Episode 15 – The Future of WordPress: Open Source vs. Private Equity

Leon (00:00):

Hello, welcome to the Boost. My name’s Leon and I’m Pablo. Today we’re here at Geekdom, again talking WordPress Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, WP Engine, silver Lake, a little bit, but all the drama that’s kind of unfolded on Twitter of stemming from Matt Wigs talk. But something I want to call out before is this cool T-shirt. You lick it, the Boost. Let us know if you want one. We’ll hook you up. Yes, we’re going to get some more printed, so I’m super pumped.

(00:36):

Cool. Okay, so WordPress, we’ve been talking back and forth a little bit about this. Let me try to set the scene and then we can kind of go from there. So I’ve got my notes out. This all stems from some cryptic tweets. Matt Muller wig started from months ago. Nobody really knew. He was talking about investors and all of the stuff that is bad to the world and WordPress as a whole. And then during WordCamp on his final day when he was talking the keynote speech, he goes up and he starts talking about private equity and the company behind WP Engine that quickly spirals into calling WP Engine Cancer of WordPress, which is what really stemmed from all this. And then he was saying, most of it’s how PE is bad, destroying open source, getting huge returns, not really contributing. And then this is the way that software dies, that a publicly traded company in some capacity comes into an open source thing. The proprietary stuff gets really good. The open source stuff gets bad. I believe he used sugar. CRM as an example of proprietary stuff is great. The open source component of it’s bad.

Pablo (01:57):

And Silverlake bought Sugar. CRM,

Leon (01:59):

I don’t know about that. I believe it’s another private equity. But he was using that as kind of like a example as an example is he’s trying to say, Hey, WordPress as a whole has stayed really cohesive. Granted, not everybody loves Gutenberg. There’s some issues around that. But overall as an ecosystem for open source, WordPress, open source is really, really good. And it’s no different than what is the wordpress.com product, which is like the self-hosted. There’s not there.

Pablo (02:29):

It’s always been confusing.

Leon (02:30):

It’s been very confusing. There is another company that’s doing exactly this, it’s called Ghost, and they do a similar model and they’ve been able to make their core product alongside the open source version. And every time the hosted version on Ghost gets an update, the open source version gets an update. So they use it as a way to fund it.

(02:51):

It’s a clever and innovative way. I think it’s good for the software. They’re essentially giving something away for free, but also building a product on the back of it.

Pablo (02:58):

Right.

Leon (03:00):

And overall, so back to this, he says that B is destroying open source, getting huge returns. Software slowly dies. He talks about the barbarians at the gate, Nabisco, it’s like a book about equity. And these big companies. After that happened, he double and tripled, quadrupled down. He wrote on wordpress.org, he tweeted out a bunch of stuff. He open sourced his nonprofit givings because he was kind of getting slandered through the news. And then he went to Reddit to say that he’s being sued. It sounds like it was a cease and desist and maybe there’s some legal action happening.

Pablo (03:37):

That’s right.

Leon (03:38):

And then WP Engine tried to hack some code in WordPress core to stop the newsfeed from showing up in WordPress. If you’ve ever logged into WordPress site, you get all the wordpress.org.

Pablo (03:48):

Is that alleged or is that proven? It’s

Leon (03:50):

Proven. So I actually logged into WordPress dot, my WP Engine count, went to the WordPress dashboard and saw that you cannot see the news anymore.

Pablo (03:58):

Interesting.

Leon (03:59):

So they took that out. And then there’s a little bit of rumor that supposedly WP Engine changed the WooCommerce Stripe affiliate thing. So WooCommerce gets money every time you use their Stripe stuff. And supposedly WP Engine altered that code and used their own. And that’s maybe some of the part, the tension, because WooCommerce really, the only way that it’s monetized is plugins. And then through that Stripe. So there’s a little bit of that. And then on WP Engine, they pretty much doubled down, said that we’re doing great. This is just a cease and desist that Matt’s slandering us, that we’re a really great company. We give back, we do all this stuff, we own all these products. And Matt responded. And then inevitably, somewhere along the path of that coded and all that WP Engine got cut off from wordpress.org. And for anybody who doesn’t know what that is, it’s the hosting solution for plugins. So if you need to get a plugin, and let’s say it’s even a page bill. Public

Pablo (04:58):

Plugins.

