American social media entrepreneur and web developer best known for developing WordPress
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A WPProAtoZHost.com Company.... Episode 67: Exploring the WordPress Galaxy with Jonathan Denwood of WP-Tonic! Today, we're blasting off into the vast universe of WordPress with a true thought leader who's been navigating its stars for over a decade. Jonathan Denwood, the founder of WP-Tonic, joins us to share his insights on running a boutique hosting company in 2025, the future of WordPress amidst the rise of AI, and the impact of Matt Mullenweg on the community. Plus, we'll dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of running a long-term WordPress podcast, as Jonathan reflects on his journey with the WP-Tonic Podcast. Whether you're a plugin enthusiast or a WordPress professional, this episode is packed with cosmic wisdom you won't want to miss—let's get started! The post Exploring the WordPress Galaxy with Jonathan Denwood of WP-Tonic : Interview 67 appeared first on WordPress Plugins A to Z.
“Community” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in the business world. But what does it really mean to build one—and what does it take to make it last? More importantly, how can businesses create communities that drive long-term success? Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and the founder and CEO of Automattic, tackles these questions in this episode. He shares insights on fostering community within a firm—like hiring the right people through auditions instead of resumes—and within a customer base by encouraging engagement and feedback. Key episode topics include: customer strategy, customer experience, customer feedback, hiring and recruitment, brand management, strategy, HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week. · Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: The Creator of WordPress· Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast· Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org]]>
Matt Mullenweg on scaling Automattic to $500M ARR. In this episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, host Alex Theuma sits down with Matt Mullenweg, Co-founder of WordPress and Founder and CEO of Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Beeper, and more. Matt shares the mindset, strategies, and lessons that helped him build one of the most impactful open-source businesses in the world — now generating over $500M in ARR, including: - The mindset and mission behind Automattic. - How AI is reshaping the WordPress ecosystem. - Key lessons from scaling to $500M ARR. - What his ‘ideal' work week looks like. - How he stays motivated as CEO. Guest links: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/ Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward:
A far less political edition than most this year let's Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger spend more time talking about tech news, web marketing, and SEO. We start by marking the movement of Mordy Oberstein as he leaves a highly successful tenure as head of branding at website builder Wix. More than anyone in our memory, Mordy helped Wix overcome what was a difficult reputation which stands as stellar testimony to his powers as a brand marketer. We note how Google Business Profiles is still broken, weeks after reporting the interface was riddled with bugs. Matt Mullenweg's for-profit arm of WordPress, Automattic laid off 16% of its workforce in order to improve profitability and capacity to invest as he moves to restructure Automattic. We also talk about Tinder and flirtbots, the assumption of a right to bend copyright rules by OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI's $33billion purchase of X (TwiXter) from owner Elon Musk, Bing's expanding Copilot, the gravity effect large brands have at Google, and a lot more fun techie stuff. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
La rapina di criptovalute del secolo. Pubblicità sul registro elettronico. Doppiaggio IA su Amazon Prime. Brother inscittifica le stampanti. Il ritorno di Digg. Queste e molte altre le notizie tech commentate nella puntata di questa settimana.Dallo studio distribuito di digitalia:Franco Solerio, Michele Di Maio, Francesco FacconiProduttori esecutivi:Federico Bruno, Giulio Gabrieli, Yoandi Herrera, Christian Masper, Simone Andreozzi, Giuliano Arcinotti, @Ppogo, Davide Tinti, Marco Caggianese, Corrado Bigliardi, Arzigogolo, Maurizio Verrone, Matteo Arrighi, Massimo Dalla Motta, Andrea Sinigaglia, Arnoud Van Der Giessen, Matteo De Lucia, Fabrizio Bianchi, @Akagrinta, Consultech Srl, Andrea Picotti, Christian Fabiani, @Jh4Ckal, Davide Capra, Simone Pignatti, @Lucatax, Alessio Conforto, Stefano Orso, Paolo Bernardini, Danilo Sia, Alessandro Lazzarini, Matteo Carpentieri, Roberto Barison, Alessio Tonioni, Manuel Zavatta, Edoardo Zini, Nicola Pedonese, Nicola Gabriele Del Popolo, Fiorenzo Pilla, Luca Barbetta, Massimiliano Casamento, Stefano Cutellè, Maurizio Galluzzo, Paolo Lucciola, Matteo Masconale, Massimiliano Saggia, Pasquale Maffei, Matteo Vivona (Indievault), ma7u, Francesco Paolo Sileno, Michele OlivieriSponsor:Links:How the Biggest Crypto Heist in History Went DownBybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm walletCrypto fans underwhelmed by Trump order creating US bitcoin reservePresident Donald J. Trump Establishes the Strategic Bitcoin ReserveYou knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search resultsAmazon is reportedly developing its own AI 'reasoning' modelOpenAIs rumored $20000 agent plan explained.They're evolving - VideoGibberLink - AI-to-AI Sound ProtocolApple delays upgraded Siri: its taking longer than we thoughtMorto: l'ex superpoliziotto coinvolto nell'inchiesta sui dossieraggiL'altolà di Valditara sul registro elettronico. "No alle pubblicità"Prime Video lancia i primi contenuti doppiati con l'IAThe Last of Us season 2 gets an explosive new trailerHundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably dont work anymoreBrother denies using firmware updates to brick printers with 3rd-party inkBrother printers joins the Evil Empire, blocks third-party inkHow Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an appMusic labels will regret coming for the Internet ArchiveThe Return of Digg, a Star of an Earlier Internet EraDigg Listens to DiggBar Complaints; Changes to ComeThe DiggBar Controversy | Ignite Social MediaTrailer - Torna la leggendaria Verdansk | Call of Duty: WarzoneAlmanacco Digitaliano 2024 su LedizioniAlmanacco Digitaliano su AmazonGingilli del giorno:Lenny Rachitsky intervista Matt Mullenweg di AutomatticPortmaster - gestisci i port direttamente dalla retro consoleiTerm 2 - terminal emulator for MacOS that does amazing thingsSupporta Digitalia, diventa produttore esecutivo.
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open source platform powering a staggering 43% of the internet. He also serves as CEO of Automattic—the parent company of brands like WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr—which is worth over $7 billion, with over 1,700 employees across 90 countries. In this episode, he discusses some of the most controversial topics surrounding WordPress, Automattic, and the broader open source community.—What you'll learn:• Matt's response to public criticism• Why products like Meta's Llama are “fake open source”• How his team is turning around Tumblr after acquiring it for just $3 million (after Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion)• Why he mortgaged his home to fund San Francisco's iconic Bay Lights project• Matt's philosophy: “Don't just build a product; build a movement”• Why open source matters: “If the Founding Fathers were around today, they'd be open source advocates”—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.• Loom—The easiest screen recorder you'll ever use—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-creator-of-wordpress-opens-up-matt-mullenweg—Where to find Matt Mullenweg:• X: https://x.com/photomatt• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/photomatt/• Website: https://ma.tt/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Matt Mullenweg(05:10) Matt's career journey(11:15) Bay Lights project and philanthropy(17:28) How Matt got involved with open source(23:25) Why products like Meta's Llama are “fake open source”(27:14) The future of open source and how to get involved(35:25) Building a successful online community(39:12) The WP Engine controversy(50:24) Facing criticism and controversy(55:29) Addressing community concerns(01:08:29) Forking Advanced Custom Fields(01:11:15) The role of social media and public perception(01:16:43) Acquiring and reviving Tumblr(01:24:25) Automattic's acquisition strategy(01:28:51) Final thoughts and future plans—Referenced:• WordPress: https://wordpress.com/• Automattic: https://automattic.com/• CNET: https://www.cnet.com/• Akismet: https://akismet.com/wordpress/• Jetpack: https://jetpack.com/• Toni Schneider on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonischneider/• WooCommerce: https://woocommerce.com/• Beeper: https://www.beeper.com/• Day One: https://dayoneapp.com/• Simplenote: https://simplenote.com/• Pocket Casts: https://pocketcasts.com/• Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org/• Audrey Capital: https://audrey.co/• Stripe: https://stripe.com/• SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/• Calm: https://www.calm.com/• August: https://august.com/• Daylight Computer: https://daylightcomputer.com/• Keys Jazz Bistro: https://keysjazzbistro.com/• Joomla: https://www.joomla.org/• Drupal: https://new.drupal.org/• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/• Wix: https://www.wix.com/• Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/• Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/• Gravatar: https://gravatar.com/• The Bay Lights: https://illuminate.org/projects/thebaylights/• The Bay Lights 360: https://illuminate.org/the-bay-lights-360/• Ben Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-davis-sf/• Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts: https://www.houstonisd.org/hspva• Jack Dorsey: We're Losing our Free Will to Algorithms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_8NganZSFI• Marc Andreessen: https://a16z.com/author/marc-andreessen/• Bill Gurley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/• An inside look at X's Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-x-built-the-best-fact-checking-system-on-the-internet• Llama: https://www.llama.com/• WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking: https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/• As Wall Street Chases Profits, Fire Departments Have Paid the Price: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/us/fire-engines-shortage-private-equity.html• WordCamp Asia: https://asia.wordcamp.org/2025/• Justin Baldoni Hit with Defamation Suit as PR Teams Turn on Each Other over Blake Lively's ‘It Ends with Us' Smear Campaign Allegations: https://deadline.com/2024/12/justin-baldoni-defamation-lawsuit-publicist-blake-lively-1236241784/• How WordPress Hot Nacho Scandal Shapes WP Engine Dispute: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-wordpress-hot-nacho-scandal-shapes-wp-engine-dispute/539069/• Gutenberg: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/• ClassicPress: https://www.classicpress.net/• Behind the founder: Marc Benioff: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-founder-marc-benioff• Mary Hubbard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryfhubbard/• Brian Chesky's new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach• Founder mode: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html• Cow.com: https://www.cow.com/• David Karp on X: https://x.com/davidkarp• Marissa Mayer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissamayer/• Alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/• WP Engine Tracker: https://wordpressenginetracker.com/• Kumbh Mela: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbh_Mela—Recommended book:• Maintenance: Of Everything (in progress): https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/addenda/page/introduction—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
On the podcast today, we have Simon Harper. He's here to discuss the current challenges and dynamics of the WordPress community. He explores the fragmentation within the community, sparked by tensions from a trademark dispute between WP Engine and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic. The conversation touches on the challenges of managing a large, diverse community, the impact of money in open-source projects, and potential strategies for fostering positivity and unity, such as emphasising contributions and uplifting the community's achievements amidst ongoing disputes. So, if you are interested in the future of WordPress and its community dynamics, this episode is for you.
