Project Guildenberg with Jonathan Wold (and about having curiousity as a prime driver)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast about people in WordPress and most certainly about the things that they do inside of WordPress, or outside of WordPress, or pretty much everywhere you can think of. And today we have a special guest who is, I would say pretty much everywhere in WordPress. I think we first met at Cloudfest. [00:00:24] Speaker B: I think I think you're right. That's at least where we first had a conversation. I think we perhaps seen each other, but welcome. [00:00:32] Speaker A: Jonathan. [00:00:38] Speaker B: Thank you. Remkis. It's great to be here. [00:00:41] Speaker A: It's great to have you here. So my first question to you would be, for those who don't know or haven't seen you at one of the camps or Cloudfest, who are you and what do you actually do with WordPress? Because I think I hinted that you do a lot, but what is a lot? [00:01:02] Speaker B: So I started out in WordPress just right around 18 years ago and I was homeschooled. I had a lot of free time growing up and found the internet at an early age, found communities. I quite enjoyed figuring out how things worked on the web and began an interest in web and web development at an early age and came across WordPress in that sort of early foray into building websites, both entrepreneurially and for some folks who'd come to me and say, hey, can you do this? And it wasn't too long into that that I came across WordPress. I'd started learning PHP and I was always looking for shortcuts to just get more stuff built and figure it out. And WordPress came across my radar and I had a fantastic early experience where I'd been working to try and get WordPress integrated into an existing site so they could use WordPress to blog. And I was having a hard time figuring out it was a little bit above my head with just my knowledge of PHP at the time. I went onto the forums, asked for help and a bunch of folks, the thread's still there. It's a fantastic early example of people who sometimes developers can be a little bit brusque and just go back and do this. But Mullenwig chimed in at one point who was quite helpful. A number of folks came in and were helping me figure it out and that blew me, got the task figured out and got WordPress successfully integrated. And then at the end, somehow the idea came to me that I should write a tutorial about this. I just wanted to, there wasn't any particular reason. Some of the folks I was around at the time were like, oh, you should sell that. And I was like, no, I just want to create it and put it out there. So I wrote a tutorial explaining my initial experience. This is like 18 years ago, right? And then just dropped a link to it at the end of the thread. My thanks. And didn't really think anything of it. I was hooked on WordPress but didn't see it as something that was going to become something I'd put the rest of my career into. And it wasn't too long after that. Yeah. So what was your. [00:03:20] Speaker A: Very, very similar, but in the Netherlands mostly I started on the Dutch forum in the beginning and quickly moved to the more international, but very similar in terms of like, whoa, this came from Joomla, not so friendly. And then the WordPress, like, I got answers, like, okay, this is a tutorial answer. Wonderful. [00:03:44] Speaker B: There was something about it that hooked me where and since then, because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, been involved in community in a lot of different ways, I realized what I didn't know then, that there's this sense of ownership and this recognition that when we help each other in this ecosystem now, I think there's something unique about WordPress specifically because it's not just open source, but there's something about this idea that when we help each other, we're also helping ourselves that I don't know, that hooked me early. And it wasn't too long after that once people began to reach out to me and say, hey, can you help us do this for our website? Hey, we'll pay you. And I was 19, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I was like, well, okay, yeah, I'll do some WordPress projects. That's cool. And it escalated pretty quickly from there. [00:04:38] Speaker A: I love how many similarities are to my origin stOry. I needed a website myself, was working with Mambo or Joomla. Didn't like it very much. Figured out, hey, here's WordPress, and this is 19 years ago, figured out some things, built my site and I shared it with one friend, like one, sent him an email like, this is my new site. I'm kind of proud of this. And he goes, I like that. Can you build the one? And I go, sure. I think he thought I was hesitating. He's like, I'll pay you. I'm like, definitely, we'll do this. Funny. [00:05:19] Speaker B: One of the things that I just look back and recognize was such a privilege and opportunity is that because I was early and you probably had a similar experience, I had the privilege of people from just all over the world on a regular basis, reaching out to me. And so I went ahead and wrote a few more tutorials after that. And for a brief period of time I was like when you'd search for WordPress integration, it was my stuff that came up. And because of that I had this opportunity to work with organizations and individuals and businesses of all types all around the world. And I worked on a project with someone from the United nations at one point where they wanted to bring WordPress and did government stuff, large enterprise stuff like nonprofit, commercial, just this really wide range. And WordPress was the one thing they all had in common. And for me, as someone who was already curious, it was fantastic. Every week there'd be several new people who'd reach out to me. It gave me as an entrepreneur, a lot of opportunity to experiment with pricing, with different ways to package and prepare things. And it was incredible. And I did that for quite a few years. I was also involved in starting raising money for a startup in the SaaS space. So I got the privilege of seeing the SaaS world and the wordpress world sort of together at the same time. And, yeah, so that was my early time in WordPress. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Again, a lot of similarities. This is funny. It's an interesting world where the sharing of knowledge was the one thing that was pulling me in. I'm innately curious. For instance, I vehemently disagree with curiosity. Kill the cat. Or if it did, I'm not a cat. I'm curious about everything. So I'll keep asking, I'll keep digging, I'll keep searching. [00:07:11] Speaker B: Let's talk about that for a moment. So I believe one of my core values is this idea. I want to cultivate curiosity. So I believe that most humans, perhaps to varying degrees, like humans, are born curious and we're curious about the world, how we figure things out. And at some point, for whatever reasons, and there's a number of different things, we start to stifle that curiosity. And what I've at least come personally to believe and practice is that it's actually important, especially as we get older, that we cultivate it. There's something about this tension between maintaining that childlike curiosity, if you will, and. [00:07:53] Speaker A: Please, yeah, what do you, because I know. So my folks, particularly my mom, was the one who had to answer all of my why questions. And instead of like, okay, after the fifth or 6th question in a row, instead of going like, okay, enough for today, just figure it out. She would relentlessly keep on answering the questions, but she would answer it in such a fashion that it also made me curious to think about stuff more. [00:08:26] Speaker B: Not just give you the answer. [00:08:30] Speaker A: I've never stopped asking the why questions. Maybe not constantly to you or to people around me, but I would always have the why questions, and I kept asking them. And I recognize now. So it's part of my blueprint, because my sister doesn't have it, my brother also has it. So it's not necessarily that it's genetic, but it's part of who I am, my blueprint. I am curious. And if you find yourself among curious people, there's a lot of stuff to learn from each other. And that drives me, at least in part, also for the podcast, like, I'm curious what you do. I know a few things that you do. [00:09:09] Speaker B: Podcasting is a great way to explore curiosity. [00:09:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You can ask very personal, very direct questions, and