Leon (04:58):

Yes, public plugin. So like a free Yost for example, if you want to download Yost, you have to get it from the wordpress.org builtin, or you have to go to Yost itself, download it, upload it. And then the same way you would do an update, you’d have to go there, download it, upload it, but you’d always go through the wordpress.org. So essentially Automattic, Matt Mullenweg Hoover made the decision, cut the head off of WP Engine by saying, Hey, you’re not allowed to have access to wordpress.org.

Pablo (05:29):

And let’s just put some context around this. We’re talking about 40% of the internet.

Leon (05:35):

Yeah, I would say a little bit more. I would say it’s supposedly about 50%. So

Pablo (05:40):

Okay,

Leon (05:41):

Major chunk of the internet runs on WordPress, nasa, the White House, Kamala Harris’ campaign. I don’t know what Donald Trump uses, but I imagine it’s WordPress, Taylor Swift, so massive, massive content management system that powers 40 to 50% of the internet.

Pablo (06:00):

You know what, it’s interesting too, is that 15 years ago, 20 years ago, frankly, I mean when WordPress was just getting started, I guess, oh, what? Oh 4 0 5,

Leon (06:13):

Yes.

Pablo (06:13):

Something along those, maybe even oh three, I’m trying to remember what year it was. So WordPress has been around for a long time, and when it first started getting traction, it was one of the first true purveyors of open source. There were many other providers out there at the time, but there was not a centralized community around development. I would contend that’s ever matched WordPress as a defacto content management system that’s downloadable. And when I first started, I was working on jula, right? And

Leon (06:50):

A wins some pain.

Pablo (06:51):

Yeah. Well, look, it was all that there was at that time. That’s all that there was. And if the products you were effectively having to figure out how to code yourself, they weren’t getting updates, you were trying to figure out what was wrong. You’d have to figure it out on your own. Go onto forums, ask questions, and essentially you’re on your own. Now, the value that WordPress brings to the table is exactly that repository. That repository is free general public license tools that allow someone to effectively launch a business with zero cost. Hosting might be the most expensive thing that you have to deal with. And frankly, mostly most of the budget hosts that are out there, you could launch a website and a business for under 30 bucks a month.

Leon (07:43):

Yeah, I would say site ground, I think it’s $10 a month

Pablo (07:48):

Right now. The issue here is that look, WordPress has supported hundreds of thousands, if not millions of small business entrepreneurs getting their business off the ground. Look, I lived on WordPress, I offered WordPress services. I supported a lot of small businesses and other agencies. It wasn’t just my own business, but other agencies before I even had my own supporting them in WordPress, development, design, marketing, any of those things. The thing is though, from an overhead standpoint, I didn’t paying in any time at all, and probably at the time was a business that I probably generated maybe $400,000 in my best year as an individual. Not bad, but this is now over 10 years ago, my overhead was never more to keep that business running was never more than maybe maybe 5% of my take.

(08:51):

WordPress allowed that to happen. It wasn’t the hosting companies that were providing those services. I could put my files on their servers. They gave me support when I ran into problems. But if it was code related, I had to go figure it out. Either find it through premium plugins that were supported or the GPL ones and then kind of figuring it out and just kind of patching it together. And it wasn’t perfect, but it worked, keeping it cheap for every man to essentially have a business. Now that is the non-corporate model where you’re supporting development shops that have a product. They build a product, they build their subscriber base, they build a following. And then I would contend that maybe, look, I see both sides of the argument as we talked off camera, but the truth of the matter is, is that you have now an entity that is highly corporatized.

