Rapid Response: Remote teams, w/WordPress/Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Global hiring is such a headache when you're building fast, but companies like Eleven Labs are scaling effortlessly with deal. They quadrupled their workforce in twenty twenty five. Without hiring an HR team. Build your global team with deal. Visit deal.com slash MOS and start expanding your business today. That's D E L

dot com. Slash M O S. Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more.

Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscot com slash apply. Twenty six.

Hi listeners. We are currently hard at work on the next season of Masters of Scale. And just like everyone else. We are grappling with the challenges brought on by the corona outbreak. A big one of these

is a sudden unexpected shift. We have all taken to remote working. Just like so many of you, I am also working from home. In fact

I'm recording this podcast from home, which is why I sound a bit different than usual. There are so many companies and entire industries that have transitioned to fully remote work. This transition is different for everyone. But there is a lot to learn from founders that have been all in on the work from home culture since long before this crisis. So we've drawn on some unreleased material from the Masters of Scale interviews for a series of bonus episodes.

Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress, which is a fully remote company. So he's the perfect person to talk to about how to approach work life. In the corona era. I recently interviewed Matt for the show and wanted to share a part of our conversation. There are so many great insights that I think you'll find helpful.

We'll have a full episode with Matt in the next season of Master the Scale, but I wanted to get this segment out to listeners as soon as possible. And if your company has found an interesting solution to the challenges of the current crisis, Send us an email at Hello at mastersascale dot com. We'll look for a way.

To amplify your idea. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Matt Mollenweg. So obviously one of the things that a lot of companies are confronting right now with COVID nineteen

is look, we wanna be good for our employees, wanna be good for our society, we wanna not make group aggregations happen so as to Spread. Maybe even hopefully contain. The spread of the disease. But now this is an entirely new muscle for us.

This isn't the way they were operating. What's the advice that you would give these companies For Quickly putting some of the Key things in place to make distributed work work.

I wish I had a time machine. I would go back. So what I was saying last year, months ago, et cetera. Pick a day a week. For everyone to work from home. Call it work from home Wednesdays.

And see what sort of stress lines that shows. What works well on that day and what's hard. And then identify the things that are hard that day and try to work around them. This is probably number one thing. What you will find from that is Documentation and communication becomes really key.

So I joke that that's a level one autonomy. Like take whatever you did in the office and not do it at your computer. Not in the office. That is a really, really valuable exercise. And you'll find silly things like A lot of people have like weird VPN setups or other things that are just a barrier or they're unable to access like

the the internal employee handbook or some tool. And just like work out all those things. Those are basics. That's level one. That's also a little bit like when movies first were created, moving pictures. The first films were just one camera watching a stage and they do a play, right? It wasn't actually like taking advantage of the medium or what you could do with film or cinematography or anything like that. So that's level one, right? Level two is when you start to say, Okay, what's actually enabled by it's being distributed that's more powerful. So that's when you start to look at okay.

Actually, a remote meeting is a lot better when you have one person, one screen. Let's start investing in headsets and maybe even better cameras or lamps for people's desks. So like people look and sound professional. Wherever they might be. You start to get a little bit of could this meeting have been an email? Like it's it's a good opportunity to like re examine some things you might just be doing by default. that you could get the same outcome with a different process, one that might be a lot more efficient.

Level three is what I think of as asynchronous. So level two you're still synchronous. Level three you can move from synchronous to asynchronous. When you can become asynchronous as an organization, it unlocks so much productivity. And so much autonomy. For you and your colleagues.

Think of it like even if a company had a policy that you could leave during the day to pick up your kids in school. It might be socially awkward. If all your colleagues were there. Feed up. Drive away from two to three PM every day.

So there's almost like some social norms or mores. that discourage things that philosophically the company might be totally okay with. Once you're not in that office environment, those go away. And someone could very easily design the day, and many people automatically do. Where even though they work Full workdays, just as hard as anyone in the office, if not harder.

They can drop their kids off and pick their kids up every day from school. So you can find those moments of high leverage. But as a point when it might only take 30 minutes. But It's in the middle of the day and it could have a big impact on A loved one or yourself. Exercise during the day.

One thing I like to do that I would find too awkward to do in office is in between meetings and stuff, I just like to do some exercises, some squats, some pushups, just like little micro things throughout the day. Could I do that in office? Yes. Would I feel super weird? Yes. Uh so you know take advantage. Maybe that's level four. When you start to really embrace

Little microhabits are are ways you can improve your day. I have a candle on my desk right now. I love candles. There's something about them relaxes me, they smell good. I don't think you can do that in a office, right? If everyone had a candle, it would be a disaster. You'd probably set the smoke alarms off. But you know, when you're working from home, you can design your environment to be what suits you really well. And wow that I think of it that

Once you have that taste of freedom, it's hard to return to your previous state. I think there's an element of that happening unintentionally right now. What. People doing distributed work. So we're gonna have this temporary crisis. Hopefully it's short, hopefully it passes. But when you return to the office,

Reimagine what you're doing. Try that one day a week when everyone works from home. Maybe open up a little bit. Yeah. Saying we're maybe one day a week in the office versus Five days a week in the office. By the way, how much we'll be able to save that currently goes to landlords, both directly from companies having to pay to have a space for A hundred percent load of the company.

