Visionary Insights into the Web and Beyond with Matt Mullenweg

Ronald: Welcome. And we have a new show lined up for you, which is called Woo Visions. And this one I’m co-hosting with the amazing Kathy Zant, who is the Kadence product manager at StellarWP. And we have the first guest, which is Matt Mullenweg himself. Welcome. It’s really nice to have you on the first session of Woo Visions. So, let me just dive in straight with a first question.

So, I think everybody knows that you are one of the WordPress co-founders, but you also manage, own, and invest in a large portfolio of businesses. And one of which is WooCommerce going back quite a few years now when it was acquired under the name of WooThemes.

The importance WooCommerce has been for WordPress

So, just sticking to that topic, as of course, the title of the podcast is Do the Woo, how important has WooCommerce been for WordPress looking back?

Matt: Hmm. I guess there’s a few different ways to answer that, but the first and simplest is that it was the first time in the history of WordPress that I modified my mission. So, previously, Automattic’s mission, which also overlapped with WordPress, was to democratize publishing. It’s two words, and we doubled it. It became democratized publishing and commerce, and very much so I believe that WooCommerce does take the philosophy, the mission, the sort of extensibility, everything that we love about WordPress and WordPress itself, and then brings it to this use case, which was nascent when we did the acquisition in 2015, but now is becoming pretty dominant, which is this idea that you have a commercial side of the open web as well. And maybe you’re selling something digital or physical or booking time or whatever it might be, but this can be a really, really empowering concept just like publishing was and still is for WordPress itself.

WooCommerce at 20.5% of WordPress sites and what that means for the future

Ronald: Yeah, for sure. It’s been a lifeline for many businesses as well. So, earlier this morning, I checked the statistics on WordPress and 43.2% is the latest famous statistic, but of those, 20.5% have also WooCommerce installed. So, if you look at that trajectory since 2015 and where this is heading to, what is your prediction on that and how important is that figure?

Matt: That’s also remarkable when you think that, to use WooCommerce today, it is a more technical lift than WordPress itself. So, someone either is a little more technical or developer or had a developer help them, probably set up those WooCommerce sites.

Where does that go in the future? Well, WooCommerce will get easier and easier to use with every release. And so, I don’t think it’s ever all the WordPress sites but some good chunk of people might want to have a commercial part of their, even if it’s a personal site, maybe it’s like selling prints from a photo you took or a little members area. Maybe it’s fundraising for a nonprofit. It could be anything that you imagine, but as soon as there’s a credit card or something involved, it brings in an incredible amount of complexity, which is Woo is kind of now like the size and complexity of WordPress itself. It is its own project, which is this big, important, and complex thing that is on a path similar to where WordPress was in its early days of taking this thing that’s really powerful and just making it easier and easier and more accessible and more accessible with every release.

Ronald: Could that also be a danger of its success that, as it becomes more complex, that it becomes too difficult or is that something that Automattic’s so conscious about and wants to work towards, to simplify, to make it easier, more accessible?

Matt: I think very much. If you look at the history of everything I’ve ever been involved in, it’s taking something, making it really powerful, and then simplifying it. So, I sometimes tell folks that we have a Promethean task. He was the God who stole the fire from the gods and brought it to the people. This has all been possible for decades, but it used to cost a million dollars to have a CMS like WordPress and you’d probably spend a year building it, or you’d spend a ton of money paying for it. Same thing for WooCommerce. People used to spend millions of dollars to do what now you can download and Woo does out of the box for free. So, it’s easy to forget that that was just 10 or 15 years ago when these things were quite expensive and quite hard.

The good news is also that it could always be easier. So, as far as we get, WordPress got really easy, but then obviously more complex layouts or richer things were still hard. So, it’s like, “Okay, now we’re going to build Gutenberg,” and Gutenberg will now open up an entirely new set of use cases to an entirely new set of people along our mission of democratizing things, which to me means making it accessible. The sort of means of productions are in the hands of the people.

So, that is, again, the curve we’re doing with WooCommerce. And you can see us doing it with other projects in the future. Automattic has some other things like Tumblr, Jetpack that we work on. With all of them always thinking, “Where are we on that curve,” of sort of flexibility, capability, power, and ease of use.

Company investments and the bigger vision

Ronald: And making investments in other companies. Do you always look at products that can complement each other? Is there a bigger vision as how that can work and support each other?

Matt: Very much so. So, sometimes it’s directly technical, like when something is built on top of WordPress as a plugin, like Jetpack or WooCommerce are. So, that’s very naturally complimentary. When one gets better, it also helps the other and vice versa. And sometimes it’s more of a mindset. So, for example, Day One, which is an app you can run on your phone or your desktop that provides a fully encrypted, what we would call blogging, Day One calls journaling. So, essentially you can have a private, fully encrypted blog. It says, “This cure is one password.” So, you could put pictures of your kids in it. You could use it as a journal. You could put notes from your therapist in it. Whatever was important and private to you, you could put in there, and it’d be fully encrypted and on your device. That’s kind of like a publishing thing. So, it doesn’t share any code with WordPress, but it shares very much a philosophy and a mindset. And I believe it to be highly complimentary.

