Matt Mullenweg talks about Automattic’s staffing and financial issues at TechCrunch Disrupt

WordPress developer and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg talked about his battle with WP Engine, Automattic’s staffing issues, and the company’s finances at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday.

Mullenweg reiterated many things from last month about the trademark fight, WP Engine not contributing to the community, and misleading customers to believe it is associated with WordPress.com. If you need a refresher on the WordPress community drama, we have an article to help you catch up.

He said the company was short-staffed after 159 workers left for six months earlier that month. Since then, Automattic has been hiring aggressively and has already hired 26 people this month.

Mullenweg said the second offer — which included nine months of severance and lost access to WordPress.org as part of the package — was designed to catch a leaker inside the company providing confidential information. He went on to say that the company had to ask others who took this offer to stay until the next year as they did not have a job.

The trademark problem

Speaking about trademark issues, Mullenweg said that in the early days of Automattic, he gave the WordPress Foundation the WordPress trademark as investors controlled Automattic. While the foundation still owns the brand, Automattic has an exclusive license to use it commercially. In addition, Mullenweg said he has 84% ​​of the voting control in the company.

When asked what other members of the WordPress Foundation board thought about the fight, he said they were incredibly supportive and referred to minutes of meetings published on the foundation’s site – the post said nothing about the trademark.

Automattic’s CEO also talked about the legal battle with WP Engine and said it could take a few years to resolve.

“The estimates I heard from Neil [Katyal, the lawyer representing Automattic] in this case and in others it is that worst case scenario, if we lose everything, it could happen in 2026 or 2027,” he said.

Automatic fees

Earlier this year, Blackrock, one of Automattic’s investors, reduced their investment to about half of the value from when they bought the shares in 2021. Although Mullenweg did not specifically address that decline, he said the company generates about half of the revenue. billions of dollars in annual revenue, operating “on break or better,” and aggressive hiring.

“We have never raised the initial capital and we have no plans,” Mllenweg said.

WordPress Forks

Speaking about the possibility of a WordPress fork due to the ongoing backlash in the community, Mulleneg said that would be good.

“There may be a fork. I mean, we’ve had WordPress forks before – maybe three or four times in history [of WordPress]. Another good thing about open source is that it can be forked,” he said.