All the time. Well, maybe it only needs to be twenty percent, but also how much of each person's paycheck is going to landlords. Because they want to have a reasonable commute, so they need to live close to these kind of high value areas, Mountain View, Cupertino, whatever. That all gets unlocked. And you can then take that commute time, take that part of your salary that's going towards that, and apply it to something that can make a really big difference in your life.

Yeah. By the way, is there any question on the distributed work that you think I should ask you that I haven't? So you know the management writer Peter Drucker? Mm-hmm. He has a book called A Daily Drucker. And it's a compilation where it's like one little page from his

Fast. Array of writing. That's true every day. And I keep it on my desk and I actually read a page every morning. And what's interesting is a lot of this was written in the seventies and eighties. Hm.

Pre kinda even internet and stuff. And it's a hundred percent relevant. You know most of the issues. that I find challenging scaling a distributed company. are the same as my friends at Dropbox, Facebook, whatever their company might be, that's in a office. You know, as soon as a in person company starts to be on more than one floor. You run into the same challenges.

You know, at Google It takes so long to get between the buildings, people just do video conference even though they're on the same campus. 'Cause they're back to back in meetings. So I think that you can really embrace These things and the challenges aren't that different.

So what makes a great distributed company are is almost exactly the same things that make a great In person company. It's trust, it's communication, it's transparency. It's open mindedness and iteration. Like these qualities If anything use

Being distributed unexpectedly because of office closure, or deliberately, like you're working from home one day a week. As an opportunity to just rethink everything you do. If if this makes the interview, I hope that everyone listening. If you were describing your day to an alien Ha ha. What would it sound like? How would it like just try it.

So much of our lives we live by default. Mm. We do something today'cause we also did it yesterday. And any chance you have to kinda zoom out, reimagine, look at it with a beginner mind or fresh eyes. I think can have a huge impact. on any person's life, regardless of the work situation.

One thing I worry about. with people working from home, because I know I myself, a work from home expert, I'm struggling with it right now. It's distraction. So we're in A crisis, a global crisis. And my vice is definitely news.

Mm. So I have to be conscious and have started to really measure my screen time. I need to time box how long I'm gonna read the latest updates. The thing is going on in the world. And so I'll literally set a timer for twenty five minutes and I'll say, All right, this is done. I'm gonna close all the websites, gonna close all the things.

We have these distraction boxes in our pocket. Uh, we have the some of the smartest people in the world. Getting us to open notifications and look at ads and click on things. And We don't yet have the antibodies for how to resist that.

It's gonna require probably some mistakes. And a lot of Willpower and self discipline. To overcome. the natural distractions of this.

My one worry is that as everyone starts working from home They'll start to face these challenges. In a different way for the first time. And so we might say, Oh, that didn't work. People weren't as productive.

But I don't worry about it too much because I think people are also very distracted in the office. It's it's actually, if anything, easier to slack off when you show up in the morning and the last person to leave and are dressed well and everything like that. Then when you're distributed and the only measure of your productivity is your actual output. It's not whether you said smart things in meetings. It's like did you get the work done? When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.

The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Lear more at creativeplaning dot com slash masters of scale.

Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show.

Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. When you're building remote teams How do you

Foster culture. How do you make the culture of This is who we are. Spread.

the right way and what are the things you do. And in particular one of the things that automatic I think emphasizes I think is a very good thing is a learning culture. Always be learning, don't presume you know stuff. But how do you make that culture work? I think someone's experience of the culture starts from the first day they visit your website and think about applying.

So you start to define what that sort of Employee experiences like From What's it like when they apply? What kind of responses do they get? What sort of qualities do the people they interact with exhibits?

What's the design of those internal tools they're doing? How's the hiring process? What's the offer letter? We put a lot of thought into all those things. Automatic has a creed. Automatic.com slash creed. After reading Dan Ariel's book around I think it's predictably irrational, where if you Read something and sign your name next to it. It means more. On the offer letter after all the legal ease.

But on the page where you sign, we put the creed. So like you're actually signing up for this when you accept the offer. And we just try to be reasonable. Then finally you get onboarded with your team. And so

You do things like Zoom like we're doing now. There's a lot of documentation that we ask people to read. There's these internal blogs you can start to read and catch up on. That makes a huge difference. What if anything have you learned to try to help accelerate the learning? clock of individuals in the organization.