In fact, one thing we want to do is make it a little easier. Like start a post in Day One, and then publish it to your blog as an example, or have a shared journal where right now journals are kind of single player. What if we could make a multiplayer? So, you could have a shared journal with your family or with your significant other or something like that. It starts to be really powerful, but it’s still blogging at the end of the day, whether you call it journaling or blogging or whatever else, a gratitude journal, it’s essentially what I would call this micro publishing or publishing.

Ronald: But it’s fascinating. I can just suddenly have this glimpse of the future, how we can possibly step away from these hosted social media platforms and have that power back to ourselves again. So, that’s real exciting. I’m just going to head over to Kathy because I’m sure she has so many more questions on this particular topic.

WooCommerce extensions ecosystem and the fueling of growth moving forward

Kathy: Well, I’m very interested about basically there’s a whole ecosystem of plugins that are supportive of WooCommerce. How do you feel that all of these other such as Iconic and other checkout types of add-ons and different ways of customizing WooCommerce. Do you feel like this is a healthy part of WooCommerce and how will it fuel growth going forward?

Matt: Yeah, totally. I think Woo extensions are just like WordPress plugins and that it’s totally open. People can do whatever they like. They can charge for it. They can have it part of the marketplace. They can have it not part of the marketplace. And that’s where something will always happen first.

But just like with WordPress, we want to take the best of whatever is in those extensions and bring it into core or make it accessible to a wider audience. And then the people making extensions will make something new or they’re make the better version of that, or whatever it is. So, there’s always that kind of an adoption curve. So, you can imagine it like early adopters, developers and then it kind of gets into the middle of early adopter or medium adopters or late adopters, where people just pay the money and they get it, but it’s pretty easy to use. And, at some point, it’s just accessible to everyone.

Kathy: Yeah. I mean, it’s obvious that WooCommerce has really fit a need of being able to quickly and easily get commerce going, especially for I think smaller storefronts that are trying to bring wares forward, where there’s obviously larger competition out there that is much more expensive that has a greater barrier of entry for people to get going, whereas WooCommerce helps people get started faster.

The growth of WooCommerce in small and larger businesses

How do you see WooCommerce as a tool for either smaller businesses, larger businesses? Where are you seeing more of the growth in WooCommerce?

Matt: Hmm. Right now, I see it a little bit like a barbell, where it’s skinny in the middle, thick at the ends. So, one place where we’re doing very, very well is when stores graduate from Shopify. They outgrow it. And so, these are big, serious stores, sometimes doing nine figures a year in revenue, a hundred million plus. And they just find the limitations of Shopify SaaS to be too constricting for their business. Or maybe they’re not aligned with the business model where Shopify is going. And so, they want that full control that open source gives you, they want the ease of developments and the ease of hiring developers that WordPress and WooCommerce give you. And they come to Woo. Now, there’s very few businesses that ever make it that far. There’s not a lot of websites, but it’s probably a good part of the GMV that goes through Woo is these bigger sites.

The other end is on the very early, so it’s folks who are already using WordPress and maybe are going to sell a single product, or they have an idea for a store, or it’s yeah. The stores that are just a sparkle in someone’s eye still, or small ones. Also on that end of the barbell could be people who are cost conscious, maybe a Magento or Shopify or Wix commerce, whatever it is it’s too expensive for their businesses or where they are at that moment. And WooCommerce is very inexpensive. It’s either free or the extensions, even if you get all the ones you need, probably looking at a couple hundred bucks a year, not the thousands and thousands the others are going to charge you. So, that’s where we’re seeing a lot of the growth.

Now, the cool thing is that we talked about powerful and ease of use as being the two things we’re always working on. That is serving those two sides of the barbell. So, the powerful is sort of the people graduating from Shopify and other commerce solutions like Magento. I forget the Salesforce one and Fusion or something. They want the power. And then the ease of use is essentially making it that easier on around at the lower ends, which I don’t really think is lower. It’s just like smaller end. It’s like newer.

Kathy: Right.

Matt: But someday, some portion of those new stores are going to be the big giants. And that’s what’s fun. One cool thing that’s always been neat about WordPress is like, “Hey, if you’re a blogger posting once a week photos of your cat, you can do that.” If that blog takes off and becomes the biggest cat blog in the world, like I Can Has Cheezburger did, or like TechCrunch started as just a personal blog and then grew into this media empire. You could be on WordPress the whole way to thousands of authors, millions of posts, et cetera. It’ll work for that very simple use case and also scale all the way into the big one. And that’s also something we want for Woo. We want it to be fine with one product and 10 orders a month, and I want it to be fully scalable for millions and millions of orders a month and hundreds of millions of billions of dollars of transactions going through it.

Handling the large sites and making core efficient

Ronald: I think some of the feedback on that is that it sometimes maybe the reputation of these really large stores that it can’t cope and it’s the database and so on. Do we need more examples of these big stores that literally run hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue through WooCommerce? As a way, you’re sort of publicizing that it can handle that, it can handle medium and very large stores.

Matt: Yeah. We need more examples. We need those examples to be growing. And what’s tough is right now, a lot of these stores don’t have any relationship with WooCommerce. They spend a thousand bucks a year on their Woo extensions, and then they’ll talk to anyone at the store or anything, but they have a very tight relationship and commercially significant one with their web host.