Say thanks and learn more about our podcast sponsor Omnisend. In this episode of the WP Minute, Matt Medeiros and Mark Zemanski discuss the overuse and misinterpretation of the term 'open source,' particularly in the context of WordPress. They reference a recent episode of WP Town Hall where Mark posed the question to Chris Pearson. Matt and Mark explore the complexities and nuances behind 'open source,' noting the difference between open source code and the brand value of WordPress. They debate the evolving nature of WordPress governance, expressing concerns over the potential disillusionment within the WordPress community. Additionally, the discussion touches on the implications of Matt Mullenweg's control over WordPress, the survival and contributions to the project, and how closed-source commercial alternatives might be gaining traction. The conversation concludes with the question of whether society is moving towards more closed-source solutions, driven by business needs and the challenges of sustaining open-source models. Support us for as little as $5 to join our members-only Slack group. ★ Support this podcast ★
Ever realized how storytelling goes beyond marketing, actually influencing product value, brand perception, and the triumph of company exits? The benefits of storytelling contribute to the long-term growth and success of a business by shaping its identity, influencing how it is perceived, and building a loyal customer base. People are drawn to stories that resonate with their experiences, values, and aspirations. And by crafting a unique and authentic narrative, businesses can differentiate themselves and leave a lasting impression on consumers. Clay Hebert, a visionary in this real, delves into the art of weaving narratives that define the trajectory of businesses. As a renowned entrepreneur, storyteller, and marketing strategist, he has a proven track record of helping companies craft compelling narratives that not only drive growth but also resonate with their target audience. His insights into the art of storytelling have been shared on stages worldwide, inspiring countless individuals to leverage storytelling for business success. Today, he is joining us on The Greatness Machine to look back on how it started, who inspired him, and how he became the man that he is right now. In this episode, Darius and Clay explore Clay's journey from selling candy bars to embracing entrepreneurship and creative marketing. They emphasize the power of personal connections over sales pitches, the influence of Seth Godin, strategic customer selection, and the creation of the "Perfect Intro" framework. The conversation underscores how storytelling shapes product value, brand perception, and company success, encapsulating Clay's expertise in marketing, entrepreneurship, and storytelling dynamics. Topics include: How Clay learned an early lesson in marketing by selling candy bars What inspired Clay to shift towards entrepreneurship and creative marketing The importance of creative thinking and adapting to different environments in overcoming creative blocks The value of personal connection over sales pitches How Seth Godin played a vital role in Clay's entrepreneurial journey Clay explains why strategic customer selection matters in a business Clay recalls his encounter with Matt Mullenweg and how that meeting led to the idea of the “Perfect Intro” framework How the power of storytelling impacts a company's life cycle And other topics… Resources mentioned: Purple Cow: https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-Transform-Business-Remarkable/dp/014101640X This is Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/This-Marketing-Cant-Until-Learn/dp/0241370140/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 Creative Act: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886/ref=sr_1_1 Connect with Clay: Website: https://clayhebert.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clayhebert/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/clayhebert Connect with Darius: Website: https://therealdarius.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmirshahzadeh/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whoompdarius/ YouTube: https://therealdarius.com/youtube Book: The Core Value Equation https://www.amazon.com/Core-Value-Equation-Framework-Limitless/dp/1544506708 Sponsored by: Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/DARIUS. Shopify: Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/darius. Stash: Join millions of Americans reaching their financial goals—starting at just $3/month! Get $25 towards your first stock purchase at get.stash.com/GREATNESS. Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at RocketMoney.com/Darius. Write a review for The Greatness Machine using this link: https://ratethispodcast.com/spreadinggreatness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The recent controversy between WordPress and WP Engine put Matt Mullenweg (Co-Founder of WordPress, CEO of Automattic) under intense online scrutiny. In our conversation, he shared lessons from the controversy and managing through crisis, as well as this thoughts on the future of open source AI and more.(00:00) Intro(01:17) Controversy with WP Engine(03:36) Understanding Open Source and Trademarks(04:36) Automattic's Role and Contributions(08:26) Navigating Legal Battles and Community Relations(18:27) Leadership and Personal Resilience(21:49) The Impact of Social Media on CEOs(31:22) Future Outlook and Reflections(32:42) Exploring the Quinn Model and Open Source Innovations(33:17) The Evolution of AI Interfaces and User Interactions(35:36) AI as a Writing and Coding Partner(38:07) The Power of Open Source in AI Development(40:00) Commoditizing Complements: A Business Strategy(41:39) The Battle with Shopify and Open Source Models(42:33) The Impact of Open Source on Market Dynamics(43:55) USB-C Transition and Gadget Recommendations(47:53) The Benefits of Sabbaticals(53:34) The Future of WordPress and Automattic(59:12) Employee Ownership and Liquidity Programs(01:04:33) Conclusion and Final Thoughts Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA
Get our Business Monetization Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/monetization Episode 672: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Matt Mullenweg ( https://x.com/photomatt ), the founder of WordPress and Automattic. — Show Notes: (0:00) Turning down $200M at 24 (6:04) WordPress's 1000 days of irrelevance (9:24) Turning a small South African company into $3B (13:40) The battle of giants - WooCommerce vs Shopify (18:37) Matt's Villain Arc (30:07) Auditions > Interviews (36:04) Putting every employee on the front line (42:56) Matt on Deepseek — Links: • Automattic - https://automattic.com/ • WordPress - https://wordpress.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it's called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam's List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
The first topic of conversation this week is an unexpected new area the Expo team is tackling: Expo Application Service Hosting. EAS Hosting is a new service for quickly deploying web projects built using Expo and React Native apps. It makes it easy to compile and sign apps with custom native code, upload apps to the Play Store or App Store, and push live app updates directly to users.The Interop project, which aims to improve interoperability between major browser engines, released its accomplishments from 2024 this week. The browsers took on 17 areas of focus in 2024, and went from 46% of tests passing in January, all the way to 95% of tests passing by the end of December.WordPress makes headlines once more, as Autommatic, the WordPress hosting company owned by WP creator Matt Mullenweg cuts its contributions back on the WP open-source project from 4,000 hours per week to 45 hours per week.News:Paige - Interop 2024 highlightsJack - Expo APIs (EAS Hosting)TJ - Automattic cuts WordPress contribution hours (WordPress Drama Timeline)Bonus News:Vitest 3.0 is outThe iPhone Air could be coming later this yearFire Starters:WebXR Device APIWhat Makes Us Happy this Week:Paige - Shrinking TV show and browser-based SwaggerEditorJack - fzf command-line fuzzy finderTJ - Switch 2Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.Front-end Fire websiteBlue Collar Coder on YouTubeBlue Collar Coder on DiscordReach out via emailTweet at us on X @front_end_fireFollow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
Manton and Daniel catch up on the latest developments in the WordPress vs. WPEngine kerfuffle, and continuing after-effects. They talk about Matt Mullenweg's tendency lately to deliver seemingly calm and encouraging messages that are nonetheless laced with evidence of his spite towards antagonists. Finally they talk about Automattic's decision to reduce its own contribution to WordPress Core development, and the implications for the rest of the WordPress community. The post Episode 625: What Fresh Hell appeared first on Core Intuition.
Matt Mullenweg is seeing more legal resistance to his WP-Emperor schtick and reacting like a manbaby about it. In a similar universe, the outgoing President warns of the coming transition to an oligarchy run by big-tech. Meta moves to the far right by removing fact checking and allowing the racist and multi-phobic content back on its platform as alternative facts carry as much or more weight in this new regime than reality does. ChatGPT moves towards agentatic services like scheduling and performing recurring information tasks. Google Gemini joins other AI companies in a training content deal with Associated Press. Gemini is pushing its way into Google productivity products but there's a catch, it comes with monthly fee. Meanwhile, Google saw it's search market share dip below 90% for the first time in the last decade. There's some really cool old-schooly Google SEO news, including advice on author names and comments in reviews, how Google's Web Vitals Chrome extension has been moved to Chrome DevTools Performance panel by default, how all you need is ULR consistency (and more...), and, well, more. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
WordPress Resource: Your Website Engineer with Dustin Hartzler
In today’s episode, we recap the State of the Word address by Matt Mullenweg from Dec 2024 in Japan.
A December 2024 Core Update started running a few short days after the November 2024 Core Update ended and mere hours before this episode was recorded live to podcast. At the same time, Google reported minor but persistent indexing issues. Otherwise, Matt Mullenweg was last seen retreating with his tail between his legs following the judicial spanking he received trying to defend his actions at WordPress against WP-Engine in court. Meanwhile, Google throws stones in a grand glass house accusing OpenAI of using its heft to manipulate the generative AI market. The text to video AI Soro has been released to a growing group of testers, Microsoft scraps Skype subscriptions, and the most important story of all, Google releases first version of its quantum chip "Willow". The future happened five minutes ago in a parallel dimension. The infinite number of moose at the door should have said something.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
This week, we cover OpenCost's big incubation milestone, CNCF's graduation rules, and a flurry of tech acquisitions. Plus, some thoughts on teaching kids about passwords. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWPR3HLPjfI) 493 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWPR3HLPjfI) Runner-up Titles Yes, No, Maybe Infinite Password Loop Bring your kids to work day: passwords. Password Talk Escaping characters Stone Cold Steve Austin Don't hire people with pets Eats AWS stuff natively. I compete on my ASCII character set.Stay in the sandbox Enron for cloud purchasing Rundown OpenCost Advances to CNCF Incubation (https://www.opencost.io/blog/cncf-incubation) Episode 492: Aran Khanna on Cloud Insurance (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/492) VMware Reflections from Explore Barcelona and the Challenges of Modern App Delivery (https://news.broadcom.com/app-dev/reflections-from-explore-barcelona-and-the-challenges-of-modern-app-delivery) New SMB subscription may not end VMware migrations (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/11/new-smb-friendly-subscription-tier-may-be-too-late-to-stop-vmware-migrations/) M&A Apple to Acquire Pixelmator, Maker of Popular Photo-Editing Apps (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-01/apple-to-acquire-pixelmator-maker-of-popular-photo-editing-apps?utm_medium=email&utm_source=author_alert&utm_term=241101&utm_campaign=author_19842959) Red Hat acquires AI optimization startup Neural Magic (https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/red-hat-acquires-ai-optimization-startup-neural-magic/) IBM's Red Hat Acquisition Will Pay For Itself By Early Next Year (https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/24/ibms-red-hat-acquisition-will-pay-for-itself-by-early-next-year/) Snyk Acquires Developer-First DAST Provider Probely (https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/11/12/2979082/0/en/Snyk-Acquires-Developer-First-DAST-Provider-Probely.html) IBM's Red Hat Acquisition Will Pay For Itself By Early Next Year (https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/10/24/ibms-red-hat-acquisition-will-pay-for-itself-by-early-next-year/) VMware Reflections from Explore Barcelona and the Challenges of Modern App Delivery (https://news.broadcom.com/app-dev/reflections-from-explore-barcelona-and-the-challenges-of-modern-app-delivery) New SMB subscription may not end VMware migrations (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/11/new-smb-friendly-subscription-tier-may-be-too-late-to-stop-vmware-migrations/) Coté's take on Explore, in last week's Cloud Foundry Weekly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkgwl9mKL2Y). RTO Amazon employees are a flight risk after the new return-to-office mandate, research reveals (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-exec-says-9-10-103742343.html) Remote work reduces child penalties by roughly half (https://x.com/arpitrage/status/1849530101035160031) Read the letter sent to AWS CEO Matt Garman, signed by 500 employees, (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-open-letter-aws-ceo-office-return-rto-2024-10) Amazon CEO Andy Jassy denies that 5-day office mandate is a 'backdoor layoff' (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/05/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-5-day-office-mandate-isnt-a-backdoor-layoff.html) Washington Post Employees Ordered Back to Office 5 Days a Week (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/business/media/washington-post-return-to-office.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) Everyone agrees: A shorter workweek is great! 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Alessio will be at AWS re:Invent next week and hosting a casual coffee meetup on Wednesday, RSVP here! And subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!If you've been following the AI agents space, you have heard of Lindy AI; while founder Flo Crivello is hesitant to call it "blowing up," when folks like Andrew Wilkinson start obsessing over your product, you're definitely onto something.In our latest episode, Flo walked us through Lindy's evolution from late 2022 to now, revealing some design choices about agent platform design that go against conventional wisdom in the space.The Great Reset: From Text Fields to RailsRemember late 2022? Everyone was "LLM-pilled," believing that if you just gave a language model enough context and tools, it could do anything. Lindy 1.0 followed this pattern:* Big prompt field ✅* Bunch of tools ✅* Prayer to the LLM gods ✅Fast forward to today, and Lindy 2.0 looks radically different. As Flo put it (~17:00 in the episode): "The more you can put your agent on rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user."Instead of a giant, intimidating text field, users now build workflows visually:* Trigger (e.g., "Zendesk ticket received")* Required actions (e.g., "Check knowledge base")* Response generationThis isn't just a UI change - it's a fundamental rethinking of how to make AI agents reliable. As Swyx noted during our discussion: "Put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional if-this-then-that software."The Surprising Truth About Model LimitationsHere's something that might shock folks building in the space: with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the model is no longer the bottleneck. Flo's exact words (~31:00): "It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small."Some context: Lindy started when context windows were 4K tokens. Today, their system prompt alone is larger than that. But what's really interesting is what this means for platform builders:* Raw capabilities aren't the constraint anymore* Integration quality matters more than model performance* User experience and workflow design are the new bottlenecksThe Search Engine Parallel: Why Horizontal Platforms Might WinOne of the spiciest takes from our conversation was Flo's thesis on horizontal vs. vertical agent platforms. He draws a fascinating parallel to search engines (~56:00):"I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won... You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia... search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical."His argument: agent platforms might follow the same pattern because:* Agents across verticals share more commonalities than differences* There's value in having agents that can work together under one roof* The R&D cost of getting agents right is better amortized across use casesThis might explain why we're seeing early vertical AI companies starting to expand horizontally. The