monopolisation and control rested with the very few, and that that's a worse place to be. Then when, for example, I got into blogging, I started my block and I think 2001 and I started it on gray matter. Remember Gray matter? Of

course, as they're inspired by gray matter,

Gray matter is this pearl collection of scripts. And there was Gray Matter and there was movable type, and blogger came a little while later, and there was just It felt like there was, like a ton of platforms. It felt more interesting. I think that's also part of it, that that a diverse text pattern text pattern Yep, at the verse set of tools were there isn't just one monolithic, dominating platform is a more interesting place to be. It's a more free place to be. It's amore experimenting place to be, and when I contrast those two worlds. I'm nostalgic in, like the best sense of that word. I

think you might have some rose colored glasses there. I mean, when WordPress came on the scene, the big criticism was there's already too many blogging platforms and moveable type had of the self hosted market. Probably like 90% live journal Blogger were utterly dominant. Really. Blogger have been bought by Google, was owned by Google already. When we're press started, how I think about it and this is, I think, a really interesting conversation cause our company's heir so philosophically a lot like And that's partially because you publish a lot of your stuff, right? Automatic has been very influenced over the years by the things that you and Jason and 37 signals in general have have published about what you do. So where we differ, I think, is a really interesting place to mine.

So, you know, right now word presses market share in the same scale I was talking about that 85% is about 34% which means that the technical number there is a cycle w three texts indexes the top 10 million domains, unique domains takes out of spam everything like that. Of all the 10 million sites, 34% of them are running WordPress. That's actually 10 times the number two, which is another open source platform. Forgive, truthful or juniors in the number two. And in fact, in terms of every year we're growing the equivalent of a couple of droop ALS in terms of the sort of percentage of the Web or

picking up did this, that's. Does that seem healthy to you like, Is that a good place? If you take off your CEO hat for a second? Does that seem like a healthy market place? Wealthy Zehr really vibrant competitors? Have I broken like several times like number two, right? Or if you're 10 times bigger than number two, I don't think anyone would say, Well, there's a vibrant market in in rental cars. Avis had, like 10 times the market share of hurts.

Well, that's what's beautiful about the Web. So Shopify only has, I think, they say 800,000 merchants. And on that W three text number, they show up. I think around 1 to 2% or something so way, way, way smaller. But look at the business that they built on top of this small slice of domains, so unique domains is not like the only measure. And in fact, you know, in the past few years we've had Wicks, squarespace, Shopify,

in addition to all the amazing improvements that happen in have happened in other open source see messes and new ones launching all the time. That's, I think, when the beauty of open source is, even though open source could become a bit of a standard, it doesn't prevent others from starting on it. And in fact, within the WordPress world has been a lot of interesting takes or flavors of wordpress that are built. So this page builder is like l a mentor or visual composer or the one we may call Gutenberg, that, um, that can sometimes have millions or sometimes even north of 10 million sites on them. And the truth is that if I had evil hat on life, let's I start doing evil monopoly stuff people could easily forthis offer and they would, uh, just tomorrow.

So there's that there's a checks and balances there. That's why I love I mean probably where we both live up in sort is allowed to be truly sovereign, right? No, it doesn't matter what I say or do or don't do. WordPress belongs just as much to you. Does anyone else and any sort of moderates that the developers can take it and make it their own or not do updates or whatever they wanted? Yes,

I say, I bought into that perhaps Maur before I actually a major open source project for many years and realized that that power is illusionary like technically, someone could fork ruby on rails tomorrow, right? What is the likelihood that that fork is going to succeed once you have kind of sort of this jog a nod off network effects? Actually, to some extent, you mentioned it before, right, that where press is growing so much faster than anyone else. The gravitational pull is huge. So shoot someone for kid and then introduce incompatibilities or whatever. What is the likelihood that that's going to be a serious contender for me? My assessment would be extremely low, just the same as if someone is was, too, for Ruby on rails today and call it whenever Snoopy on Pale,

like the odds of that being anything than a curiosity for two days. Some hacker news That's extreme, you know, Which is exactly why I think this conversation is interesting is open source, sometimes to me. And I say that beneficiary of this is it can provide a veil over true power. And who has that power? And I would argue that WordPress being in the position of 1/3 of all these domains, you just recounted being on WordPress right is tremendous power. And even if that power is somewhat distributed, it's still very much so, located mostly with the company backing that engine and that you built like a commercial business on top of it. But then even uses the name. It goes even further just to say that there's a lot of power here, and the last point I wanna make in that it's off course. There's a lot of power.

Why would venture capitalists and otherwise invest half a $1,000,000,000 into WordPress if they didn't see Automatic as the company as having a lot of power over WordPress? Right? Like I think I mean, the whole reason someone is able to raise that kind of money is off the back of something that's where someone can pitch. Hey, we have, like, 1/3 of all websites on the Internet, and we think we can get to, like, almost, or we can get to 85% that that's like That's a very compelling venture story, right? Like hey, already have, Like the beginnings of Monopoly, there's a straight shot to a monopoly. Once we get to a monopoly, we can extract monopoly rents and therefore a company could be worth billions of dollars. Where do you differ

on Dennis's? Yeah, there's there's some some good threats there. Yes, first is. You know, no one's forced to use WordPress, and that's not just a thin veil. I mean, there's a Tana options out there, including, like, I think it the rails Demo is like building block in five minutes, right? Yes. So there's, uh,