(09:53):

They’ve taken these products that have these followings that have been literally built from the ground up, many bootstrapped, and they found success. Then they come in a company, I’m not going to even say WP Engine specifically, there’s other companies. GoDaddy has done it. Every major hosting company that’s in existence has done it. They go out and they buy that company. All of them say, oh, we’re going to continue supporting the community. We’re going to continue development. It’s going to be a great product. It’ll continue to be a great product. Nine times out of 10, that’s not true. It gets purchased, acquired, all of a sudden the product starts suffering. What happened to that community? What they did was they bought a mailing list, a community, and they infiltrated it through the product. Now they become defacto leaders in the space. I mean, to put it bluntly, is GoDaddy a major WordPress hosting solution? I mean, haven’t heard there’s lots of WordPress sites hosted on it. Would you say that GoDaddy in any way, shape or form is confused with being WordPress?

Leon (11:04):

Very many times. You say, what’s your login to your WordPress site? They give you a GoDaddy login, they give you WP Engine login. There is much confusion of what is WordPress. And the same confusion also happens with wordpress.com versus.org. But you say WordPress to a business owner, and I just did this the other day, amazing lady psychiatrist. I told her, what’s your WordPress login? She goes, oh, I’m not sure what’s that? And I was like, well, did you get it from GoDaddy? And as soon as I said GoDaddy before I even went to the next one, it was, Hey, that’s where my website is. It’s their website. And I was like, oh, great. GoDaddy builder. It ended up being WordPress and Easy and all of that.

Pablo (11:48):

So the confusion is maybe general, it’s not all WP Engine’s fault. It does not mean that that confusion has not generated profit though.

Leon (11:58):

No, and that’s part of the background of that is Matt Wig contends that WP Engine has trademark infringements because they’re

Pablo (12:07):

Using WP in the name W,

Leon (12:09):

And on top of that, sometimes the reference is WordPress engine. And then when they display on the exhibits in there, and I’ll link it in the notes is on the exhibits. It was like, best WordPress host, WordPress host, WordPress, WordPress. It was there, and I think you counted, counted it.

Pablo (12:28):

Yeah, no, I have a note here. Now, here’s the thing I just sort of just checking, right?

(12:34):

Yeah.

(12:35):

I just did a control find on a browser. I’m using Brave Browser and I just went to the WP Engine’s website and I counted 56 mentions on their homepage of WordPress. However, GoDaddy on their one page for WordPress mentions WordPress 51 times hosting her, who Matt Mullenweg said was an option that people should consider when telling people to leave WP Engine. They mentioned it 50 times. So it’s not about the term WordPress being used in their copy because everyone’s doing it. It’s possible that because of the fact that GoDaddy hosting Air and all of these other major hosts don’t have any sort of relationship to the WordPress name. Maybe because WP Engine has that in their name, maybe has that reference. But what’s interesting is WP is not protected under the trademark.

Leon (13:35):

No. And it’s just WordPress and there’s some oddity to it because the trademark is for the open source version. And then Matt Mullenweg, because of how he founded it, he also gets to use it in a commercial sense. It’s a little loophole, but in this exhibits and this cease and desist, most of them are screenshots of headless WordPress, the all in one headless platform, and it’s like WordPress hosting for small business. And I think it’s the way that they use it. It’s not that it’s a WordPress host, it’s always in the sense power your business with WordPress experts. They’re billing themselves as the only experts, the best experts,

(14:19):

And

(14:19):

They kind of convey it as their own hosting or their own platform in a sense. But I think that’s the contentions here and in the background, we don’t know what Matt Mullenweg, those meetings and all of that. He had this public fight might just be other stuff. There might be other things under the surface that WP Engine’s doing that we just don’t see yet.

Pablo (14:47):

So the thing that I’m seeing is there’s really lots of different variables that could come to play, but I feel like it’s one of two things that will probably happen. It’s either going to be resolved amicably and lots of money will be changing hands, so it’ll be settled out of court. Or there is nothing preventing from companies like WP Engine to taking WordPress core product and then deciding to fork it, right? WP Engine is already selling a headless product. WordPress is not a headless product. It has to be manipulated to become a headless product. So if headless is really the direction they’re going to go, then that isn’t going to be probably the product that they sell. And if it’s headless, it’s changing the whole dynamic of how WordPress functions out of the box. That’s completely legal under GPO, right? The question then comes down to, is this going to change the WordPress hosting industry? Because if WP Engine can be sued by WordPress, and the contention is around being WordPress experts. I mean, GoDaddy says lots of interesting things about WordPress and so do other hosting providers.

