Sharing some personal news: I recently joined Automattic (makers of WordPress.com, Jetpack and WooCommerce) to help build better products for our customers. I’m very grateful to Kinsey and Matt for the opportunity.
Over the last few years, I’ve explored entrepreneurial projects and also invested full-time in early stage African technology companies. Throughout the exploration process, I realized that I missed building products and my motivation for investing was the desire to learn about new businesses and to support entrepreneurs in their journey.
I joined Automattic because the company was a great fit in a number of areas that I’m passionate about:
- Empowering entrepreneurs with world-class tools: The cost of starting technology companies has come down dramatically and access to quality tools has improved dramatically. Entrepreneurs now have access to services to allow decentralized, asynchronous product development, open-sourced products they can build on top of, cheap hosting of content, and tools that allow a deep understanding of their data. These products typically have low entry costs that scale up as the businesses grow. This allows entrepreneurs all over the world to solve problems during their early stages without a lot of access to funding and without sacrificing quality. Automattic builds products to empower entrepreneurs.
- Distributed work: I believe that talent is roughly evenly distributed, and enabling employees to work when they feel productive and choose where they want to live will allow companies both access to better talent and improve retention of talent. I’ve seen this firsthand through investing in tech companies in Africa that have distributed engineering teams with technical architects from abroad who collaborate with local engineering teams highly effectively. Automattic is fully distributed with ~900 people working in ~70 countries – check out https://distributed.blog/ (and Matt’s podcast) if you’d like to learn more about how we work.
- Decentralization of creators: Creators all over the world are able to express themselves and find audiences that are interested in their content. They now have the tools to express their voice and discover, grow and engage their audiences. Bloggers are the new authors, YouTubers are the new tv producers and Podcasters are the new radio hosts. Automattic builds tools for creators.
- Mobile-first internet users: There are billions of people in emerging markets who will experience the internet primarily through their mobile device, both as creators and as consumers. It’s a fundamentally different way of experiencing the internet compared to our reference points as adults in developed markets. There is a gap in high quality tools for mobile-first entrepreneurs and a significant opportunity to build these tools from first principles. Automattic is well placed to create this mobile experience.
I’m really looking forward to building products for entrepreneurs and creators all over the world at Automattic.
Thanks for reading 🙂