I would argue that a lot of the people adopting WordPress are doing so because in evaluating all the options out there, including the network effects of like the developers, the knowledge, the plug ins of themes, the ecosystem, everything WordPress compares pretty favorably to the ones out there, both on the enterprise side. That consumer side site builder it center, and maybe it's also the price. You know, it's open source. It's free. You can get $1,000,000 so far for nothing. That's that's a good deal. People like that, I would argue, said that if someone four trails Snoopy on pales, I like the name of probably one get a

lot of users. I would

say that that speaks a little bit to your stewardship of it and that you probably bought a lot of people all the time, so I, um but not to anything that is like gross mismanagement that would cause a really big part of the community to go. So, you know, typical release of WordPress has 4 500 contributors. Maybe 10% of that is from automatic, like 40 or 50. And they're important people like we do try to contribute as much as possible. But if 200 of those went some by cells, because I did something really brain dead, yeah, that would be a pretty serious competitors. And there are some examples of that in open source history. Junior itself, I think, used to be mambo.

WordPress itself was a four could be too, and 16 years ago, and more recently we see things like my sequel and Maria D. B. And there's lots of other examples where you can have a fork that if you ah, if you put enough weight behind it or it gets enough, the committee going can actually pretty interesting and take over a Seyward

present. Be tooted, right? So the possibility is there, right? But I think that they're still just inherent to me, at least not just aesthetic but riel issue with concentration and the death of diversity in terms of really effects, right, like WordPress sits on 1/3 of it, and it's so much larger than you, no one else. So even if it is possible, sort of in theory, someone could fork it, and in theory, someone could sort of usurp it. But what's the likelihood and what happens while that's not happening,

as you say with network effects? Actually, WordPress, I think, has a tunnel network effect, right? Like when a platform is so large and so dominant, it's likely to attract all the plug in writers and all the theme builders. And because that's the main marketplace in much the same way that people go like. Well, of course we sell on Amazon. That's where the customers are. And you could say like, well, people choose to shop on Amazon. Yeah,

they do. Does that mean that is not, ah, problem? That they're growing in sort of monopolistic ways or how they conflicts, the power that they derive from that position? I think it still is. I think we're living through an era right now. We're a small handful of big tech companies are exerting and completely undue amount of power over the Internet over discourse over all sorts of things. And that's something we should try to recoil from and at least learn from and at the very, very least, not aspire to building Maur off. And I think that that was kind of what at least tickled me and got this going right like that. Why isn't WordPress in a great place, quote unquote only being 1/3 of all the sites of the Internet? Why does it need to get to 85%?

Why does growth need to be that explosive and that wild? And then let me answer that question first, at least in my way, steer type of that answer. And that's how I have an interest. Because that's not how Venture Capital works. You don't get venture capital to the tune of half a $1,000,000,000 busing. Hey, thinks a great we'd love to stay here, right? Like you get it because you tell a compelling, extremely rapid, exponential growth story. And that's the part that scares me, because I think when you look at all these big tech companies, the vast majority of them I got into this position fueled by venture capital.

And then they exploited those positions based on that venture capital, and we were all so much worse off. And I don't wanna be worse off when it comes to blogging. And I don't want to see just this concentration of power and one engine, no matter how good it is. I think that's the other part. That I take note, too, is there's one theory of monopolist enforcement that's just consumer harm, right? Like, is Amazon bad for the consumer in the sense of like, do they raise prices? I think this is, um, great,

uh, push back to that theory coming up now bubbling up now and say, you know what consumer harm is not the only thing that matters. A general sense of concentration of power is also a thing that matters, and we should tackle that directly. I mean, of course, this is an imperfect comparison. WordPress is not Facebook or Google. There are differences around, like open source and so on. But e I'm finding that there's a difference is often overstated, like Facebook can also point to tons of their ships being open. So say we open sores, all our secret sauce to howto build. I don't know, make PHP run fast. Our databases and Google could say the same thing and and doesn't change the fact that they're clearly monopolies and in my opinion,

clearly bad, though, and they don't ally it or two run Facebook or Google, but even. But even if they did, you get the building block.

But even if they did would have changed. That's what's actually pretty interesting. You think

s O. I mean, we're pretty unique in that wordpress dot com runs core WordPress, so it's a multi site instant ation of the same software that you can download a

run that is, that is fairly unique,

actually, and in fact, there are people who run large multi site WordPress instances with hundreds of thousands or millions of sites on them. That's that's cool, like I would actually love of. Let's say one of our become better is like Wicks switched to work for us, right? Because then we would, you know, collaborate on the rails, if you will, or the sort of fundamentals like security, speed, log and whatever it is. And we can compete on maybe interesting user experiences or things built on top of that. But it's feel so wasteful for to me, for like people to reinvent the wheel 1,000,000 times.

That's where t go to the WordPress 10.1. It's very important to distinguish that Easy's the not Invest in WordPress. They invested in automatic this round we announced the investment in WordPress. The word first ecosystem is huge and actually think about dominance a ton because you look at really successful platforms. Typically, the bigot the company behind it doesn't go over 5%. I was reading old thing around the launch of Windows 95. I don't know if you remember, but there was like a rolling stone song and people standing in line to get when you was 95 Microsoft would talk about how for every dollar they made for Windows $20 were made in the ecosystem by other companies. It's remarkable if you go to a lot of platforms, you see a similar ratio to that, like a 20 to 1, or about a 5% ratio. Automatic makes probably two or 3% of the revenue in the WordPress world. This company's include, like Go Daddy,

who might not contribute very much back to core but probably have three or four times the number of subscribers than us actually running word for us. Um, so it's kind of huge, and I think about that a lot. Like I want to grow the whole ecosystem. Um, not just our slice of it. And our slice of it now someone has said, is worth $3 billion. Uh, subsiding. But and you actually did sell some serious obey. That's right. Eso you have taken investment that we haven't

taken funding. Maybe this is a lost point. But like Jason and I sold our own personal shares, nothing went into the company to fund any operations. It went to fund a Lamborghini and some other fun shit, but nothing too thick. I mean, still fair enough to say, By the way, I think that's really I I have no qualms that I sort of I tell that story all the time. It's not that, like selling equity in itself is a problem. I have a problem, generally speaking on sort of the industry terms with the equity that's being bought by venture capital and sort of the economics that that model run song, like a Grand Slam monopoly pushing set of economics that, like so you take 300 million at 10%. Like what does normal venture capital economics went back?

