 I'm here with John who you guys heard during the keynote and you heard that he was invited by Matt to join him at Automatic, so you likely know that he works at Automatic. I want to start there just by asking, I mean at the time you were, I think, with Kleiner Perkins and also doing stuff with eBay. So those are well-known companies, a lot of influence, and in some ways Automatic was a company that also had influence, though not the same kind of dynamic. And so how did you evaluate those and how did you make that decision to decide to join Automatic? Well, it's a little embarrassing. You lost a bet. No, this may be bad to say in this room, in this community, but I, two years ago, left WordPress for all my sites, because six years prior I was at this event where I had WordPress in like 2004, loved it, and then I found this service called Posterous, sort of a Gary Tan. I loved it, so I moved to Posterous, so five, six years ago I met this thing and this young man comes up to me, Matt Mullenweg, says, hi, you know, I found our WordPress and I had his WordPress, the thing, you know, which looked to me, they moved your blogs. Because Posterous is going away, so I thought, oh, yeah, please do that. So, move everything over, and from that very moment on, I could never figure out how to do the things I needed to do, and I was like, oh my gosh, where is that, you know, I was like, he disappeared from me, and for years, couldn't touch it, didn't know how to, because WordPress world is hard. Well, what's crazy is that for people who have been in it, right, I think I started in 2005, it had an interface, right, a particular look and feel, and then it just changed incrementally, so every step of change I absorbed with a tiny monocle of friction, right, because I was just going through the change of the Delta, right, so then you'd hear a whole community of people like that saying, well WordPress is easy, you know, WordPress is easy because you're describing it as having learned from, you know, 3.0 to 3.1, not from, you know, 2.0 to 3.0, or 2.0 to 3.8, right, where you're like, I don't know if you noticed this, but your menu items went from 6 to 346, right, and you're just like, where do I go, where do I look, what do I do, we hadn't caught that because it was all just tiny incremental change, right? Well, I know, it was like, I was, it was winter, and I like to see what the young people do, and I saw the whole trend around like, you know, flat file websites, the old way, Jekyll and things like that, middleman, I was like, oh, what is this? So I wrote the code to take the exporter file and parse it my way and then push it into this other format and put it up in AWS, and it was like, oh my gosh, it was like freedom. I could actually touch everything again, and that's what I met Matt. Yeah. So in case you don't have background or context, there was a point in time where when we wanted to blog, we would write stuff here, pull everything down, re-index, generate files, and then push it back up to what was the regular stupid folder, right? Like you just, you had a dumb hosting account with a dumb folder, none of it was fancy, and you just took files that your computer would generate, and you just push it back, which meant you just write anything in the little app, right? Radio, user land, and all those, I mean, you go way back, you just generate and then push it up. Of course, if you made a change, you had to redo it, if you changed permalinks or anything else, right? If you're changing the URL paths, you might have to, you know, re-index everything and push it back up, but you had total control, right? And then over time, that was changing, right? People are logging into sites and making changes, and now there's servers, and now there's, well, you're using Apache, but now you're using nginx, and all these things are changing, and that makes it harder. And so when he mentions Jekyll, it is a throwback approach, right? It is another, which just, I mean, again, just to give some context, today, you would hope that we would have all these websites that would load in femtoseconds, because it's text, it's titles, maybe an image or two, right? With some sort of connection to CNN, yet it's not that way, right? Because every single page load hits, you know, WordPress, which hits engines, which hits PHP, which hits the short code PHP file, which parses all the text, which, and you're like, all that, I just wanted to write a paragraph, right? So Jekyll's approach was just, I know, it would just generate a whole bunch of HTML and throw it in the folder, then you're done again, right? So it was almost coming all the way full circle. It's old school. Yeah. All the other time I stopped, watched out, and I was like, this is fast. Yeah. So anyways, I was really happy, and that's what I met Matt again. And I was like, oh, I remember you. You moved all my stuff over, and that was really nice, but I could never figure out how to, like, you know, and it said, well, he recognized that this thing you're describing, kind of the frog in the boiling water, but over time it seemed okay to everyone who was in it. Yeah. But a newcomer would be like, or someone who came back after they stopped watching the TV show for three years. So we had a just rethink the whole thing. And we also needed to integrate JavaScript because the browser is so much more powerful today. And I thought, well, okay, so he's aware. And number two, I