most people are just perfectly fine with because it's on the precedence of it's the podcast. It's actually my curiosity. [00:09:24] Speaker B: One of the things I want to touch on this idea of cultivation for just a moment, because I'm still early in exploring this. My current way of thinking about it is that I will put myself in new situations. So it was last year, actually, last year is when I took up acting for the first time. Okay. In sort of a more proper way. I auditioned for community theater. I did a musical. So it was a bunch of firsts, right? First time, like doing a proper audition, first time in a proper, like, it was Sondheim's into the woods. And I took two minor roles but were still significant for me. Had a solo, like a bunch of new things, very challenging, very difficult, and just a fantastic experience for me for a lot of reasons. And it put me in a bunch of new circumstances. And it started with my curiosity. And I had that moment where I'm curious about this, but am I going to actually foray into it? And I was like, yeah, I'm going to do it. And I keep being rewarded internally at very least for that. [00:10:31] Speaker A: It will. [00:10:32] Speaker B: And so I'm like, yeah, I'm going to keep doing that. Right now. The thing that I'm kind of scared about is so to me, it's a sign that I'm going to go that direction is doing like stand up comedy, not because I want to become a comedian, but because this is a whole new territory of experiences, including scary ones. And there's something, at least for me, my current thinking is that if I cultivate my curiosity and let myself go and experience those things, there's nothing but gain, regardless of how uncomfortable it may be, it's going to be a valuable thing. What do you think? [00:11:07] Speaker A: I agree. Yeah, I agree. I fully agree. Whatever I figured out that was happening in my upbringing, I did the same thing together with my wife to our three kids. All three are also hyper curious. And it's interesting to see that if you cherish that instead of just saying, again after the fifth, 7th, 10th, why I kept explaining, I wouldn't say. So there's a car driving by. Kid asks, what is that? And then I hear parents say, in Dutch, you say tutu as a reference to that's a car. And I would explain, so that's a Peugeot 205 GTI. And give the details. And I think one of the things that triggered is that there's extra information that you sort of categorize. Whatever the thing is that you asked about. I did the same thing when I learned Wordpress the same thing. I asked why to pretty much anybody who wanted to listen to me to the point that I had my brain works in such a fashion that I remember where I last saw a tutorial about, I don't necessarily have to Google it, I just know who wrote it last. And then I figured out, I have a problem here. I knew the solution over there. I'm going to find it. [00:12:35] Speaker B: I like that idea a lot. So I'm a parent as well. I have a 13 year old son, ten year old daughter, and I want the same. But I like that idea of providing additional details that are kind of like seed plants, where if you just give like a surface answer, and I'll wrestle with that sometimes where it's like someone's asking me a question, it's like I'm willing to go really far with what I'll tell them, but it's like, how far do you go? And I'll think about that more because it's like if you just give some more details, but think about them as like, curiosity prompts that the person can choose to follow or not, but offer it to them. I like that. [00:13:09] Speaker A: I always saw the difference. No negativity towards my sister, but she does things differently. And she would answer her kids, like, that's a car. And if it was a tractor, she would still say, yeah, sure, that's a car. And I'm like, no, there's a difference. I would explain, no, that's a tractor. Because big wheels behind, you can see different profile on the tires and looks different. It's not just a moving object which has an engine in it. These details matter at some point. Now, some kids like to know that difference, and some are absolutely fine with whatever answer you give them. But the curious ones, in my particular case, all three kids are, like the same type of curious as I am. It's fun to see that if you feed that, they'll get even more curious and they'll get more specific. My youngest is a great example. She's 16, and she has philosophy as one of her courses in high school. And if there's a thing that if you can get a chance to do, it's philosophy, because it forces you to think about stuff you not necessarily going to touch when you're 16. Like maybe at 37, not at 16, but interesting questions that you get. And I like feeding that. I think that's just, I wish more people would be that type of curious. [00:14:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I ran into something interesting the other day where there's a tension there. I love reading. The tension for me is that if I had unlimited time. So here's an example. How do you relate to things that you don't agree with or that don't fit a worldview that you have or an ideology? And for me, what I like to think, and the ideal in my head, is that I would give, quote unquote, equal time to opposing views. Because most of the way that I solve problems is to let ideas sit in tension. I'll do research, I'll think about something, and I'll have this. And then I will fairly consciously cultivate an opposing perspective. But I do this in areas of my explicit interest. I'll do this in Wordpress. I'll do this with strategy, with life in general. For instance, I will rarely talk politics with someone, not because I'm not willing to or not open to, but just in general. People tend to take pretty closed minded views, and I do the same. We all, as humans, we have these biases. And so for me, what I'm thinking through lately is how do I more consciously determine when I turn that on versus not? Because life is limited. I have finite time and resources. There is this degree to which, even though I'm open, I look for shortcuts. How do you think about this idea? [00:15:53] Speaker A: So I think I'm, again on the same page. I had an interesting conversation today with James Giroud where we kind of touched on this as well, specifically where I said, for the longest time, I've had a quote in One of my online profiles saying, I am the leftness and the right. [00:16:11] Speaker B: Okay, and what's that? [00:16:13] Speaker A: It's from a song. I forgot the name. Of the song. You can Google it. The whole song is like these weird comparisons where it doesn't make sense, but it does make sense. And the leftness in there. I'm left handed, so it makes sense for me to have a little connection there. But on the political scale, I'm not left, I'm not right, I'm not center. I can see value in certain, in socialism, in libertarianism, whatever. And I'm not center. I'm whatever makes sense. In what I see as a whole. It's hard. There's always this room where there's always an argument that completely denounces what you're profoundly pretty much assured of. That is the truth. There is no truth. And the sooner you realize that it's all perspective, it just becomes easier. [00:17:11] Speaker B: I disagree on that. However, it's like the idea of there being no truth. [00:17:17] Speaker A: There is truth, but it's your truth. There's no one truth that fits all. [00:17:23] Speaker B: I think I would agree with that, and that would at least be worth a long sort of exploration, which to me it's like, yeah, how could I possibly know things like that? So here's my question. So you and I have a similar perspective. From what I'm gathering. A friend comes to you and says, hey, you got to read this book. And the book is pretty clearly positioned as fitting into a particular ideology or worldview. What I don't really care about is whether that aligns with mine or not. But it seems like it's going to have a pretty strong perspective on something. And I wrestle a bit with how do I decide whether to do it. This is the tension I'm trying to get at. I'm naturally curious about things. What I'm starting to wrestle with now as I get older is my finite time. And I could enjoy that. I could read something and enjoy something that was just a direct opposite of my worldview and get something out of it. Yet how do I navigate the choices? Because there's so much to do and my instinct is that I do need to be selective and picky about it. But anyway, I'm curious, how do you handle that, where it's like you have finite time, someone