Do they want 310 million back? No. They want three billion back, right? Like they need a 10 to 1 grand slam hit. Well,

you're thinking you're mixing up a late stage in early stayed true. True to some extent, though, so early stages is making bets. They spent a lot of things to go to zero, and they want some 10 baggers arm or in their late stage. I mean, they're trying to beat index funds and I some p. So if the markets growing at 10 or 15%. You're going at 30% every year. They look really good and really happy and almost number none of their investments go to zero. So it's a completely different capital

market. But I mean, even if you gave you, if you look at, if you look at that category like what Woodward Press looked like if it had for 10 years to grow 30% a year, this is where I just want to focus back on your own aspiration to you end up with aspirations that exactly that right? What would it look like if 85% of the Internet was run on WordPress and that that, to me, is perhaps when we come back to the fundamental disagreement me that would look dystopian like anyone platform? I don't care whether it's open source or it's my platform. Anyone else's platform, once it dominates 85% off like immediate expression like that's fucking terrible like, isn't this what ah, kind of when capitalists joke about? I just saw a tweet the other day about Cuba, and some fucking right wing dude was holding up or was in a supermarket, and there was this whole row just off one kind of cereal,

and they all went like, This is what you get with communism one kind of cereal and there's like, isn't a joke here that that's what capitalism is trying to do in all these different segments that we're trying to get, like one brand of blogging, one brand of out of no microblogging, one brand of social networks and and then has done it actually doesn't have

funny. It's just traffic analogy, though. Maybe the better analogy would be. Our cereal aisles have like 100 serials, but they're mostly from the same company. Where would that be? A better still

be pretty bad, right? That's basically just like

labeling exercise. I'm just trying to help the analogy, but, you know, I think part of what's going on here is also you know, you've referred the WordPress a lot of times is blogging, and I think if it Maur really like a platform, that's why the examples I use our platforms. So if you look at how a lot of people are building on it days, word price to bootstrap, something that doesn't look like wordpress at all, so it might not even have a website. It might be powering just on a P I. It might be what some people call headless with the couple installations could be a store. It could be, You know, this is big platforms that use it for to power their user system because we've shown that it's a user structure and schema that scales the hundreds of millions of users.

So you know, just things built in there that people are building on it and so much like the same way, like, I don't know exactly what percentage of the Web runs like a patch here, Engine X, but let's call it a huge percentage, probably over 34%. That's okay. That doesn't prevent, like the different types of websites that are built on it. If Engine X got to 80 85% that I don't think would prevent and the diversity or what people could put on their on their websites, same with WordPress, workbooks could get the 85% and it wouldn't mean that there is any sort of monoculture or lack of diversity. If anything, it would allow people to focus more on what's different and not recreating the wizardry of the user system, the log and all that sort of stuff that we've all built a 1,000,000 times. And you just don't need to anymore. If if something like work past Salter needs Yeah,

e, I think I used to believe that Andi think I even used to push that somewhat with Ruby on rails. And I've really come to, for me personally regret that line of thinking. I think just a consultation in itself is an issue for all sorts of reason. That monoculture is an issue that once you're down to one grain and you get one past, that affects that. Oh, all of a sudden you wipe out what, 85% of the the grain harvest that year? And I think that that's not that unrealistic of our comparison to the Web. There's value in diversity in and off itself on all these different levels. Also on ideas, I think a great example. You go like, Well, why would we want to keep rebuilding Weezy wake over and over again?

Well, because there's a a bunch of good, different ideas that could come out of that which is funny, like we actually build our own visit week editor A on Why did we do that? There were all sorts of, ah, once already out there and you could say like, Well, this is a solve problem. We never need to think about this again. Sure we do. It's pretty bad if we get to the point where we think it's the end of history that, well, all the innovation

that libraries, you must use some things off

the show. I do. But I don't want any of those libraries off the shelf to be so dominant as to be essentially the entire market, just like I would fucking hate if Ruin Rails had, like, an 85% market share, off wept frameworks. First of all, the constituency you'd have to fit under that umbrella would be so, ironically enough, divers that you'd have people wanting to walk in completely different directions. And I think this is one of the things that's often true with software is that you simply cannot serve the needs of everyone with one implementation. And when you try to, you end up making all the miserable that ah, an expression of like, let's say how a blogging system should be, um,

that's artistic. It's scientific, its taste. It's all these things that go into building software and to think that like, well, there'll just be one size platform that fits all, uh, again, I'm just thinking of like, what is the future I would like to live in? What does a healthy, open, free Internet look like? To me, it looks like an Internet with tons of different providers, tons of different tooling,

where what we collaborate around is protocols, not consolidation of software market share that gives individuals, companies, or even projects outsized power to dictate the manners of the Internet. Because I think the analogy you gave with if I think it was weeks, you said, like if if they dropped whatever they're doing and like, let's just focus on the same engine reminds me a lot of what happened with chrome and someone brought it up in the threat. Or maybe I brought it up in threat on Twitter, where Microsoft

I think I did, I said, I like

you liked it. Yes, that Microsoft dropped having their own rendering engine, and then they just said, I fuck it, we're gonna throw in the towel, and we're just gonna go with chrome with the same chrome rendering engine.