core agent capabilities - reliability, context management, tool integration - are universal needs.What This Means for BuildersIf you're building in the AI agents space, here are the key takeaways:* Constrain First: Rather than maximizing capabilities, focus on reliable execution within narrow bounds* Integration Quality Matters: With model capabilities plateauing, your competitive advantage lies in how well you integrate with existing tools* Memory Management is Key: Flo revealed they actively prune agent memories - even with larger context windows, not all memories are useful* Design for Discovery: Lindy's visual workflow builder shows how important interface design is for adoptionThe Meta LayerThere's a broader lesson here about AI product development. Just as Lindy evolved from "give the LLM everything" to "constrain intelligently," we might see similar evolution across the AI tooling space. The winners might not be those with the most powerful models, but those who best understand how to package AI capabilities in ways that solve real problems reliably.Full Video PodcastFlo's talk at AI Engineer SummitChapters* 00:00:00 Introductions * 00:04:05 AI engineering and deterministic software * 00:08:36 Lindys demo* 00:13:21 Memory management in AI agents * 00:18:48 Hierarchy and collaboration between Lindys * 00:21:19 Vertical vs. horizontal AI tools * 00:24:03 Community and user engagement strategies * 00:26:16 Rickrolling incident with Lindy * 00:28:12 Evals and quality control in AI systems * 00:31:52 Model capabilities and their impact on Lindy * 00:39:27 Competition and market positioning * 00:42:40 Relationship between Factorio and business strategy * 00:44:05 Remote work vs. in-person collaboration * 00:49:03 Europe vs US Tech* 00:58:59 Testing the Overton window and free speech * 01:04:20 Balancing AI safety concerns with business innovation Show Notes* Lindy.ai* Rick Rolling* Flo on X* TeamFlow* Andrew Wilkinson* Dust* Poolside.ai* SB1047* Gathertown* Sid Sijbrandij* Matt Mullenweg* Factorio* Seeing Like a StateTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're joined in the studio by Florent Crivello. Welcome.Flo [00:00:15]: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:17]: Also known as Altimore. I always wanted to ask, what is Altimore?Flo [00:00:21]: It was the name of my character when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. Always. I was like 11 years old.Swyx [00:00:26]: What was your classes?Flo [00:00:27]: I was an elf. I was a magician elf.Swyx [00:00:30]: Well, you're still spinning magic. Right now, you're a solo founder and CEO of Lindy.ai. What is Lindy?Flo [00:00:36]: Yeah, we are a no-code platform letting you build your own AI agents easily. So you can think of we are to LangChain as Airtable is to MySQL. Like you can just pin up AI agents super easily by clicking around and no code required. You don't have to be an engineer and you can automate business workflows that you simply could not automate before in a few minutes.Swyx [00:00:55]: You've been in our orbit a few times. I think you spoke at our Latent Space anniversary. You spoke at my summit, the first summit, which was a really good keynote. And most recently, like we actually already scheduled this podcast before this happened. But Andrew Wilkinson was like, I'm obsessed by Lindy. He's just created a whole bunch of agents. So basically, why are you blowing up?Flo [00:01:16]: Well, thank you. I think we are having a little bit of a moment. I think it's a bit premature to say we're blowing up. But why are things going well? We revamped the product majorly. We called it Lindy 2.0. I would say we started working on that six months ago. We've actually not really announced it yet. It's just, I guess, I guess that's what we're doing now. And so we've basically been cooking for the last six months, like really rebuilding the product from scratch. I think I'll list you, actually, the last time you tried the product, it was still Lindy 1.0. Oh, yeah. If you log in now, the platform looks very different. There's like a ton more features. And I think one realization that we made, and I think a lot of folks in the agent space made the same realization, is that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I think many people, when they started working on agents, they were very LLM peeled and chat GPT peeled, right? They got ahead of themselves in a way, and us included, and they thought that agents were actually, and LLMs were actually more advanced than they actually were. And so the first version of Lindy was like just a giant prompt and a bunch of tools. And then the realization we had was like, hey, actually, the more you can put your agent on Rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user, because you can really, as a user, you get, instead of just getting this big, giant, intimidating text field, and you type words in there, and you have no idea if you're typing the right word or not, here you can really click and select step by step, and tell your agent what to do, and really give as narrow or as wide a guardrail as you want for your agent. We started working on that. We called it Lindy on Rails about six months ago, and we started putting it into the hands of users over the last, I would say, two months or so, and I think things really started going pretty well at that point. The agent is way more reliable, way easier to set up, and we're already seeing a ton of new use cases pop up.Swyx [00:03:00]: Yeah, just a quick follow-up on that. You launched the first Lindy in November last year, and you were already talking about having a DSL, right? I remember having this discussion with you, and you were like, it's just much more reliable. Is this still the DSL under the hood? Is this a UI-level change, or is it a bigger rewrite?Flo [00:03:17]: No, it is a much bigger rewrite. I'll give you a concrete example. Suppose you want to have an agent that observes your Zendesk tickets, and it's like, hey, every time you receive a Zendesk ticket, I want you to check my knowledge base, so it's like a RAG module and whatnot, and then answer the ticket. The way it used to work with Lindy before was, you would type the prompt asking it to do that. You check my knowledge base, and so on and so forth. The problem with doing that is that it can always go wrong. You're praying the LLM gods that they will actually invoke your knowledge base, but I don't want to ask it. I want it to always, 100% of the time, consult the knowledge base after it receives a Zendesk ticket. And so with Lindy, you can actually have the trigger, which is Zendesk ticket received, have the knowledge base consult, which is always there, and then have the agent. So you can really set up your agent any way you want like that.Swyx [00:04:05]: This is something I think about for AI engineering as well, which is the big labs want you to hand over everything in the prompts, and only code of English, and then the smaller brains, the GPU pours, always want to write more code to make things more deterministic and reliable and controllable. One way I put it is put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, the minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional, if this, then that software.Flo [00:04:29]: I love that characterization, put the Shoggoth in the box. Yeah, we talk about using as much AI as necessary and as little as possible.Alessio [00:04:37]: And what was the choosing between kind of like this drag and drop, low code, whatever, super code-driven, maybe like the Lang chains, auto-GPT of the world, and maybe the flip side of it, which you don't really do, it's like just text to agent, it's like build the workflow for me. Like what have you learned actually putting this in front of users and figuring out how much do they actually want to add it versus like how much, you know, kind of like Ruby on Rails instead of Lindy on Rails, it's kind of like, you know, defaults over configuration.Flo [00:05:06]: I actually used to dislike when people said, oh, text is not a great interface. I was like, ah, this is such a mid-take, I think text is awesome. And I've actually come around, I actually sort of agree now that text is really not great. I think for people like you and me, because we sort of have a mental model, okay, when I type a prompt into this text box, this is what it's going to do, it's going to map it to this kind of data structure under the hood and so forth. I guess it's a little bit blackmailing towards humans. You jump on these calls with humans and you're like, here's a text box, this is going to set up an agent for you, do it. And then they type words like, I want you to help me put order in my inbox. Oh, actually, this is a good one. This is actually a good one. What's a bad one? I would say 60 or 70% of the prompts that people type don't mean anything. Me as a human, as AGI, I don't understand what they mean. I don't know what they mean. It is actually, I think whenever you can have a GUI, it is better than to have just a pure text interface.Alessio [00:05:58]: And then how do you decide how much to expose? So even with the tools, you have Slack, you have Google Calendar, you have Gmail. Should people by default just turn over access to everything and then you help them figure out what to use? I think that's the question. When I tried to set up Slack, it was like, hey, give me access to all channels and everything, which for the average person probably makes sense because you don't want to re-prompt them every time you add new channels. But at the same time, for maybe the more sophisticated enterprise use cases, people are like, hey, I want to really limit what you have access to. How do you kind of thread that balance?Flo [00:06:35]: The general philosophy is we ask for the least amount of permissions needed at any given moment. I don't think Slack, I could be mistaken, but I don't think Slack lets you request permissions for just one channel. But for example, for Google, obviously there are hundreds of scopes that you could require for Google. There's a lot of scopes. And sometimes it's actually painful to set up your Lindy because you're going to have to ask Google and add scopes five or six times. We've had sessions like this. But that's what we do because, for example, the Lindy email drafter, she's going to ask you for your authorization once for, I need to be able to read your email so I can draft a reply, and then another time for I need to be able to write a draft for them. We just try to do it very incrementally like that.Alessio [00:07:15]: Do you think OAuth is just overall going to change? I think maybe before it was like, hey, we need to set up OAuth that humans only want to kind of do once. So we try to jam-pack things all at once versus what if you could on-demand get different permissions every time from different parts? Do you ever think about designing things knowing that maybe AI will use it instead of humans will use it? Yeah, for sure.Flo [00:07:37]: One pattern we've started to see is people provisioning accounts for their AI agents. And so, in particular, Google Workspace accounts. So, for example, Lindy can be used as a scheduling assistant. So you can just CC her to your emails when you're trying to find time with someone. And just like a human assistant, she's going to go back and forth and offer other abilities and so forth. Very often, people don't want the other party to know that it's an AI. So it's actually funny. They introduce delays. They ask the agent to wait before replying, so it's not too obvious that it's an AI. And they provision an account on Google Suite, which costs them like $10 a month or something like that. So we're seeing that pattern more and more. I think that does the job for now. I'm not optimistic on us actually patching OAuth. Because I agree with you, ultimately, we would want to patch OAuth because the new account thing is kind of a clutch. It's really a hack. You would want to patch OAuth to have more granular access control and really be able to put your sugar in the box. I'm not optimistic on us doing that before AGI, I think. That's a very close timeline.Swyx [00:08:36]: I'm mindful of talking about a thing without showing it. And we already have the setup to show it. Why don't we jump into a screen share? For listeners, you can jump on the YouTube and like and subscribe. But also, let's have a look at how you show off Lindy. Yeah, absolutely.Flo [00:08:51]: I'll give an example of a very simple Lindy and then I'll graduate to a much more complicated one. A super simple Lindy that I have is, I unfortunately bought some investment properties in the south of France. It was a really, really bad idea. And I put them on a Holydew, which is like the French Airbnb, if you will. And so I received these emails from time to time telling me like, oh, hey, you made 200 bucks. Someone booked your place. When I receive these emails, I want to log this reservation in a spreadsheet. Doing this without an AI agent or without AI in general is a pain in the butt because you must write an HTML parser for this email. And so it's just hard. You may not be able to do it and it's going to break the moment the email changes. By contrast, the way it works with Lindy, it's really simple. It's two steps. It's like, okay, I receive an email. If it is a reservation confirmation, I have this filter here. Then I append a row to this spreadsheet. And so this is where you can see the AI part where the way this action is configured here, you see these purple fields on the right. Each of these fields is a prompt. And so I can say, okay, you extract from the email the day the reservation begins on. You extract the amount of the reservation. You extract the number of travelers of the reservation. And now you can see when I look at the task history of this Lindy, it's really simple. It's like, okay, you do this and boom, appending this row to this spreadsheet. And this is the information extracted. So effectively, this node here, this append row node is a mini agent. It can see everything that just happened. It has context over the task and it's appending the row. And then it's going to send a reply to the thread. That's a very simple example of an agent.Swyx [00:10:34]: A quick follow-up question on this one while we're still on this page. Is that one call? Is that a structured output call? Yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah.Flo [00:10:41]: And you can see here for every node, you can configure which model you want to power the node. Here I use cloud. For this, I use GPT-4 Turbo. Much more complex example, my meeting recorder. It looks very complex because I've added to it over time, but at a high level, it's really simple. It's like when a meeting begins, you record the meeting. And after the meeting, you send me a summary and you send me coaching notes. So I receive, like my Lindy is constantly coaching me. And so you can see here in the prompt of the coaching notes, I've told it, hey, you know, was I unnecessarily confrontational at any point? I'm French, so I have to watch out for that. Or not confrontational enough. Should I have double-clicked on any issue, right? So I can really give it exactly the kind of coaching that I'm expecting. And then the interesting thing here is, like, you can see the agent here, after it sent me these coaching notes, moves on. And it does a bunch of other stuff. So it goes on Slack. It disseminates the notes on Slack. It does a bunch of other stuff. But it's actually able to backtrack and resume the automation at the coaching notes email if I responded to that email. So I'll give a super concrete example. This is an actual coaching feedback that I received from Lindy. She was like, hey, this was a sales call I had with a customer. And she was like, I found your explanation of Lindy too technical. And I was able to follow up and just ask a follow-up question in the thread here. And I was like, why did you find too technical about my explanation? And Lindy restored the context. And so she basically picked up the automation back up here in the tree. And she has all of the context of everything that happened, including the meeting in which I was. So she was like, oh, you used the words deterministic and context window and agent state. And that concept exists at every level for every channel and every action that Lindy takes. So another example here is, I mentioned she also disseminates the notes on Slack. So this was a meeting where I was not, right? So this was a teammate. He's an indie meeting recorder, posts the meeting notes in this customer discovery channel on Slack. So you can see, okay, this is the onboarding call we had. This was the use case. Look at the questions. How do I make Lindy slower? How do I add delays to make Lindy slower? And I was able, in the Slack thread, to ask follow-up questions like, oh, what did we answer to these questions? And it's really handy because I know I can have this sort of interactive Q&A with these meetings. It means that very often now, I don't go to meetings anymore. I just send my Lindy. And instead of going to like a 60-minute meeting, I have like a five-minute chat with my Lindy afterwards. And she just replied. She was like, well, this is what we replied to this customer. And I can just be like, okay, good job, Jack. Like, no notes about your answers. So that's the kind of use cases people have with Lindy. It's a lot of like, there's a lot of sales automations, customer support automations, and a lot of this, which is basically personal assistance automations, like meeting scheduling and so forth.Alessio [00:13:21]: Yeah, and I think the question that people might have is memory. So as you get coaching, how does it track whether or not you're improving? You know, if these are like mistakes you made in the past, like, how do you think about that?Flo [00:13:31]: Yeah, we have a