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I posted this in 2019 – who knew it would become so relevant in 2021?

“If you can put a man on the moon how come you can’t do something about traffic?” a regional manager said in 1970.

Jack Niles, a NASA rocket scientist’s solution was telecommuting, a term he is credited with coining in 1973.

Except for in-office, in-home Trainings and classes I teach, I work from home – and have for most of my life. Do I sometimes (often) go for a run, a bike ride or dip in the ocean in the afternoon? Yes, but I make up the hours after the sun sets. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

If you get a job at Automattic (WordPress creators), you don’t have to worry about moving. Hell, you don’t even have to get out of bed.

The company, is completely distributed, meaning its 230 employees work from home. Or they can work from home. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, notes that the company has a physical headquarters in San Francisco. “Well, you’ve got to have somewhere TO get mail,” he explains. While a handful of employees work in the San Francisco office, the rest are flung across 170 cities. “It allows you to get the best and brightest people in the world,” Mullenweg says. Automattic gives its employees a monthly stipend of $250 to get a co-working space if their home office situation isn’t great. As an Automattic employee, you also get up to $3,000 to set up your home office.

by Todd Wasserman

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WordPress Powers 30 Percent of All Websites
The new figures come from W3Techs, a company which monitors and surveys web technology usage. When compared to the other top content management systems (CMS), the lead WordPress has is even more impressive. It is also worth mentioning, the result is for the entire web, whether a website uses a CMS or not.

And a large percentage of these sites are owned by small businesses looking to simplify their online presence. WordPress provides an affordable solution offers the functionality and features a business needs to effectively run its website.

The numbers W3Techs came up with are based on the scans it performs of the top 10 million websites as determined by Alexa rankings. The process takes three months to average the results, and based on this finding, WordPress holds a commanding lead.

What WordPress Offers
Whether you are building your first small business website or looking to upgrade, WordPress has an all-in-one solution with the scalability you need as you grow. This includes an open source CMS platform with a community of developers, tens of thousands of plugins, built-in SEO tools for optimization, social media integration, hosting, mobile ready design and insights.

Thanks for your wisdom Michael Guta

“The best marketers in the world don’t fit our preconceptions of what that word means because they’re in hoodies instead of suits and create environments and ecosystems rather than the traditional trappings of marketing.”

For better or worse, a great deal of investment in technology is driven by pattern matching. In that world any company (including Automattic) that generally eschews hype, is largely subscription driven, and has a small number of employees relative to its audience should be thrilled at the 19 billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp. The deal is incredible.

This has kicked off another round of pattern matching and halo effects, which are currently incredibly favorable but will evolve over the coming years based on how things go post-integration, just like the public perceptions of Geocities, Youtube, Doubleclick, Bebo, and Skype wildly shifted based largely on the press coverage over their latest traded value.

I’m thrilled with the outcome for WhatsApp and the manner in which they built their company, their product, and I hope they bring more of that thinking to Facebook, but I don’t think they should become a playbook any more than Instagram should inspire a no-revenue playbook. The pattern we should take away from this story is that there is no pattern. (In Perl, “there’s more than one way to do it” or Tim Toady.) As an entrepreneur making decisions for your company, always go back to your first principles of what’s important to you and why you started in the first place. As a journalist, try not to fit everyone into arcs you’ve seen before or ascribe value to previous coverage (or lack of coverage). As an investor try to evaluate every situation on its unique merits. Should founders be CEOs or not? Well, it depends on the founders, the company, and what it means to be CEO, not what an over-normalized sample of a few hundred companies did before in completely different contexts.

There are also products that succeed with design that seems childish or terrible on the surface (Myspace, eBay, Snapchat). A lot of what it comes down to is have you made something people want, and are they finding out about it from their friends. That’s often the realm people think of as marketing. The best marketers in the world don’t fit our preconceptions of what that word means because they’re in hoodies instead of suits and create environments and ecosystems rather than the traditional trappings of marketing.

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