WordPress co-creator and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg talked about his fight with WP Engine, Automattic’s staffing issues, and the company’s financials at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday.
Mullenweg repeated a lot of stuff from the past month about the trademark fight, WP Engine not contributing to the community, and misleading customers to believe it was associated with WordPress.com. If you need a refresher on the WordPress community drama, we have an article that will help you catch up.
He said the company was short-staffed after the exodus of 159 employees, who took a six-month severance offer earlier that month. Since then, Automattic has been aggressively hiring and had already recruited 26 people this month.
Mullenweg said that the second offer — which had nine months of severance and lost access to WordPress.org as part of the package — was designed to catch a leaker within the company giving out confidential information. He added that the company had to ask others who took the offer to stay until the next year as they were short-staffed.
Talking about trademark issues, Mullenweg said in the initial days of Automattic, he gave the WordPress Foundation the WordPress trademark as investors were in control of Automattic. While the foundation still owns the trademark, Automattic has the exclusive license to use it commercially. Plus, Mullenweg said he has 84% of vote control at the company.
When asked about what the other WordPress Foundation board members think about this battle, he said they are incredibly supportive and referred to the minutes of the meetings published on the foundation site — the post doesn’t mention anything about the trademark.
Automattic CEO also talked about the legal battle with WP Engine and said that it might take a few years to resolve it.
“Estimates I have heard from Neil [Katyal, the lawyer representing Automattic] in the case and others is that worst case scenario, if we lose everything, it would be kind of happening in 2026 or 2027,” he said.
Earlier this year, Blackrock, one of the investors in Automattic, marked down their investment to almost half the value from the time they bought the shares in 2021. While Mullenweg didn’t directly address that markdown, he said the company generates around half a billion dollars in annual revenue, running at “break even or better,” and hiring aggressively.
“We haven’t raised any primary capital and have no plans to,” Mullenweg said.
Talking about the possibility of a WordPress fork because of ongoing tension in the community, Mulleneg said that would be fantastic.
“There might be a fork. I mean, we’ve had WordPress forks before — probably about three or four times in the history [of WordPress]. That’s one of the beautiful things about open source is that there can be a fork,” he said.