could feel his passion for the people that had gotten the word best to where it is, and he didn't want to let them down. Yeah. And I like that, you know? Yeah. Feels like a commitment. And I liked that he's like a 34-year-old now hippie. Yeah. And it's cool to get to work on freedom. Particularly though, I'm interested less so in the early years of the web, which was about freedom of speech, essentially. Because now we have a lot of speech and whatever all over the place. I'm more interested in financial freedom, which I think WordPress did for a lot of people. It was kind of like a college substitute, not just coding and marketing and design, all kinds of things. And I think that the closed platforms have taken it away from a lot of people. And so I believe that the open web is important to keep this kind of blue-collar tech ecosystem really not just alive, but thriving. Yeah. And it won't thrive unless there is some kind of financial opportunity, not to become like the Elon Musk, you know, have like millions and millions of dollars. Just like, I just want to feed my family or need to take care of my mom or dad or I'd like to go out like once a month. So for me, that's what drives me now is how to leverage the scale of WordPress, its position, and to really kind of hone in on the earning potential that WordPress brings, not just to the people who build sites, but for people who own the sites. That excites me a lot. So your title at Automatic is wrong? It's because I realized biographies are kind of like oversold. So I thought if my title became my like bio, it's easy to say. So tell us the title. Well, the first thing, it's because whenever you like begin something, you're the clearest ever seen the movie Memento. I forget everything. So I have to kind of like to get a picture of it, take notes. And so in my title, I put everything I needed to remember as a begat of this journey. The first is global because WordPress community is global. Has anyone been to a WordCamp Europe event or anything like that? It's pretty amazing. Thank you. It's like, it's like, whoa, it's like Euro Disneyland or it's all kind of the same, but they have waffles instead of whatever. It's very similar and it's in different languages. It's double byte languages in some cases, but they're everyone speaking the same language of opportunity and freedom. And so global, because sometimes when you're like when we're near in the US, you think that you're kind of the center of the world. Or if you speak English, you think that that's what drives everything, but it's only half the world. So global. And then computational design, because design is a really poorly designed word because you think design is design of your head is on your logo or design or whatever. I'm primarily interested in computational design. Computational design is what is able to leverage the power of Moore's law, which is this doubling of processing speed every year and a half. And somehow when you harness your thinking to that engine, you're not moving at the speed of technology. Let me give you an example. So if you look at computers in the 1970s and you compare them to computers today, if you use Moore's laws calculation, what it says is that the computers today are nine billion times faster than the computers in the 1970s. So let me give you an analogy. Let's say you bought a car. It's an awesome car. 1970. It went 60 miles per hour, costs with $12,000, $15,000. Now imagine you're in 2018, you're buying a car, it goes 100 miles per hour. No, actually it goes nine billion miles per hour. And it costs the same, if not less. And everybody has them. That is weird, but to your point, it's boiling frog. If you're in it, you didn't notice it, but computers became space-aged fast. And so if you're talking about design of my glasses or a logo, that's like last century. Any design involving hundreds of people, thousands of people using a WordPress site, any kind of design involving some kind of testing that you can do now and so many bins, like all this stuff is like space-aged stuff. Compatial design. Lastly, inclusion. Because I learned over time that design is very simple. As long as you remember that design is about the people you serve, it's being inclusive of the people that you serve. And you cannot design for them unless you hang out with them. It's like, I know exactly what you all need, because I know what a human being is. They've got like a thing over here. They've got these things attached to it, like a potato. And they're all the same. And I just like that. So I'm going to design whatever. I realize that inclusion was the key to designing better products. And so I wanted to remember that as an important factor. Well, inclusion is one of those things that if you don't make it a priority, it's easy to have it just kind of fall into the background. I have a theory for a while. I have a theory. It's because I go over time, it's this word diversity and inclusion in organizations has tended to be owned by human resources. And if you've seen the office, there's Toby, head of HR, whatever. I mean, I love HR by the way, but I don't think the average person is like, oh my gosh, HR. Unless you're an HR person. Most people are HR. They kind of do this, right? Because it's all kind of legal risk type of stuff. So it's kind of like putting all that stuff together and diverse inclusion feels more like a requirement. And nobody likes things that