Toni Schneider has been CEO of Automattic (almost?) as long as that company has existed: that’s four years, plus a few days. Happy anniversary to Toni, Matt, and the rest of Automattic.
Toni plans to celebrate by starting a series of posts on lessons learned from the four years. He specifies three topics: open source business models; distributed companies; and internet scale services. I’d say that’s an excellent list of three.
I’ll suggest to Toni a fourth, and a sort of fifth. The fourth topic is integration. We don’t get all our web tools from Automattic/WordPress, and we never will. How does Automattic work on making WordPress and its other projects play well with others (e.g., Flickr, Twitter) in order to present an integrated web experience for customers?
The sort of fifth topic is also integration, sort of. Each of Toni’s original list of three topics is interesting in its own right, but becomes even more interesting in combination with one or both of the other two. For example, what has Automattic learned from other open source projects about distributed work and about scalable services?
I’ll mention just one more Automattic topic before moving on to other anniversaries. Toni is a VC as well as a CEO. What’s the exit strategy for Automattic? I mention this topic because I think that others are very interested in it, not because I think that there is much chance that Toni will post about it.
Other recent anniversaries include:
- Largehearted Boy: the excellent music and lit blog turned eight recently, making it venerable as well as venerated among blogs.
- Me and Flickr: five years last month. I’ll celebrate my changing my WordPress.com gravatar to my Eggman in Squared Circle photo/crop, and by posting a photo of our yard in the snow. Which reminds me…
- The four of us and the house in Silver Spring: two months yesterday. Here’s my one-month post. Since then, posting about local exploring has migrated over to Andrew’s Wanderings. AW is another WordPress blog, hosted by WanderNote, rather than by Automattic.