WordPress now powers one-third of the web and Automattic has 900 employees in 68 countries. They’re proof that distributed work can scale. But what does it mean for the future of business?, Matt Mullenweg is asking on his new blog about distributed work.
Mullenweg started a new podcast and blog on distributed.blog. The first podcast episode is having CEO of Upwork, Stephane Kasriel as a guest. He talked about the broken American dream and how can it be fixed.
Kasriel is an immigrant and says that he long believed in the American dream — the idea that if you work hard, no matter where you’re starting from, you can achieve a self-sufficient, reasonably comfortable life.
Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for many people. Kasriel says that one solution to this seemingly intractable problem lies in fundamentally changing how Americans think about work. And that involves dispensing with the rigid view of work as a full-time, 9-to-5 endeavor where workers gather five days a week in an office to get things done, and are compensated with fixed salaries and benefits. Instead, he wants to make it easy for companies to hire contractors anywhere in the world, under flexible terms, and pay them by the hour or by the project.
Excited to chat with @skasriel about @Upwork and fixing the American dream for the first episode of the Distributed podcast: https://t.co/P761OCqVkk
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) May 16, 2019
Also, it’s very interesting to read the Mullenweg’s opening article on distributed.blog:
My life’s work is WordPress. But in building my life’s work, I discovered something just as important:
Talent is evenly distributed around the globe, but the opportunity is not.
With WordPress, I discovered the power of open source software development. I met a group of like-minded people online, and we worked together to build a publishing platform that now powers over one-third of all websites on the internet.
In our quest to democratize publishing, I realized we were also changing the way work gets done. While the early companies of Silicon Valley started out in garages and cramped workspaces, WordPress was being built without any offices at all.
When I founded Automattic as the parent company of WordPress.com, we went all in on the future of work. We would be an entirely distributed company with no central offices. All our work would be online. We’d use internal blogs, group chat, and video conferencing for our meeting spaces.
Now here we are in 2019, and Automattic has grown to 900 employees working from 68 countries. I’ve learned so much about distributed work. I know it’s the right path.
Read the full article on distributed.blog