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Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

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Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#21

Post by ttul »

whalesalad wrote: post #9

> “The roadmap is the same. I just think we might be able to do it in five years instead of ten,” Mullenweg said. I tried to hunt for why the investment was taken and this is all the article mentions. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m guessing that competition is heating up and they need marketing fuel to keep people on the platform while they transform it from a duct taped blogging tool to something more flexibl…

How much of that $300M was a secondary to founders and employees? We may never know.

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#22

Post by ttul »

tyingq wrote: post #4
pmlnr wrote: post #2

I genuinely thought Automattic is already profitable, is it not?

To me, they seem to have to have a lot of employees (940, soon 1200) for what they do. That probably makes it harder. I'm curious what portion of the employees are development folks.

43% are in engineering, according to LinkedIn.

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#23

Post by calimac »

Matt has been a special founder. He has integrity and a his compass is aligned with a strong vision for product and the open internet.

The battle for an open internet is multigenerational Here a quote from the article “The problem we’re tying to solve is likely multigenerational. It can take the rest of our lives and we need to pass it on to the generation that comes after to continue to work on it. Hopefully for the rest of humanity because I can’t imagine a time when humanity cannot benefit from an open, free, connected web,” Mullenweg told me

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#24

Post by rblion »

DHH isn't too thrilled about this.

> “We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is a nasty, monopolistic goal. Listening to Matt muse about 85% marketshare dreams is a real downer. But $300m is a down payment on monopoly dreams.

full thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174695189090308096

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#25

Post by human20190310 »

notzuck wrote: post #19

"To that end, as we reviewed our hiring process, we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire." If that's there attitude then fuck them. You can guess which demographic they are talking about.

I googled the quote, and based on the context here [0], it seems like the demographic being referred to is non-male.

What's wrong with reviewing hiring processes to determine if they're excluding a demographic that contains individuals who would have done well in the role?

[0] https://cate.blog/2019/05/15/addressing-hiring-gaps-through-...

EDIT: The tl;dr for the article is that they're doing research on "how the people you didn’t hire would have done".

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#26

Post by whalesalad »

gk1 wrote: post #16
photomatt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where it's possible, I'll always invest in product and engineering over marketing (specifically external ad spend). The Tumblr acquisition is a good example of that, we actually scaled back WP.com marketing in anticipation of that to give more room to bring on Tumblr's entire 200ish-person team. 90%+ of our growth is organic, and that percentage is going up.

Translation: We're actually doing well, but you only hear about Wix and others because they spend more money on advertising than we do.

I see a lot of WP ads lately so perhaps I’m just being targeted.

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#27

Post by buboard »

rblion wrote: post #24

DHH isn't too thrilled about this. > “We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is a nasty, monopolistic goal. Listening to Matt muse about 85% marketshare dreams is a real downer. But $300m is a down payment on monopoly dreams. full thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174695189090308096

does he know WP is open source?

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#28

Post by buboard »

AznHisoka wrote: post #5

Does anyone else see a misalignment between the $3B valuation and the huge impact Wordpress has had on the internet? 1/3 of all websites are powered by Wordpress, yet they seem to be valued low compared to other tech companies.

Their product is not their stock, it's their code.

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#29

Post by buboard »

tyingq wrote: post #8
AznHisoka wrote: post #5

Does anyone else see a misalignment between the $3B valuation and the huge impact Wordpress has had on the internet? 1/3 of all websites are powered by Wordpress, yet they seem to be valued low compared to other tech companies.

Pretty sure the vast majority of those WordPress sites bring them no revenue.

au contraire, i bet wordpress users make a lot more revenue than SV combined (not a high bar - most SV startups lose money)

Re: Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

#30

Post by jakoblorz »

gk1 wrote: post #16
photomatt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where it's possible, I'll always invest in product and engineering over marketing (specifically external ad spend). The Tumblr acquisition is a good example of that, we actually scaled back WP.com marketing in anticipation of that to give more room to bring on Tumblr's entire 200ish-person team. 90%+ of our growth is organic, and that percentage is going up.

Translation: We're actually doing well, but you only hear about Wix and others because they spend more money on advertising than we do.

300m in pure ads incoming
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