Leon (16:03):

I think this is why a lot of the community is really worried. I think I was a little shocked at the community response. I kind of expected more people to get behind it of like, Hey, WP Engine is a bit bad. They’re abusing the systems. They’re not really giving back back. But

Pablo (16:22):

Is it that, or do you think it’s also because they charge a premium for their services? Literally they’re the Mercedes-Benz of branding related to cost. You’re paying for lightning fast. They say it on their site that the website speeds an attribute that you’re not going to find elsewhere.

Leon (16:44):

When I think WordPress host, the only one that pops into my mind is WP Engine. Off the top of my head, you say WordPress host, and I go, oh, WP Engine. After that, I might put Nexus or a hosting juror site grounds in there, but always WP Engine, they made themselves so public that they’re a WordPress host that most people just know it as that.

(17:11):

And I don’t think that a lot of people understand you can just pick up your website and move it to any host that you’re not stuck there. But as a business owner, all you’re thinking is like, oh, hey, this is my platform. They own my website. There’s a lot of that. And then they own a CF. They own studio press. They own all this stuff that I actually do think helps them fork it if they actually do fork. And when we say fork, it’s essentially take the code and move it into another stream and build your own tools, CMS and everything.

(17:43):

There’s a real possibility that that’s the outcome. I know a lot of people are saying, Hey, this is the end of WordPress. I don’t really see it. I think Matt Mullenweg has shepherded WordPress along really well. There is definitely the confusion parts of names org, dot com, commercial, but without Automattic WordPress is an open source platform. Probably wouldn’t have been here like the Gutenberg push the block stuff. Nobody wanted to do it. And maybe it’s been kind of poorly executed, but the fact that he has invested Automattic’s time into building that and pushing that and saying, if we want to exist as a platform, we need to innovate. And even the new backend, it looks very early 2000 still. They’re redesigning it, making it react based and all this stuff that’s being done by Automattic

Pablo (18:40):

Well, lemme ask you this question too. This is now flipping the coin in terms of what it took to develop that product. WordPress as a product, it’s commonly known that the WordPress community has a lot of contributors. Many of them are unpaid. Now, maybe that’s the reason why WordPress has an altruistic side to it by giving back to community, because you have people that are giving of their time, they’re freely giving that time to help the WordPress community and to build a better product. And in terms of whatever revenues generated by WordPress or Automattic as a company, then there is this social giving component. I would contend that WP Engine as a company has very few, if any contributors that are doing work for free. I mean, WP Engine has to pay everybody, employees, they have to pay benefits, they have to pay anything that a major employer would. And it’s stated that WordPress, or I’m sorry, Automattic and WP Engine are roughly the same size. So in the end, it feels like this is just a question of money. How are you generating your revenue? What are you doing to support the community? How are you giving back to the community as a whole? The thing is, is that look, a private equity owns you. I’ve never come across a single private equity that wasn’t all about profit. Now,

Leon (20:20):

Yes, profit now or profit within a very specific time horizon, short timeframe, and it’s all less than two to three years all the time.

Pablo (20:27):

So that means that not only are your services going to be boosted, the likelihood that the companies that are being acquired immediately get r and d pulled back because of budgetary constraints, especially now in this market where investment dollars have scaled back. I think we all know that that’s the environment today. So it comes down to, alright, well how are we going to allocate our financial resources? How will WP Engine work with WordPress or Automattic to further Automattics work? My question is, is that okay, I get the reason why Automattic’s going after WP Engine or Matt Mullen work specifically is going after WP Engine, but I almost also wonder what prevents this conversation from hitting other major hosting providers.