And if you think of the incentives, this is part of why I want to do a lot more WooCommerce hosting and host some of these big stores. If you’re one of these big stores listening to this, please come. I want to host you because when we see a bottleneck, as kind of the people also making the software, we’re like, “Oh, let’s fix that in the core. Let’s make it so the database structure, whatever it is, works to millions of rows here,” and versus a host, more of their incentive is like, “Well, they, for whatever reason, even though it’s open source, feel like they can’t fix the core. So, let’s sell you a bigger box, speeds and fees. We’re going to get you more CPU and more hard disk and more memory on the box.” And then they’re just going to sell you kind of a bigger and bigger box.

But as we see with WordPress, it’s often the code improvements that you can get sometimes orders of magnitude speed and scalability just by structuring the database or optimizing the code in the most efficient way. And part of why WordPress is so scalable today is because we ran WordPress.com. So, as we started to get millions of blogs, doing billions of page views, even funny edge cases that were performance impairing would start to show up for us pretty major. And we’d always look at it from a core force mentality, not like, “How do we hack this for ourselves or build a plugin?” Like, “How do we make this in core really, really efficient?”

One of my favorite examples was there was this smiley code. So, the code to turn, because you can type a colon and a parentheses and it’ll turn that into a smiley kind of pre-emoji even, that code was a regular expression that was recursive and would loop. And there was this kid’s website called Club Penguin and a bunch of the Club Penguin users came on WordPress.com and they would do these crazy blogs and write to each other. And they would use WordPress in a way that no one has used WordPress before or since. It was like really … They’d have these super long comment threads and people would post, they would, I guess, copy and paste thousands and thousands and thousands of smileys in the comment and then there’d be hundreds or thousands of these comments.

And so, it turns out this inefficiency where it would just get a little slower every additional smiley that the regular expression was matching in the text became to where these pages would actually crash our servers. It would run out of memory. I mean, that’s kind of amazing. The smileys were taking out a server, which is funny, but the fix in the line of code was just a couple characters. It’s a very small tweet to the regular expression that took it from literally taking down expensive clusters of servers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to being a total nonissue. It was a few characters of a change.

There’s problems and bugs like that in WooCommerce today. We’ve fixed pretty much all of them for WordPress. WordPress almost doesn’t really have it anymore. We’ve kind of found all those bottlenecks, but at WooCommerce, I’m sure there still are some more. And so, I’d love to just have a hosting relationship with some of these big stores so that we can have that really tight feedback loop between the WooCommerce team and the customers that are pushing the limits of what Woo can do. This happens a bit through the host today and some of the hosts do contribute some things back, but it’s just not that common in other organizations.

Ronald: So, there’s two lessons here actually, isn’t it, that bringing in the big stores on … I’m assuming this is the VOP offering and I really dive deeper into the limitations and the codes and improve that. But also there’s a little bit on the hosting relationships and maybe it’s sort of a call out to the host to say, “Well, we have this fantastic product for which they obviously charge and earn quite a bit.” And to collaborate because it’s a win-win situation and to collaborate to this open source and invest more into it will benefit everybody eventually.

The biggest WooCommerce challenge for the future

Matt: Yeah. And that’s also one of, I would say, WooCommerce’s biggest challenges. It’s just that the WooCommerce team makes a small percentage of the money in the WooCommerce ecosystem. Most of it’s made by service providers and host. So, but we’re competing with the Shopifys and stuff of the world that capture 95%. So, we need to figure out how to sort of get that balance so that we have the revenue, to be honest, to hire developers, to make the core software really good to compete with the proprietary alternatives. And that’s always the balance there.

Ronald: Hmm. On its own, it’s a huge ecosystem and maybe competing there with fight for the future towards the WordPress bigger project. Yeah. There’s probably a bit more conversation and dialogue to be had with service providers and host.

Matt: It’s a lot of what I talked about in the State of the Word as well, like this idea of five for the future and putting things back. But it’s also, as the people running WooCommerce, Automattic has to also make it easy for people to spend money with us. And there’s been some of the changes over the years, some of which were somewhat controversial, but for every change I’ve had in mind, like what makes this a really sustainable business that can be around a decade from now? So, when we bought WooCommerce, extensions were almost all one-time fees. But of course, they have lifetime development. You need to constantly be updating everything like that. And so, we shifted to be all renewing things and then we made it auto-renewed versus you having to go in and put your credit card again.

And that was a little controversial at the time, but I was like, “Well, if this is a subscription should renew, we need more people to renew than that because then that allows us to increase the development every year, plan to have 10 people on it this year and 15 people on it next year,” that sort of thing. And so, it behooves us as well to create the sustainable business practices that provide value to folks in the ecosystem. That’s something they want to buy and spend money on.

Ronald: Talking of State of the Word, Kathy, I know you’ve been diving a little bit deeper in that.

Matt defines Web 3.0

Kathy: Well, I was interested something that you brought up in State of the Word, when you talked a little bit about Web3 and you didn’t really want to define it. Do you want to define it now?

Matt: I think what’s one thing that’s nice about these versions is people kind of bring their own definitions. So, to me, for some people, the definition of Web3 means crypto or blockchain or other things. For me, it’s more like a user-centric definition, which is actually not that different from the original Web 2, which is how do we give people ownership, autonomy, freedom, very, very core to our community’s mission, you know?

