181–190 of 249 posts
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Let this be a lesson to anyone investing in a startup: don't give any cash unless there's real corporate governance.
but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
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He'll never admit he was wrong or step down. He'll drive Automattic into the ground and Wordpress along with it (until someone forks it, like say...WP Engine, heh. Or Redhat, or IBM, or some huge web design firm, etc.) He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project. It reminds me of the rage-bender Jamie and Jim Thompson went on, attacking OPNsense f…
> He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project. Non Wordpress user here, not a blogger, don’t use CMSs. Curious about this line. Reading the history on Wikipedia, the original b2 was the precursor. It was pretty small and being abandoned. Matt proposed forking it in January 2003, and worked with Mike to bring the first version to fruition a few mon…
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I might agree with you, if the "why we're making changes" section had listed even one reason to lay people off.
Our revenue continues to grow, and will be even more profitable as we lay off 16% of the employees. The tone being set is not a good one to be sure.
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With apologies to Louis XIV, Matt is Automattic.
wait, did he put his name in the company name? if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
And he's full of himself and completely wrong in this crusade he launched for some reason, completely indefensible acts left & right for over a year.
Both true.
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>I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down. Oh, to be young and idealistic again! So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
If they have to fire people, they're running it poorly, so yes?
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but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
How did they "ruin" a company if that company made money?
Huh. >> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline. https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hxnh73/automatt...
What does this mean in term of monthly wages?
I was a technical lead for the Romanian branch of an US company. They fired me along with my team and other teams. The reason was they were profitable but they missed the ARR by a million or something. Last year they did the first firing round, this the second.
When they announced they will fire us, they also announced they will hire more sales people. The ratio of business people/tech people was already 7:1 before that. They also said a programmer should produce 5 times the money the company spent with him, and we were at 4 point something.
Now I have found a position at a local company which takes care of its people even in harder times.
Mentioning "our revenue continues to grow" seems quite out of place in an announcement like this.
I disagree - it's not properly addressed, but it's nice to see it at least brought up. Layoffs are always awful, but seeing companies talk about "changing economic realities" amongst continuing revenue and profit growth - often all time highs - is a real morale killer for those who are left behind. Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet/Google are trillion dollar megacorps who are insanely profitable, but they're firing people be…
"Our revenue continues to grow" doesn't matter if unnecessary expenses outstrip it.
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Since Matt regularly comments here, and given the expression chosen; I'm pretty certain that they know who the elephant is.
His account has been inactive for almost all of 2025, I think his legal team must have taken away the password.