gives you a strong recommendation. What do you do with that? [00:18:47] Speaker A: I'll give it some time. In that I'll look at what the book is about and how much do I think I'll gain from it. I know I can gain from a completely opposite view of what I see as a truth at that moment in time. I also know there's like, for instance, find the perfect diet. So there's people that say, eat plant based. Yeah, there's people that even go one further and say, no, fully vegan. Like, nothing can touch or come from an animal. So it becomes a lifestyle. There's people who do the carnivore diet, they only eat meat. Like, literally only. No vegetables. Steak. [00:19:29] Speaker B: All secondhand? [00:19:30] Speaker A: Yeah, all steak and lamb. And that's it. Both have the effect that existing problems, any weird types of diseases and bowel movements and stuff that just is not your normal default state can dissipate, just be gone. Yeah. So which one is the right one? Which one is the truth? So I'll have my curiosity about the carnivore diet as I've had my curiosity about plant based. I've eaten plant based for nine years. I'm little over a year back to eating meat. That's a conscious decision, and that's essentially that. So somebody came with new evidence, new angle. I was like, that's interesting, I'll research it. And I found more truth in that than I did as opposed to what I was doing at the time. So it's a balance of finding what information resonates with me because I'm picky. I don't dive into everything anymore. Again, I'm acutely aware that the time is finer. I'll find something that resonates with me in one way or another. [00:20:39] Speaker B: So I have a similar experience and I'll connect this to something relevant in WordPress. So first, I was raised vegetarian, so I started eating meat. I've tasted meat on a few occasions over the years, but I started eating meat for the first time last year. And part of the reason why I did it because I'm pretty all in on the overall benefits of a plant based diet. But part of the reason why I did it is it began to bother me that I still talked about not eating meat. There was something about it that I was holding it like a bit of some special designator or like a prize, oh, I've never done your role. And I was like, I don't think that really serves. So it felt like an area where I was unnecessarily blocked. So, yeah, I'm like, okay, it felt a little bit counterintuitive. I'm like, I'm going to start eating meat. I'm going to try some things, I'm going to experience some more things here. Because anything I think that's worth a good idea holds up to scrutiny. And to me, it wasn't enough to just say, oh, I was raised this way and just never did it right. Where now I'm like, I feel in a better position for, at least for myself to take a more balanced perspective. Where I didn't like the, I guess what I describe as like the Pride association with having never done something. And when it was like, I mean, there's plenty of things I'll be happy to have never done, right. But that wasn't really a good one, especially within the social context anyway. Yeah, I'm curious to see where that goes with WordPress. So I have all this experience as a freelancer basically, right? It got to a micro agency level. Then I kind of felt a little tapped out, like I was managing 20 plus projects. And even though there was still plenty of hardness, like lots of things to figure it out, it was a lot of the same, wasn't as much of a challenge anymore. Timeline is fuzzy. I feel like that was about eight years ago, but I'm not exactly sure. I started to do a bit more of enterprise work and that was interesting to me. And I ended up pretty quickly making my way into an agency called XWP. I was the first person from the outside in and they had split off from another company of theirs. And I got involved in sales and doing some early engineering stuff. And that was a fantastic experience because suddenly we're working on some of the biggest projects in the world and that was a whole new set of things to learn. And it was in that experience that I began to first think about WordPress as an ecosystem and just became more and more curious. I came across this idea that Matt Mullenweg had put out there of thinking about WordPress as an operating system. And at first I was like, what are you on about? What's the deal with that? But the more I played with it, the more I sat with it was like, okay, there's something here. And I began to just test it through the lens of the enterprise work that we were doing, through the small business work I was still connected with and just my broader experience. And as the years went by, it just began to stick with me more and more. And I began to shift my thinking to say, okay, if this is the case, then WordPress, it became a lens through which I looked at the ecosystem, where it was like, okay, then what do I take from that idea and draw from other about what does Apple do? How do they think about the operating system lens and the App Store? What about Android? What about Linux? What about Windows? And why do I feel like this sticks and applies and just began to poke at that. And at least for me, what came out of that was this growing sense of personal mission where I was like, I really care about this space. I care about WordPress, I care about what it represents above and beyond just the personal interest and curiosities. It's had a real impact on the people that I've met, on the life that I've been able to create. And I began to see more and more its role in the open web broadly. I got to work with Google pretty early on and that sort of set my sights, just thinking broader about open Web context, some of the benefits and challenges of working with a large organization. And in that process, I just had this growing sense of, okay, WordPress matters. I began to see it as an indicator of the health of how the open Web. If WordPress is doing well, then I think that's a good indicator for how the web as a whole is doing. And the way that I like to think about it, I'm a fan of proprietary platforms and innovation. I just don't want to see that dominate the web. I want open source to continue to thrive. And so I started to look at saying, okay, what can I do? Where is the opportunity for impact in this ecosystem? And for a couple of years, I thought it was the hosting companies. I had a lot of context early on, worked with a bunch of hosts through the enterprise experience, just had just a lot of perspective on that, which was pretty unique and valuable for me to have started there. And I organized this little event called Host Camp as part of, co organized it as part of Wordcamp Europe and Berlin. This was some years back, and the idea was to have this focus on advancing the state of Wordpress infrastructure. And I began to pull together some of these ideas. And this is where the curiosity thing comes back because I was pretty set for a while that hosts were the thing. I'm like, this is it. This is how you grow the ecosystem. All we have to do is get the hosts to work together. And as I sat with it and as I did that work, something began to sort of poke at me, as it often does when you're curious where it's like, okay, something's not quite right here. There's something like, I'm talking to hosts, they're saying, yes, they want to work together, they want to do this, but why does this feel harder than it should? And I began to think about the concept of incentives and aligning incentives and misaligned incentives. And the more I got into that, I was like, you know, something's not right here. If one host does a bunch of really valuable contribution to the project, everyone benefits, which is great, but there's almost this like reverse incentive because the people who are competing with them directly benefit from what they do. There are fantastic people in hosting and to be clear, it plays a really important role. But for me it's like it's not quite enough. There's something here where we're working uphill and so that set me on this path to, well, what is it then? Where is the opportunity to have the most impact and leverage, if you will, on growing the ecosystem? And for me that's where I settled on product companies as the key piece. Basically, if you take the operating system metaphor, they're the apps, right? What good is Apple or Windows without the third parties that build for them? AnD that PUT me on this path to say, okay, I think that products are the key to growing the WordPress ecosystem, to mitigating, as I describe some of the