A take on the realities of decentralization and ownership

Kathy: Right. You talked a little bit about decentralization and ownership in State of the Word. And in the crypto space, I mean the whole idea of Bitcoin has been completely decentralized completely. It’s all in the Bitcoin white paper and basically how crypto has worked has been completely decentralized. Now, we’re starting to see the advent of these DAOs and NFTs and smart contracts and things like that. And I know that it’s pretty experimental and there’s a lot of scams and things that are happening in that space, but there’s ideas that are being played with there. And I’m wondering if you’re watching that space and what things are you noticing that are innovative there?

Matt: Yeah. I think where my antenna goes up, where my spidey sense is when people are selling you one thing, but actually giving you another. So, I do see some folks talking about decentralization under the banner of Web3, but they’re actually just making a new centralization. It’s like, they’re kind of like, “Oh, they’re just trying to shift power from an incumbent to them, not actually put it in the hands of the people.” And a great essay about this is actually Moxie Marlinspike’s essay, where he sort of created some NFTs and some DAO-type stuff and everything like that. He is the guy behind and was a CEO until recently of Signal, which is the open source encrypted messaging app. It’s an alternative to WhatsApp and others. So, his bona fides are huge and he’s deeply technical. And he goes in there and be like, “Oh, in my MetaMask wallet, it turns out MetaMask actually isn’t a full node. It’s just talking to this API. And so when OpenSea took down my NFT, it actually disappeared from my MetaMask as well.”

So, what we thought was this open thing on a blockchain, it was still on the 3M blockchain, but because it wasn’t on OpenSea, it actually didn’t exist, these other sort of supposedly decentralized things. And so, I think there’s a lot of that out there. So, we just need to look with a critical eye because it’s very easy for sort of technology populists to sell us one thing, these ideas, and then actually deliver something which is sometimes the opposite or not that at all.

The tough thing about that in the crypto space is there is so much complexity and overhead to running a full Ethereum node or something where you’re not just a client to a centralized service. The good news in WordPress is it’s a lot easier to switch host, which is kind of like being a client, but it’s actually not that difficult to run it even on your own computer or your home server. In fact, like QNAP, home NASes or a Docker image or something that you can run fully on your own and go top-to-bottom infrastructure is pretty accessible to someone with an afternoon and a bit of patience, you could get that running. It’s not a computer science degree thing. It’s more just reading the tutorial and clicking all the buttons kind of thing.

And so that, I feel like we’re really putting both a principled and theoretical freedom, but also a very, very practical freedom into the hands of even non-technical people, which to me is very, very important. And so, what I really like about the Web3 space is the idea and the hope that I have is that these things that are today really hard to do, and maybe don’t give you as much freedom as you do will get to the point where it’s a lot easier to do and a lot more real world autonomy and freedom and how it works.

But Moxie has this line in his post, which he’s like, “People don’t want to run servers.” And you know what? After 17 years, 18 years of doing WordPress, I commiserate with that quite a bit. It’s a big responsibility to run a server. And now you’re not just worried about updating WordPress. You’re worried about every single part of the stack, the operating system, the database, the networking layer, the firewall, the user systems, the passwords, the access, the SSH keys, the encryption, the DNS. There’s a lot of steps in there to truly run it yourself. And I completely understand why a lot of people want to outsource that to someone else, essentially outsource the IT part of it.

That’s why we think about import and export so much and why it’s so important to me that it’s very easy to move between WordPress, WordPress web post, whether that’s WordPress.com or GoDaddy or WP Engine. Again, your new one will often move your site for you. You can’t do that from a Squarespace or Wix because they would have to rewrite it from scratch. But from WordPress, the data models are totally open. So, it’s actually pretty easy for someone to take a half hour and move your site to a completely new host.

Ronald: Interesting. If I can describe you as a visionary and there’s a quote from Chris Hardie who I think he worked with you and he quoted this in a recent Post Status blog post. And he said, “I discovered that he has a superpower: He can see around the corners and beyond horizons in ways that few other people can. And I’d suspect time travel is involved if I didn’t know better.”

Matt: That’s very kind. I actually thank you for telling me that. I missed that from Chris.

Thanks to our Pod Friends FooSales and OSTraining

Ronald: So, I think it’s going a bit, moving up from what Kathy said about the Web3 and the metaphors. And I remember a year and a half ago in another Do the Woo podcast you did, you already talked about metaphors and I checked this with Bob and for all of us, it just went straight over our head.

So, where do you get to sort of your inspiration from that and how do you keep on, unless time travel really is a thing and you don’t want to give the secret away, where do you get the inspiration from? Who are the inspiration sources and how do you put that then into your own vision view? And then I have a follow-up question on that.

Time travel and Groundhog Day

Matt: There’s so much good stuff in there. Let me talk about time travel first. I actually thought about this. If I did have a time travel machine, the version I think would be really fun to do isn’t going super far in the future or the past because I think that’s a little tricky, like the Earth is moving so fast. It’s just some complications there for how all that would work. And if you go too far, imagine someone even a hundred years ago coming to today. How hard would it be just to catch up to what we take for granted? So, imagine going a hundred years in the future would be also really hard, but what I think would be really fun. Have you seen the movie Groundhog Day where he repeats the same day a thousand times?

