The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)

**Matt Mullenweg** (0:00)
If you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies, and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals.

**Christina Casioppo** (0:04)
Please put your hands together for Matt Mullenweg.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:07)
Matt Mullenweg has been making some questionable moves recently. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days. 20 plus years of good sentiment burned in days. You were like a 100% beloved hero of open source and internet, and now you're like in this, a lot of people don't like you.

**Matt Mullenweg** (0:23)
If you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress, it's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. Previously, like 1% of the world thought I was terrible, and now I feel like it's up to like 4 or 5%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
People that don't know what the hell is going on, what's just like the high level overview, what's going on?

**Matt Mullenweg** (0:39)
There's a company called WP Engine. By 2018, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silverlake. You know, since 2019, WP Engine has kind of changed a bit. They started using the trademark. They're offering something called WordPress. They refer to it as like a bastardized, hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
Why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy?

**Matt Mullenweg** (0:58)
A lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to get out of bed.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:07)
Today, my guest is Matt Mullenweg. Matt is the co-creator of WordPress, which powers 40% of websites on the internet today, including Whitehouse.gov. He's also the CEO of Automattic, which is valued at over $7 billion, and owns products like wordpress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Gravitars, and Pocket Casts. There is a lot of drama these days around Matt and WordPress and within the open source community, so I thought I'd have Matt on to address many of the criticisms head on that he hasn't addressed in other places, and also just get the full story on what's going on. We also chat about what incepted him to spend over half his life at this point on open source and creating WordPress. Also why products like Llama are what he calls fake open source, and his perspective on AI and open source. Also, how AI is actually trained on open source code, and what that means for the future, and his approach for deciding what companies to acquire within Automattic. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion and Superhuman and Perplexity Pro, and Linear and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Matt Mullenweg. This episode is brought to you by Work OS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where Work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by Work OS, including ones you probably know. Like Versel, Webflow and Loom. Work OS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale, while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control, or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim or user management, you should consider Work OS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.
This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Casioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, joining me for this very short conversation.

**Christina Casioppo** (3:51)
Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:53)
Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?

**Christina Casioppo** (4:01)
Sure. We started Vanta in 2018, focused on founders, helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC 2 or ISO 2701 Today, we currently help over 9,000 companies, including some startup household names like Atlassian, Ramp, and LangChain start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance, centralizing GRC, and accelerating security reviews.