And it's worth saying here that the chromium rendering engine is open source. Yes, so they can build a completely unique user experience on top of it, everything. But they're contributing to this common way of interpreting HTML. And despite its users,

how did the Web fair last time a single rendering engine had What did they get to? I think they got to like, 92%. Maybe they only got two already 85%. I should have you looked that shit up

because, uh, but that was proprietary engine. It wasn't open source of

Maybe I don't That's ah distinction with some difference in some cases and a lot of non difference in a lot of other cases. This idea that once you have a rendering engine, for example, let's take that example what you haven't rendering engine that sits on 85% of the Internet. What happens if we can answer this question pretty well because we saw what happened. Developers start developing just against that, they stopped developing against protocols. So you stop having a healthy ecosystem because you turn away from protocols and you turn towards implementations. And those implementations are quote unquote owned, whether it's equity owned in terms of companies dominating or its mind share owned. Or it's controlled in terms of having an outside influence by, ah, small number of people who set the tone and their own. There's power, like whether we call that power open source that we call a proprietary or whatever we call it its power. And having a lot of power invested in a few people has a tendency to corrupt. The software world has just endless examples of what happens when we consolidate power into the hands of a few people,

and it's very rarely a great story. Let's take the ideal stage. I think there was some time in, like 2008 or whatever, whether we're like three different rendering engine Firefox and Chrome and Internet Explorer and Whip Kit, they all had. I don't remember what it was like, maybe 20% each. Right, that was a better whip.

That was a terrible if it was such a pain in the butt. Yes, it was a pain. I say this as someone who was on the Web standards project because the standards weren't there. I think that was part of the problem. So the standards were not moving fast enough. There was no HTML five. It was, like bad except shame on each meal for a CSS wasn't being iterated fast enough. That's why the standards fell behind the browsers. And then the browsers would have quirks and the implementation of the same thing because they weren't able to work together in the same engine. Like, I love the idea that, like if the Microsoft folks find something wrong with a CSS attribute that's being interpreted different way, if they fix that second go upstream, or they can have a public discussion on the bug track of a chromium and argue a Google or whoever it might be about, what's the right answer? Because we'll search for truth, not just for whatever you know, different engineers building the same thing happened have is the quirks of the implementation.

But you understand, I have given up on protocols right, like we might as well hand the Internet, then to chromium and just say like a let's falled a ll. The standards bodies you as an implementation. Whatever you say will be truth anyway, So why bother with this whole thing of protocols? Well, I think the Internet in his magic is the magic of protocols. It is the magic of the verse, different implementations and that magic is not free. You're absolutely right. It is much easier for, let's say, Apple to control exactly how the AP I should work for Objective C or Swift or whatever they control the whole goddamn thing. Now, if that was,

all there was in the developing for the Internet was the same thing that we were all just subjects of a single project and not a set of protocols. Fucked like that erases a huge part of why I'm interested in developing for the Web and why I'm not that keen on developing for native platforms, right? It really is a struggle between what do you go forward? You go for implementations. Will you go for protocols?

I think if you look at the history of the Web, all the most successful protocols are often accompanied by referencing limitations or great open source software to implement them. And the typically were distractions of things people were doing versus architectural astronomy of like what would be the theoretical thing that theoretical We're just gonna make the standard almost fails every single

but you need D you need the competition between the actual

different you need. People need to be free to experiment, and then you standardize what works. Yes. And that's what I do that

if you have a single, uh, let's say rendering engine, for example chromium sit on 85% of the planet. There's not gonna be any experimentation. We went through that, i e.

It creates a big fat target. If you can knock him off the king of the Hill, you have a huge, very like, true don't really. There's like thousands of entrepreneurs trying to DC

WordPress right? But until that happens, or it doesn't we go through the dark ages exactly as we went through the Dark Ages with AII 6 96 sitting in 90% of the market. Anyway, I'm just making the

argument that the sex was totally closed. Like I would say, a big difference is that you know, you talked about monocultures and grains, but we're not a grain where the soil all right, that's 50,000 plug ins and themes built on top of it. And you can literally modify the code or use the frameworks or just write your own and have a really, really interesting alternative. I think also a big difference. You know, 85% when I talk about that. Um, that's not a goal. Like I don't wake him in the morning saying, How do I get another percent? Um, it's a trailing indicator.

So it's a trailing indicator of what I get passionate about was like, How do we create the best possible experience for developers and users so that they adopt it? And how do we track how we're doing there? Let's look at the adoption just like you have any sort of metric, Um, but there's nothing we do that tries that game that metric or, like tries to move it specifically. It's just how do we make that better user experience,

which I think is a noble goal to have as an individual company? I'm trying assume out and like, what should the gold be for our industry? Should the gold for our industry be that like one company? One Project one rendering engine when blogging engine ends up with all the spoils in essence. And I go like, you know what? That works out pretty well for the individual company. So I can see, like with a CEO hat, go like, Well, that's what I should be doing. And then I also see that So with the rest of us in the peanut gallery worrying about the health of the industry and of the Web, and we should be countering that we should be looking at, like, how can we make sure we don't end up in that situation? This reminds me, actually have replaced the settlers of Catan

times. It's

pretty fine, great game. And so it's like a multiplayer game, and it's all sort of collaborative in the start, and what I've found whenever it's played, Catan is whenever one player pulls ahead, sort of towards Thean face of the game would usually happened. Is this very healthy thing that all the rest of the players go like, Yeah, let's stop trading with that person. And that's exactly how I feel about this, where it's funny we didn't even actually introduce this. So the block that we run at base camp single versus nose runs on WordPress you guys help this? Get on that and we run on the, um, posted version. It's been great.