I feel like that version of time travel, I would think would be fun to do, live the same day a thousand times. I also loves that he learns new skills, like he learns jazz piano or something where he just takes it every day. And it’s kind of cool. That would be kind of fun to almost plug in and just learn a new skill over and over again without time moving forward. So, that’d be the time travel I’ll do. I’ll do the same day over and over.

Ronald: It better be a really good day, though, because living that same day, an awful day a hundred times wouldn’t be so good.

Matt: Well, we can make it good, right?

Ronald: Yeah.

Matt: So, that’s part of the fun. It’s a really brilliant movie. I recommended it to folks.

Inspirations for his visions

So, where I find inspiration and good ideas, I read a tremendous amount. So, I probably read four or five hours a day and that is a mix of books, often first thing in the morning. Blogs are kind of the meat, and then my sugars or carbs are probably like social networks like Tumblr and Twitter. It’s my guilty pleasure. I can’t quit it. And I find some value from it sometimes, but it’s obviously not where I think I’m really progressing, but I’ll often find links to blogs or articles or books sometimes on social media.

So, for books, I feel like the best way sci-fi is really where you get a lot of inspiration for what’s happening, whether that’s Neal Stephenson, Isaac Asimov. I forget the name of the author, but The Three-Body Problem. There’s so much good sci-fi, Dune. And you read this and it’s kind of like a possible future of where this is what happens often when one part of society gets really exaggerated relative to other parts of society, like this is what happens if we say, “Government has all the answers.” This is what happens if we say, “Government has none of the answers.” If we totally get rid of governments. This is what happens, like psycho history in Asimov’s Foundation series. If we think that some combination of psychology and historical data gathering is the thing that predicts the future and then what happens then? So, I think that really fun.

And then blogs. There’s so many good writers today and on WordPress folks like Ben Thompson has Stratechery, actually someone I used to work with as well, now is just such an incredible publisher. There’s Substacks. Some Substacks I really like, so newsletters I follow. Matt Levine writes for Bloomberg. It’s a column, but also goes out as a newsletter. There’s just folks who write every single day and just do such an incredible job of finding the best stuff. And then I follow all the WordPress ones, Post Status, Do the Woo. That’s the thing I have the hardest time keeping up with is actually the podcasts because I don’t commute. And so, I don’t really have a lot of podcast time in my day. And if I’m running or exercising often, I’ll do music to make it bearable for me to get through it. So, the podcast time is probably my hardest to find and my backlog of podcasts, I think I actually just looked. Automattic has a podcast app called Pocket Casts. Check out Pocket Casts if you haven’t used anymore. But it actually tells you how many hours are in your queue. And I think my current queue is 180 hours.

Ronald: Ouch! Yeah.

Matt: If I got nothing to do. I listen to them sped up. So, hopefully I can get through that a little faster, but that’s where probably my biggest backlog right now, even bigger than my book backlog.

Ronald: Do you publish any of the good books that you read and share them with your audience?

Matt: Yeah. I try to do a once a year. I think I missed last year. I also read fewer books last year than I read in any year in the past decade. There’s something the combination of COVID and reopening. And I think I was doomscrolling too much on social media where I slowed down about one, but yeah, it’s on my to-do list of blog, my reading list. I publish everything and then I try to highlight the ones that I found particularly good.

If you want a fun sci-fi recommendation that’s kind of short. It’s like a novella and really kind of blew my mind. It was so creative. Check out This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Ronald: Going to make a note.

Matt: It’s one of the more interesting kind of universes I’ve gone into in a while.

Ronald: Nice.

Kathy: Interesting.

Ronald: I’ve got a part two of this time travel question.

Matt: It’s a time travel book too, which is kind of funny.

Translating his visions to the WordPress community

Ronald: Well, I think it might be the title of the podcast. But going back to your vision and how you digest it. And I know you do a lot of meditation, I’m assuming you still do that. And you get a lot of good strength from that, but how do you then translate that vision to all the WordPress folks? State of the Word is an announcement, but that’s probably a culmination of a lot of research and thinking years prior to that. And maybe if we go back to how Gutenberg was announced and launched, and you could relive that a hundred times where there may be parts in that where you think, “Hmm, actually I could have done that slightly different.” And then I suppose, going in the future, will you apply these learnings?

Matt: I’m pretty happy with how Gutenberg’s been going. I wish it was faster, but I think software just takes time and especially something as ambitious as Gutenberg. So, it was controversial in the beginning, but I feel like that was necessary to do the shift because if you look at it, it’s kind of the biggest shift we’ve ever had in WordPress from a code point of view, from an interface point of view, everything. And so, I feel like there was a little bit of a Band-Aid rip that had to happen, that I was expecting and we did experience the pushback, but now, more and more, even people who hated Gutenberg are big, are like, “Yeah, but I tried it out last week and it’s a lot better,” or, “I love copy and pasting from Google Docs now,” or just it kind of eventually wears people down.

And which brings me to the answer to your first part of your question, which is probably one of my favorite quotes in the world. If I had to put something on a billboard, it would be this. It’s, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” So, future doesn’t happen by default. It’s all people building things, sitting at keyboards, having conversations like this, ruminating, thinking about it in the shower, thinking about it over coffee. That’s how it actually happens. And I think that’s one of the most powerful ideas, too, that especially on the internet, people building the future of WordPress are at computers, just like you and me are now. They’re not more special computers. They’re not like they don’t have special keyboard or magical mice that allow them to create WordPress. It’s just kind of like the same stuff everyone has access to.