are required. Because if you're not doing that, you're doing the wrong thing. So I'm more interested in bringing inclusion to product creation. And if inclusion can help product creation, because the fundamental tenant that I learned in venture capital is that the most successful businesses have a large market. And this is a phrase called TAM, total addressable market. So if your TAM is large, it means that you have potentially many customers. If your TAM is small, it means you're not going to be able to grow as a business at the rates you might want to. So the best way to grow your TAM is to be inclusive of customers, people who are not like yourselves, which is so hard because we think we're so smart. Like I know exactly how that person, I watched a TV show. I watched them. I wrote a book, you know. I had so many people, you know, I'm very interested in this political situation in the US and Europe right now. Because we tend to think diversity inclusion is a certain way. And when you look at all of the kind of like video and the alt-right type of stuff, whatever, it tends to paint a bleak picture of the Appalachian region. You know, those people over there, they're all one kind. And when you're like in a coastal city, the first thing people will say, well, did you read the J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, reviewed the New York Times, did you read that? Oh, I read it. I just totally get what's happening over there. I realize that I suffered from that problem. So I went to the Appalachian Mountains to meet coal miners in coal mining towns. And it just really changed how I saw that region. Yeah, we're reading that book at home right now. And it was provided to us by a friend of ours whose grandfather was out there. She's now in California. But it's great to have these conversations where someone's saying, well, here's my dad's story or my grandfather's story. And you're like, wow, that's definitely not my grandfather's story, right, from another country. And so you're just having these conversations about it. I have a fundamental belief that the reason diversity also ends up, or inclusion, right, ends up being something that just, if it's not a top priority, it kind of fades in the background, is because it requires some discipline, especially in your time out, product, not in the HR world, but in the product space and building anything. It requires a kind of proactive step outside, step outside, connect with some other people, connect with some different people, challenge your own assumptions. And if you don't actively do that, right, it's just a lot easier to do whatever's on your to-do list today. And so it just starts falling back quietly, not with a big rage. It just starts slowly not being on the list of things that you have time to do. Are you seeing or are you guys working on ways to get people out of the building or ways to get people connected? I mean, obviously, you're going all the way across the country to hang out with some people that are different from you, but are you seeing a set of patterns or dynamics or disciplines developing in the organization? I mean, obviously a remote organization, but how are you helping people make that a practice? First of all, a lot of the technology companies like Shopify and Facebook, when they began to work with businesses, they realized that they had lacuna. It's interesting that in the diversity inclusion industry, there's a lot of talk about blind spots, but it turns out that if you're blind, you don't like people saying blind spot. So I asked my lexicographer friend, is there a better word in this lacuna? It means having a gap. So I guess what I found is that if you don't, this whole idea of difference, if you look different, you're now different, but if you look the same, it gets harder. So one thing that I advocate for a lot is Caucasian men because people say, why do you do that? And I say, well, it's because they're not all the same. And unless we all recognize that we're all a little bit different, then we don't be curious about other people's differences. That's how diverse inclusion can be non-inclusive. And you raise your point about, you read this book and you notice similarities or you can find some similarities. When you talk with people like in that region, let me give you an example. So there was a person, Rusty, he runs an incubator where he supports coal miners who have lost their jobs to retrain and learn PHP and JavaScript and they're building websites in the mountains to remotely. But I was so struck by how he said, he says something like, you know, I talk like this. It's called Talking Hillbelly. And so it's, in the media, your talk just think it makes you sound stupid. And I never thought about that. You know, it's going to pause, just listening to him. And he said a lot of cultures, immigrant cultures, they talk funny and they're stupid. And I was like, whoa, this is so interesting. And then the other day I was watching like Amazon, whatever, video, whatever, and they were, they were, they brought back the Beverly Hillbellies. You know, as a kid, that was really funny. But when you watch, you're like, wow, if I was in that area, it's been so deeply enculturated. I guess that would be bad to me too, you know. When I was in the region, I was traveling with a group. One person was ex-White House, legal counsel division, who's African American. And she said, you know, well, you feel