memory module. So I'll show you my meeting scheduler, Lindy, which has a lot of memories because by now I've used her for so long. And so every time I talk to her, she saves a memory. If I tell her, you screwed up, please don't do this. So you can see here, oh, it's got a double memory here. This is the meeting link I have, or this is the address of the office. If I tell someone to meet me at home, this is the address of my place. This is the code. I guess we'll have to edit that out. This is not the code of my place. No dogs. Yeah, so Lindy can just manage her own memory and decide when she's remembering things between executions. Okay.Swyx [00:14:11]: I mean, I'm just going to take the opportunity to ask you, since you are the creator of this thing, how come there's so few memories, right? Like, if you've been using this for two years, there should be thousands of thousands of things. That is a good question.Flo [00:14:22]: Agents still get confused if they have too many memories, to my point earlier about that. So I just am out of a call with a member of the Lama team at Meta, and we were chatting about Lindy, and we were going into the system prompt that we sent to Lindy, and all of that stuff. And he was amazed, and he was like, it's a miracle that it's working, guys. He was like, this kind of system prompt, this does not exist, either pre-training or post-training. These models were never trained to do this kind of stuff. It's a miracle that they can be agents at all. And so what I do, I actually prune the memories. You know, it's actually something I've gotten into the habit of doing from back when we had GPT 3.5, being Lindy agents. I suspect it's probably not as necessary in the Cloud 3.5 Sunette days, but I prune the memories. Yeah, okay.Swyx [00:15:05]: The reason is because I have another assistant that also is recording and trying to come up with facts about me. It comes up with a lot of trivial, useless facts that I... So I spend most of my time pruning. Actually, it's not super useful. I'd much rather have high-quality facts that it accepts. Or maybe I was even thinking, were you ever tempted to add a wake word to only memorize this when I say memorize this? And otherwise, don't even bother.Flo [00:15:30]: I have a Lindy that does this. So this is my inbox processor, Lindy. It's kind of beefy because there's a lot of different emails. But somewhere in here,Swyx [00:15:38]: there is a rule where I'm like,Flo [00:15:39]: aha, I can email my inbox processor, Lindy. It's really handy. So she has her own email address. And so when I process my email inbox, I sometimes forward an email to her. And it's a newsletter, or it's like a cold outreach from a recruiter that I don't care about, or anything like that. And I can give her a rule. And I can be like, hey, this email I want you to archive, moving forward. Or I want you to alert me on Slack when I have this kind of email. It's really important. And so you can see here, the prompt is, if I give you a rule about a kind of email, like archive emails from X, save it as a new memory. And I give it to the memory saving skill. And yeah.Swyx [00:16:13]: One thing that just occurred to me, so I'm a big fan of virtual mailboxes. I recommend that everybody have a virtual mailbox. You could set up a physical mail receive thing for Lindy. And so then Lindy can process your physical mail.Flo [00:16:26]: That's actually a good idea. I actually already have something like that. I use like health class mail. Yeah. So yeah, most likely, I can process my physical mail. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:35]: And then the other product's idea I have, looking at this thing, is people want to brag about the complexity of their Lindys. So this would be like a 65 point Lindy, right?Flo [00:16:43]: What's a 65 point?Swyx [00:16:44]: Complexity counting. Like how many nodes, how many things, how many conditions, right? Yeah.Flo [00:16:49]: This is not the most complex one. I have another one. This designer recruiter here is kind of beefy as well. Right, right, right. So I'm just saying,Swyx [00:16:56]: let people brag. Let people be super users. Oh, right.Flo [00:16:59]: Give them a score. Give them a score.Swyx [00:17:01]: Then they'll just be like, okay, how high can you make this score?Flo [00:17:04]: Yeah, that's a good point. And I think that's, again, the beauty of this on-rails phenomenon. It's like, think of the equivalent, the prompt equivalent of this Lindy here, for example, that we're looking at. It'd be monstrous. And the odds that it gets it right are so low. But here, because we're really holding the agent's hand step by step by step, it's actually super reliable. Yeah.Swyx [00:17:22]: And is it all structured output-based? Yeah. As far as possible? Basically. Like, there's no non-structured output?Flo [00:17:27]: There is. So, for example, here, this AI agent step, right, or this send message step, sometimes it gets to... That's just plain text.Swyx [00:17:35]: That's right.Flo [00:17:36]: Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Maybe it's TMI. I'm having blood pressure issues these days. And so this Lindy here, I give it my blood pressure readings, and it updates a log that I have of my blood pressure that it sends to my doctor.Swyx [00:17:49]: Oh, so every Lindy comes with a to-do list?Flo [00:17:52]: Yeah. Every Lindy has its own task history. Huh. Yeah. And so you can see here, this is my main Lindy, my personal assistant, and I've told it, where is this? There is a point where I'm like, if I am giving you a health-related fact, right here, I'm giving you health information, so then you update this log that I have in this Google Doc, and then you send me a message. And you can see, I've actually not configured this send message node. I haven't told it what to send me a message for. Right? And you can see, it's actually lecturing me. It's like, I'm giving it my blood pressure ratings. It's like, hey, it's a bit high. Here are some lifestyle changes you may want to consider.Alessio [00:18:27]: I think maybe this is the most confusing or new thing for people. So even I use Lindy and I didn't even know you could have multiple workflows in one Lindy. I think the mental model is kind of like the Zapier workflows. It starts and it ends. It doesn't choose between. How do you think about what's a Lindy versus what's a sub-function of a Lindy? Like, what's the hierarchy?Flo [00:18:48]: Yeah. Frankly, I think the line is a little arbitrary. It's kind of like when you code, like when do you start to create a new class versus when do you overload your current class. I think of it in terms of like jobs to be done and I think of it in terms of who is the Lindy serving. This Lindy is serving me personally. It's really my day-to-day Lindy. I give it a bunch of stuff, like very easy tasks. And so this is just the Lindy I go to. Sometimes when a task is really more specialized, so for example, I have this like summarizer Lindy or this designer recruiter Lindy. These tasks are really beefy. I wouldn't want to add this to my main Lindy, so I just created a separate Lindy for it. Or when it's a Lindy that serves another constituency, like our customer support Lindy, I don't want to add that to my personal assistant Lindy. These are two very different Lindys.Alessio [00:19:31]: And you can call a Lindy from within another Lindy. That's right. You can kind of chain them together.Flo [00:19:36]: Lindys can work together, absolutely.Swyx [00:19:38]: A couple more things for the video portion. I noticed you have a podcast follower. We have to ask about that. What is that?Flo [00:19:46]: So this one wakes me up every... So wakes herself up every week. And she sends me... So she woke up yesterday, actually. And she searches for Lenny's podcast. And she looks for like the latest episode on YouTube. And once she finds it, she transcribes the video and then she sends me the summary by email. I don't listen to podcasts as much anymore. I just like read these summaries. Yeah.Alessio [00:20:09]: We should make a latent space Lindy. Marketplace.Swyx [00:20:12]: Yeah. And then you have a whole bunch of connectors. I saw the list briefly. Any interesting one? Complicated one that you're proud of? Anything that you want to just share? Connector stories.Flo [00:20:23]: So many of our workflows are about meeting scheduling. So we had to build some very open unity tools around meeting scheduling. So for example, one that is surprisingly hard is this find available times action. You would not believe... This is like a thousand lines of code or something. It's just a very beefy action. And you can pass it a bunch of parameters about how long is the meeting? When does it start? When does it end? What are the meetings? The weekdays in which I meet? How many time slots do you return? What's the buffer between my meetings? It's just a very, very, very complex action. I really like our GitHub action. So we have a Lindy PR reviewer. And it's really handy because anytime any bug happens... So the Lindy reads our guidelines on Google Docs. By now, the guidelines are like 40 pages long or something. And so every time any new kind of bug happens, we just go to the guideline and we add the lines. Like, hey, this has happened before. Please watch out for this category of bugs. And it's saving us so much time every day.Alessio [00:21:19]: There's companies doing PR reviews. Where does a Lindy start? When does a company start? Or maybe how do you think about the complexity of these tasks when it's going to be worth having kind of like a vertical standalone company versus just like, hey, a Lindy is going to do a good job 99% of the time?Flo [00:21:34]: That's a good question. We think about this one all the time. I can't say that we've really come up with a very crisp articulation of when do you want to use a vertical tool versus when do you want to use a horizontal tool. I think of it as very similar to the internet. I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won. But I think that Google, right? But I think the even more surprising fact is that the horizontal search engine has won in almost every vertical, right? You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia. I think maybe the biggest exception is e-commerce. Like you go to Amazon to search e-commerce, but otherwise you go through Google. And I think that the reason for that is because search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical. And search is so expensive to get right. Like Google is a big company that it makes a lot of sense to aggregate all of these different use cases and to spread your R&D budget across all of these different use cases. I have a thesis, which is, it's a really cool thesis for Lindy, is that the same thing is true for agents. I think that by and large, in a lot of verticals, agents in each vertical have more in common with agents than they do with each vertical. I also think there are benefits in having a single agent platform because that way your agents can work together. They're all like under one roof. That way you only learn one platform and so you can create agents for everything that you want. And you don't have to like pay for like a bunch of different platforms and so forth. So I think ultimately, it is actually going to shake out in a way that is similar to search in that search is everywhere on the internet. Every website has a search box, right? So there's going to be a lot of vertical agents for everything. I think AI is going to completely penetrate every category of software. But then I also think there are going to be a few very, very, very big horizontal agents that serve a lot of functions for people.Swyx [00:23:14]: That is actually one of the questions that we had about the agent stuff. So I guess we can transition away from the screen and I'll just ask the follow-up, which is, that is a hot topic. You're basically saying that the current VC obsession of the day, which is vertical AI enabled SaaS, is mostly not going to work out. And then there are going to be some super giant horizontal SaaS.Flo [00:23:34]: Oh, no, I'm not saying it's either or. Like SaaS today, vertical SaaS is huge and there's also a lot of horizontal platforms. If you look at like Airtable or Notion, basically the entire no-code space is very horizontal. I mean, Loom and Zoom and Slack, there's a lot of very horizontal tools out there. Okay.Swyx [00:23:49]: I was just trying to get a reaction out of you for hot takes. Trying to get a hot take.Flo [00:23:54]: No, I also think it is natural for the vertical solutions to emerge first because it's just easier to build. It's just much, much, much harder to build something horizontal. Cool.Swyx [00:24:03]: Some more Lindy-specific questions. So we covered most of the top use cases and you have an academy. That was nice to see. I also see some other people doing it for you for free. So like Ben Spites is doing it and then there's some other guy who's also doing like lessons. Yeah. Which is kind of nice, right? Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to do any of that.Flo [00:24:20]: Oh, we've been seeing it more and more on like LinkedIn and Twitter, like people posting their Lindys and so forth.Swyx [00:24:24]: I think that's the flywheel that you built the platform where creators see value in allying themselves to you. And so then, you know, your incentive is to make them successful so that they can make other people successful and then it just drives more and more engagement. Like it's earned media. Like you don't have to do anything.Flo [00:24:39]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, community is everything.Swyx [00:24:41]: Are you doing anything special there? Any big wins?Flo [00:24:44]: We have a Slack community that's pretty active. I can't say we've invested much more than that so far.Swyx [00:24:49]: I would say from having, so I have some involvement in the no-code community. I would say that Webflow going very hard after no-code as a category got them a lot more allies than just the people using Webflow. So it helps you to grow the community beyond just Lindy. And I don't know what this is called. Maybe it's just no-code again. Maybe you want to call it something different. But there's definitely an appetite for this and you are one of a broad category, right? Like just before you, we had Dust and, you know, they're also kind of going after a similar market. Zapier obviously is not going to try to also compete with you. Yeah. There's no question there. It's just like a reaction about community. Like I think a lot about community. Lanespace is growing the community of AI engineers. And I think you have a slightly different audience of, I don't know what.Flo [00:25:33]: Yeah. I think the no-code tinkerers is the community. Yeah. It is going to be the same sort of community as what Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, Notion to some extent.Swyx [00:25:43]: Yeah. The framing can be different if you were, so I think tinkerers has this connotation of not serious or like small. And if you framed it to like no-code EA, we're exclusively only for CEOs with a certain budget, then you just have, you tap into a different budget.Flo [00:25:58]: That's true. The problem with EA is like, the CEO has no willingness to actually tinker and play with the platform.Swyx [00:26:05]: Maybe Andrew's doing that. Like a lot of your biggest advocates are CEOs, right?Flo [00:26:09]: A solopreneur, you know, small business owners, I think Andrew is an exception. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he is.Swyx [00:26:14]: He's an exception in many ways. Yep.Alessio [00:26:16]: Just before we wrap on the use cases, is Rick rolling your customers? Like a officially supported use case or maybe tell that story?Flo [00:26:24]: It's one of the main jobs to be done, really. Yeah, we woke up recently, so we have a Lindy obviously doing our customer support and we do check after the Lindy. And so we caught this email exchange where someone was asking Lindy for video tutorials. And at the time, actually, we did not have video tutorials. We do now on the Lindy Academy. And Lindy responded to the email. It's like, oh, absolutely, here's a link. And we were like, what? Like, what kind of link did you send? And so we clicked on the link and it was a recall. We actually reacted fast enough that the customer had not yet opened the email. And so we reacted immediately. Like, oh, hey, actually, sorry, this is the right link. And so the customer never reacted to the first link. And so, yeah, I tweeted about that. It went surprisingly viral. And I checked afterwards in the logs. We did like a database query and we found, I think, like three or four other instances of it having happened before.Swyx [00:27:12]: That's surprisingly low.Flo [00:27:13]: It is low. And we fixed it across the board by just adding a line to the system prompt that's like, hey, don't recall people, please don't recall.Swyx [00:27:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so, you know, you can explain it retroactively, right? Like, that YouTube slug has been pasted in so many different corpuses that obviously it learned to hallucinate that.Alessio [00:27:31]: And it pretended to be so many things. That's the thing.Swyx [00:27:34]: I wouldn't be surprised if that takes one token. Like, there's this one slug in the tokenizer and it's just one token.Flo [00:27:41]: That's the idea of a YouTube video.Swyx [00:27:43]: Because it's used so much, right? And you have to basically get it exactly correct. It's probably not. That's a long speech.Flo [00:27:52]: It would have been so good.Alessio [00:27:55]: So this is just a jump maybe into evals from here. How could you possibly come up for an eval that says, make sure my AI does not recall my customer? I feel like when people are writing evals, that's not something that they come up with. So how do you think about evals when it's such like an open-ended problem space?Flo [00:28:12]: Yeah, it is tough. We built quite a bit of infrastructure for us to create evals in one click from any conversation history. So we can point to a conversation and we can be like, in one click we can turn it into effectively a unit test. It's like, this is a good conversation. This is how you're supposed to handle things like this. Or if it's a negative example, then we modify a little bit the conversation after generating the eval. So it's very easy for us to spin up this kind of eval.Alessio [00:28:36]: Do you use an off-the-shelf tool which is like Brain Trust on the podcast? Or did you just build your own?Flo [00:28:41]: We unfortunately built our own. We're most likely going to switch to Brain Trust. Well, when we built it, there was nothing. Like there was no eval tool, frankly. I mean, we started this project at the end of 2022. It was like, it was very, very, very early. I wouldn't recommend it to build your own eval tool. There's better solutions out there and our eval tool breaks all the time and it's a nightmare to maintain. And that's not something we want to be spending our time on.Swyx [00:29:04]: I was going to ask that basically because I think my first conversations with you about Lindy was that you had a strong opinion that everyone should build their own tools. And you were very proud of your evals. You're kind of showing off to me like how many evals you were running, right?Flo [00:29:16]: Yeah, I think that was before all of these tools came around. I think the ecosystem has matured a fair bit.Swyx [00:29:21]: What is one thing that Brain Trust has nailed that you always struggled to do?Flo [00:29:25]: We're not using them yet, so I couldn't tell. But from what I've gathered from the conversations I've had, like they're doing what we do with our eval tool, but better.Swyx [00:29:33]: And like they do it, but also like 60 other companies do it, right? So I don't know how to shop apart from brand. Word of mouth.Flo [00:29:41]: Same here.Swyx [00:29:42]: Yeah, like evals or Lindys, there's two kinds of evals, right? Like in some way, you don't have to eval your system as much because you've constrained the language model so much. And you can rely on open AI to guarantee that the structured outputs are going to be good, right? We had Michelle sit where you sit and she explained exactly how they do constraint grammar sampling and all that good stuff. So actually, I think it's more important for your customers to eval their Lindys than you evaling your Lindy platform because you just built the platform. You don't actually need to eval that much.Flo [00:30:14]: Yeah. In an ideal world, our customers don't need to care about this. And I think the bar is not like, look, it needs to be at 100%. I think the bar is it needs to be better than a human. And for most use cases we serve today, it is better than a human, especially if you put it on Rails.Swyx [00:30:30]: Is there a limiting factor of Lindy at the business? Like, is it adding new connectors? Is it adding new node types? Like how do you prioritize what is the most impactful to your company?Flo [00:30:41]: Yeah. The raw capabilities for sure are a big limit. It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small. It's kind of insane that we started building this when the context windows were like 4,000 tokens. Like today, our system prompt is more than 4,000 tokens. So yeah, the model is actually very much not a limit anymore. It almost gives me pause because I'm like, I want the model to be a limit. And so no, the integrations are ones, the core capabilities are ones. So for example, we are investing in a system that's basically, I call it like the, it's a J hack. Give me these names, like the poor man's RLHF. So you can turn on a toggle on any step of your Lindy workflow to be like, ask me for confirmation before you actually execute this step. So it's like, hey, I receive an email, you send a reply, ask me for confirmation before actually sending it. And so today you see the email that's about to get sent and you can either approve, deny, or change it and then approve. And we are making it so that when you make a change, we are then saving this change that you're making or embedding it in the vector database. And then we are retrieving these examples for future tasks and injecting them into the context window. So that's the kind of capability that makes a huge difference for users. That's the bottleneck today. It's really like good old engineering and product work.Swyx [00:31:52]: I assume you're hiring. We'll do a call for hiring at the end.Alessio [00:31:54]: Any other comments on the model side? When did you start feeling like the model was not a bottleneck anymore? Was it 4.0? Was it 3.5? 3.5.Flo [00:32:04]: 3.5 Sonnet, definitely. I think 4.0 is overhyped, frankly. We don't use 4.0. I don't think it's good for agentic behavior. Yeah, 3.5 Sonnet is when I started feeling that. And then with prompt caching with 3.5 Sonnet, like that fills the cost, cut the cost again. Just cut it in half. Yeah.Swyx [00:32:21]: Your prompts are... Some of the problems with agentic uses is that your prompts are kind of dynamic, right? Like from caching to work, you need the front prefix portion to be stable.Flo [00:32:32]: Yes, but we have this append-only ledger paradigm. So every node keeps appending to that ledger and every filled node inherits all the context built up by all the previous nodes. And so we can just decide, like, hey, every X thousand nodes, we trigger prompt caching again.Swyx [00:32:47]: Oh, so you do it like programmatically, not all the time.Flo [00:32:50]: No, sorry. Anthropic manages that for us. But basically, it's like, because we keep appending to the prompt, the prompt caching works pretty well.Alessio [00:32:57]: We have this small podcaster tool that I built for the podcast and I rewrote all of our prompts because I noticed, you know, I was inputting stuff early on. I wonder how much more money OpenAN and Anthropic are making just because people don't rewrite their prompts to be like static at the top and like dynamic at the bottom.Flo [00:33:13]: I think that's the remarkable thing about what we're having right now. It's insane that these companies are routinely cutting their costs by two, four, five. Like, they basically just apply constraints. They want people to take advantage of these innovations. Very good.Swyx [00:33:25]: Do you have any other competitive commentary? Commentary? Dust, WordWare, Gumloop, Zapier? If not, we can move on.Flo [00:33:31]: No comment.Alessio [00:33:32]: I think the market is,Flo [00:33:33]: look, I mean, AGI is coming. All right, that's what I'm talking about.Swyx [00:33:38]: I think you're helping. Like, you're paving the road to AGI.Flo [00:33:41]: I'm playing my small role. I'm adding my small brick to this giant, giant, giant castle. Yeah, look, when it's here, we are going to, this entire category of software is going to create, it's going to sound like an exaggeration, but it is a fact it is going to create trillions of dollars of value in a few years, right? It's going to, for the first time, we're actually having software directly replace human labor. I see it every day in sales calls. It's like, Lindy is today replacing, like, we talk to even small teams. It's like, oh, like, stop, this is a 12-people team here. I guess we'll set up this Lindy for one or two days, and then we'll have to decide what to do with this 12-people team. And so, yeah. To me, there's this immense uncapped market opportunity. It's just such a huge ocean, and there's like three sharks in the ocean. I'm focused on the ocean more than on the sharks.Swyx [00:34:25]: So we're moving on to hot topics, like, kind of broadening out from Lindy, but obviously informed by Lindy. What are the high-order bits of good agent design?Flo [00:34:31]: The model, the model, the model, the model. I think people fail to truly, and me included, they fail to truly internalize the bitter lesson. So for the listeners out there who don't know about it, it's basically like, you just scale the model. Like, GPUs go brr, it's all that matters. I think it also holds for the cognitive architecture. I used to be very cognitive architecture-filled, and I was like, ah, and I was like a critic, and I was like a generator, and all this, and then it's just like, GPUs go brr, like, just like let the model do its job. I think we're seeing it a little bit right now with O1. I'm seeing some tweets that say that the new 3.5 SONNET is as good as O1, but with none of all the crazy...Swyx [00:35:09]: It beats O1 on some measures. On some reasoning tasks. On AIME, it's still a lot lower. Like, it's like 14 on AIME versus O1, it's like 83.Flo [00:35:17]: Got it. Right. But even O1 is still the model. Yeah.Swyx [00:35:22]: Like, there's no cognitive architecture on top of it.Flo [00:35:23]: You can just wait for O1 to get better.Alessio [00:35:25]: And so, as a founder, how do you think about that, right? Because now, knowing this, wouldn't you just wait to start Lindy? You know, you start Lindy, it's like 4K context, the models are not that good. It's like, but you're still kind of like going along and building and just like waiting for the models to get better. How do you today decide, again, what to build next, knowing that, hey, the models are going to get better, so maybe we just shouldn't focus on improving our prompt design and all that stuff and just build the connectors instead or whatever? Yeah.Flo [00:35:51]: I mean, that's exactly what we do. Like, all day, we always ask ourselves, oh, when we have a feature idea or a feature request, we ask ourselves, like, is this the kind of thing that just gets better while we sleep because models get better? I'm reminded, again, when we started this in 2022, we spent a lot of time because we had to around context pruning because 4,000 tokens is really nothing. You really can't do anything with 4,000 tokens. All that work was throwaway work. Like, now it's like it was for nothing, right? Now we just assume that infinite context windows are going to be here in a year or something, a year and a half, and infinitely cheap as well, and dynamic compute is going to be here. Like, we just assume all of these things are going to happen, and so we really focus, our job to be done in the industry is to provide the input and output to the model. I really compare it all the time to the PC and the CPU, right? Apple is busy all day. They're not like a CPU wrapper. They have a lot to build, but they don't, well, now actually they do build the CPU as well, but leaving that aside, they're busy building a laptop. It's just a lot of work to build these things. It's interesting because, like,Swyx [00:36:45]: for example, another person that we're close to, Mihaly from Repl.it, he often says that the biggest jump for him was having a multi-agent approach, like the critique thing that you just said that you don't need, and I wonder when, in what situations you do need that and what situations you don't. Obviously, the simple answer is for coding, it helps, and you're not coding, except for, are you still generating code? In Indy? Yeah.Flo [00:37:09]: No, we do. Oh, right. No, no, no, the cognitive architecture changed. We don't, yeah.Swyx [00:37:13]: Yeah, okay. For you, you're one shot, and you chain tools together, and that's it. And if the user really wantsFlo [00:37:18]: to have this kind of critique thing, you can also edit the prompt, you're welcome to. I have some of my Lindys, I've told them, like, hey, be careful, think step by step about what you're about to do, but that gives you a little bump for some use cases, but, yeah.Alessio [00:37:30]: What about unexpected model releases? So, Anthropic released computer use today. Yeah. I don't know if many people were expecting computer use to come out today. Do these things make you rethink how to design, like, your roadmap and things like that, or are you just like, hey, look, whatever, that's just, like, a small thing in their, like, AGI pursuit, that, like, maybe they're not even going to support, and, like, it's still better for us to build our own integrations into systems and things like that. Because maybe people will say, hey, look, why am I building all these API integrationsFlo [00:38:02]: when I can just do computer use and never go to the product? Yeah. No, I mean, we did take into account computer use. We were talking about this a year ago or something, like, we've been talking about it as part of our roadmap. It's been clear to us that it was coming, My philosophy about it is anything that can be done with an API must be done by an API or should be done by an API for a very long time. I think it is dangerous to be overly cavalier about improvements of model capabilities. I'm reminded of iOS versus Android. Android was built on the JVM. There was a garbage collector, and I can only assume that the conversation that went down in the engineering meeting room was, oh, who cares about the garbage collector? Anyway, Moore's law is here, and so that's all going to go to zero eventually. Sure, but in the meantime, you are operating on a 400 MHz CPU. It was like the first CPU on the iPhone 1, and it's really slow, and the garbage collector is introducing a tremendous overhead on top of that, especially a memory overhead. For the longest time, and it's really only been recently that Android caught up to iOS in terms of how smooth the interactions were, but for the longest time, Android phones were significantly slowerSwyx [00:39:07]: and laggierFlo [00:39:08]: and just not feeling as good as iOS devices. Look, when you're talking about modules and magnitude of differences in terms of performance and reliability, which is what we are talking about when we're talking about API use versus computer use, then you can't ignore that, right? And so I think we're going to be in an API use world for a while.Swyx [00:39:27]: O1 doesn't have API use today. It will have it at some point, and it's on the roadmap. There is a future in which OpenAI goes much harder after your business, your market, than it is today. Like, ChatGPT, it's its own business. All they need to do is add tools to the ChatGPT, and now they're suddenly competing with you. And by the way, they have a GPT store where a bunch of people have already configured their tools to fit with them. Is that a concern?Flo [00:39:56]: I think even the GPT store, in a way, like the way they architect it, for example, their plug-in systems are actually grateful because we can also use the plug-ins. It's very open. Now, again, I think it's going to be such a huge market. I think there's going to be a lot of different jobs to be done. I know they have a huge enterprise offering and stuff, but today, ChatGPT is a consumer app. And so, the sort of flow detail I showed you, this sort of workflow, this sort of use cases that we're going after, which is like, we're doing a lot of lead generation and lead outreach and all of that stuff. That's not something like meeting recording, like Lindy Today right now joins your Zoom meetings and takes notes, all of that stuff.Swyx [00:40:34]: I don't see that so farFlo [00:40:35]: on the OpenAI roadmap.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yeah, but they do have an enterprise team that we talk to You're hiring GMs?Flo [00:40:42]: We did.Swyx [00:40:43]: It's a fascinating way to build a business, right? Like, what should you, as CEO, be in charge of? And what should you basically hireFlo [00:40:52]: a mini CEO to do? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's also something we're figuring out. The GM thing was inspired from my days at Uber, where we hired one GM per city or per major geo area. We had like all GMs, regional GMs and so forth. And yeah, Lindy is so horizontal that we thought it made sense to hire GMs to own each vertical and the go-to market of the vertical and the customization of the Lindy templates for these verticals and so forth. What should I own as a CEO? I mean, the canonical reply here is always going to be, you know, you own the fundraising, you own the culture, you own the... What's the rest of the canonical reply? The culture, the fundraising.Swyx [00:41:29]: I don't know,Flo [00:41:30]: products. Even that, eventually, you do have to hand out. Yes, the vision, the culture, and the foundation. Well, you've done your job as a CEO. In practice, obviously, yeah, I mean, all day, I do a lot of product work still and I want to keep doing product work for as long as possible.Swyx [00:41:48]: Obviously, like you're recording and managing the team. Yeah.Flo [00:41:52]: That one feels like the most automatable part of the job, the recruiting stuff.Swyx [00:41:56]: Well, yeah. You saw myFlo [00:41:59]: design your recruiter here. Relationship between Factorio and building Lindy. We actually very often talk about how the business of the future is like a game of Factorio. Yeah. So, in the instance, it's like Slack and you've got like 5,000 Lindys in the sidebar and your job is to somehow manage your 5,000 Lindys. And it's going to be very similar to company building because you're going to look for like the highest leverage way to understand what's going on in your AI company and understand what levels do you have to make impact in that company. So, I think it's going to be very similar to like a human company except it's going to go infinitely faster. Today, in a human company, you could have a meeting with your team and you're like, oh, I'm going to build a facility and, you know, now it's like, okay,Swyx [00:42:40]: boom, I'm going to spin up 50 designers. Yeah. Like, actually, it's more important that you can clone an existing designer that you know works because the hiring process, you cannot clone someone because every new person you bring in is going to have their own tweaksFlo [00:42:54]: and you don't want that. Yeah.Swyx [00:42:56]: That's true. You want an army of mindless dronesFlo [00:42:59]: that all work the same way.Swyx [00:43:00]: The reason I bring this, bring Factorio up as well is one, Factorio Space just came out. Apparently, a whole bunch of people stopped working. I tried out Factorio. I never really got that much into it. But the other thing was, you had a tweet recently about how the sort of intentional top-down design was not as effective as just build. Yeah. Just ship.Flo [00:43:21]: I think people read a little bit too much into that tweet. It went weirdly viral. I was like, I did not intend it as a giant statement online.Swyx [00:43:28]: I mean, you notice you have a pattern with this, right? Like, you've done this for eight years now.Flo [00:43:33]: You should know. I legit was just hearing an interesting story about the Factorio game I had. And everybody was like, oh my God, so deep. I guess this explains everything about life and companies. There is something to be said, certainly, about focusing on the constraint. And I think it is Patrick Collison who said, people underestimate the extent to which moonshots are just one pragmatic step taken after the other. And I think as long as you have some inductive bias about, like, some loose idea about where you want to go, I think it makes sense to follow a sort of greedy search along that path. I think planning and organizing is important. And having older is important.Swyx [00:44:05]: I'm wrestling with that. There's two ways I encountered it recently. One with Lindy. When I tried out one of your automation templates and one of them was quite big and I just didn't understand it, right? So, like, it was not as useful to me as a small one that I can just plug in and see all of. And then the other one was me using Cursor. I was very excited about O1 and I just up frontFlo [00:44:27]: stuffed everythingSwyx [00:44:28]: I wanted to do into my prompt and expected O1 to do everything. And it got itself into a huge jumbled mess and it was stuck. It was really... There was no amount... I wasted, like, two hours on just, like, trying to get out of that hole. So I threw away the code base, started small, switched to Clouds on it and build up something working and just add it over time and it just worked. And to me, that was the factorial sentiment, right? Maybe I'm one of those fanboys that's just, like, obsessing over the depth of something that you just randomly tweeted out. But I think it's true for company building, for Lindy building, for coding.Flo [00:45:02]: I don't know. I think it's fair and I think, like, you and I talked about there's the Tuft & Metal principle and there's this other... Yes, I love that. There's the... I forgot the name of this other blog post but it's basically about this book Seeing Like a State that talks about the need for legibility and people who optimize the system for its legibility and anytime you make a system... So legible is basically more understandable. Anytime you make a system more understandable from the top down, it performs less well from the bottom up. And it's fine but you should at least make this trade-off with your eyes wide open. You should know, I am sacrificing performance for understandability, for legibility. And in this case, for you, it makes sense. It's like you are actually optimizing for legibility. You do want to understand your code base but in some other cases it may not make sense. Sometimes it's better to leave the system alone and let it be its glorious, chaotic, organic self and just trust that it's going to perform well even though you don't understand it completely.Swyx [00:45:55]: It does remind me of a common managerial issue or dilemma which you experienced in the small scale of Lindy where, you know, do you want to organize your company by functional sections or by products or, you know, whatever the opposite of functional is. And you tried it one way and it was more legible to you as CEO but actually it stopped working at the small level. Yeah.Flo [00:46:17]: I mean, one very small example, again, at a small scale is we used to have everything on Notion. And for me, as founder, it was awesome because everything was there. The roadmap was there. The tasks were there. The postmortems were there. And so, the postmortem was linkedSwyx [00:46:31]: to its task.Flo [00:46:32]: It was optimized for you. Exactly. And so, I had this, like, one pane of glass and everything was on Notion. And then the team, one day,Swyx [00:46:39]: came to me with pitchforksFlo [00:46:40]: and they really wanted to implement Linear. And I had to bite my fist so hard. I was like, fine, do it. Implement Linear. Because I was like, at the end of the day, the team needs to be able to self-organize and pick their own tools.Alessio [00:46:51]: Yeah. But it did make the company slightly less legible for me. Another big change you had was going away from remote work, every other month. The discussion comes up again. What was that discussion like? How did your feelings change? Was there kind of like a threshold of employees and team size where you felt like, okay, maybe that worked. Now it doesn't work anymore. And how are you thinking about the futureFlo [00:47:12]: as you scale the team? Yeah. So, for context, I used to have a business called TeamFlow. The business was about building a virtual office for remote teams. And so, being remote was not merely something we did. It was, I was banging the remote drum super hard and helping companies to go remote. And so, frankly, in a way, it's a bit embarrassing for me to do a 180 like that. But I guess, when the facts changed, I changed my mind. What happened? Well, I think at first, like everyone else, we went remote by necessity. It was like COVID and you've got to go remote. And on paper, the gains of remote are enormous. In particular, from a founder's standpoint, being able to hire from anywhere is huge. Saving on rent is huge. Saving on commute is huge for everyone and so forth. But then, look, we're all here. It's like, it is really making it much harder to work together. And I spent three years of my youth trying to build a solution for this. And my conclusion is, at least we couldn't figure it out and no one else could. Zoom didn't figure it out. We had like a bunch of competitors. Like, Gathertown was one of the bigger ones. We had dozens and dozens of competitors. No one figured it out. I don't know that software can actually solve this problem. The reality of it is, everyone just wants to get off the darn Zoom call. And it's not a good feeling to be in your home office if you're even going to have a home office all day. It's harder to build culture. It's harder to get in sync. I think software is peculiar because it's like an iceberg. It's like the vast majority of it is submerged underwater. And so, the quality of the software that you ship is a function of the alignment of your mental models about what is below that waterline. Can you actually get in sync about what it is exactly fundamentally that we're building? What is the soul of our product? And it is so much harder to get in sync about that when you're remote. And then you waste time in a thousand ways because people are offline and you can't get a hold of them or you can't share your screen. It's just like you feel like you're walking in molasses all day. And eventually, I was like, okay, this is it. We're not going to do this anymore.Swyx [00:49:03]: Yeah. I think that is the current builder San Francisco consensus here. Yeah. But I still have a big... One of my big heroes as a CEO is Sid Subban from GitLab.Flo [00:49:14]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:49:15]: Matt MullenwegFlo [00:49:16]: used to be a hero.Swyx [00:49:17]: But these people run thousand-person remote businesses. The main idea is that at some company
Edge of the Web - An SEO Podcast for Today's Digital Marketer
Literally, if you have to check your legalese, check the site you have on the package, Mattel! Top news of the week in digital marketing and AI. Matt Mullenweg gets trolled by a mock website based on his own website, trying to show departures from WPEngine. There's a core algorithm update happening right now - watch your stats! What is the potential scenario of a Google break up, as it applies to the Google Ad section of their business? AI news and a really cool AI tool on this episode (can you visualize it?), along with a slew of posts from Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable. Also, make sure you check out the last Interview Series episode with the top brass from Third Door Media, which talks about the recent acquisition of Search Engine Land by Semrush. Great interview with some great insights from these gentlemen! News from the EDGE: [00:02:01] Automattic Confronts Irony with New Protest Site: WPEngineTracker.com [00:06:10] Google Launches November 2024 Core Algorithm Update [00:08:35] EDGE of the Web Title Sponsor: Site Strategics [00:09:52] How a Google Breakup Could Impact the PPC Industry Captain Obvious [00:15:52] Proofread Your Packaging, Mattel! AI News: [00:19:31] Latest Google AIO Updates May Impact SEO AI Tools: [00:22:22] Get Visuals From Your Text: napkin.ai [00:23:39] EDGE of the Web Sponsor: InLinks Barry Blast from Search Engine Roundtable: [00:25:26] Google Ads Allows US Elections Ads Again Starting Nov 11 [00:26:39] HARO / Connectively Platform Closing Down December 9 [00:28:26] Google AI Overviews Testing Anchor Text-Based Hyperlinks Thanks to our sponsors! Site Strategics https://edgeofthewebradio.com/site Inlinks https://edgeofthewebradio.com/inlinks Follow Us: X: @ErinSparks X: @TheMann00 X: @EDGEWebRadio
Paris Marx is joined by tante to discuss troubling developments in the open source world as Wordpress goes to war with WP Engine and a new definition of open source AI doesn't require being open about training data.tante is a sociotechnologist, writer, speaker, and Luddite working on tech and its social impact.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:tante wrote about the problem with the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source AI.Check out this link for the full breakdown on the Wordpress drama.Wordpress changed its trademark guidelines on September 19 regarding the use of the WP abbreviation.Tumblr and Wordpress started selling user data for AI training earlier this year.A lot of the controversy around Richard Stallman started blowing up in 2019.Support the show
Google Preps AI That Takes Over Computers Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said Jeff: Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media? Apples Have Never Tasted So Delicious. Here's Why Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content Video game preservationists have lost a legal fight to study games remotely Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI Open-source AI must reveal its training data, per new OSI definition McDonald's Finds an Unlikely Savior to Finally Fix Its McFlurry Machines RIP Foursquare Craig gives CR $5 million for cybersecurity WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says a fork would be 'fantastic' LeCun blasts Musk as the biggest threat to democracy today Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk's Get-Out-the-Vote Effort Trump's Truth Social valued at more than Musk's X after extraordinary rally Masnick on Elon Musk Events TikTok founder becomes China's richest man The Age of Cage Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 McKinsey's 18 next big arenas of competition Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: veeam.com uscloud.com INFO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT - code TWIT100 cachefly.com/twit
Google Preps AI That Takes Over Computers Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said Jeff: Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media? Apples Have Never Tasted So Delicious. Here's Why Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content Video game preservationists have lost a legal fight to study games remotely Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI Open-source AI must reveal its training data, per new OSI definition McDonald's Finds an Unlikely Savior to Finally Fix Its McFlurry Machines RIP Foursquare Craig gives CR $5 million for cybersecurity WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says a fork would be 'fantastic' LeCun blasts Musk as the biggest threat to democracy today Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk's Get-Out-the-Vote Effort Trump's Truth Social valued at more than Musk's X after extraordinary rally Masnick on Elon Musk Events TikTok founder becomes China's richest man The Age of Cage Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 McKinsey's 18 next big arenas of competition Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: veeam.com uscloud.com INFO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT - code TWIT100 cachefly.com/twit
Google Preps AI That Takes Over Computers Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said Jeff: Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media? Apples Have Never Tasted So Delicious. Here's Why Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content Video game preservationists have lost a legal fight to study games remotely Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI Open-source AI must reveal its training data, per new OSI definition McDonald's Finds an Unlikely Savior to Finally Fix Its McFlurry Machines RIP Foursquare Craig gives CR $5 million for cybersecurity WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says a fork would be 'fantastic' LeCun blasts Musk as the biggest threat to democracy today Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk's Get-Out-the-Vote Effort Trump's Truth Social valued at more than Musk's X after extraordinary rally Masnick on Elon Musk Events TikTok founder becomes China's richest man The Age of Cage Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 McKinsey's 18 next big arenas of competition Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: veeam.com uscloud.com INFO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT - code TWIT100 cachefly.com/twit
Google Preps AI That Takes Over Computers Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said Jeff: Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media? Apples Have Never Tasted So Delicious. Here's Why Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content Video game preservationists have lost a legal fight to study games remotely Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI Open-source AI must reveal its training data, per new OSI definition McDonald's Finds an Unlikely Savior to Finally Fix Its McFlurry Machines RIP Foursquare Craig gives CR $5 million for cybersecurity WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says a fork would be 'fantastic' LeCun blasts Musk as the biggest threat to democracy today Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk's Get-Out-the-Vote Effort Trump's Truth Social valued at more than Musk's X after extraordinary rally Masnick on Elon Musk Events TikTok founder becomes China's richest man The Age of Cage Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 McKinsey's 18 next big arenas of competition Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: veeam.com uscloud.com INFO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT - code TWIT100 cachefly.com/twit
Google Preps AI That Takes Over Computers Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said Jeff: Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media? Apples Have Never Tasted So Delicious. Here's Why Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content Video game preservationists have lost a legal fight to study games remotely Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI Open-source AI must reveal its training data, per new OSI definition McDonald's Finds an Unlikely Savior to Finally Fix Its McFlurry Machines RIP Foursquare Craig gives CR $5 million for cybersecurity WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says a fork would be 'fantastic' LeCun blasts Musk as the biggest threat to democracy today Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk's Get-Out-the-Vote Effort Trump's Truth Social valued at more than Musk's X after extraordinary rally Masnick on Elon Musk Events TikTok founder becomes China's richest man The Age of Cage Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 McKinsey's 18 next big arenas of competition Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: veeam.com uscloud.com INFO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT - code TWIT100 cachefly.com/twit
HTML All The Things - Web Development, Web Design, Small Business
The WordPress drama between WPEngine and Matt Mullenweg has been quite the stir up for primarily WordPress, but also the open source community in general. Not to mention, all the WPEngine customers that are effectively collateral damage having their websites adversely affected, sometimes without even realizing what's happening. In this episode, Matt and Mike discussed the WordPress drama and touched on how it could affect open source projects moving forward. Is WordPress in the right? Is WPEngine? You decide... Disclaimer/Correction: A section of this episode states a misinterpretation of the GPL license. We've published a correction in the show notes under the "Disclaimer & Correction" section. Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcasts/open-source-is-dead Thanks to Wix Studio for sponsoring this episode! Check out Wix Studio, the web platform tailored to designers, developers, and marketers via this link: https://www.wix.com/studio
Edge of the Web - An SEO Podcast for Today's Digital Marketer