And that’s pretty amazing, where for other things, I imagine if you’re building a rocket ship or a boat or a car, you need special tools, but the means of production, the tools for building the internet are actually widely accessible in a really cool way. So, whatever your vision is, I think that it almost doesn’t matter as because you learn so much in building something. You can have all the ideas in the world. You can go to the mountain and come down with your stone tablets. Guess what? If they’re written in stone, it’s not going to work. You need to modify it constantly. And it’s really the iteration process, which I think makes us able to quote, unquote, “Predict the future.” It’s not that we knew where we were going to end up. It’s that we were like, “Oh, this seems like a cool place. Let’s go and let’s walk a mile and then check, are we closer or further? Is there quicksand? Is there a mountain? Is there a river?” Is it like, “We thought it was a mile away and it’s actually like 10 miles away.” You’re just constantly adjusting course based on the journey. And, for me, that’s very much listening to users, watching people try to use the software, WordCamps and user events. And I read the comment sections a lot.

So, I read WP Tavern and Post Status a bit for the articles, but I usually know what’s in the articles. And so, really I go to the comments and what is the conversation on YouTube on the podcast? I love reading YouTube comments, which is, I guess a weird thing I do, but it’s like, “What are people saying?”

At Twitter, I follow all these keywords for people talking about WordPress and WooCommerce and everything. What is the happening in the community around this? And then that’s kind of the information flow for where we need to pay attention. Even the people who are trolling or angry or saying terrible things like, “You know what? At least they care.” That’s way better than someone ignoring you or apathy. So, I almost want someone who loves it and who hates it better than a bunch of people who just don’t even pay attention to it. And that’s also why I don’t mind when things get spicy in the WordPress community, because at least we care. And as long as we remember there’s a human on the other side of the screen. And we probably want the general same things as the outcome, which is a freer, more open internet with great software to use, that allows us to come back from this huge fight we’re having over the naming prefix of a table or the structure of receipts or something like that. I mean, “All right, all right, all right. Let’s take time out. What do we want here and what’s something we can try?” Maybe we can’t agree on the right answer, but maybe we can agree on the next experiment to run and that’ll give us some more data on …

It’s not about being right, either. I really could care less. There’s something I care about the least in the world, that’s being correct. It’s really just about getting to this outcome. And if that means I have to look like I was the dumbest person in the room and I had all the wrong ideas and everything, but we still get to that outcome, I’m still super happy. I don’t need credit. I don’t need to be right. I don’t need anything. Just want to get to this world where we’re making great software that people love using and has a fun, supportive community and enables people to do stuff that they couldn’t do before.

Filtering feedback and criticism

Ronald: That’s a beautiful thing, actually. One of my questions I was going to ask you, but I think you’ve pretty much answered that was how you do you deal with criticism? How do you filter feedback good or bad? But I think that’s pretty much answered. So, again, it proves you are a time traveler.

Matt: I just personally always look for what’s behind the message. Sometimes the message is the heart and I will get feedback to folks like, “Hey, this came across in a really weird, mean way,” or, “I think maybe it came across a little harsher than me.” So, we do have those conversations, too. I think it’s important to keep the community positive and healthy, but regardless, maybe it’s someone who I’m never going to talk to. Maybe it’s some anonymous account on the internet. It like, okay, “Why do they care so much? What is driving them to to say this really strong string of curse words about something we’re working on?” And I find that really fascinating, almost forensic or like if you’re an anthropologist studying a culture or an alien observing like, “What was this person’s day that led them to posting this tweet?”

Ronald: Wow. Yeah.

Matt: And sometimes you find they might not have anything to do with the software either. And it’s also just keeping in mind, everyone’s on their own journey. You don’t know what someone’s going through, what their day was like, what their week was like. It could be, you never know. And so, I try to always just give folks the benefit of the doubt and the grace that, you know what? I’ve had bad days, too. And I’ve said things I regret, and it doesn’t matter how much you meditate or whatever else we do. Everyone is human and we’re all going to do things or say things we regret and we’re going to be wrong probably more often than not, but it’s just having grace for each other and then also grace for yourself, I think is really, really key and important.

Ronald: It’s probably a good moment to take our hat off for all the support developers of hosting and plugin companies because they obviously, they do get it at the worst when everything goes wrong.

Matt: Yeah, but we also have such amazing outpourings of support. And that’s something, growing up in Houston, this was actually a big thing because I’ve a very, very close friend who, one fundamental thing we disagree on is kind of human nature. She is a little bit more on the sort of Hobbesian view where humans by nature, life is nasty, brutish, and short or all just like … What’s this saying? A few missed meals away from anarchy and riots in the streets and all these sorts of things. And that maybe like this humans are fundamentally more of a, what do you call it? Have a more animal nature, which could come out at any point.

