Building a Virtual Organization

In addition to getting my WordPress photo tutorial, I spent a chunk of the afternoon with my partner Peter Flint (who runs our Recruiting Team at Polaris) and Matt, Toni and Raanan from Automattic brainstorming a bunch of stuff, including how to think about building the organization.

To date, Automattic has been a virtual company, with no “office,” and this has worked quite well. Among other things, it has allowed the company to attract some of the very best software developers in the world — literally.  Thinking about how to continue to get the benefits of this virtual model, while also scaling the organization as needed to sustain the business’s growth, is a fascinating challenge. It is hard to say how just how this will pan out down the road. But one thing I will bet on: Matt and Toni will develop their own model for building an organization rather than going down a tried and true path that has worked for others; and, that the Automattic model will be the right model for Automattic.

While I like to think that I am helping the guys work through the various opportunities and challenges they face, I have to confess it is a ton of fun working closely with a team whose singleminded focus on doing things “right” often leads to rewriting the rulebook as we go.

Something tells me I will look back on this having learned more from it than the team learned from me. (Don’t tell Matt and Toni I said this…)

Oh, and just to make sure the photo tutorial worked, here is a photo of Matt and Toni:

Getting (another) Photo Tutorial

For some reason I have been struggling getting photos to work correctly on my blog.

So Matt, Toni and Raanan are giving me a tutorial.

Finally Current

For the first time since the new year I have gotten current with email and voicemail.

I literally spent 11 hours straight yesterday buttoned up in my basement office, hiding from the world, to do this.

And boy does it feel good.

To any of you out there to whom I’ve been slow to respond: SORRY! I promise to (try to) do a better job.

Using Web Audience Metrics to Predict Election

Check out Ryan’s Spoon post using quantcast figures for the campaign websites to project election results.

Also fun that he has evoked such ire from the Ron Paul zealots!

Big Round for Automattic

Fresh on the heels of their big night at the Crunchies Awards Friday night, today Automattic announces a big new $30MM financing.

Details of the round are over at Matt’s and Toni’s blogs, and covered by GigaOm and The Wall Street Journal.

What’s fun for me is that the Automattic story is such a good illustration of how seed deals are supposed to work.

A couple years ago Om Malik and Tony Conrad introduced me to then 20 year old Matt Mullenweg, who had just moved to San Francisco from Texas to work for CNET. Nights and weekends Matt also led an tecchie open source software project called WordPress. After — literally — watching the download counter spinning like mad at Matt’s party celebrating the release of WordPress 1.5, I knew there was something pretty special going on. Without really having much of a clue where it might lead, but knowing that Matt was a rare talent who I would want to get to work with, we helped Matt incorporate Automattic and led a small seed investment in the company, along with Phil Black (then Blacksmith Capital and now True Ventures) and former Kleiner Perkins partners Doug Mackenzie and Kevin Compton.

From there it was off to the races. Nearly concurrent with the funding, Matt found an awesome partner — Toni Schneider, who had been CEO of Oddpost, and then, after Yahoo acquired Oddpost, went on to run the Yahoo Developer Network. It is not everyday that a tiny seedling of a startup hires a CEO with Toni’s chops, let alone as one of the very first founders! Over the course of the following year Automattic quietly brought on a crop of the very  best WordPress developers from around the world, as well as Raanan-Bar Cohen, a senior exec from Dow Jones Digital.

Later, one weekend Matt decided he didn’t want his Mom to have to deal with blog spam, so he created Akismet, the world’s first anti webspam service. To date, Akismet has stopped 4,311,783,380 spams. And a few months after our funding, Matt launched a hosted service for the WordPress publishing tool. Two years later, the service hosts over 2 Million blogs, which create more than 100,000 posts per day and see more than 100 million unique visitors each month.

WordPress had gone from an open source publishing tool to a massively scaled web service. As this trajectory became more clear, Matt and Toni began to spend more cycles thinking seriously about the future of Automattic, and now have developed a plan to build Automattic into a substantial Internet platform business.

Much to the delight of the investors, everyone has agreed that now is the time to invest against this objective so that the company can hire the right talent and dedicate the appropriate resources. As a result, my partners and I are tickled to have the opportunity to follow what two years ago was a tiny seed investment in a brilliant kid with an interesting experiment, with a quite large investment in what we feel pretty confident is going to be an important and valuable Internet platform.

Why Polaris is Backing Quantcast

Today Quantcast announced a financing which Polaris co-led along with the Founders’ Fund. It was a big round for a big idea.

The first wave of Internet successes demonstrated they were able to attract eyeballs.

The second wave of Internet success was actually making money — whether it be E-commerce or contextually relevant ads.

The next wave of Internet success will, in my opinion, be driven by two things: monetizing web video, and making the web addressable.

Our investment in Quantcast is based on our belief that they have an opportunity to lead the emergence of the addressable web.

I was first introduced about a year ago to Quantcast founder Konrad Feldman by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, who had started exploring how WordPress could use Quantcast. When Matt told me Quantcast was doing important stuff, and doing it well, I paid attention. Over the course of several months, I had the chance to introduce Quantcast to a number of portfolio companies and friends around the web publishing business. It wasn’t long before each of the companies to whom I had introduced Quantcast – including our portfolio companies like Automattic, JibJab and Heavy – had become “Quantified publishers.” And, having grown accustomed to hearing everyone bitch about the inadequacies of Nielsen and Comscore, it certainly got my attention when, to an individual, they all swore by the service.

So, when Konrad called to tell me they were raising a round, it wasn’t hard to figure out that this was one we wanted to do. So we did…

Congrats to Automattic on Crunchies Awards

The Automattic gang came up big at the Crunchies Awards Friday night, winning “Most likely to succeed” and “best CEO” awards.  Here is an article summarizing results: “Facebook, WordPress, Major Crunchies Winners.”

Congrats guys!

Hangin’ Out with Facebookers

Am here at Vinny T’s carboloading with a dozen Wellesley High students, hearing what they do/don’t do and like/don’t like with Facebook.

For starters, they tell me MySpace got sketchy, and Facebook isn’t.

JetMan is the hot app.

But the crushing wave of new facebook apps is becoming a nuisance. All those damn invites are a hassle and clutter things up. And, one thing that is really annoying is the app that requires you to send out lots of invites.

Facebook or not, messaging and music are still the killer apps.

Email is for fogeys. Kids use email for communicating with parents, school, etc.

And here is a new one for me: voicemail is passe. If you can’t reach ‘em live then you text or IM them.

But, kids still eat chocolate cake. And so do I. Back to the South Beach diet tomorrow.

I’ll close with my favorite quote from the night: “It would be really cool if I could live in a castle online.” Yeah, and it would be cool if I could live in a castly offline.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Web

At one of my company’s board meetings today we had an interesting conversation about the web’s gyrations between synchronous and asynchronous behavior.

The web started off asynchronous. But then IM changed that, and brought a wave of synchronous activity.

Early Facebook apps, though, are largely asynchronous.

Some would argue this is just a phase, and we’ll see synchronous FB apps soon enough.

What do you think?

For All You Guys in California

Hope this makes you feel good.

Here is the view from my office lobby’s window: