Matt, now Ma.tt1, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two”2 and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.
By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.
This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.
The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.
I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.3
I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.
The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.
I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.
But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!
But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.4
- http://ma.tt/ a 5 character domain! Mad geek cred! [↩]
- I can kid myself that Matt’s articles reference to acts doesn’t have some basis in his enjoyment of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet hip-hopera. [↩]
- Only recently have I started to feel confident enough around the code base to really fake it well. [↩]
- I also really appreciate the shared values and shared importance of family, friends, and work to play. [↩]
4 Comments
Congratulations. That’s what we call in the financial industry “a shit ton of cash”.
I’m excited to see what you guys will spend it on. $30M buys a lot of hackers’ time
Wow, congrats! It’ll be fun to see where you take it.
Wish you were here, Lloyd! The desert is fine.
$29.5 Million is a lotta cash. Hope you use it wisely, especially as the going is about to get slightly difficult with a possible recession in the near future. Hiring more engineers and building a robust infrastructure is good, but just to be on the safer side, you should take a look at some historical data from 2001-2002, and see what happened to companies who funded expansions just before the crash.
One Trackback
[...] A Fool’s Wisdom » We Raised $29.5 Million! [...]