tradeoffs of decentralization. One of the good examples like decentralization is fantastic. There are thousands of hosting companies. WordPress would be very hard to kill. One of the trade offs is that you have just crazy amounts of choices. It's overwhelming for end users. Things don't really work well together. Compatibility is a problem. And as I began to talk with products and just draw from my product background experience in the middle of all this I went to work at automatic for a bit. So I was at Woocommerce, which was a great experience for me to just broaden my perspective and have a lot of context for how automatic thinks about things. And there's been a trade offs of that too. And what I ended up settling in on was this idea that, okay, I want to help product companies. I see three problems that keep showing up, at least for WordPress native product companies. I care about the SaaS as well, but for this conversation and context I want to focus on just like the WordPress native ones, those who kind of grew up WordPress, they struggle with monetization, business models, pricing. There's a whole set of things that I would oversimplify as being characterized by having been like engineer or designer, perhaps led, but not a lot of business experience. And we did a lot of copying each other early on where someone priced it this way. So I guess I'll do the same. So there's some challenges with monetization. There's a large problem set challenge with compatibility where even though authors are happy to work with each other, there's no sort of shared standards. There's no real incentives to facilitate compatibility between products. So when I to host, that's the number one problem that sort of shows up for them. But those dwarf in comparison to the heart of the problem, which to me is what I call like the distribution problem where you can have a product that has a great product market fit. There are, according to Web Pros, like 92 million live Wordpress sites today. And no matter how fantastic your product is, there is no guarantee that you're going to be able to get that product in front of anything close to your proper addressable market in this space because they're spread out over thousands of different hosting companies. Sure there are big players, we can't ignore that, but the reality is just that it's not trivial to get in front of any of those install bases. Being listed in Wordpress.org is no guarantee that you'll go anywhere. Then that became the thing that was most compelling to me. It's like, okay, what can we do to solve those problems and to help these products get distribution? And if we can solve that, I think that is what I see at least today as the strongest leverage point for growing the ecosystem in a positive, healthy direction. [00:31:02] Speaker A: Is that a marketplace? Does that translate to a long term? [00:31:06] Speaker B: Yes. Okay, long term, what I want to see is an app store, if you will, that is shared across 80% of all WordPress installs. And it has one particular key characteristic that I think is not trivial to pull off. If I am with host A and purchase some premium WordPress products and move to host B, those should go with me. And where we're on current trajectory is hosts are more likely to try and incentivize currently to try and have all of that within them. This is why I don't think, for instance, it's a good idea that hosts buy WordPress products. In general, it's not good for the product. It can be good for the host, but it's not good for the product long term. [00:31:52] Speaker A: That's an interesting point of view. [00:31:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it can be good for the founder as well, who wants an exit, who's done. But in general, the moment that you sell a product to a host, what other host in their right mind is going to want to recommend that same product? [00:32:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. You need some sort of altruistic mindset already activated at a host, which some do and see. Yeah, and some do, but I can see that being an issue. [00:32:25] Speaker B: There's an incentives problem at least we can agree to like, oh, we recommend this product, but like you said, I'm all for altruism and I'm a beneficiary of it and believe in it. I don't think it's a good economic foundation for an ecosystem. [00:32:40] Speaker A: No. [00:32:41] Speaker B: And it's just not how humans work to a degree. [00:32:45] Speaker A: But there's a limit. Not easily defined, but there's most certainly a limit from a small business, a single person, a plugin developer, hosting company. There's just various degrees of what is acceptable. [00:33:01] Speaker B: Well, and especially when you can align incentives. That's what sort of set me on this path where it's like, okay, it's one thing if we just have to accept the status quo, and this is what it is, but I'm like, no, I think this is actually solvable. We actually can align incentives because the products have problems and the hosts have problems. If we can figure out a way to thread the needle between them, they can help each other without having to buy. There's ways that this can be done. It just requires coordination and cooperation and collaboration, and that's a people problem. So I was like, okay, I think we can work on that. [00:33:37] Speaker A: I like that. There's a lot of questions I have now, but the first one that pops up as a blocker is at some point you're going to want to have a deep integration with Wordpress itself. That means in one way, the only path of distribution right now is the plugin store. [00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:34:08] Speaker A: I say store, but it's not store, the plugin repository. How would you solve that one? [00:34:15] Speaker B: So there's a couple of ways. So it's important to think about the phases. So again, the heart of all my work so far is thinking about incentives and figuring out where those lie. And sometimes you have to take multiple steps to get somewhere. So, for instance, if we're solving this problem today, if you take a product and maybe they're in, maybe they're not, and you work out a distribution deal with a hosting provider, there's nothing that says you have to use the same physical code. Right? Like, I'm all for GPL and just the open source mindset way of doing things. There are rules, though for, that aren't about just the GPL, it's just the way that does things. For instance, how you relate to lemetry and just what you do within the product itself that don't have to apply. So you can take a product and go do a deal with a host that distributes that product across their base, and you basically circumvented.org entirely. Now, this is a curious tension, because I'm all in on the value of and the work that's being done there, and I want these things to sort of come together. But it's like there's not an inherent dependency. We can do this work independently. You can take a product and have it be distributed directly through a host without, and also not pull the resources from in doing so. That's one example of how I think about this, where if you're kind of bypassing them, yes, but as a means to an end, where it's more of like, let's not put the burden on, let's innovate outside of it, yet do so in an open source way. I have zero interest in a closed ecosystem, in some sort of smaller thing. It's like we go for ubiquity or we don't even bother. So for me, ubiquity is like eventually 80% of all WordPress installs share the same infrastructure. It's never going to be 100%. I don't want that. But having a majority means that you have to do this in a way. And this is where I think the hosts come in, where it's like if we could solve this problem and imagine a situation where you develop the App Store, it sits inside of WordPress, it's booted up as like a must Use plugin, whatever, however that works. But you distribute it through the hosts and then work out all the stuff, get it functioning, have it be doing the things it needs to do. And then my ideal at some future state is where you'd bring what is doing and cares about together with whatever is developed here, however it's done. And you figure out a way first to make be an explicit beneficiary of it, which is important. Like, you don't have any adversarial role. You benefit the project explicitly from the outset, and then as time goes on, you find those ways to bring it to core. [00:37:13] Speaker A: Interesting. So the way to disperse the product is essentially make sure that every single host gets on