sorry for these people, but don't forget African Americans have been left out of many opportunities for multiple generations, which you did apply to many immigrant categories too. And I thought, wow, this is really messy. You know, this is messy. But I like it. Because if we can understand all of our differences and we can communicate about them and kind of get excited about it and design in that way to be inclusive. In the article I pointed out in Quartz, I didn't know this. But it's true. If you go into any slack, any one slack, if you look at the public channels, if you count the speakers, they will index mail. It's true. It's index mail. And I wasn't sure why. But you read the article, and again, this is generalizations. This isn't everybody. But this article pointed out that once you have a bias towards this kind of mail-centric chatter in a slack, it excludes people who don't want to behave like that. I'm sure. And even like introverted men, it isn't conducive. And suddenly you're like, I can't be a part of that, whatever. And the simple way to correct that that's suggested is to do what these researchers have observed is visible in healthy, primarily women-based chats, slack rooms, which is being supportive of each other. Like Chris said this. Did you notice that? You know? Sam said this. Did you see that? And I thought, wow, that'd be a much better slack. The one where people just drop a link and drop a link, and it's like, okay, I don't really know what I'm learning here. But if I don't drop a link, am I stupid or whatever? And so like, from that I learned like, oh, I should do that more of that too. But you only do that unless you create the dissonance in your mind that this normal thing isn't really a great thing. And so how can technologies be designed differently? Like take a WordPress and a commenting system. For instance, one thing that we had is that we had a design and exclusion. We have a design and exclusion podcast available. It's a four hour resource to talk about how much harder it is to be online if you are a woman or any other tech-based discriminatory group. And it was started because a friend of mine said to me, just change your avatar to be a woman and see what happens. And so in a different network, I tried that. And it was really like, what is this? It is night and day. But I wasn't aware, you know? But once you become aware, you're like, I don't know if this is, you know, it's like, let's do something about it. That's how I feel right now. I don't know what to do, but I know I've become aware. And are you seeing that permeate through your teams? Definitely. Because all I say, that's my title, my title. Inclusion. Inclusion. And we have Ashley. Inclusion. A lot of the messages I share inside, not just automatic, but in every gathering I'm at, I try to point out the logic that I find odd. It's all because of the fortune of an accident I had. What accident? I tripped while jogging. I had like nine pins in here. I tripped. And I was lucky that, you know, just shattered this, whatever it was, I was lucky. I felt lucky. And I thought, well, I've been saved for some reason. What is it? And it was at that very moment that I realized that I'm Asian. I didn't know you were Asian until that moment. No, it was like, I didn't know that. Oh, that's why that. Oh, okay. But it just wasn't aware. And then I realized that it was that moment where I'm a big Star Trek fan. And I remember, because I had the opportunity to speak at the Star Trek 50th anniversary thing. And as a nerd, I was like, awesome. But then I realized that it was started in 1966, the same year I was born. And I pointed out how when I was a kid, I remember thinking it was strange that Sulu spoke with regular, like, unaccident English. Should he speak like with that kind of, you know, the accent? And I thought, that's really weird. You know what I mean? And I was like, wow, I'm so conditioned to seeing things a certain way. So I thought now, at this time in my life, I should work to change that wherever I can. And you're doing a lot not just with adults, you're also doing stuff with kids. Yeah, well, we did a project to work with the classroom in Appalachia. And it's just been fun because because we're a remote ecosystem, this is the WordPress in general. Yeah. It means that really anything is possible, especially with low cost high end video conferencing systems today. Rusty brought up how he looked at us and said, you all are city people, you know, city people live in 3D, 3D meaning like, you know, skyscrapers, 3D. And he said, if you live in a town, you're living 2D, you're like moving around like this in the town. He says, we live in 1D off of one street. And that's how I realized if you're in this technology world, you're living in 0D, where you can beat space time and you can connect with anybody. And so I remember when I was able to get a few designers interested in working with this little town, and we brought in the superintendent and two very strong, liberally minded designers on the call, a video call. And I remember when the superintendent, David, said, I'm so excited about this. You know, I'm going to see Mitch McConnell on Monday. I can't wait to tell him about this. And you can see those editors just rocked. But after that call, the direction was, he seemed like a nice guy, really cares about his students. Huh, you know what I mean? Right. Well, one of the things that I appreciate