WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called on him to step down from his leadership role. He resigned from his leadership role amid his controversial fight and legal battle with hosting company WP Engine.
Not only does Mullenweg intend to stay, but he also thinks about how he will manage his succession plan. He doesn’t want to convey what he helped build on the “committee,” but rather he doesn’t want to pass it on to another CEO who continues to act as a steward to the WordPress community.
In a recently aired episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Mullenweg mostly rehashed the drama surrounding his battle with WP Engine. He believes he is leveraging the open source nature of WordPress to build his business without making enough contributions to WordPress projects and the community. The WP engine is built on WordPress.
Mullenweg also briefly commented on what he saw before about the future of WordPress and the future of hosting companies WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr and other businesses, Automattic.
Mullenweg pointed out that the most “iconic” company of our generation is one where executives maintain a majority of vote management, a factor he considers in his serial planning.
“…I don’t want to hand it over to the committee if I’m gone,” Mullenweg said. “I want to pass it on to someone else who can have a similar role to me. I’m really trying to be a steward.”
“And ultimately there’s that check and balance, because once again, the community can leave, fork the software, and people can change…” he added.
Mullenweg also promoted the role that Automattic itself plays to promote WordPress adoption, referring to how the free version of WordPress.com helped introduce over 100 million people to the software.
“We work in such commercial, non-commercial, open source, concerts. I think it’s a really informed model that we’re starting to see more companies do that.” “It’s actually very exciting to see some of the things that get controversial when we start, like open source and distributed work, being the default for so many exciting new startups and this whole ecosystem.”
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