board. [00:37:24] Speaker B: Yes, and there's a few ways that you go about that. I've had years to think about this, but that's the short of it. You're never going to get every single host. [00:37:31] Speaker A: No, that is the goal. [00:37:34] Speaker B: And you also give end users, this will be a small percentage, but some people will be self hosted on their own host. They say, I want this app store, if you will, and they'll be able to install it themselves. And this is how some hosts will say, hey, more of our customers are using this. Oh, wow. There's a great program that it offers. We can actually be sharing that revenue. We should sign up for that. So there's a number of ways that that would work. Here's a piece that gets me. This is important to me. I'll acknowledge I haven't figured out how it works yet, but I think the intention matters to me. In the ideal Future state, this app store charges 15% to products, and of that 15, 5%. So I guess 33% of the 15 goes directly into a five for the Future program, where that money goes into core. And there's a lot to be said about how that works. There's a lot of trickiness to be worked out. Been thinking about it for years. I have more questions than answers. But the idea to me is to. It's an example, in its simplistic form, of how you build in the incentive for five for the future without having to rely on altruism at all. So my ideal would be where there's thousands of products that are, whether they care about it or not, are contributing to WordPress and providing the resources to make the project better. AnD in my ideal, this is where the Guild concept comes in. If you're in the app store, 5% of what you make is going into the project anyway. And if you care about that, you can come and get involved in a deeper level and begin to direct where your money goes into specific initiatives. So you give choice along the way. But the heart of it right there is, I don't want to go to a company and say, hey, put 5% of your money into this. When they're like, well, we'll do it, but why is no one else doing? There's this curious thing where it's like, no, don't worry about that. We're going to provide you with value, and if you don't care, we're going to do it anyway. If you do care, you can get more involved and direct where what you're contributing goes to. But to me, it's an example that I get really excited about, about how you solve the incentives problem without having to rely on altruism. [00:39:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I like it. One of the things I'm curious about, because the project is called Project Gildenberg, right? Yep. The word Guild is in there. Yeah, I think I know what it means. But just to be sure, what does the name mean into the context of what you just explained? [00:40:16] Speaker B: So there's a couple of things. Guildenberg, at its heart, is about solving problems for product companies. And the guild concept being in the name. So my co founder, Anna Maria came up with the name I'm quite happy with. It combines like the idea of the guild with Gutenberg, and it's a good fun. But the heart of the idea is to facilitate cooperation, coordination, collaboration between products and the other stakeholders affected. So hosts join as distribution partners, products join, and there's a lot of things that I want to see it do, a lot of directions where we want to go with it. But at its heart, it's an organization with aligned incentives to facilitate solving problems for products. And I think the idea of a guild, at least better than anything else that's come to mind, and we're rolling with it. It just evokes this idea of we're working together on this and we have aligned interests, even if we might be competing in areas like you can have multiple products that do similar things, but we have an overall aligned interest in growing our ecosystem. [00:41:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that is a guild. That is a guild because that is competitors working together on quality, on the products, on the ways of working. There's many different things that promote a guild. So you've been working with this idea for quite a few years, as you've mentioned. I'm assuming you had conversations with this in mind, with hosting companies, with product companies, and whatever's in between. Yeah. How has that been received so far? [00:42:06] Speaker B: So really well. I'm pausing for a moment reflecting on how hard it's been, how much work. [00:42:15] Speaker A: To get to this going. Great now, but don't ask me about the past three years. [00:42:18] Speaker B: So I've had really helpful feedback at every step along the way, which just speaks again to just the nature of our community. I've had hosts who just given me the privilege of sort of unfettered access to their thinking, where they've given me really candid feedback on how they think and what matters to them. And I've had the same with products, and ultimately I've had just this privileged position of being able to synthesize all of that, and it's still something I'm iterating on and thinking through and trying to get to the heart of. But after years of thinking and playing with it loosely and then a year and a half now of full time focus on it, I feel like I finally, so I've had valid, put it this way, in some odd sort of way, a lot of my time over the past couple of years was trying to prove, not push against this idea, where part of how I will approach problem solving for something important to me is like, okay, hypothesis, let's try to prove it wrong. So I'm like, if I talk to a bunch of hosts and they all say it's a bad idea, well, then, okay, then obviously it's a bad idea. If I talk to a bunch of products and they all say it's a bad idea. And what's happened is that doesn't matter how hard I've pushed or things I've trieD, and I've definitely gotten individual things, oh, this isn't good. This is something that's off. But overall, it's been a consistent, overwhelming emphasis on like, yeah, we agree this is a problem set that would be valuable if it's solved, please let us know if you do something about it or if someone's going to do something. And so that became clear early on. Then the problem was like, okay, how does one actually do this? I know that it's not going to be what Jonathan Wool does. This is a big effort. How do you pull something like this off? I've had startup experience. I've been around a lot of different things. So the pieces were there. But at least for me, it just took a lot of thrashing and almost like, how serious am I about this? How much does this really matter? And so I can talk now about how it's going, but. [00:44:30] Speaker A: It'S been a. [00:44:30] Speaker B: Difficult couple of years where it's tested a lot of my, how serious am I about this? And I keep going towards like, okay, I need to align incentives. It needs to be its purest possible form. I need to be able to explain it clearly. And it takes time to do that. It just takes like, I'm not sure, Remkis. If I knew how much work it would be, if I would have set out to do it, I might have been just like, hey, here's all the ideas, guys. Here's all my blog posts. [00:45:02] Speaker A: Someone figure it out. [00:45:04] Speaker B: You all have fun. But I couldn't leave it. And it's just kept coming back. And now I'm like, all right, I think this is going to be the next at least five years of what I do. So I'm much clearer now than I was before. [00:45:19] Speaker A: That's good because it's a good idea to the point that it's actually a great idea. [00:45:26] Speaker B: Man. [00:45:29] Speaker A: Do you need a moment there? [00:45:33] Speaker B: What I'm focused on now. So what I set out to do with my co founders was like, okay, let's create an accelerator. Let's invest in products and just kind of focus on getting new products that we want to see to market. I love that idea. That's an important piece of the puzzle. We're still working on that. What I've shifted focus on lately is to say, okay, let's take products that already have product market fit. We can still continue to work with folks who have figured out, but there's a lot of products that have stuff mostly figured out that just need help with distribution. Let's focus on that. So what we do these days is we take products that have good product market fit. If they're a WordPress native product, there's usually some challenges still, some things that need to be sorted through. That's all good. If they're a SaaS, they tend to have the monetization of business model figured out, but they'll struggle