about the work you're doing and in general, right, and all the folks that are doing work with children, right, is that you're creating opportunities for them, creating opportunities for them to have different experiences with different people and using these platforms to make it a part of what they consider their normal, right. And I think one of the ways that we work through inclusion, right, is making sure that all different kinds of kids have that option, right, not just three-digit children, right. Yeah, that's why I'm excited about WordPress. Because I think that the install base is so broad, and the socioeconomic diversity is so great, that its impact for more younger people is important because of PHP. Let's have a PhD for a second. PHP is no longer cool. JavaScript is in, and the problem with JavaScript with each iteration, the computer science people get excited. And they throw in what's called syntactic sugar. Syntactic sugar is not sugar. It's like some kind of, I don't know what it is, it's like some kind of, really walk of factory sugar. So you're like, what is that sugar? Oh, it's really good. Meaning that it makes it harder to understand and actually excluding more people. Whereas PHP is really easy to read. It's as bad as Perl. It's not a really good computer language, but it's legible enough. Kind of like a car, old car, you open it up to a hood, you're like, oh, that's that part, that's that part. Maybe if I touch this, this will change, you know. So I guess I'm hopeful that we'll see WordPress, PHP base, that part of it. It's not antiquated, but the on rent for more people. Because like if you look at Facebook's code, anything that big, it's like, so I'm hopeful that we'll find more avenues to more young people to get into code versus this, you know, like let's code. It's very abstract. So let's code. But we have this amazing built in community that could be the partners that facilitate their growth. That's awesome. That's awesome. So we have time for one question for Chant. Yeah, in the back. The language of shame, it's a joyous sort of process. And it's a joyous sort of process. Well, you know, at MIT, when I was at MIT, I was wonderfully naive. So I like walking to walls and like, you know, it's awesome. And I remember like being at some kind of cocktail thing with the muckamucks. You know what muckamucks are? Muckamucks are important people. I was in the muckamucks. And I said to the chancellor at MIT, I said, hey, you know, I'd love to be on a committee, you know, committee. I looked at me like, you want to be on a committee? And he pulled out his palm pilot and typed his name into the, you know, my name into the palm pilot. And like a week later, he called me up and said, I've got a really important committee for you to run. And I said, what's that? It is the work and family committee. That sounds great, sir. I'll take it on. And when I joined, I realized it was the most undesirable committee. But it was the most interesting committee because it was about burnout and work. It was about graduate student child care. But more importantly, it was about employees with elder care issues and loved it. So I was able to organize that and went well. And so three years later, he calls it well done. I've got another very important committee for you to run. So I'm ready for it. I thought it's going to be the big one, you know, the good ones. It's the race and race and cultural relations committee. I said, I can't wait. So I showed this committee and assured everyone's like, no, it's the worst committee that we have. You're like, oh, great. I love fixer uppers. But it's there that everything, my understanding of diversity and inclusion changed dramatically because I would hear all kind of like terribly terrible things happening every week. This is like a 21st century. I would hear things like students showing up in class late and the professor saying, you know, you're late to your exhibiting Latin American qualities. You know, all this kind of stuff you'd hear like, really, this is like the 21st century. This is actually happening. You know, but the thing that changed shifted everything into the youth was when there was a Native American student and he was talking about the difficulties he'd experienced. It was a terrible thing as he was described. And so as a chair, I wanted to empathize with him and, you know, like, well, you know, I didn't know I was Asian back then too, actually. I've been called these kinds of things. I've had a bottle thrown. I've had stuff happen and I know it's terrible. He looked at me and he said, you have no idea what I've gone through. You know, you've gone through a kind of immigrant racism. I've gone through an Indigenous person racism. I said to him, I thought, yeah, it's different. See, everyone's hurt is different. It's very independent and unique. So yes, there's a lot of strong anger because the hurt is real. That said, I seek to have another part to develop, which is, I hate to say it, purely business-minded. I just believe that inclusion is good business. I just believe that it helps you create better designs for products and services. People are asking, why don't I talk about this over here? My point is this is, there's a lot of this and I support all of it, but I'm squarely focused on this kind of inclusion. Let's give it up for John. All right, we're going to take a couple minute break and then we'll have another talk in here.