Sixteen years in and now valued at $7.5 billion, Automattic has found a multitude of strides, even as it strives to own ever more of the media market.
Nothing has been automatic about the success of Automattic. Today, for those who haven’t been paying attention, the company looks a bit like an overnight success story.
The tech industry has made a full 180-degree turn with regard to open source in the 16 years since Matt Mullenweg founded Automattic, the commercial backer of open source CMS, WordPress.
WooCommerce began life as WooThemes, a small design firm that didn’t look very different from the many others that created WordPress themes.
It’s impossible to talk about Automattic without talking about remote work. The company is a role model and innovator in this area: It has been entirely remote since 2005, and at 1,700 employees, it
E-commerce is booming as retailers race to transform their brick-and-mortar footprints into online storefronts. By some counts, the market grew an astonishing 42% in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 p
Startups are stories of feverish dreams and obsessive fears. Short of hearing it from the source, a glimpse into the inbox of a founder would be the best way to experience the travails they endure on
Email is the communication medium that refuses to die. “Eventually, every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?” wrote the v
Brands are emotions made physical. The clothes we wear, the media we consume, the devices we use — all signal not only to others what we value and see in ourselves, they also are a way to construct
Many of the stories in our EC-1 series tell tales of startups in the wilderness hacking out green field opportunities. Klaviyo is a different breed of company: One that went into an established market
Our recently published EC-1 on Roblox recounts the origin story and growth prospects of the company. But there’s one more piece to the story: what Roblox’s impact will be on gaming and the broader
Could Roblox create a new entertainment and communication category, something it calls “human co-experience”? When it was a small startup, few observers would have believed in that future. But aft
Gaming has always been a part of human culture, but what may have once been a passive pastime enjoyed by some is now an ultra-competitive and lucrative business market with huge players duking it out
There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of succes
As tech has grown, policy debates have become an important pastime. Today’s tech industry aspires to replace human drivers with self-driving cars, secretaries with AI assistants, permanent jobs with
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. There are two t