We sort of evacuated from medium and we got on this platform, and we've been happy in that. But I sit a little bit now with the taste in my mouth that, like I should be one of the other players in the end stage of the settlers of Catan and simply for the health off the Internet to make it as grand as possible. Like maybe we should have made a different choice. Not because what press is not great, Not because you're not great. Not because there's not a great team, because all that shit is a relevant to the health and long term sort of vibrancy of theater net. This is what I advocate when it comes to process a process agency that I basically refused to serve the Web in chrome. I only use chrome when I have two, which is usually when some fucking developer has decided the chrome is the Internet and you have to use chrome to use your application. What happens? You

must test in it, though when you build things,

we have people at the company who do that. So I mostly relying on people doing that because obviously you have to their dominant right, like that's the sports of dominance, but that I try to spend my time in Firefox and I tried to spend my time and safari because those are two minority browsers and just that alone is worthy of doing it right. So to get back to this point is that if this was do anything that we cared about the base camp, I want to go like you know, what we should have picked. Whatever number two or three or four or five or 10 is if we want healthy Internet. That's that's not in the hands of one company, one project or whatever. At base camp, right? We make commercial software, We sell commercial software, we're in the market. You could define that. Let's just find this project management,

your company communication. You could define that as a slice of cake, and you could say we have I don't know 1% of that. Well, however you slice the cake, maybe have 5% 2% whatever percent we have, I think it's possible to be a capitalist to run a company and not have aspirations of domination. And I guess I'm just projecting here. Like I wish that more companies thought like that. I wish that when I read you go like, Oh, man, imagine we just got to 85% would not be sort of kind of awesome. There's something would kick in and you just go like, OK, I could see that just in this narrow view of this one company, maybe that would be awesome and would be awesome for our investors and shareholders and me and that sort of relatively small

heart. It'd be it'd be awesome for the Web, actually.

Is that your final answer?

Really Attacking a strong man. I'm just just be the 85 is a result, right? It's not the goal. Sure shouldn't. That's really, really important to say. And to think like Facebook or whatever

would argue the same. They are where they are because they're awesome.

No, no, no. Because oh, I think I feel a little caught up in some very rightful concerns. You have about one proprietary companies and to just kind of startup funding culture in general. Um, you know, if There's two things I will ask you to consider. No, do it now. But like post this conversation, you give me a lot to think about as well. It's one that open source platforms are fundamentally different from proprietary platforms in their adoption. And in fact, I bet you can think of lots of cases where, when the open source platform gets widely adopted,

it becomes more like a protocol than a product. It becomes something that a lot of diversity and interesting things are built on. And to that, it's not zero sum. You know, we're not talking about land or not talking about sellers like a time. We're not talking about fields. We're talking about the digital world, and there is so much possibility and abundance created by, you know, the platforms that came before us, WordPress cannot exist was so much that were built. On top of that, people don't think about anymore. They don't think about the Web server. They don't think about their database server.

They don't think about the language. Sometimes if they're using it as a consumer point of view, and so were we used to think about those things a time I used to choose your blogging engine or your website engine by kind of the technology stack. And now people look at the user interface and the future. Maybe they will have really good your eyes and they're looking at Who helps you meet your business goals that much like I don't know. But the layers of distraction that uses need to think about changes and that means is not zero sum it all Shopify. I can build, ah, $30 billion business 10 times our evaluation on a small slice of the domains or users. There's so much opportunity out there, and I think there's gonna be more every day. And it's not any sort of like trailing adoption or standardization on an open source. Stack doesn't prevent that at all.

I think. Good points, I'd say for me looking at something like Shopify, why, I've been a little bit of a cheerleader. I mean, I'm horribly biased on the topic of Shopify bus because of a phase rails rails. Not only do they use rails, they helped bring the pipe went forward with CEO Tobie was one of the original rails, core members, good friend of Toby. So if anyone should take the following with that amount of disclaimer. Um, my argument would be that that is exactly how I love to see the expression of the marketplace that someone can build a valuable business without capturing the market. Then you can build value. As as you say. They've built up one of our 30 $40 billion business off 1%.

That, to me, is a beautiful expression of capitalism actually working. I mean, you could then argue about Smith Wesson might have 1% of the gun market, like, Well, isn't that beautiful capitalism? And maybe not like, the particulars matter, too. But this idea that, like, they're not the amount of power vested in them t to get to that value is very low versus that's what I worry about. The amount of power that gets vested into these dominating platform is huge. And I think we're actually overdue a conversation in open source about power.