I have kind of the view that humans fundamentally are good. Now, there’s some bad out there. Some percentage maybe has a mental or some, whatever it is. And so, there’s evil in the world. We have to deal with that. But fundamentally humans have a nature where they want to be part of a community. They want to connect. They want to help each other. And where I got this, I was trying to figure out, because we were arguing about this. I’m like, “Well, we obviously had different life experiences.” Why do I believe this? I don’t know if it was something I read, but obviously growing up in Houston, we used to get really bad hurricanes, actually still get bad hurricanes that are getting worse, actually in a lot of ways. And beforehand the news would always be like, “Oh, there’s going to be looting because power would go out for a week or two.” People wouldn’t have food. People would be flooded out. They’d be on the roofs of their house.

But what I would see is the community come together and one of my best friends, he’s actually now a firefighter, which is funny. But I remember his brother had some jet skis. And so, people were stranded on the roof of the house. They got the jet ski, which normally they’d have to drive an hour to the ocean to run. And they just went around the neighborhood and picked up people from the roof and then they’d take them and the donations of food, the donations of shelter, the donations of everything. It was really amazing. Yeah. There was probably some looting and there’s probably some people who took advantage of the situation, but by and large, a city of millions of people was looking out for each other and helping their neighbors. And so, I feel like that’s a default and that’s what we should both try to encourage, expect, and highlight when it goes well.

What is new and innovating coming to WooCommerce

Kathy: Yeah. We kind of talked about the NFTs but other innovative commerce trends such as holographic shopping assistants, NFTs, things like this. Are you seeing anything that is new and innovative that might eventually come into WooCommerce that might, well, since you’re a time traveler, something that we can’t really see. We just kind of know checkouts. We know basically how things work, but in the future, there could be different ways of checking out. There could be different ways of actually transacting commerce. Are you seeing anything on the horizon or anything sort of in experimental spaces that look like something that might come to WooCommerce?

Matt: Hmm. You mentioned NFTs. I feel like selling digital goods and membership sites is something that I feel like could be a lot smoother in WooCommerce. So, I really want to get that super, super good and super, super dialed in, including paid newsletters. That should just be so easy, like a few clicks to set up.

So, call it Substack in a box or Superstack or whatever we call it. That should just be a very simple thing to do. And WooCommerce has all the ingredients. It’s got MailPoet, it’s got obviously WooCommerce itself.

Focusing on checkout in 2022

So, I would say something I’m really focused on in 2022 is the checkout process. And just how can we make that so smooth and friction-free and utilize just whatever the best technology is, whether that’s Google Pay, Apple Pay, anything. Whatever it is. Let’s just make it super smooth and fast for people to check out because why not? No one ever said like, “I want to spend more time filling out this form,” or like, “Doing something.”

I think it’s little stuff like this autofill built in the browsers and 1Password and other extensions, LastPass. How do we make the autofill work really well with our forms? Maybe that’s also going to them and saying, “Hey, 1Password, when people are filling the shipping address, you’re overriding the billing address. So, how do we make it so you just target the one? How can we give you a context there to make that really nice?” So, just stuff like that, I feel like we could make a bit smoother.

Kathy: Yeah. There are a few plugins that are trying to reach a solution with those types of challenges to take away some of the friction in checkout and things like that. So, like you were saying before, it would be interesting to see WooCommerce take a look at some of those things and make that just kind of out of the box with WooCommerce.

Matt: I want Woo to have the most beautiful checkout in the world. I want it to be the checkout that every other service is like, “Oh, we got to copy that.”

Kathy: I look forward to that very much so.

Ronald: Which could be no checkout at all, isn’t it?

Matt: Yeah, maybe.

Ronald: Just like you have the Amazon stores where you literally walk out with your shopping. Obviously you need to have some account.

Matt: Oh, yeah. That’s a good point. Yeah. That’s probably a little trickier, but you do bring up point of sale and there’s now starting to be some Woo branded point of sale. That’s obviously something that I think should get better as well. Yeah, where you just walk out is kind … Have you been in one of those stores yet?

Ronald: No, I haven’t. But the other good one, which we highlighted was the, I think is the American Airlines or one of the Delta. So, where you sit on a seat and you order whatever you want, and it gets automatically charged to your account based on your seat position. So, I think there are some really cool, innovative things happening in that space.

Matt: I love that stuff.

Ronald: Yeah, and how quickly can developers adapt to that and not to have some disintegrated system. And I think you refer to it previously where it’s like Gmail only being able to send to Gmail users. But actually if you have a Gmail, you can email everybody. So, it’s that one service that can serve all checkout in a way.

Matt: Part of the revolution of Uber and ridesharing was something we’d probably take for granted now, which is, you’re not fumbling with change and cash at the end of a ride. You just literally walk out. And it’s a big problem now from when people are in taxis. If I’m in a taxi, like an old school taxi in New York or something and this happens to everyone. So, they know it by now. It’s like the ride finishes and you just start to get out of the car. And they’re like, “Oh, no. Wait. You have to pay.” And the credit card machines used to be terrible in them. Now, they’re pretty better.

Matt: But it was kind of a checkout experience, because I’ve done those stores where you just pick stuff up and walk out now a couple times. In San Francisco, there’s an, I think, Amazon Go store. And even now in airports, I forget the name of the … But they do all the airport stores and JFK and a few others they have now where you just grab the stuff and walk out. And it’s so fun. It feels kind of naughty. You’re like, “Uh … “

Ronald: I know where you’re going with this. Yeah. Arrested for shoplifting. “No, no. I thought it was one of those self check out things.”

