I go out for lunch whenever I can. I really enjoy lunches. There's something very personal about sharing food with someone. It's a chance to develop personal connections with folks. Often, I'll have lunch with Toni Schneider, my CEO. He and I get along superwell, which is one of the reasons I think the business has worked. He brings the gravitas because he's a digital native -- the former CEO of Oddpost, a webmail company Yahoo acquired in 2004. We'll go to lunch at 12:30 and stay until 5. If I'm in town, I'll get together with Toni as frequently as we can, because we really enjoy each other's company.
I'm very disorganized. I'm wildly late all the time and really bad at keeping a schedule. That is one of the many reasons I love Maya [Desai]. Her official title is "anti-chaos engineer," which is another way of saying office manager. She does a bunch of things for Automattic, including streamlining my schedule and arranging my travel. Last year, I was on the road for 200 days and clocked 175,000 miles. That's seven times around the globe. The bulk of my travel is to WordCamps. We did the first one in San Francisco in 2006. We invited people from the local tech community to come talk about open source. Later, we decided that, rather than having everyone come to us, we would go wherever people want to have the camp. So instead of paying thousands of dollars to go halfway across the world, it's 20 bucks to go down the street. And for that, you get a full day of great speakers, a T-shirt, lunch, and an open bar. Since then, there have been hundreds of WordCamps in countries such as Argentina, Japan, and China. We host one annually in the Bay Area, but the rest are organized by local tech communities.
Of the 45 or so WordCamps a year, I go to about half. If I went to all of them, I would be traveling practically every weekend. I open up each event with my "State of the Word" speech, which gives a broad overview of WordPress and the history of open source. I feel it's my responsibility to spread these ideas, because they have had such a profound effect on my life. The smallest gatherings have 50 participants, and the largest have about 500. In the Philippines, people treated me like I was a rock star. After the camp was over, I spent two hours taking pictures and signing autographs. People were like, "Will you sign my laptop?" "Will you sign my badge?" "Will you sign my body part?"
I use my camera when I travel to document my day. The photos are autobiographical -- because my memory's so bad, I'll often forget everything about a trip. Then, usually on planes, I process, upload, and edit those photos on my laptop and then craft a narrative of what I've seen throughout each day. It's like a visual diary. But it's hard to keep up with: I have photos from 2005 I haven't posted on my blog yet. On a trip to Vietnam last February, I took 2,000 to 3,000 photos. They say the difference between an amateur photographer and a pro is the amateur shows you everything. I'm somewhere in between. I'll post maybe a quarter of how many I took.
I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog. But now my attitude is, If I'm not blogging for myself, it's not worth it. So I don't post once a day, only when it feels natural. Some people complain -- they say, "Write more about WordPress; we don't want to see photos of kids in Vietnam," but I don't really care. I really like posting photos of places I've been. For my 25th birthday last January, I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. The Spanish is going all right, but I'm failing the cooking one. I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator, you will find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. But I will reach the photo goal. By March, I'd taken about 6,000 photos and posted 2,000 of them.
People write a lot of comments on my blog, and I actually read and manually approve every comment before it gets posted. I think the broken-windows theory -- that a broken window or graffiti in a neighborhood begets more of the same -- applies online. One bad comment engenders 10 more. I'll happily approve a comment from someone who completely disagrees with everything I believe in, but if I get a positive comment with a curse word in it, I'll edit it out. My blog is like my living room. If someone was acting out in my house, I'd ask that person to leave.
I look at our numbers every day -- usually after 5 p.m. -- via an internal dashboard, where we track 500 to 600 statistics, from the number of words people are posting to how often they're logging in to WordPress.com. I wrote a lot of the software, and I'm most interested in the activity numbers -- how many people use the site every day. All the numbers update instantly.
I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office -- just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight. Sometimes, I will go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 a.m., and then go to work.
For WordPress, we're trying to set up a community that will be around 10 to 30 years from now, that's independent from the whims of the market. I feel like the nonelected benevolent dictator: It's my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software project in a way that reflects their interests. Last year, I probably met 2,000 or 3,000 people who make their living from WordPress. We want to be like Google, eBay, Amazon -- they all enable other people to make far more money than they capture. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do. We're trying to create a movement.
My mom started a blog a couple of weeks ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my mom to use.
