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How Automattic wants to build the operating system of the web
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and soon Tumblr, is now worth $3 billion. But its founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg has a bigger goal. He wants to make the web better, more open and diverse.
With the rise of social networks and closed platforms, Automattic’s mission statement has never sounded so important. Automattic doesn’t want to be the hot new startup. It wants to build a strong foundation to empower content creators for decades to come.
In an interview this week, Matt Mullenweg discussed why he raised $300 million from Salesforce Ventures, what he thinks of the current state of the web and how Automattic has a shot at building the open-source operating system of the web. The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
(Photo Credit: Christopher Michel / Flickr under a CC BY 2.0 license)
Romain Dillet: Tell me more about how much money you’ve raised, who you’ve raised from.
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Axios’ Dan Primack on ‘the most polarizing startup that exists’
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was a bit special. Instead of meeting up at the TechCrunch HQ to record the episode, Kate and Alex met up in muggy Boston at Drift’s office, where we linked up with Axios’s Dan Primack. And because we were feeling chatty, we went a bit long.
After checking in with Primack (he has a newsletter and a podcast), we first dealt with the latest from Tumblr. In short, Verizon Media is selling Tumblr to Automattic for a few dollars. How did Verizon wind up owning Tumblr? Ah. Well, Yahoo bought it. Later, after Verizon bought AOL, it bought Yahoo. Then it smushed them together and called it Oath. Then Verizon decided that it didn’t like that much and renamed the group Verizon Media. But Verizon doesn’t want to own media (besides TechCrunch, of course), so it sold Tumblr to Automattic, a venture-backed company best known for operating WordPress.
That’s a lot, I know. What matters is that Yahoo bought Tumblr for more than $1 billion. Verizon sold it for around $3 million. Now, Automattic has a few hundred new employees and a shot at juicing its user base before it goes public.
After that, we lamented that the WeWork S-1 had yet to appear. This was a tragedy, frankly. We had expected to spend half the show riffing on WeWork’s financials, alas…
So we turned to some normal material, like Ramp’s recent $7 million raise to take on Brex, and, SmartNews’s recent round, which gave it an eye-popping $1.1 billion valuation.
We ran a bit long because we were having fun, fitting in some conversation surrounding the notes from the SEC regarding the now-dead and then-fraudulent Rothenberg Ventures. More on that here if you want to get angry.
And finally, Vision Fund 2. It’s been a big source of interest for everyone on the show, and we expect whatever the second-act Vision Fund winds up becoming to be a big damn deal. The fund will invest in more than just consumer marketplaces; in fact, it’s eyeing more AI businesses and even biotech. That should be interesting.
All that and we have a lot more good stuff coming. Thanks for listening to the show, and we’ll be right back.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
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Tumblr just added a switch in the iOS Settings that lets you turn the porn back on
Here’s an interesting change: Tumblr’s iOS application just received an update which now lets you turn on or off adult-oriented, NSFW search results just by toggling a switch in iOS’s Settings. That’s right: you can now switch on or off the Tumblr porn with ease. Weirder still, Tumblr’s note about the change in the App Store update text says this was… Read More
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Tumblr launches Cabana, a new app for watching videos with friends
Tumblr today is launching a new app, called Cabana, which allows a group of friends to video chat and watch videos together, in real time. The app is being introduced under the Tumblr brand, and will cater to the type of users who frequent Tumblr’s blogging service – teens and young adults – but it’s not currently designed to interoperate with Tumblr’s product… Read More
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Startup spending guide: When freebies will do
This is the second installment in the Startup Spending Guide series, where we are exploring how early-stage startups should spend their non-payroll money. In the first installment we enumerated areas where early-stage startups need to spend money. In this installment we’re going to cover areas where free tools are not only available, but preferred. In the final installment we’ll… Read More
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Apple’s iPhone Live Photos Now Work On Tumblr
If you’re a Tumblr user who happens to have an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, today is your lucky day. The Tumblr team dropped an update which includes support for both 3D Touch and Live Photo. The Live Photo bit is super interesting because Tumblr is a place where GIFs and animated images tend to get shared and re-shared at pretty rapid rates. The best part is that you can view them even if… Read More
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Tumblr’s Instant Messaging Now Available To All, Adds Support For Sharing Posts
Last month, Tumblr rolled out instant messaging on the web, iOS and Android to a subset of Tumblr users ahead of a broader launch. Today, the company says that all users will now have access to this feature, which introduces a way to communicate directly with others on the service, in a private, chat-like interface. Originally, the product itself was fairly bare-bones – you could… Read More
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Tumblr Launches A “GIF Maker” For Mobile, Promises More Tools For Creative Expression To Come
Tumblr today is launching a new tool that will capitalize on its community’s love for both creating and sharing GIFs with the debut of a mobile-only “GIF Maker.” The tool, which lets you quickly turn your iPhone videos or burst photos into GIFs, will not be a standalone application, but will rather become a core feature of the main Tumblr mobile app. “Tumblr is the home… Read More
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Tumblr Finally Makes “Reblogs” More Readable, Especially On Mobile Devices
One of blogging site Tumblr’s flagship features, the reblog – meaning the reposting of another person’s content onto your own site – is getting a significant makeover starting today. The company is introducing a change as to how these reblogs appear on users’ dashboards, making them far more readable than they were previously. No longer a long list of… Read More
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Tumblr 4.0 Arrives On iOS With Better Blogging Tools, Filtered Search, And A New Widget
Tumblr this morning has begun to roll out a sizable update to its iOS application with the release of Tumblr 4.0. The new application, which also now appears under a revamped app icon, includes a number of features previously available only on desktop, like the ability to create secondary blogs on the fly or submit to submission blogs, for example. Meanwhile, other additions are… Read More
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