Matt: And it’s also like, I don’t even want to do it on accident. So, I kind of want to see a confirmation when I walk out like, “Oh, did you get everything,” because if they accidentally miss something, I want go back and scan it or whatever. So, I don’t know. It’s kind of a funny. It’s a really funny feeling. And I wonder if that user behavior is just something that we’ll get used to, kind of like putting your credit card online was really scary to people in the 90s and the 2000s. And now we take it for granted that that kind of walking out not being a bad thing is something that we’ll get used to in the future.

Kathy: Yeah. I have a few friends who have WooCommerce storefronts and I’ve noticed when they put on Apple Pay or they put on Amazon Pay, immediately, that becomes the number one way of checking out. Would there ever be a WooCommerce pay type of solution?

Matt: Yeah. I feel like we need something to make it really smooth there. And one, just WooCommerce is seen a lot of transactions, a lot of credit cards, a lot of stores. I think we said last year, 31 billion of transactions went through WooCommerce. So, I mean, that’s pretty big.

Kathy: Substantial, yeah.

Matt: That’s pretty good. Save credit cards or something to make that faster, that would be awesome. It is tricky, though, because all the privacy stuff for browsers also makes cross domain things harder. So, I do wonder if … Shopify does a pretty good job of this, where they bounce through their domain, but it’s pretty branded. Maybe there’s something like that, but that’s really up to the WooCommerce team to figure out what the best thing is there.

Security and WooCommerce success

Kathy: Sure. Sure. And then, the last question I really have is about security because, coming from the security space, I’ve seen just the maturity of WooCommerce and WordPress, the entire space in terms of the awareness of security across the board, the speed in which the core team responds to security issues and gets things patched. It’s almost like WordPress and WooCommerce have come into their own in terms of security. Is that a big part of what you think WooCommerce’s success is, because obviously with PCI-DSS, that’s a huge part, a huge concern for merchants, for card providers, everybody. Can you speak to security at all?

Matt: Security is something you do every day. You’re never finished. It’s never like, “Okay, now we’re secure,” because the code’s written by humans and humans are imperfect. I think if you’re running a WooCommerce store, oh, this is why we make a product with Jetpack that does realtime backups. So, if you’re a blog or something, it’s probably okay to back it up once a day. If you’re running a WooCommerce store of any size, you really need real-time backups, because you don’t want to lose a single order, right? Seconds after that order is done, you want it fully backed up in multiple locations. And that’s what the Jetpack backup product does. So, I really do think every WooCommerce store should be running that.

The other side is updates and that is just something we try to make it easy for people to upgrade and to push the updates and to work with hosts to secure sites, even if they don’t update. That’s just kind of what we’ve been doing with WordPress for many, many years. And so, the WordPress community, I feel like, has gotten good at taking these things seriously, really triaging the reports, duplicating them, talking to reporters, giving credit where it’s due. When someone reports an issue, we have the bounty system and then just trying to make it on as many sites as possible, because the older code is, the more likely it is to have a problem, no matter who wrote it, whether it’s an Apple, that’s a $3 trillion company or a developer with a single person and a single plugin. So, it’s all about how can you update sites? So, that’s the thing, backup and updates that, to me, are the key there.

Ronald: I think we’re coming towards the end of this really good, insightful podcast.

Matt: Congratulations on this podcast. I’m so excited to hear where it goes and I guess it’s going to be a lot of future-facing stuff, too. So, I’m looking forward to learning now.

Ronald: Absolutely. And it’ll be people who are sort of one foot inside the Woo space, one foot out and sort of have an insight looking into the WooCommerce ecosystem view and see a little bit and hear from them what they see of the future of the vision, where we are heading towards. And we can all learn from that.

The one luxury item Matt would want on a deserted island

But just one final quick question for you there, because this episode very much reminds me of the Desert Island Discs that the BBC Radio 4 records. And if you haven’t looked at it, it’s worthwhile to look into it but one of the last questions is if you are on a deserted island and, in this case, I’m going to slightly change it because you can take one luxury item with you, which is apart from your computer, maybe a styling internet and coffee, or is it your saxophone? And I’m not sure if that’s still a thing. But what would it be? What would you like to be stuck with on your deserted island?

Matt: You said the things that get to it, because a saxophone. They’re all tools. And so, they can provide you endless entertainment and learning, growth and everything. Although a saxophone on an island might not do as well. So, maybe I would take a drum or something like that might be more to the elements. But if I were to say nothing that you already said, since you already picked all the ones I would pick, my luxury would definitely be like a tea apparatus, which is maybe a very British answer, too. I don’t drink coffee. I love tea. But if there was some way I could have hot water and something I can steep in it or a matcha machine or something, that would be amazing. That would definitely be a little pleasure that would make yeah, just something nice in each day.

Ronald: Yeah. Wow! I think I’ve learned so much from you and how you think, how you look at the world in interviews and stuff, future. So, thank you so much for your time, Matt.

Matt: Kathy, Ron, congratulations. This is going to be an awesome podcast. I can’t wait to see what y’all come up with and thank you so much for being part of the WooCommerce community.

Kathy: Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Matt.

Ronald: Brilliant. Thank you very much. Really kind of you.