And we've been coy about it for a long fucking time in ways that have helped not serve people but actually end up silencing them or sidelining them or whatever, that there's a tremendous amount of power. I mean, a lot of open source projects are kind of give, ah, wink and a notch to it. And I think in Python they called Guido the best Neverland dictator for life. Like what is that, if not an expression of the power that someone holds again, doesn't mean it's the same kind of powers capitalism, power and that I literally own the means of production. And I can fire you or whatever but its power nonetheless. And I think that power deserves to be interrogated. And, I think, ultimately needs to be constrained that the open source world and the world of software and the world of the Internet is better when power is checked and powers better checked when no one sits on basically all off

the pie at. At this point, I would like to offer to listeners that you go to the Wikipedia page for a benevolent dictator for life. You'll see David Hi, Mary Hansen for Ruby on rails on the page, By the way, I'm there, too, for WordPress. I thought

it was funny. I was just I actually on a Django podcast yesterday and we were talking about this and they were like, Oh, isn't this great like your benevolent dictator for life? Fuck no, it's not great. In fact, if there's any monitor or label that gets attached to me, that really makes me question what I do would rails. It's that that that isn't inherently to me. On my both aesthetics and ethics, revolting term, this idea that there is this dictator and, like, we should just be happy because they happen to make good choices right now. Ah, fuck like that.

It's not a good governing model. And I think, like, see, what was the other scandals that just happened this month? Right? Free software moment, right, Stillman. I mean, it was more or less the sort of benevolent and dictator for life of that organization. Yeah, he kind of was,

He's He's not on the Wikipedia. For what it's worth, I

think most people would give him that life or would have given him that label. Did he A crew substantial power from that? Oh, absolutely right that he misuse that power in all sorts of ways. Abso fucking lutely. And this is what makes me uncomfortable about this whole thing that once we set it up as though we're just a bunch of benevolent dictators. First of all, when you get that shit from, like, how do you know that? That just benevolence this is coming from This is describing things to people that you really can't. And I think in the case of Stallman, now is clearly played out a slight that was not a accurate label in either case, that we deserve to interrogate all this power that's flowing through open source, if anything, that the discussion right now. And funnily enough,

I'm often on the other side of the spectrum here about, like the expropriation of free, open source labor and how it have a tendency to accumulate wealth to a handful of highly successful companies. And then you have a bunch of programmers to basically get none out of it, right? The irony here is I just argue the other side of that of that coin and that you should do open source for for sort of other reasons. But I think the discussion itself I'm very much interested in because it is about power and about making the power explicit and not hiding behind this. Okay, it's just open towards everyone could do everything and like anyone could forget and so on. It just doesn't happen. And like we have enough history now off like what? 30 40 years of open source to see what actually happens and what doesn't happen. Stallman happened. Major forks that turn out great very rarely happened. And when they do happen, they're usually like you said with Maria de B and my sequel,

because the person who was behind my sequel sold it for $1,000,000,000 then decided, Well, fuck it. I'm just gonna make my own thing again, right? It's not exactly just like, Oh, it was just a common person who rose up and made a fork, and it turned out great, like the number of cases you can sight of that is very small list,

but it's a sometimes they're big. I mean, WordPress itself being an example. It was a fork of an existing platform, I think, in The Benevolent Dictator, which is an interesting sidebar. I really like the benevolent part and again, I think on the dictator, for I don't love that terminology. I don't think either of us would be attached to that. But in other places, you know, cos they typically have a CEO countries. They typically have presidents or something like that. And all these systems are set up to have checks and balances, whether that's aboard or shareholders or voters or things like that,

you know? And if you don't like your country, for example, it's really actually difficult to move to another one and opt into, like, a different governance system. Uh, but in software, it is 100 1000 million times easier than like Uprooting your family and your friends and everything like that and moving to a different country. So and actually, Free Software Foundation's a good example that myself and many others drifted away from them over the years. So even though they started things, their influence got smaller and smaller and smaller as they took positions which didn't really align with the future where people were going, where their constituents will be, that developers, users,

donors, whatever, um, we're headed. She sent that Rails is doing great work. Press is doing great, etcetera. I think we've been responsive to changes in the marketplace and why I think that term started as a joke. There is something interesting that with a lot of these open source products. There's almost nothing you can name on the list that has a committee based leadership structure, and I think about that all the time. Like why is it difficult for committees or an alternative? Governor structures Great, really great software. Back and software front and software. You typically have something more like a director of a movie or ah,

you know, conductor Orchestra. There's no perfect analogies because its software it's different but like differently have like a person with whom a great deal of decision making power for determining the platform rest. And that is often a good thing for the health and quality of the platform. And I don't mind it as much because we have these checks and balances of with open source for King or you know, all sorts of different ways that people can opt out of that person's power.

I can see the advantages of sort of director of like, how do you get good software? Right? But I think the checks and balances balances. They start to fall apart as you accumulate power. And I think it's one of the reasons, for example, that it took what 30 years of incriminating stories about Stall meant for that to finally fall, you say like, Well, that's accountability. Yeah, accountability over the course of three decades. It's kind of some slow moving wheels of justice here. If you take, say, a WordPress at 85% like how slow would the wheels of justice and accountability move vs If word presses just like 5% of the market,

like what are the switching costs for someone to vote with their feet, right to walk out? I'll just go to any of the other 20 platforms that all have 5% of the market, and I'll take my stuff there versus Well, I have to uproot. Maybe not to the level of nation state, but, like just look at how hard is for people to fucking quit technology in general. How many people have quit Facebook regardless of the I mean hundreds of scandals at this point, right? Facebook has suffered essentially zero accountability for all their malfeasance. Uh, and it's not just Facebook. Look att uber look at all these other companies where they end up in the manana monopolistic situation. The inertia of that monopoly is so strong that all their malfeasance essentially gets swept away. If you look at the landscape of technology today,

I don't think it's a landscape of fucking accountability. Power has its own inertia, and that is a problem in an off itself, regardless of how benevolent it's being wielded. We should be incredibly suspect off concentration, not the least because we have all these cases of concentration out in the wild. There were the opposite of benevolent, right? Like I don't think anyone would use the word benevolent about Facebook or Google or Amazon or uber right like there.