Leon (21:25):

It’s going to happen. I think the reason the community’s worried is because what is the actual trademark infringement? Is that the leverage point or is it actually just something that was happening? And then hosts more and more have gone to buy the plugins that our users use, bring ’em in, say that they’re going to develop ’em, but offer them as a free add-on to the service. It was a clever idea, but the execution to it has been poor and it’s always, you get the app, I see it. They don’t develop more. The RD slows down and at some point another player comes onto the market and it gets better seeing it with every single plugin. There’s been no requirement to contribute to wordpress.org though like the WordPress core. If you are a host or any of that, they should probably change that because to the point is you have Magento. Magento is an open source product. The Magento that you get open source, somebody has to develop it the same thing in every single way. Adobe has an open source software. All these people have open source software. But when you look at a Facebook, Facebook has open source frameworks like React is from them. But just like in a better example is Chrome.

(22:53):

Chrome is a browser, it’s open source. But if you look at the differences, Chrome open source is not as robust and doesn’t have these proprietary things built in Chrome. The Google one that’s owned is really good. It’s got a bunch of things, but the Chrome and I like how Google did it, they called it Chromium. They split the two. Same thing I think where Matt Mullenweg in 2003, 2004 messed up. He didn’t split the two companies. He didn’t call it WordPress and the other one was like WordPress Somatic

(23:30):

(23:30):

I think that would change a lot. Let the open source people have it. Let the one, because now you have a thing that’s a for profitable business and the other one that’s an open source, but this is one of the few places where the open source product is as good as the proprietary product, almost nowhere else that happens. You look at even at Chrome, Chrome and Chromium, there’s a difference. Difference. You know what you’re giving up, losing some APIs, you’re using some technology. Obviously in chromium you can rip out the tracking and some stuff, but a lot of those Chrome builders have to then add all this other stuff in there. In the end, my take is Matt Mullenweg is fighting a battle that probably should be fought against private equity against the word the WP Engine. I think the tactic that he kind of did it with was way too brash and way too, I’m going to blast and

Pablo (24:32):

Because in the end, the people that are suffering are the business owners too, right?

Leon (24:35):

Yeah. Because they cannot, and the part, I don’t know if we mentioned this, they can’t update any plugins right now on WP Engine

Pablo (24:42):

Update Core. Can they upload independently?

Leon (24:46):

Yeah, they would’ve to go upload independently. But truthfully, most business

Pablo (24:50):

Owners dunno how to do

Leon (24:51):

That. No. And agencies, an agency can do it. An agency has the capability to do it. I wouldn’t doubt some agencies are moving immediately. I saw Pressable jumping on it. Of course it’s

Pablo (25:03):

Owned by Automattic. It’s

Leon (25:04):

An Automattic company. They own a majority of it. Speaking of Pressable,

Pablo (25:10):

Just a real quick point. In their little hero banner at the very top of the browser, pressable.com, it says, looking to switch from WP Engine, apply here. Literally it’s a CTA right at the very top of the homepage. But interestingly, when I searched the term WordPress on Press Bull’s website 19 times, so GoDaddy, as we mentioned, had it 50 times, 56 times for WP Engine. Just interesting that the issue, I’m sorry, it was 51 times for GoDaddy, 50 times for hosting or 56 times for WP Engine, but only 19 on Pressable. So pressable barely optimizes for a company name or a brand name of the CMS that they are specializing in. So the real question comes down to is, okay, so if Pressable can do it, they’re using the power of WP Cloud as a product that they have. That’s the same thing as WP Engine,

(26:16):

Right?

(26:16):

I mean, as far as confusing a brand, the only way that I know that Pressable is owned by WordPress is only because we’re industry insiders.

Leon (26:25):

Yes.

Pablo (26:26):

A business owner that has no clue, do they know what Automattic is? They No. They know

Leon (26:33):

You say Automattic and they Google it and they forget that the

Pablo (26:36):

Double T. The double T

Leon (26:37):

Because of Matt Mullenweg.

Pablo (26:39):

Exactly.