with how to position themselves, how to go into the community. Those are all both quite solvable and they all need the same thing, which is distribution. So what we do, we onboard them, and then we work together on a rev share basis. So typically 25% down to that goal of 15% based on the deals that we help them close. So it ends up being a really simple narrative. I go to a host and say, hey, we're going to bring you products that reduce your cost and increase lifetime value. You get a piece of any of this and you tell us what you're looking for, we'll go find the products that you need. We'll help broker that, streamline it, make it easy so that you can just turn them on, try them out. And that's what we've been doing in different ways for the past couple of years. Now we're streamlining it and turning it into a program, building a team around doing that. And yeah, that's the heart of what I see as the key economic engine for everything else. I want to see Gildenburg do. If we do nothing else but just help products get distribution and help hosts, like reduce costs, increase lifetime value, we're good. I want to build an app store. I think the work that I'm describing now is the key activity to get there. And I'll keep taking us in that direction. But even if it doesn't look like what I want it to, it's like, this is valuable work. This is a good loop that we can continue to do. So that will be the basis of what Gildenburg Inc. The commercial side of the business, does going Forward. [00:47:50] Speaker A: Makes sense. So are you focusing on products? Products as in plugins, themes? Or are you focusing on services or as products? Products. [00:48:01] Speaker B: So services I care about the service ecosystem right now. [00:48:09] Speaker A: Can you give an example of what wouldn't work currently? [00:48:13] Speaker B: Something that what works is scale. And there's a curious line there. I can work with some productized services to some degree, but I think it's really on the side of if it's more niche, then you also have to work with niche hosts that focus on specific markets. That's totally a thing. I like that work. In general though, it's focusing on products that. All right, it has a million install base right now. How do we grow it to 10 million? Through distribution deals and going to build around that. There's three types of products that I think about in the WordPress space. They're either feature products that bring a specific piece of functionality to WordPress. They're integrations with SaaS, where it's like connecting with WordPress with some other system, or they're an ecosystem plugin. Woocommerce is a great example of that. Form builders and forms and builders tend to be good examples of this as well, where there's an entire ecosystem of its own. And what we're trying to do is grow the install base for that ecosystem. [00:49:18] Speaker A: Can you give me an example of the first two as well, of the. [00:49:22] Speaker B: Ones that we work started well. So my work is split into what I did before Gildenburg, which I can talk about, and also what's now officially in Gildenburg. So one of the first products that we started working with is called short pixel. It's a image optimization product. The goal there with short pixel is to be able to. They've got a good product. They've been around for a long time. Okay, how do we help more people become aware of it? What does it look like to bring short pixel functionality into other products in the performance space and to do deals with hosts that get short pixel across their install base? Another example that I've been working with here recently is Ninja Forms. They've been around for a long time. They have a great product. I think that they're still early in what their install base could be. So they're a good example of an ecosystem plugin where I've been working with Quay and the team to say, okay, hey, you guys have a loyal customer base. A lot of great stuff going for you. How do we make some improvements to what's there in terms of the business model and positioning, and then get yourself ready for partnerships so that we can grow the install base? They've been doing great work. It's been a lot of fun working with them and those are two good examples on different sides, and now I'm talking with a bunch more. [00:50:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I get that. Possibly there's quite a few that you can't disclose, but it sort of helps understanding if you have examples. What does that look like? [00:50:52] Speaker B: Is there a lot more to share in the future as well? [00:50:56] Speaker A: I'm betting on it. [00:50:59] Speaker B: Actually, what I just wanted to touch on with that is a big thing that's motivating for me, especially with who we work with early on. It's really important to me that we open source the work that we're doing. I was thinking about this today. A lot of what I do with these products is actually stuff I've already written about, so that's important, but I want to make it even more accessible, where it's like we're developing playbooks. How do you do partnerships? How do you improve the onboarding in your product? How do you think about pricing? How do you think about. I was talking to Matt Cromwell the other day about the work he's done on customer experience. I was like, man, this would be awesome to take this and turn this into a playbook for the guild where people can have the benefit of what Matt and his team worked. So it's really important to me, with those who we work with early on, that they're. And I've loved this. Like, Quay and his team have been fantastic, the short pixel guys, as well, of just being open and making changes to things. And whether someone works with Gildenberg or not, I want them to benefit, because, again, the Goal is to grow the ecosystem. And so it's like, as we work these things out, how do we just make it more available? So, to me, it's really important that our incentives are aligned to do so openly. And so that's why I have confidence that we'll be able to see a lot more of this stuff, because it's like, hey, this is what we did. This is the playbook that we'd created. [00:52:24] Speaker A: As a result, it's very much aligned with the open source philosophy, sharing and together putting in an effort to make the world better, whatever we define as the world, other types of products that are harder to work with. [00:52:46] Speaker B: So I've been thinking more about enterprise lately. I care about this space quite a bit. [00:52:52] Speaker A: What do you define as enterprise? Because that's a very fluid concept. Remote. [00:52:56] Speaker B: Sure. Fair. I can take it from a couple of different ways, but they're going to spend at least $1,000 a month on something, right? That's obviously bottom end, but you need. [00:53:10] Speaker A: To get on a vendor list. There's things like vendor lists. [00:53:13] Speaker B: Yes, that's the whole thing. So I care about that space. I think it's an important part of Wordpress's growth. I'm planning to work with a couple of products that I'd say are more enterprise skewed, but I'm pretty selective about it just because ultimately I think it's more important to focus on the 80% as a whole, like the WordPress ecosystem as a whole. So if we get the balance right, if I have ten products to work with today, I really would like no more than two of those to be enterprise focused, if that makes sense. Yeah, there are a lot of enterprise products that are interesting that could be worked with, but I need to keep that ratio, especially now and then. I think those that rely too much on, I guess what I was alluding to, that productized service where it's not really scalable. I care about them, they're an important part of the ecosystem. But it would be something that I would love to see us get to later. Whereas right now I want to focus more on products that have scale, that all they're really missing is the distribution piece. [00:54:17] Speaker A: The scale is built in already. It's already there, it's just not activated. [00:54:21] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:54:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm also asking that question for whomever is listening, watching, how does that work for my product? How can someone determine whether scale is already part of their product? Are there any metrics that you would look at? [00:54:44] Speaker B: Part of it is just the simple idea of does your product work on its own or does it require human assistance? Right. As product has services