from Hacker News

Automattic raises $300M at $3B valuation from Salesforce Ventures

by jblz on 9/19/19, 1:23 PM with 120 comments

• by whalesalad on 9/19/19, 2:00 PM

  > “The roadmap is the same. I just think we might be able to do it in five years instead of ten,” Mullenweg said.

  I tried to hunt for why the investment was taken and this is all the article mentions. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m guessing that competition is heating up and they need marketing fuel to keep people on the platform while they transform it from a duct taped blogging tool to something more flexible.

  There is no middle ground with WP. You’re either buying a generic theme that doesn’t really fit your business and forcing your content into it... (every small business out there right now) or you’re Rolling Stone and you run big boy WP with major customizations. The middle area is weak. That’s where people like Wix etc... are eating their lunch.

• by AznHisoka on 9/19/19, 1:53 PM

  Does anyone else see a misalignment between the $3B valuation and the huge impact Wordpress has had on the internet? 1/3 of all websites are powered by Wordpress, yet they seem to be valued low compared to other tech companies.

• by nathan-io on 9/20/19, 12:12 AM

  “What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web. We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress."

  God help us all.

• by nshntarora on 9/19/19, 10:16 PM

  Awesome! @photomatt would also love to know the company's plans with HappyTools (https://happy.tools/), what's coming next?

• by nathan-io on 9/20/19, 1:08 AM

  The article didn't mention the lack of version control, which AFAIK is impractical due to the sheer amount of HTML and layout-defining configuration WP stores in the db.

  In spite of WP's revision history feature on Posts and other models, I've always found this to be a major issue on WP sites.

  Obviously there are numerous other problems with WP, that's just one I didn't see the author touch on.

  I try to talk clients out of WP whenever possible, and most let me build using a proper MVC framework.

  I like to think I'm making the Internet a little better, one not-another-WordPress-site at a time.

• by rblion on 9/19/19, 2:54 PM

  DHH isn't too thrilled about this.

  > “We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is a nasty, monopolistic goal. Listening to Matt muse about 85% marketshare dreams is a real downer. But $300m is a down payment on monopoly dreams.

  full thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174695189090308096

• by njx on 9/19/19, 8:57 PM

  I am surprised nobody here mentioned wooCommerce and Gutenberg. Prior to Gutenberg, I was sold on Elementor but now with the upgrade have been using Gutenberg quite often and love it.

  I bet the funding is going into these two fronts especially wooCommerce (the top ecommerce platform on wordpress and also owned by Automattic.

• by pX0r on 9/19/19, 5:47 PM

  Will things like WP (not in particular) die out eventually because of poor developer experience ? Corollary: frameworks liked by developers will eventually stick even if currently they have a modest userbase.

• by pmlnr on 9/19/19, 1:44 PM

  I genuinely thought Automattic is already profitable, is it not?

• by neom on 9/19/19, 2:16 PM

  Whenever I see valuations like this from corporate VCs, I always wonder if they're trying to protect against someone else buying the company.

• by puranjay on 9/19/19, 7:33 PM

  Around three years back, if you were to ask me to build a website, I would straight up choose WordPress. Not because it was the best at it, but because it was the easiest and the cheapest way to do it.

  Now, I'm not so sure.

  Blogging itself is in decline and the kind of blogging experience WordPress offers is, frankly, too bloated for the average blogger

• by mwexler on 9/19/19, 5:10 PM

  Hopefully this means Simplenote will continue to be supported!

• by Aperocky on 9/20/19, 4:23 AM

  > We want all website to be ran on WordPress

  The horror, it would be a worse disaster than npm. God no

• by ravivyas on 9/19/19, 4:58 PM

  The keyword in the post is "e-commerce"

• by calimac on 9/19/19, 2:53 PM

  Matt has been a special founder. He has integrity and a his compass is aligned with a strong vision for product and the open internet.

  The battle for an open internet is multigenerational Here a quote from the article “The problem we’re tying to solve is likely multigenerational. It can take the rest of our lives and we need to pass it on to the generation that comes after to continue to work on it. Hopefully for the rest of humanity because I can’t imagine a time when humanity cannot benefit from an open, free, connected web,” Mullenweg told me

• by cft on 9/19/19, 4:58 PM

  As they get more and more funding, their content moderation is converging with Facebook. This is from May:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/bn5gse/what_happene...

• by maxerickson on 9/19/19, 1:47 PM

  $160 million dollars is a ton of money. WTF.

• by notzuck on 9/19/19, 2:41 PM

  "To that end, as we reviewed our hiring process, we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire."

  If that's there attitude then fuck them. You can guess which demographic they are talking about.