Leon (26:40):

No, nobody knows. And I think what most people, especially on the echo chamber of Twitter has been, and this, well, sorry, X, what has been discussed there is nobody confuses WordPress with WP Engine GoDaddy or anything, but they do. They really do. And I don’t know if that’s ever actually a fixable thing. It is just like if you ask somebody where they bought their domain nine times out of 10 they’re going to say GoDaddy, and it’s probably not GoDaddy. They just know that name. No, I guess the close comparison is what you mentioned Tissues versus Kleenex. Kleenex is a name brand

Pablo (27:25):

Or bleach versus Clorox

Leon (27:27):

Name brands. But bleach is the product, but Clorox is the brand and they became synonymous with the two. So you can use a brand name in that case. Well, here’s the other

Pablo (27:39):

Thing. I think there is a big difference between WP Engine and some of these other hosting companies. These other hosting companies have other products, other services that fall outside of WordPress, so they’re marketing other things. Every page that I go to on WP Engine’s website has a significantly high number of WordPress terminology used. I mean just the about page about us, WP Engine slash about Dash us. You go to that page, you do a control F 39 times the word WordPress is showing up.

Leon (28:13):

I really, for the longest time, I did admire WP Engine. I still think that they’re a great host in a lot of ways. I don’t know if they’re the best.

Pablo (28:21):

You got great support

Leon (28:23):

And that’s the point. The only reason I’ve ever put stuff on WP Engine is because anything could explode and they have the best support. I applied to work there long time ago and I was like, oh, this is such a cool thing. I started using WordPress

Pablo (28:35):

And they’re an Austin company. Yes, right. So I mean they’re local.

Leon (28:40):

It’s like what other WordPress type businesses do you think of? I always think WP Engine, I think of Gravity Forms, but there’s not a ton of WordPress companies that are really the other one, sorry. Those are the big ones where I look and I’m like, whoa, those are big teams. That’s really cool. They built a business on WordPress. They’ve done this. I do agree that I think the private equity is probably sucking out a lot of value to say, Hey, you can’t just give free hours to contribute to WordPress core. That should be,

Pablo (29:17):

How much was it that was contended? It was supposed to be like they were going to give 20 hours or something like that when the commitment that WordPress was putting in was like 2000 hours or something. I forget.

Leon (29:29):

I think they want to have, I think it was like 2000 where they want, if you’re going to be a premier partner sort of thing, you should commit that many hours. And there was a chart of, or a bubble chart. How many hours do people contribute or how many times do they contribute? You don’t see WP Engine. I think GoDaddy showed up a little bit, but for the most part it was, sorry. It was very sparse for everybody. And I’ll find that chart. I’ll send it to you and I’ll put it in the show notes. But that chart was very telling because it was Automattic in the center and then everybody around it was just like they were tiny. And it shows who’s shepherding the product along, who’s

Pablo (30:12):

Protecting the product At the end of the day. That’s what it comes down to. And

Leon (30:14):

I think that’s what a lot of people are losing on the

Pablo (30:17):

Governance,

Leon (30:18):

The thing. Yeah, they’re saying that they have an independent thing. Matt Mullenweg’s ruling of this iron fist, and I’m like, he created this 21 years ago. He brought it to this point. If he’s still contributing, putting man hours, I think he has the best interest of WordPress. In the end, he bought Tumblr and he’s migrating Tumblr’s backing code to WordPress. He bought these other open source projects, pocket cast, he bought all this other stuff and he’s open sourcing it and playing that model. And he’s talked about being the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet, and there’s obviously money to be made, but I do think he is not just like, I want to have money. I think he’s like, I want to have impact and I want to make sure that this stuff continues on for decades. And

Pablo (31:16):

He’s building legacy. Yeah,

Leon (31:18):

He’s building legacy. But I do think that there’s a part of him that’s just like, I want the web to be open. And if he sees WP Engine there as that existential threat, that cancer, I get it a little bit. It’s like, whoa, there’s 102 billion private equity sitting here trying to extract value from this free thing. I’ve seen it happen way too often where the company becomes the main one and then the open source software just falls off. He’s like, I got to stop it. I got to protect it.

(31:49):

(31:49):

That’s what he’s doing right now. Not very tactfully, but I think what it’s going to end up is a lawsuit and

Pablo (31:58):

There already is a lawsuit going

Leon (31:59):

To, I think it’s going to be in discovery that we see what the real thinking motives are. Because you’ll see emails, you’ll see text messages, and I think that’s when we will understand the full outcome.