We're back from Tech SEO Connect! And we brought Mark Williams-Cook to pinch-hit for Mordy while he was on holiday….and last minute, so there's that. We dialed into some things that we missed while we were away. For starters, the Semrush buyout of Search Engine Land is huge news, and we have even bigger news! Marc Sirkin, Danny Goodwin, and Barry Schwartz will be on the show soon to discuss the event. Matt Mullenweg seems to be melting down about First Amendment claims against WP Engine. The WordPress community seems to be up in arms, at least in our “bubble.” Deep dive there! Google's leadership shuffle and what Kevin Indig had to say about it. AI News and a really cool, we think, AI Tool for this episode. Check it out. Plus, hear about our media partnership with Brighton SEO USA and your chance to snag a ticket to the event in San Diego. Go to https://edgeofthewebradio.com/brightonseo! News from the EDGE: [00:04:19] Mullenweg Criticized for 1st Amendment Claims [00:12:36] Wrong Direction: Google's Leadership Shakeup Long Time Coming [00:23:27] EDGE of the Web Title Sponsor: Site Strategics [00:24:40] Semrush Acquires Search Engine Land AI Blitz: [00:34:08] EDGE of the Web Sponsor: Inlinks [00:34:59] Google's AI Fails At 43% Of Finance Queries, Study Finds [00:37:34] Penguin Random House Protects Its Books from AI Training Use AI Tools: [00:41:48] Lumona Barry Blast from Search Engine Roundtable: [00:43:32] Expandable Google Knowledge Panels On Desktop Search Thanks to our sponsors! Site Strategics https://edgeofthewebradio.com/site Inlinks https://edgeofthewebradio.com/inlinks Follow Us: X: @ErinSparks X: @thetafferboy X: @TheMann00 X: @EDGEWebRadio
On this episode of the Somewhat Frank Podcast, Frank Gruber (X and IG: @FrankGruber), John Guidos (IG: jgoodtimes83), Jen Consalvo (X: @noreaster,) and Simon Kahan (IG: @simonkahan) discuss the following topics: OpenAI unveils experimental ‘Swarm' framework, igniting debate on AI-driven automation - OpenAI introduced Swarm, an experimental framework for multi-agent AI networks that can collaborate on tasks autonomously. Nvidia released an open-source LLM to rival GPT-4 - Nvidia, which builds some of the most highly sought-after GPUs in the AI industry, has announced that it has released an open-source large language model that reportedly performs on par with leading proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. Why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear' against tech investing giant Silver Lake - Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, is in a public dispute with WP Engine, backed by private equity firm Silver Lake, over alleged trademark violations and misuse of WordPress branding. This has resulted in lawsuits and legal threats from both sides. WordPress powers roughly 40% of all websites. NFL Helmet Caps - NFL players are wearing Guardian Caps during practice and games to reduce head impact. These caps provide added protection by absorbing shock during collisions. Two people communicate in dreams: Inception movie-styled sci-fi turned into reality - The most intriguing aspect is the creation of the “Remmyo” language, which allows the decoding of sounds produced in dreams. This opens the door for future advancements, including the possibility of real-time, interactive conversations during lucid dreams. Superhuman - an email client designed to improve productivity and efficiency for users. It is primarily known for its speed, sleek interface, and powerful features that enhance the email experience beyond what traditional email clients like Gmail offer. We also upload our episodes to YouTube in video format so you can see us now. Check it out on Established YouTube, where you can subscribe to get updates when we drop a new episode. https://soty.link/ESTYouTube As always, thank you for listening, and feel free to reach out and let us know what you think at: somewhatfrank@est.us
Your underutilized, underappreciated marketing directors are writing quite the sob stories in their journals every night. Is your law firm worthy of their complaints? ----- Today, we're picking the heart-shaped lock of every law firm marketing director's innermost desires and disappointments. Gyi and Conrad unpack the age-old issues between marketers and those they serve to (hopefully) broaden understanding for both sides. They outline some of the common mistakes made by each party—lawyers v. marketers—and give tactical advice for collaboration that encourages the bloom of efficiency and profitability. They pick apart the faulty ideology around referrals, search, and marketing budgets that could be stunting your firm's growth and your marketer's potential. Later, which should you pick—Ahrefs or Semrush? The guys answer a listener question on which, if either, of these tools is best, but not without a few caveats. The News: Search Engine Land Acquired by Semrush – Eh, this probably isn't great for Search Engine Land's readers. There's got to be some sort of stupid Type-A ego B.S. going on with this whole situation: WP Engine asks court to stop Matt Mullenweg from blocking access to WordPress resources - The Verge. Allison McKeen, Ryan McKeen, and Brittany Green launched a great new book (and may, or may not, be Mando fans)! – The Way: A Simple Roadmap for Leading a Healthy Law Firm Suggested Episodes: Dear State Bar Regulator - South Carolina Edition Connect: The Bite - Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter! Leave Us an Apple Review Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on TikTok
More Wordpress & WPEngine shots fired; hate mail; European road organizations reject the Cybertruck; EU fines against X; civil rights commission pans FART (facial recognition technology); FCC looking into broadband caps; NYT tells Perplexity to stop using its content; AI writing police reports; Instagram becoming Myspace; TikTok knows damn well how bad their product is; Google, Amazon go nuclear for their AI; the Diplomat; Lincoln Lawyer; Shrinking; Silo; Apple digital car keys; new Amazon kindles; robot vacuum hacked; Ham license update; fridges; old songs on road trips.Sponsors:DeleteMe - Head over to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use the code "GOG" for 20% off.1Password Extended Access Management - Check it out at 1Password.com/grumpyoldgeeks. Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/670FOLLOW UPThe GOG Store is OPEN!Response to DHH - OriginalResponse to DHH - EditedWordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine pluginSecure Custom FieldsInternal blog post reveals Automattic's plan to enforce the WordPress trademark using 'nice and not nice lawyers'Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress ChaosIN THE NEWSEuropean Road Safety Orgs Are Terrified of the CybertruckThe EU's Fines Against Elon Musk May Be Much Larger Than AnticipatedCivil Rights Commission Pans Face Recognition TechnologyFCC launches a formal inquiry into why broadband data caps are terribleThe New York Times tells Perplexity to stop using its contentFrom Elon Musk to cop car chases, how a software engineer launched a police AI startupProsecutors in Washington State Warn Police: Don't Use Gen AI to Write ReportsInstagram is introducing profile cards to help users find new friendsTikTok is reportedly aware of its bad effects on teen usersGoogle strikes a deal with a nuclear startup to power its AI data centersAmazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactorsNASA's Europa Clipper mission is on its way to JupiterMEDIA CANDYThe Diplomat, Season 1The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3Apple TV+ announces sixth season for “Slow Horses,” starring Gary OldmanShrinking on Apple TV+ gets early season 3 pickupSilo — Season 2 Official Trailer | Apple TV+APPS & DOODADSApple may be adding digital car key support for specific Volvo, Polestar and Audi vehiclesGoogle is purging ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin from the Chrome Web StoreAdobe starts rolling out generative AI video tools in betaAdobe shows off 3D rotation tool for flat drawingsAmazon announces first Kindle ever with color screen, retailing for $279Robot vacuums spew racial slurs at owners in wake of hackWalk the Distance app deleted...THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the BuildingWP Engine asks court to stop Matt Mullenweg from blocking access to WordPress resourcesHamStudyShe'll Be Coming Around The MountainRoll Out The BarrelOh! SusannaI've Been Working On The RailroadThis Land is Your LandOh My Darling ClementineClementine (Live) - Tom LehrerThis Land Is Your Land (Live) - The Clancy BrothersSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Today on Equity, Devin, Margaux and Anthony Ha are rounding up the week's startup and venture news, kicking things off with a look at the $400 million raised by Lightmatter, and the importance of fast networking within the fast growing datacenter industry today — not just in years to come — makes the impressive round a little more understandable.Our Deals of the Week continue with Paladin's drone play for first responders and police, and Abel aiming to reduce the substantial paperwork backlog that officers accrue in their everyday duties. Abel Founder Daniel Francis brings a chaotic energy (having landed a Twitter job from Musk after pretending to have been laid off) that could shake things up.Diving deeper, Anthony breaks down the complex back-and-forth that is the WordPress/WP Engine dispute - and we're left wondering why the obligations of and to the "open source community" are not entirely clear. What does it mean for an open source ecosystem when one person (in this case WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg) still seems to exercise tremendous influence? And could we say the same of Meta's Llama or other "open" AI solutions?Last, the "bummer" results from PitchBook showing that although founders are founding and investors are investing, there isn't a huge amount of money being made. Turns out they weren't just in it to change the world after all. What could this lack of liquidity be attributed to? Is it the macroeconomic climate, the sectors being invested in, the VC's strategies changing... or something else? At least defense and AI are doing OK, and Europe seems to be chugging along, so maybe it's specific to America? Check back in a month.Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
"The" self-hosted app to archive your favorite YouTube channels and easily integrate into Jellyfin/Plex. Plus, our favorite WordPress alternatives and an update on No Google October.
Netflix earnings don’t disappoint, social network Bluesky sees new growth, WP Engine files federal lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg. MP3 Please SUBSCRIBE HERE. You can get an ad-free feed of Daily Tech Headlines for $3 a month here. A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible. Big thanks to DanContinue reading "X Updates Privacy Policy For Third-Party Data Collection – DTH"
WordPress's emperor, Matt Mullenweg, demands a hefty tribute from WP Engine, and a battle erupts, leaving millions of websites hanging in the balance. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive, a digital library preserving our online history, is under siege from hackers.All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the "Smashing Security" podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault.Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.Episode links:WP Engine is not WordPress - WordPress.Secure Custom Fields - WordPress.Tweet from Advanced Custom Fields.Advisory: Advanced Custom Fields changes - Tim Nash.WordPress saga escalates as WP Engine plugin forcibly forked and legal letters fly - The Register.Internet Archive hacked, data breach impacts 31 million users - Bleeping Computer.The Internet Archive is still down but will return in ‘days, not weeks' - The Verge.Dimsdale podcasts - OTR radio drama comedy and more.Jeff Goldblum's furiously fun Greek gods drama is a masterpiece - The Guardian.KAOS - Netflix.Smashing Security merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers and stuff)Sponsored by:1Password Extended Access Management – Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.Vanta – Expand the scope of your security program with market-leading compliance automation… while saving time and money. Smashing Security listeners get $1000 off!Flashpoint - Access the industry's best threat data and intelligence.SUPPORT THE SHOW:Tell your friends and colleagues about “Smashing Security”, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.Become a supporter via Patreon or Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes and our early-release feed!FOLLOW US:Follow us on
Matt Mullenweg joins Jaclyn in the virtual studio to discuss the significance of kindness in his company, how his passion for music influenced his career, and the connection between open source and kindness.Matt Mullenweg is co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers 43% of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WordPress VIP, Day One, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc. Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair. Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. He currently splits his time between Houston and San Francisco.This podcast is one of the many ways we live out our organization's mission to educate and inspire people to choose kindness. Visit our site kindness.org and sign up to become a part of our global community which spans more than 100 countries. It's free to join and when you do you'll be the first to get access to our latest research, tools, and even episodes of this podcast. Let's build a kinder world, together. Contact us at podcast@kindness.org or on social at @kindnessorg. Important links from this week's episode:kindness.orgautomattic.comFollow Matt & AutomatticIG: @photomattFacebook: @automatticIncX: automatticCreditsHost: Jaclyn LindseyGuest: Matt MullenwegProducer: Melissa MaloneMusic Composition: Chris ChristianaDesign: Ben Gibson, Christine Do, Smithfield StudioTranscript available at this link.
Welcome back to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning psychology podcast brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Join hosts Leanne Elliott, chartered psychologist, and Al Elliott, business owner, as they explore the latest trends, news, and workplace insights that are shaping the future of work. In this week's episode, we tackle a range of stories from leadership struggles to the ongoing debates about remote work. Plus, we have an exciting new Hot Take segment featuring Oliver Yonchev, an entrepreneur and former CEO of Flight Story, the global marketing group founded with Steven Bartlett. Oliver shares his bold predictions about the future of AI and how it will shape the way we work. Segment 1: News Roundup Milestone Birthdays and CEO Performance Leanne dives into a study called The Big Birthday Crisis, which explores how CEOs nearing milestone birthdays, like 49 or 59, see a significant dip in company performance. WordPress vs. WP Engine Drama Al breaks down the recent feud between Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, and WP Engine. Remote Work vs. In-Office Connection Leanne covers a new study from Cornell University that challenges the idea that people form stronger bonds in person versus over video calls. Segment 2: Hot Take with Oliver Yonchev This week's Hot Take comes from Oliver Yonchev, former CEO of Flight Story. Oliver's bold prediction? He believes that AI will be able to do most of what humans do—and do it better—within two years. He discusses how advancements in AI, driven by Moore's Law, are accelerating at an unprecedented rate, and what this means for the future of work. Connect with Oliver on LinkedIn Listen to Oliver's Podcast Memes and Machines Listen to Oliver's full interview on Truth, Lies and Work Ep38: Oliver Yonchev and The Art of Possible: Creating a Culture of Success at Flight Story https://truthliesandwork.com/truth-lies-work-podcast/oliver-yonchev_2269/ Segment 3: Workplace Surgery Leanne answers listener questions, offering practical advice on the following: Question 1: Proving the ROI of Well-being Initiatives A listener with a consulting firm struggles to quantify the value of mental health and well-being programs in their company. Leanne shares tips on how to measure their financial impact and demonstrate ROI to skeptical finance teams. Question 2: Understanding Employee Engagement vs. Satisfaction A product manager asks about the difference between employee satisfaction and engagement, and Leanne breaks down why keeping employees happy is not the same as keeping them engaged—and why it matters. Question 3: Balancing Client Demands and Employee Well-being A small business owner faces the challenge of keeping up with demanding clients while managing their team's burnout. Leanne offers strategies for maintaining client satisfaction without sacrificing employee well-being. Resources Mentioned: Well-being: Productivity and Happiness at Work by Sheena Johnson, Ivan Johnson and Carey Cooper Secret password/Easter egg = Bobi Bean Support with Mental Health and Well-being If any of the topics in this episode have affected you, or if you need mental health support, please reach out to one of the following resources: UK: Mind offers mental health support and information. For those in distress, call Samaritans at 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. US: Contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. Rest of the World: Visit Befrienders Worldwide to find a helpline in your country. Connect with Truth, Lies & Work YouTube: Truth, Lies & Work YouTube Channel TikTok: Truth, Lies & Work TikTok Instagram: Truth, Lies & Work Instagram LinkedIn: Truth, Lies & Work LinkedIn Connect with Al Elliott: LinkedIn Connect with Leanne Elliott: LinkedIn Email: Reach out at hello@truthliesandwork.com. Book a Meeting: Schedule a meeting with Al & Leanne here.