Obviously one that you already talked about is well We shift from email to blogging'cause then we can all see it and learn. having knowledge not die in inboxes is huge. So the collective wisdom of the company can really grow with this internal blogging system. Yeah. Then I

We use an internal learning management system called Sensei. It's actually built on WordPress. You can learn things, quizzes. We started to use that in the WordPress.org community as well for onboarding new contributors. So they can learn more about how a certain system works or how to run a WordCamp or an event or things like that. We find that these things.

Work. Pretty well. To be honest. The X factor is always motivation. So

What I find is that It's never been a better time. to learn things, right? There's there's literally All of the knowledge of humanity at your fingertips. But what holds people back is the presence of motivation.

So I find that if we can get the mastery, autonomy, and purpose in place where people Have The trust to work how they like. They are working for something larger than themselves, that's a purpose than the mastery part of it.

It's different for different people, but we can provide the same information five different ways, as a podcast, as a link to a book, as a blog post, as a whatever, and they'll get it. Yeah. It's huge. The one thing I wish I did a little bit more.

I've been thinking a lot the past few days is just recommend books. Had a few people say to me. Fast week even. So maybe this is recency bias that like they read a book that really changed the way they thought about things. I take it for granted'cause I'm trying to read all the time. I usually read

At least thirty books a year, like and also because I was a new CEO, I was like, Oh, I have to read a ton of business stuff before someone figures out I don't know what I'm doing. So I've started to try to recommend books a bit more. And sometimes it takes people a little while to get through them, but A good book can really shortcut. I think years of trying to learn things from Blog post or podcast or anything else.

What are two or three books that you've recommended, you know, recently or are top of the recommendation list in the last, you know, year or two? Two that come to mind are actually around words and language. Yeah, words create reality. And When you're distributed, more of your communication is written. So it becomes really key.

And the two there, I love, are On Riding Well by William Sinsler. LA Professor. It's as you would expect, beautifully written. The other is from Something a little outside my normal wheelhouse. There's a gentleman named Frank Lunz.

Who's a Republican polster and strategist. Which Ideologically it's separate from me, but I wrote this amazing book called Words That Work. Where he talks about how language can completely change how people perceive the exact same ideas. I think about that all the time.

It's amazing an interface as well, like the copy. can completely transform more than any other design changes how people interact with something. So Uh, those are two I recommend a lot. I love Krista Tippett's on being.

Mm. Amazing. That book changed my life in a lot of ways. I recommend a lot around meditation. Although often then I'll recommend apps than necessarily books.

'cause it's a practice. It's not necessarily you just read about. Yep. The one that was probably most influential on me. really opened my eyes and my world was um Nasim Telebs Black Swan. Right. Yep. And it wasn't just interesting on its own. It has an interesting thesis.

But had so many references and illusions. To other work. that it set me off for several years just trying to like Read some of the things he had, right? That led him there. And that was for me like kind of an intellectual tipping point.

of kind of my awareness of Things going on in the world. I presume you've read Anti Fragile as well,'cause obviously there will be some ties to that in the WordPress ecosystem. I'm obsessed with anti Fred and

I do try to design automatic that it gets stronger in times of adversity. We're going through one right now. So I am Very fascinating to see how the structures we put in place Fair under adversity.

Because A rising tide lifts all votes. In a bull market, everyone looks smart. And we'll find out for ourselves. coincided with success and what actually is a driver of success in this uh more challenging market. I want someone to be able to Changed everything they do.

Just with an automatic. So there's teams that do daily standups, maybe on video even. And there's teams that only communicate through IRC. And that's okay. Whichever is your jam, you can find the team inside Automatic that that fits that. And so we allow a lot of What's the word? Heterogeneity? around working styles and even like software being used, project management, source control within the company.

As part of the Way to help make us hopefully more resilient or even anti fragile in adversity. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Matt. If your company has found an interesting solution to the challenges of the current crisis, Send us an email at hello at masterthe scale dot com.

We'll have another bonus mini episode for you soon. And brand new. Full episodes of Masters of Scale. in April. I'm Reed Hoffman.

Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a Wait What original. The show is recorded remotely using sanitized audio gear. It's hosted by me, Bob Saphion, Masters of Scales editor at large, and Masters of Scale host, Reed Hoffman. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi.

Our producer is Jordan McLeod. Scripts by Christina Gonzalez. Original music and sound design by Ryan Holiday and Daniel Nissenbaum. Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson and Lina Sillicen. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh.

Special thanks to Emily McManus, Sarah Sandman. Adam Heiner, Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin. Charlie Manessis. And Saida Sapia.

Visit masters of scale dot com slash rapid response. To find the transcript for this episode. and be sure to subscribe. to our email newsletter.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.