Pablo (32:10):

Sure. Well, there’s more to come. Clearly. I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’re going to do a show on this. As this develops, we’re probably going to have to keep revisiting it. But the fact that it is such high profile developments, I guess from a standpoint of it directly impacts our world,

Leon (32:32):

All of our clients, everything

Pablo (32:34):

That we see, it’s also a central Texas company being impacted by this. And yeah, I agree. When I first moved here from Baltimore, WP Engine was one of those first companies that I was excited about because working in WordPress for as many years as I did, I wasn’t as close to any of these companies physically. And then all of a sudden, there’s one right in your backyard. It’s interesting to see that it’s taken this long because there’s always been grumblings. You’ve heard little things about WordPress having issues with companies using the brand in such ways. And supposedly Matt Mullenweg was trying to broker some type of deal for some time, and he felt like he was being strung along.

Leon (33:21):

I don’t blame him. You’re fighting against massive Goliaths, and yes, you are a big player, but when you walk up to a Jeff Bezos and you’re a 400, it’s a $400 million company and it’s 102 billion company.

Pablo (33:39):

Big difference.

Leon (33:40):

It’s a big difference. They have a lot more sway, and it’s a very hard thing. And again, maybe not done tactfully, but I think in the end that there’s a good motive behind it. That’s

Pablo (33:52):

Right.

Leon (33:53):

And I think it’s to protect us too. Of course, the agencies and obviously they always say, if you want to go to war, go to the courts In business,

(34:03):

That’s what’s happening. There is a war, and the side effect is WP Engine. Customers are going to be impacted, and Pressable is going to be a little money grabbing at the moment, but they’re also paying people out on yearly contracts. They’re doing no different than other marketing where a host goes down for days and then everybody comes in and goes, Hey, we will recover, help you and everything. So lots going on, mainly on X, mainly on Twitter, which I find fascinating too. It’s happening on Matt Mullenweg’s blog. It’s MA TT Amazing Domain, and then WP Engine’s kind of going back and forth. So I don’t know if we’ll find a resolution in the next week or two. I feel like this could go on for months.

Pablo (34:53):

Yes, it’d be interesting to see what not being on the repository, what that does to WP Engine subscriber base.

Leon (35:02):

I think for the most part, most people are going to be non-technical and go, oh my gosh, my website’s broken. Go to support. Support’s going to have to have some politically answer of like, Hey, we’ve been cut off, or, Hey, the repository is broken. They’re just saying that we’ve been cut off. But sooner or later, people are going to go, screw this. It’s almost like when the carriage deals with tv. If you don’t have Disney and ESPN, sooner or later, you’re going to go, screw this. I don’t need to be on DirecTV. I’m going to go to Time Warner at t. I think the same thing’s going to happen here is people are going to go WP Engine sooner or later, they’re going to go, screw this. I’m going to go to whatever else host. And if they go and they see Pressable, they don’t know the difference. They

(35:48):

Know who

(35:49):

Is. They don’t know Matt Mullenweg. We have a mutual friend, Chris. I mentioned Automattic Matt Mullenweg. He’s worked in WordPress for eight years, five years, six years, whatever it is. He didn’t know Matt. He kind of knew Automattic, but he didn’t know Matt Mullenweg. He didn’t know any of that. And I was like, oh yeah, WP Engine. He goes, oh yeah, that’s the WordPress host. And I said, exactly. He knows it, but he doesn’t. So I think there is a component of

Pablo (36:17):

Where the confusion comes in. Yeah,

Leon (36:19):

The only way his mom doesn’t understand it, my dad doesn’t understand it. I asked my dad about it. He asked me about it, and it was like, it is a host, but it’s not their software. And he was just like, yeah, this is a little confusing. He was like, I just thought they were the same company. And I was like, oh, that’s funny.

Pablo (36:37):

Yeah, that’s very true. So yeah, I think we’re just going to have to kind of keep our eyes and ears open on this one, and I’m sure we’ll do another episode of The Boost once we see some meaningful progress on this front and keep everyone informed. But thank you for joining us on this week’s episode of The Boost, and we’ll be seeing you very soon. Bye.