require human. So they're inherently less scalable. I also say this, this is important to me as someone who's been in this space a long time. I really enjoy all of this. It's important to me. This is what motivates a lot of my writing and creating the playbooks, like going to word camps. It's really important to me to just be available and to be helpful as I've been helped. So if someone's like, to me, it's not about whether you work with Gildenberg or not, whether I make money on it or not. In that sense of things, it's like, how do we grow the ecosystem? So what I want is for people who are trying to figure things out to feel free to ask questions. And if there's an opportunity to work together, fantastic. If there's like, I was talking to someone the other day and it's like, I think we're aligned. But let's just be really candid about whether the timing is right or not because we don't have to do anything. And anyway, I want to encourage anyone. This is what I've found to be the case in this space, and I want to continue to perpetuate that the more accessible we can be to each other, the more that we benefit from it. Sometimes people are like, oh no, they wouldn't want to talk to me. No, it's not true. You don't know until you've asked. And I love talking with founders who are trying to figure this stuff out, and maybe it'll inspire a new blog post. [00:56:07] Speaker A: If nothing else, where would they find that blog post? [00:56:12] Speaker B: So right now my writing is mixed between Jonathanwold.com and Gildenberg.com. I'll probably be writing most of my WordPress focused stuff on gildenberg.com in the future. Most of my library of writing on the topic at the moment is on jonathan.com. So between those two. [00:56:31] Speaker A: Yeah, you want the subscribers on both. I get it. [00:56:35] Speaker B: I suspect Jonathanwold.com over time is going to become more about my curiosity explorations. I wrote about theater on my last post, and I'll move WordPress more or the other, except for perhaps some philosophic posts about WordPress as I get old. [00:56:54] Speaker A: Jeez, define old because I'll turn 15 next month. [00:57:00] Speaker B: It's not a negative for me. I'm quite proud of the grays that are starting to come out. It just means that we've had more experience. [00:57:08] Speaker A: It does. It also means I got gray real early. No, I've embraced it. So I have the family hairdo already. So I knew what was coming. My son is 25 and he'd go like. So as, like the, I don't know what's that called in English, but like the hair receding at the receding hairline. [00:57:36] Speaker B: Yeah. They're called like widows peaks or something sometimes. [00:57:40] Speaker A: So he goes, should I just switch to the family hairdo or do I still have a few years? And I go, you have a few years. [00:57:47] Speaker B: Just go enjoy it while you got it. [00:57:50] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:57:50] Speaker B: But my grandfather kept long hair into the end of life, so I'm probably good. But you never know. You never know. [00:57:58] Speaker A: So I think they say it comes from the mother's side. [00:58:01] Speaker B: It was on my mother's side, yeah. [00:58:03] Speaker A: So if that's the case, you are good. In my case, I should have some hair left if I grow it. If I look at my, I should. [00:58:13] Speaker B: Have absolutely nothing but benefits and trade offs, right. I end happiness. The longer mine gets, the more work it is to also take care of it. [00:58:21] Speaker A: I shave twice a week. Very simple, very straightforward. Never have to think about how to do my hair. So what I find interesting is that your curiosity combined with your interest in what the open source community is about, led you on very well. I'm going to call it a big path, but I mean that in the sense of it's a large and lofty goal. It is. I've seen other projects inside of WordPress Strand. I'm thinking of the WP governance thing, familiar, that was attempted to launch and get traction on a few years back. Obviously that traction also depended on the project management lead to be fully onboarded. How important is that for you? I don't mean necessarily Matt Malweig, but I mean, sure, the foundation, the core group of contributors, whether that's core or just general, very active on. [00:59:37] Speaker B: I like this question a lot. So I think I'm a big fan of Josepha's. I think she's quite underrated for those who know her and the work that she does to lead the project at the director level, it's incredible. I hope that we as a community continue to work to just get better at supporting the work that she's doing. It can be pretty thankless at times. A lot, and a lot that goes unseen. And there's a lot of challenges. [01:00:08] Speaker A: Most, I would say the most, yes. [01:00:12] Speaker B: So the project is really important and the structure is really important. I guess the way that I think about it is that we're tackling a different problem set. I would love to see, over time become more, and I love the work that Angela's been doing on exploring new wordcamp formats, et cetera, ways that we can better serve the ecosystem. So I'd love to see the project, over time become more embracing of commercial interests and just the different roles and dynamics. But I'm okay if it doesn't, and here's why. I guess the way that I think about it is we can solve this set of problems for product founders in a way that just explicitly supports the project. This idea of the five for the future, whether without any fanfare or hooplab, it's just a decision right? Where it's like I'm building this model in a way where there are going to be funds in a box to allocate, and we'll allocate those funds. It's a pretty simple loop where it's like you go to people on the project, team leads and hey, what do you guys need? What are the needs right now? What are things that need to be done? And then you just do those things. And what I love to see over time is interest to align, but it's okay if they don't. I don't think you force anything. I think There's a natural, like, let's go build this app store, work with the host, solve problems, do so in a way where we are explicitly connecting ourselves to core through contribution, through working on the things that need to get done. If we can get those worlds to connect in the future, great. But that's not a problem for today and for me at least personally, and my intentions in building this organization is to support the work of core. But doing so in a way of like, even if it's not all that noticed, it's like on the economic sense where it's like, I'd love to see us sponsor a bunch of contributors who can stay independent, who can work on things that need to get worked on. The bias is there we're going to represent the interests of the products, so there will be an inherent bias. But my belief is that if we work on things that are good for the products, like better shared standards, maybe more emphasis on like, I'd love to see like a WordPress design kit get worked on, ways to just make it easier to build products at Core. [01:02:29] Speaker A: I think that was launched yesterday, the initiation of that nice. On Make Core, Matthias presented sort of the scope of the new WordPress dashboard. [01:02:44] Speaker B: Fantastic. To me, things like that I want to see supported and given the resources and taken seriously and then adopted. And I think we can do that through the product lens. So I think it's just not much drama to it where it's like we do the work, we put resources into the project where it needs to be put. There's a close symbiotic relationship and we just sort of see where it goes from. [01:03:09] Speaker A: I want to add to that, since this podcast will go out later than yesterday was Wednesday, July Twelveth. [01:03:18] Speaker B: Nice to check that out. [01:03:19] Speaker A: Cool. I'm also going to date how much time I'm going to need to turn this podcast into a published one. But it's what it is. [01:03:29] Speaker B: See you 2024. [01:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it'll be before that. It'll be before that, but I still have quite a bit of a backlog. Cool. So I think the only other question I have that sort of is you haven't touched on, you want to get to a place where there's a marketplace, an app store or whatever, you call it. We have marketplaces, app stores, inside WordPress ecosystem right now, themeforest being the most obvious one. Is there any thoughts on how that integrates or integrates or doesn't, at least. [01:04:17] Speaker