But those are all proprietary, agree, right? There's an interesting thing that has.

That's why I want to use the broader samples of, like, say, Stallman to the Free Software Foundation. So just to say that, like,

that's not a good example, either, because he was pretty irrelevant, to be honest, like he would go around and give talks the same doctors gave for 20 years. But he wasn't like running something big or something

influential. You mean he surely was the hope that I don't think we can agree. It's not the same

thing, and we can't not a product that people are using. I think there's an interesting thing there, which is, Well, first, I'm not gonna defend Facebook or any of those companies like I'm not the person that I'm probably more in agreement with you. Anything but for open source is an interesting pattern that the bigger it gets more widely adopted. Some sort of open source standard is that actually easier. It moves to get move away from it. And in WordPress this case, for example, if you were on one of the really small CMS is and you want to migrate to another one, you would actually have a hard time with that data migration because no one's built that kind of system that go in between those. In fact, what might be your easiest thing to do is migrate toward press and then get it back out of work for us into this other small thing you want to move to. And the reason for that is as worthless has gotten bigger and bigger,

and it's got open day. It's open source. People have built great importers and exporters for it. So you know everyone starting a CMS today is gonna have a WordPress importer because it's got lots of usage, and so that creates a de facto, more freedom of the thing that has more concentration of usage. Where if you were on with small things like again, you'd find it more challenging the

switch, Yes, but as a veil, in my opinion, because, as you just said at the at the top of the show here, that, like WordPress is growing at, what, 10 x, the next competitor him several times the next competitors, like so So the mathematics with stats of it is that, like even if that is a possibility, it's not a possibility that's being wildly used. Part of why I'm interested in having this conversation is because I'm wrestling with, like, all these topics myself,

and I'm sort of I'm taking on some of these topics sort of a harder line. Perhaps then I wouldn't normally take just to explore the territory now that in other cases of this discussion, I think I'm taking exactly the line that I kind of feel it is true. I just used to get your take on the tumbler thing, and maybe this is this is slightly off the agenda list, but the reason I'm interested is because you just said, Well, I'd hate to be compared to, like, the likes of Facebook and so on. And one of the other things that kind of tingled my warning bells a little bit was when you guys bought Temple. First of all, which I thought was great. Like most observers of the tech industry, wouldn't necessarily point to Verizon. It's let's use the word we're using earlier is benevolent,

right? So getting tumbler out of the claws of that thumbs up, getting it at a fucking what, 98% discount, triple thumbs up. Just I love all that right, like plundering basically back from, like the excesses of Yahoo and so forth. But where I am a little bit worried is later on in that announcement. Or maybe it was an interview you were talking about tumbling. You were talking about its potential and you were talking about his potential particular for marketing. And this'll is one of the reasons I think that, like we are in such a shit hole right now in the industry and with Facebook and Google and so on is because surveillance capitalism is devouring the world. When we said, like software is eating the world advertisement based software Seeding the world, I'd say.

And Tumbler. Mmm. Believe self advertisement, right? Unlike, See what press? How do you think that that might change your business in your perspective, that all of a sudden now you own an advertisement based business and to grow that advertisement? Don't you need to basically do what everyone else is doing and introduce some surveillance capitalism and sell ads based on use of profiles, just interests? Because I don't even see, like, how does Tumbler otherwise make money? Yeah,

this is a good question

now, So I think this

is also meeting because I've been wrestling with this a lot. By the way, it's been a pleasure to talk. We didn't mention it earlier, but rails text pad on WordPress, always to be on the same server used to log in S S h and C like I run w like you'd be locked in their d h h is logged on to feel completely overlapping,

intertwined nous of the history of the web, which is, I think is also like that. This is such a privilege to be ableto have these discussions with people been around for the duration, right? Like there's not that many. I think that, like, are still around in this sense of leading major projects, or whatever you wanna call it and sort of wrestling with the evolution of the industry that we saw it all the way from. As we just talked about like 2001. I started blogging how to know when you started blogging, but 20 years of blogging? Let's call it that and just see how the whole thing changes

totally. And by the way, next time we get on, I would love to debate funding and fund raising in the VC model in investment. Let's let's let's get Hewlett part too. All right, so to talk about Tumbler really quickly, um, one. It is true that they right now make all of the money from advertising. It's not a ton. And so automatic This doesn't particularly change. Are like whole map like we're still a subscriber driven company. Actually, you asked how we're gonna watch one way to make money from Tumbler. That's not advertising subscriptions. There's things like selling domains and upgrades and other things that we've done for 10 plus years on wordpress dot com.

They've been really successful that I'm curious to see what sort of flavor a version of that could be interesting for the tumbler community, and it might be something totally different, like maybe no one cares about buying the domain there. But they would love to be able to support creators because somebody creatives and fun artists and everything on tumbler like you could have like a built in patron like model so you could support a creator you love at a price, they said. And you know, 95% of that award goes to the Creator directly, without, like, a ton of gentleman. So that's that's a business. We'd be totally interested on the advertising side. I am curious to see what we can do because Tumbler does have a critical mass of people spending time there. And, as you said, the alternatives in the social networking space tend to be less privacy focused.

