A couple of months ago, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg embarked on a podcast journey to understand the future of work. He examines the benefits and challenges of distributed work and recruiting talented people around the globe.
More than 15 years ago, Matt started WordPress with some friends from the Internet who believed in the idea of democratizing publishing on the open web. He was 19.
The funny thing is, he’d never even met most of the people he was working with. He was based in Houston, and others were scattered all over the world. They had a shared passion, and they were connected on the Internet. What else did they need? Now WordPress powers more than 33% of all sites on the web.
WordPress was his first introduction to the idea of distributed work — they didn’t need to live in the same place or work in the same office to build something that changes the world. So when he started building Automattic in 2005, they took the exact same approach. All you needed was good WiFi and a dream.
Fast forward to 2019, and Automattic remains a fully distributed company, with 900 employees working from 68 countries and no central office. Now that they’ve been working this way for over a decade, he wanted to create a podcast to tell the story of distributed work — not just sharing everything they’ve learned at Automattic, but speaking with other companies, executives, and creators who are pioneering the future of work. They’re going to learn about the practical application of distributed work in our daily lives, but also answer the bigger questions about why it’s important.
The following TED video released in February 2019 is a primer on distributed work and the Distributed podcast.
Recent Episodes
- Upwork’s Stephane Kasriel on Fixing the American Dream
- Pluto VR cofounder John Vechey on the Virtual Office
- VC Arianna Simpson on Distributed Work and the Blockchain
- Mark Armstrong interviews Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg
- Upwork’s Zoe Harte and Han Yuan on managing people and products in a distributed company
- Design leader John Maeda on creative collaboration in a distributed context
- Leadership coach Leo Widrich on how distributed workers can build emotional resilience and stay connected
Openstream is also a distributed company, founded in Switzerland in 2004. We‘re not as big as Automattic, but nevertheless around 15 WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento enthusiasts helping mainly Swiss startups and SMBs to build and customize websites and online stores.
The first part of this text was originally taken from distributed.blog, slightly modified and extended.