Nicholas Bloom finds WFH is powering a productivity boom, Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves, Levels.fyi has added a salary heat map, Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the Internet really is & Artem Zakirullin details how cognitive load is what really matters in software development.
The beginning of the end for Wordpress; open source, or not; police Cybertrucks; Apple Intelligence rolling out; dystopian AI text summaries; X sends money to the wrong bank, argues that Twitter ceased to exist; Internet Archive attacked; Instagram, Threads moderation out of control; the Penguin; Beetlejuice; Salem's Lot; Joker; Kaos cancelled; Bitcoin doc; Green Day demastered; Roblox; Megalopolis; Tesla's Cybercab; is Elon a modern PT Barnum, or worse; ham radios, HamFests, TRS-80, cameras, Disneyland and chasing the nostalgia dragon.Sponsors:DeleteMe - Head over to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use the code "GOG" for 20% off.1Password Extended Access Management - Check it out at 1Password.com/grumpyoldgeeks. Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/669FOLLOW UPJason's Threads PostMatt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me'Why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has gone 'nuclear' against tech investing giant Silver LakeWPEngine, Matt, Automattic & Wordpress.org megathreadWordpress.org/Matt vs WPEngine megathread, Part 2Automattic is doing open source dirtyThe Pettiest Drama in the Tech World Is Taking Place at … WordPress?DirectusCalifornia Cops Show Off Absurd New Cybertruck With Music From Terminator MoviesTeslas "nearly unusable" for police workIN THE NEWSThe first Apple Intelligence features are expected to arrive on October 28Man learns he's being dumped via “dystopian” AI summary of textsX reportedly paid its Brazil fines to the wrong bank, causing further delay in reinstatement caseX lost a court battle after trying to claim ‘Twitter ceased to exist'The Internet Archive taken down by DDoS attacksInstagram and Threads moderation is out of control - The VergeChina Joins SpaceX in Ruining Astronomy for EverybodyMEDIA CANDYThe PenguinBeetlejuice BeetlejuiceSalem's LotSalem's Lot 1979Joker: Folie à Deux Bombed—What Went Wrong?Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren, and Pierce Brosnan in Talks for Guy Ritchie's ‘Ray Donovan' Offshoot ‘The Donovans''Kaos' Canceled: Jeff Goldblum Netflix Comedy Series Won't Get Second SeasonReacher Gets Early Season 4 Renewal At Prime VideoControversial HBO Documentary Concludes Peter Todd Invented BitcoinGreen Day's Dookie has been demastered into Game Boy carts, a toothbrush and other weird formatsAmazon Seeks to Dismiss Prime Video Ad Tier LawsuitAPPS & DOODADSRoblox Is Playing Dumb About the Bots and Predators on Its Platform, Hindenburg Research SaysMeta is working to fix Threads' engagement bait problemAT THE LIBRARYConstituent Service - A Third District Story by John Scalzi and narrated by Amber BensonEarn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers by Steve PrattPolostan: A thrilling historical epic from #1 New Yortk Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson, perfect for fans of historical fiction and espionage thrillers. (Bomb Light) Kindle Edition by Neal StephensonMists of Time: Echoes of Extinction: Book 3 by D. Ward CornellTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the BuildingEnable iPhone orientation lock for specific appsA Look Inside Apple's $130 USB-C CableMegalopolisTesla's Cybercab Is HereI am seriously considering getting my ham radio license. I want this, but I do not need this - stuff vs. experiencesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and founder of WordPress on the ongoing trademark dispute between WordPress and WP Engine, a hosting company owned by private equity firm Silver Lake.Matt Socials:Twitter: https://x.com/photomattLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/ Host Auren Hoffman Socials:Twitter: https://twitter.com/aurenSubstack: https://substack.com/@auren
More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto unmasked: Will HBO reveal who really made the cryptocurrency? How a UK treaty could spell the end of the .io domain OpenAI pursues public benefit structure to fend off hostile takeovers Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI Who Expressed Alarm Over the Technology, Shares Nobel Prize in Physics Paris Megalopolis review The Wordpress saga Justice Department weighs fixes for Google search monopoly Google's response U.S. judge orders sweeping changes to Google's Android app store Why Caroline Calloway Is Staying Put in Sarasota for Hurricane Milton When Cell Service Is Down, You Can Send iPhone Texts via Satellite A Google Doc of 2024 Events Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch museum First a statue. Now Zuck designs a minivan for his wife. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: USCloud.com 1password.com/twig veeam.com
More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto unmasked: Will HBO reveal who really made the cryptocurrency? How a UK treaty could spell the end of the .io domain OpenAI pursues public benefit structure to fend off hostile takeovers Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI Who Expressed Alarm Over the Technology, Shares Nobel Prize in Physics Paris Megalopolis review The Wordpress saga Justice Department weighs fixes for Google search monopoly Google's response U.S. judge orders sweeping changes to Google's Android app store Why Caroline Calloway Is Staying Put in Sarasota for Hurricane Milton When Cell Service Is Down, You Can Send iPhone Texts via Satellite A Google Doc of 2024 Events Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch museum First a statue. Now Zuck designs a minivan for his wife. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: USCloud.com 1password.com/twig veeam.com
More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto unmasked: Will HBO reveal who really made the cryptocurrency? How a UK treaty could spell the end of the .io domain OpenAI pursues public benefit structure to fend off hostile takeovers Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI Who Expressed Alarm Over the Technology, Shares Nobel Prize in Physics Paris Megalopolis review The Wordpress saga Justice Department weighs fixes for Google search monopoly Google's response U.S. judge orders sweeping changes to Google's Android app store Why Caroline Calloway Is Staying Put in Sarasota for Hurricane Milton When Cell Service Is Down, You Can Send iPhone Texts via Satellite A Google Doc of 2024 Events Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch museum First a statue. Now Zuck designs a minivan for his wife. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: USCloud.com 1password.com/twig veeam.com
More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto unmasked: Will HBO reveal who really made the cryptocurrency? How a UK treaty could spell the end of the .io domain OpenAI pursues public benefit structure to fend off hostile takeovers Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI Who Expressed Alarm Over the Technology, Shares Nobel Prize in Physics Paris Megalopolis review The Wordpress saga Justice Department weighs fixes for Google search monopoly Google's response U.S. judge orders sweeping changes to Google's Android app store Why Caroline Calloway Is Staying Put in Sarasota for Hurricane Milton When Cell Service Is Down, You Can Send iPhone Texts via Satellite A Google Doc of 2024 Events Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch museum First a statue. Now Zuck designs a minivan for his wife. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: USCloud.com 1password.com/twig veeam.com
Show DescriptionWe're getting some feelings out about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg vs WP Engine drama, as well as the Web Components conversation that happened this past week. Listen on Website →Links WP Engine sues WordPress co-creator Mullenweg and Automattic, alleging abuse of power | TechCrunch Automattic demanded a cut of WP Engine's revenue before starting WordPress battle - The Verge WP Engine Banned from Using WordPress.org Resources – WP Tavern The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained | TechCrunch Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me' - The Verge WP Engine Term Sheet Theo and Matt Mullenweg Matt Discusses WordPress WCUS 2024 Q&A Modern WordPress Learning Automattic | Five for the Future | WordPress.org Automattic Alignment Matt Mullenweg Calls Out GoDaddy Matt Mullenweg Charitable Contributions Lee Wittlinger Location WebOps Platform WP Engine Hacker Interview WordPress.com WordPress Hosting Web Components Present Web Components Are Not the Future Sponsors
In this episode of Tech News Weekly, hosts Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti discuss Meta smart glasses with real-time facial recognition and the ongoing drama between WordPress and WP Engine. Also joining are Daniel Rubino of Windows Central to talk about Microsoft's latest Copilot features and indie developer Christian Selig to discuss his experience with Apple's removal of his Juno app from the App Store. Abrar Al-Heeti shares how Harvard students created an app called I-XRAY that uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses and facial recognition to find personal data on people in real-time, raising privacy concerns Mikah Sargent dives into the ongoing feud between WordPress and WP Engine, with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg calling WP Engine a "cancer" and the two companies exchanging legal threats Daniel Rubino breaks down Microsoft's latest AI Copilot updates, including an improved UI, voice interactions, smart search, and photo/paint features that rely on dedicated neural processing units Christian Selig discusses his short-lived Juno app, which provided a cleaner YouTube experience on Apple's Vision Pro before being pulled due to pressure from Google, sparking debates about app store policies and developer rights Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guests: Daniel Rubino and Christian Selig Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/twit e-e.com/twit flashpoint.io threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly
In this episode of Tech News Weekly, hosts Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti discuss Meta smart glasses with real-time facial recognition and the ongoing drama between WordPress and WP Engine. Also joining are Daniel Rubino of Windows Central to talk about Microsoft's latest Copilot features and indie developer Christian Selig to discuss his experience with Apple's removal of his Juno app from the App Store. Abrar Al-Heeti shares how Harvard students created an app called I-XRAY that uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses and facial recognition to find personal data on people in real-time, raising privacy concerns Mikah Sargent dives into the ongoing feud between WordPress and WP Engine, with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg calling WP Engine a "cancer" and the two companies exchanging legal threats Daniel Rubino breaks down Microsoft's latest AI Copilot updates, including an improved UI, voice interactions, smart search, and photo/paint features that rely on dedicated neural processing units Christian Selig discusses his short-lived Juno app, which provided a cleaner YouTube experience on Apple's Vision Pro before being pulled due to pressure from Google, sparking debates about app store policies and developer rights Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guests: Daniel Rubino and Christian Selig Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/twit e-e.com/twit flashpoint.io threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly
In this episode of Tech News Weekly, hosts Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti discuss Meta smart glasses with real-time facial recognition and the ongoing drama between WordPress and WP Engine. Also joining are Daniel Rubino of Windows Central to talk about Microsoft's latest Copilot features and indie developer Christian Selig to discuss his experience with Apple's removal of his Juno app from the App Store. Abrar Al-Heeti shares how Harvard students created an app called I-XRAY that uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses and facial recognition to find personal data on people in real-time, raising privacy concerns Mikah Sargent dives into the ongoing feud between WordPress and WP Engine, with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg calling WP Engine a "cancer" and the two companies exchanging legal threats Daniel Rubino breaks down Microsoft's latest AI Copilot updates, including an improved UI, voice interactions, smart search, and photo/paint features that rely on dedicated neural processing units Christian Selig discusses his short-lived Juno app, which provided a cleaner YouTube experience on Apple's Vision Pro before being pulled due to pressure from Google, sparking debates about app store policies and developer rights Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guests: Daniel Rubino and Christian Selig Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: 1password.com/twit e-e.com/twit flashpoint.io threatlocker.com for Tech News Weekly
Daniel and Manton talk about the community drama and impending fiasco of WordPress and Matt Mullenweg vs. WP Engine. They weigh the arguments of either side. Then they consider the larger issue of dependencies we have on the platforms we develop for, and how we strive for independence from platforms that can make or break our business. The post Episode 614: 500 Thumbs Down appeared first on Core Intuition.
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of The Learning Leader Community This is Episode #601 with the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg Notes: What is your creed? I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible because it's the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that's insurmountable. "People need something to believe in." -- That's what draws talent to the company. What do you look for when hiring a leader? "The four qualities that you can't train..." Work ethic Taste Integrity Curiosity Coaching -- Expose your leaders to coaches. Mirror Ask questions Reflect Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence: Optimism in dark times Player coaches -- They can do the work AND lead others Hire well -- They spot talent, hire, train, develop, and retain them Commencement speech -- Encourage others to think bigger. Raise their ambition. From Tyler Cowen -- The high-return activity of raising others' aspirations - (PhD instead of Masters) At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous. Matt's Twitter Bio -- I can think. I can wait. I can fast– This comes from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Siddartha said “if you can think, wait, and fast, you can do just about anything.” Don't constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work! Jim Simons was a mentor for Matt. Be guided by beauty. Will Durant - Health lies in action, and so it graces youth. To be busy is the secret of grace and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.” Matt's goals -- My goals in life are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. I travel a lot. In 2023 I visited 63 cities, and 18 countries, and my average velocity was 41.9 miles per hour. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I write code, poetry, prose, and music, often in support of those three goals, but sometimes just to make the world a more beautiful place. I love taking photos and have posted over 30,000 to this site, hence my common username photomatt.