So taking some of what we love about privacy and use eccentricity, um, combining. That's with a network which is starting a little bit. De novo, so kind of from scratch, building about advertiser base and things. How

do you even sell that without going down to Bill's capitalism. Are you going to sell that advertisement based on, like the visitor and a profile of them or based on the content that's to me is really I know this is a whole another, maybe even to podcasts to dive into, but to me, the dividing line on the Internet today, whether advertisement is sold unsafe the doctor go model were they sell based on search terms, or you sell it on the Googles last Facebook model, which is to sell it based on the visitors and profiles of them.

Yeah, I think you want architect the system to hold the principles that you think are important. And by the way, like we said earlier, we do plan to open source as Muchas tumblers possible, including switching the back in to WordPress. So what? You'll see that what I'm interested in is, well, it's really more in interest. So it's closer the duck duck, Go or read it, then it is based on user targeting. And the reason for that when the cool things about tumbles, you can have different identities on it, so you gonna have an identity that follows all your favorite comics and identity that follows all your favorite programming blocks and so logically, like just for my naive advertising mine.

Like I should see different ads in the context of what I'm following on different account, yes, and so that it's not easy, by the way, one you need to understand the content. And two, I think you have to go out there and sell it separately if you're just kinda plugging in standard. AII units. Programmatically high is better type advertising model. You are gonna end up with either untargeted things or or three, or networks that night compromised privacy. But if you can have true native ads and I know we've, I get the sense Google's in your favorite. But but I think we should go back like 20 years and think, What innovation AdWords waas This idea that it wasn't loading a sterile networks, right?

It's it's just sewing a clean text. Add that loaded with the page was fast, then have images or punched a monkey. Flash gifts or anything like that was actually pretty clear model. And so I love the idea of this native advertising where the thing that's the ad is the same as the thing on the network. So people go to Tumbler to read post on the poster. Interesting. They could have all sorts of fun stuff. Like what if all the ads were post and so there wasn't attracting picture. There wasn't anything unless you clicked on that, I guess. And you need to go just kind of Twitter, right? Lynn Twitter is one examples of creating this Instagrams actually done some interesting stuff. There are other. Like you said they are a part of Facebook has the most

user data. I would say my main issues like which adds, Show up in the feet. Are they based on the topic of what your people you're following or they, based on some elaborate profile, has been gathered up about you because these people will suck up all sorts of data sources to build like, Hey, that's how you can target 14 to 17 year olds who live in Florida and, like I don't know. So that's why I was just curious where you felt really shown that if like, are you going to use basically information about the visitors that are outside of the universe of Tumbler? To show the mats. That to me is surveillance capitalism, or are you gonna go Sort of deduct up, go approach of showing. Or, as you said, like, just based on like what I choose to follow while I'm on Tumbler?

Yeah, it's like I said, a really difficult business problem. So on day one, what's there is kind of more programmatic cats, So they're probably either buying broad things. They're not very targeted in general or based on broad demographics. Um, going forward, what I think could be really fun is you know, if you can go from having 100 advertisers to 1000 or 2000 you could do a lot more of that sort of interest based starting that felt like, really relevant and exciting to people didn't feel like something that was a record scratch when you're in a tumbler feet. But to do that, you have tohave a direct sales team. We need to onboard all those advertisers like that as a non trivial problem. That's exciting, and we're gonna go for it,

but it might not work. The good news is we have a great business model that we've been doing for over a decade now. with the rest of automatic, which is subscriptions. And I just love that like your customers are your customers and you're providing them something really good. And as long as they get more value than what they're paying you that, keep doing so. And that's also in spirit. Spry brothers and signals like y'all been doing that forever as well. That's my native model, but I'm always open to trying new things. So this is a little bit of a new thing for us, and I love the check back in a year or two and I talked about

how it went well, I love that sentiment, and I was about to give you an amen and a hallelujah. But I will hold 1/2 feet to the fire instead. And, uh, I

would expect nothing else

and track it on. Well, I think we should have been going Ah, good bit over the hour here, and I really want to thank you for your time and taking your time to wrestle with this. I don't pretend to have the answers, even devised strong opinions on him, and I think the, uh, the answers actually will shake out from strong engagements and strong arguments back and forth and the dialectic loss of us like to call it of trying to figure out what's the right way to go and what's the right way to take the Internet wants toe. How do we do right by the Internet like that's been one of the themes that's been bouncing around in my head for a couple of years. At least, that there's Hey, I've been working on the Internet for 20 years. Yes, it's it's it's great to continue to work a base camp on DDE that but there's also this other aspect of it I serve, Ah,

a greater purpose, really. And I try to say that without gagging, because the word purpose have kind of been hijacked by, uh, the likes of we work and so on, expanding the world's consciences and all this way where we take these esteemed words and we rented the meaningless by laundering them through this commercial tumbler. Tumblr pun not intended. Yes, thank you so much. And I hope we can continue the conversation about the venture capital in another episode. I'd love to line that up because, uh, I mean, you have the goods right from from the inside, sitting on 500 million ish of expectations. I'd love to hear how that feels and like where that takes a company and how it helps her distracts from the direction you want to go to. And, uh, maybe we can explore that and not episode

and thank you for having a reasonable conversation on the Internet like that's too rare. And I really enjoyed the debate. Thanks a ton, Matt. This was awesome. Rework is produced by Whalen, Wang and Me. Shawn Hilder. Our theme music is broken

by designed by clip art. You can find David on Twitter at D H.

H. Matt is on Twitter at photo mat. You can find us at rework podcast, and a website is rework dot f m.