2025-08-21 07:07:27
My good friend Tim Ferriss has launched a new card game with the Exploding Kittens folks, I just ordered it and you should do so too. It’s a lovely way to share an evening with a few friends.
2025-08-19 15:15:06
Over the weekend, Automattic/Beeper had the pleasure of hosting and sponsoring the Build the Future MCP Hackathon in New York City organized by Adam Anzuoni, alongside Anthropic, Stainless, WorkOS, Smithery, and MongoDB. As someone deeply passionate about open-source technology and the potential of AI, I was thrilled to not only support this event but also to speak at it and serve as one of the judges. For those unfamiliar, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and enables AI models to interact with multiple tools in a more efficient and structured manner, allowing developers to create sophisticated agents that can handle complex tasks. And it’s only 8 months old! The energy in the room was electric—hackers collaborating, iterating, and demoing groundbreaking projects in just a few hours. (I would love to see the results of a longer overnight or all-weekend hackathon.)
For a wrap-up of the winners, check out this great X/Twitter thread by Alex Reibman. The first-place winner, Levels AI, orchestrates different AI/ML models to solve specific business requirements without needing heavy manual coding or specialized teams. Essentially, it’s models creating more models—a meta-approach to AI that could streamline operations for companies of all sizes. Yusuf Olokoba said the name was inspired by Pieter Levels, which is pretty cool. I wanted to note one team in particular: BeepResearch, which used our early access Beeper API and local MCP.
Judging the entries was tough! People built so much cool stuff in a really short period of time. I always say technology is best when it brings people together, and this was a great example of that, and makes me very excited for Contributor Day at WordCamp US next week. (Which has such a stacked AI program as well.) Hopefully some people who enjoyed the office might consider getting 24/7 access.
I also just want to take a beat and say how amazing it is that I’m blogging this, on a United flight from Houston to San Francisco I’ve taken a million times, on a plane 36,000 feet in the air and technology is amazing. I can’t wait until United has Starlink!
Also last week the WordPress AI team shipped its MCP adapter!
2025-08-14 10:52:33
WordPress.com offers two modes of WP: WordPress and WordPress MS. For free and lower-priced accounts it runs a version of WordPress called WordPress MS, or WordPress Multisite, which is designed for super-efficient multi-tenant usage, which is what has allowed it to introduce hundreds of millions of people to WordPress and run at a huge scale. (It was initially called MU, for multi-user, but we had to change it because someone squatted the name WPMU and built a business on top that was confusing users with commercial products. Such is my curse.) It revolutionized the hosting industry in a number of ways, including acclimating customers to per-site pricing instead of unlimited domains and raising the bar for what a host would manage for users so they didn’t have to worry. It has also provided a highly secure base login, which allows us to offer popular SaaS services, such as statistics and anti-spam, to all WordPress users, regardless of where they’re hosted.
At higher-priced plans you’d get access to not just a curated set of plugins and themes but the ability to install anything you like from the ecosystem, which invisibly switches your account to WP.cloud in the backend that supports unlimited plugins and themes and custom code, in a way that’s still multi-datacenter and maintenance-free. This has been very successful and works great for a ton of customers, but it still puts an asterisk when you recommend WordPress.com to someone because they’d need to be on one of the higher-priced plans to get an experience of WordPress with custom plugins and themes.
For the first time ever we’re running a summer special where every single paid account gets that full WP.cloud experience with full customization and control. It’s a test we’re running until August 25th. It’s WordPress, without the asterisk, without limits, implemented in a way that’s intuitive and safe for novice users, while also being extremely powerful for developers. If you haven’t checked out WP.com in a while, it’s a great deal starting at just $4 per month. I’m curious to see the results of how this goes. We also have a number of more radical things I’m eager to try out! It’s a great time to reimagine what you’re doing from the ground up and question your longest-held beliefs, as AI has really put people in a more experimental and open mindset.
2025-08-13 09:52:24
One of the projects that has been going very well within Automattic is Newspack, a vertical WordPress distribution tailored for publishers. Here’s the story of the Haitian Times:
2025-07-31 10:20:37
To announce and celebrate the incredible engineering achievement of the Beeper team launching local bridges and their premium model we hosted a fun event in Automattic’s space in NYC. The app side of Automattic does some amazing work, and the applications themselves are pretty well known and reviewed, but many don’t know they’re part of Automattic, so it was a good opportunity to tell that side of our story a bit. Here’s the video from the event:
And if you’ve ever wanted to get better control over your instant messages, regardless of what network they may be on, definitely check out Beeper. I find it especially useful on desktop, like a Superhuman for messaging.
2025-07-01 04:34:50
In honor of Automattic’s 20th anniversary, and also since it’s been a few years, I joined Nilay Patel the editor-in-chief of The Verge on their Decoder Podcast. We talked about Tumblr and the Fediverse, how Automattic thinks about Ecosystem and Cosmos sides of the business, Automattic’s re-organization into cross-business functional teams and leadership, the vision of Clay as a personal CRM and Beeper as the super-human messaging app that puts control in the hands of users, Newspack, the future of websites, the obligatory coverage of the alleged WP Engine trademark violations and their subsequent preemptive suit, and much more. Please give it a listen! They chose the title “Why Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress.”
Speaking of Beeper, we’re going to do a fun event for the next-gen version that’s launching on July 16 in New York City in NoHo. I’ll be there along with Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria and some of the best and brightest in New York’s tech and creative class. If you’re a Beeper early adopter (or would like to be) and want to attend, leave a comment! We’ve held back some invites for cool folks like readers of ma.tt. 
It’s like getting on board with WordPress in 2004.
