Automattic. A company that played a massive role in shaping the modern internet and deserves a separate series of articles. However, it will only be touched on superficially here.
In May 2003, Matt Mullenweg, together with Michael Little, founded a new platform for publishing blogs. It was not the first such platform; the most popular at the time was b2/cafelog. Indeed, Matt and Michael were the developers of that platform, but they decided to create their own product. The new platform developed rapidly and quickly gained a large audience.
This part will discuss what Guillermo Rauch and the Learnboost team did after Automattic acquired them.
Automattic
On May 27, 2003, Matt announced the availability of the first version of the new platform and named it “WordPress”.
The main task of Automattic itself (besides developing WordPress) became hosting and supporting websites written in WordPress. The main principle of monetization was that any user could create a site on WordPress, publish it for free, and then, if necessary, pay for additional features.
Automattic raised 6 million in Series A and B funding rounds from investors including True Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, The New York Times, and others. In May 2013, Tiger Global invested 50 million dollars in purchasing shares from Automattic’s early investors. By that time, about 20% of websites were running on WordPress.
Automattic actively purchased interesting products, primarily due to the people working on them. In 2013, they met with Guillermo and Tian Lu.
Sale of CloudUp
On September 25, 2013, after the meeting, Automattic announced the purchase of CloudUp, along with the company LearnBoost and all related libraries (including socket and mongoose).
This was Automattic’s 12th acquisition (after Lean Domain SearchLean Domain Search, PosterPoster, SimperiumSimperium, CodeGarage, After the DeadlineAfter the Deadline, Blo.gsBlo.gs, PollDaddyPollDaddy, IntenseDebateIntenseDebate, BuddyPress, GravatarGravatar and PlinkyPlinky).
The CloudUp team set about updating the editor and tools related to media in WordPress. Matt himself (the founder of WordPress) admitted that CloudUp was significantly better than the WordPress media library. The editor was planned to implement real-time editing for simultaneous work on texts by several people.
Life at Automattic
The LearnBoost and Automattic teams had a similar view on open development — they participated in conferences, created and supported open-source projects. “Automattic and us share a history and vision: we have a distributed workforce, we passionately care about creating a better web and we support our open-source roots” — Tian Lu (co-founder of CloudUp).
The team took on the tasks set for them, but they did not plan to stop working on CloudUp — they created new projects, packages, and talked about the imminent expansion of the service.
They also continued to work on open-source projects. Thus, in 2014, the first stable version of socket.io was introduced.
Nevertheless, the story of the CloudUp service itself ended there. The site remains unchanged and continues to lie on the internet with a field for applying to join the testing.
The Team’s Future
Tian Lu
After the company’s acquisition, Tian remained the general manager of Cloudup, overseeing the creation of a new technology stack and a completely new editor.
Also, in 2013, Tian will create his company Tsukemen. As a co-founder of two startups, Tian raised nearly 5 million dollars from CRV, Bessemer, RRE, and other investors before a successful exit.
Now, Tian is a Vice President of Product at Blockchain.com, responsible for product strategy and design. He joined the Blockchain.com team through the acquisition of his company Tsukemen.
Nathan Rajlich
Since 2013, Nathan has been working at the WordPress company on editors.
In 2014, he spoke at a conference in Buenos Aires on the topic of “Writing a webmodule” — about writing npm modules intended for use in browsers [speech].
Until 2016, he worked at Cloudup and Automattic. He currently works at Vercel.
Tj Holowaychuk
In 2014, while already working at segment.com as a backend developer, he will participate in the development of YAL. In 2014, TJ will write the article “Farewell Node.js” (goodbye node.js) with an official farewell to node.js and a transition to the Go language. However, he continues to support his projects on js (primarily koa). In 2014, TJ will sell express to StrongLoop (but that’s a whole other story).
This was not just a departure from Node.js, but also a partial departure from programming and open-source. The following are TJ’s words:
“No, I have no intentions, my new goal is to live better. After all, open-source doesn’t pay the bills, so it’s better to focus on other things or if you just like a project, that’s cool.
Now I spend most of my time enjoying other things, I code for 2–3 hours a day if I don’t like something. Time is your real currency! Money is good, but don’t waste time. If you really like the project you’re working on, then do it, but don’t neglect other areas of your life (or people).”
In 2016, TJ will create the Apex company, and Guillermo — the Now utility and the Zeit company.
Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo also worked on the development of WordPress, for example, he redesigned the video platform — VideoPress. For this, he “used the Virtual DOM approach and wrote a very simple version of React,” making it interactive and convenient. He added features such as searching for a moment by frames and embedding video functionality.
Guillermo left WordPress on October 13, 2015, and founded a new company — Zeit.