Blog of Stu West, advisor and startup business builders in Silicon Valley
Last night’s EFF’s Pioneer Awards were a sincere and moving tribute to some amazing supporters of openness. This NSA-themed parody video of “Blurred Lines” is just plain hilarious:
Policy wonks and stand-up comics passionate about the same thing? Cool.
(HT to GigaOm)
A fun new book came out today by the talented Scott Berkun, a former Automattic employee. It’s called The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
The WSJ reported this morning that Tiger Global has upped its investment in Automattic. Our founder Matt provided some more color on his blog. I’m really excited to continue working with the team at Tiger Global. I want to add a big thanks to Dave Barrett and the entire team at Polaris Partners, who have been great supporters of and advisors to Automattic over the years.
A upright bass, piano, banjo and horn ensemble you can dance to? Inspiration from Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Springsteen? A drummer that can lead four-part harmony? Impossible? Nope. What is impossible is staying in your seat while these guys play.
I’m happy to welcome new investor Tiger Global to the Automattic / WordPress.com family. From Matt’s blog:
…there has been a large secondary transaction in Automattic stock, about $50M worth. “Secondary” means that it’s existing stockholders, like the earliest investors or employees, selling stock to another investor versus money going into the company (“primary”). It was led by Lee Fixel at Tiger Global, one of the behind-the-scenes quiet geniuses that has previously invested in SurveyMonkey, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, Square, Warby Parker… Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained. The minority of stockholders that elected to participate are holding on to the vast majority of their shares. We’re building an independent company that’s going to be a growing part of the fabric of the web for many years to come, so allowing early investors to lock in some returns releases any short-term pressure there might be on the company for a liquidity event and allows us to focus fully on the long road ahead.
Cool observations from new Automattic employee Jason Munro.
On the first of May, I started a new job at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. I was hired as a “Code Wrangler,” but to date I have not written a lick of code. This is because for the first three weeks new employees must participate in a customer support rotation. I know what you are thinking: “Let the software engineers communicate directly with customers? I saw Office Space, so I know that’s a bad idea!” or maybe “Bummer, customer service is a thankless soul-sucking quagmire of loathsomeness.” Surprisingly, neither one of these normally valid assumptions is true in this case. So what makes working at Automattic so special that software engineers can enjoy communicating directly with users and customer service ends up being rewarding and fun? Quite a few things actually.
The customer service team is known as the “Happiness Team,” and its members are “Happiness Engineers.” When I…
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