B: As I know it? So I haven't looked at themeforest and Envato closely in a while. I have a lot of context from the past, but at least as I know it, there was no vision for a ubiquitous play, nor intention nor strategy in that direction. So I think it's valuable work. I think it's probably worth discussing, if we're successful, what are the long term ramifications to the ecosystem? Because there's always benefits and trade offs. [01:04:43] Speaker A: Right. [01:04:44] Speaker B: But at least the way that I look at it, Envato, to my understanding and others like them who've done different marketplace plays, I haven't seen anyone who set out with that particular vision focus on ubiquity. It's been more about carving out, whether conscious or not, like certain slices and markets, and then been happy to do that. And also, to me, it's really important that whatever I want to see, whoever works on this App store problem, I think you have to do so with a holistic view of both the needs of the project, needs of the host, the needs of the products. You can't build a marketplace, in my view, and also get into hosting because you've inherently misaligned interests with the host that you could work with. [01:05:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. [01:05:26] Speaker B: That could all change. I spent a lot of time looking for others working on this type of stuff because it wasn't my, oh, I want to go do this big thing. Right, and ultimately settled onto it's like, well, at least to what I've seen so far, no one else has combined that set of vision and interests and desire to align. So I'd love to see more cooperation, collaboration. Envato's done a bunch of great stuff, so there's an openness on my to. But in the meantime, just keep going. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Yeah. From my perspective, Envado specifically, I think they're dropping the ball in terms of vision and innovaTion. There's so many opportunities they've had. This is a good example of something they could have led the way. In no way, shape or form have they been in the vicinity of something like this, not even. That's why I was kind of curious if there had been any discussions, talks, or curiosities from their end towards your Gildenburg project. [01:06:38] Speaker B: Not that I'm aware of. I've had a few conversations with great folks in Envato. Over the years, I've been writing publicly about this for years, so no one's asked me. And at least as I think about it now, at least what I can tell of their public focus, it's too different to warrant me saying, hey, do you guys want to change your strategy entirely, get out of hosting to do this? [01:07:02] Speaker A: I see that as well. Wow. I generally don't comment too much on someone's project as such, but I am genuinely excited for this one. [01:07:17] Speaker B: Thank you. [01:07:18] Speaker A: Because it solves a problem. I'm just going to sound really old now, but a lot of us veterans, a lot of us are in the WordPress ecosystem for over, I think. Let me put it this way, before WordPress truly started to become a much more commercially friendly solution, which in my mind is 2008. Yeah, sounds right. That started with Brian Gardner's revolution theme, and then for me, one of the first next ones that was really made an impact is gravity forms, which I think is 2009, but before that, best. [01:08:04] Speaker B: Lifetime I've ever gotten out of a product I purchased earlier. [01:08:08] Speaker A: Same, still use it, still love it. But for those of us who've seen the rise of commercial interests in WordPress, you it started to solve some of the problems. But there's a lot of problems that came with the solutions that were being implemented. We talked a little bit about hosts, how they have an influence, which is possibly not something we want, because if one host purchases a plugin, does the other host still want that plugin to be promoted? It becomes very quickly murky water. [01:08:55] Speaker B: And. [01:08:56] Speaker A: That'S a tough thing to solve. But if you solve it from the different perspective, like you're suggesting what you're doinG, it starts to become sensical. Okay, me as a hosting company, I don't necessarily benefit from this directly, but the ecosystem benefits from it, and thus I benefit from it. So it's an indirect movement that I find very interesting to see how this plays out. And I don't mean that in a negative way, I mean that in a positive way. I know this is going to play out, and I'm kind of curious how fast it will go into the direction that we'll all be excited. [01:09:34] Speaker B: It's interesting, one of the other, this is to me somewhat controversial, but I think things are worth scrutinizing and I don't mind changing my mind about this in the future. When I look at what awesome motive. [01:09:48] Speaker A: Is doing as an example in the. [01:09:49] Speaker B: Space, there's a lot that I can appreciate about how they're going about it and just the size of the network and sort of what they're doing. But when I look at the data and I look at the behavior, my inclination is based on what I see today. Awesome motives practices wouldn't be welcomed within my vision for how the Guild, if you will, would run. I agree. It's a free space. They can do what they want to do. I want to create incentives. To me, in our ideal space here, we create standards and ways of doing things and best practices that are user friendly, user centric, that align with our values for the project, FTC friendly as well. Shout out to Carl Hancock and would ultimately create in my just put it this way, I don't think we should be relying on awesome motives like altruism to make better choices. Whereas if there are clear incentives to make better choices where it's like, hey, you don't get distribution if you don't follow these practices. So they're a good example to me because they would for years probably just not care because they have their own distribution, right? [01:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:11:01] Speaker B: But there is a future state where that might not be the case. And what I would like founders to see is that awesome motive is not the only game in town. There are other options if you want to sell your product and if you care about the long term. ANd my hope would be that someone like awesome motive says, you know what? Incentives have changed a bit. We will play ball. We'll also get involved in these things. We'll do this because we see that it's in our best interest to do so, and then we can be happy about it and just let the past be the past. But I think that's an important example to me where it's like awesome motive today in the way that they do things I don't feel like is as friendly to the end users as it could be. It doesn't do the best it could for the project, especially given the leadership position they're in. I'd want to see that improve. I don't expect them to do it from a place of altruism, and I don't have much to offer them today. But in the future, when we have distribution, someone like awesome motive might come around and say, hey, you know what? We want access to that, too. Awesome. Here's what you all got to do. You need to follow these practices and do things these ways. [01:12:05] Speaker A: I like that example. I enjoy knowing quite a few people working at awesome motive. Yeah, some great people, Syed included. I have wonderful conversations with them. But yeah, they go about how they market themselves because I think it's mostly the marketing side of things in a way that doesn't align with my values. That's not passing judgments per se, but it's more, it's also not how I see it. [01:12:34] Speaker B: It's not the Wordpress values, too. If you dig into what we, one of them, for instance, is giving credit where credit is due. We can copy each other's stuff, right? That's all fair game. It's open source. But part of what we do is if I take something that you built, I'm going to give credit to Remkis. Like, hey, thanks to Remkis, who did the original here. Here's my version of it. That's an example of something that we value, that's part of the lifeblood of this open source ecosystem. You don't have to do it. [01:13:04] Speaker A: Don't copy from me, though. Sure. [01:13:08] Speaker B: But anyway, it's an example. And the good news is it's learned behavior. And what I'm on about ultimately is let's create the incentives for people who may not know to practice some of these behaviors that we value. And one of them is like giving credit where credit is due. [01:13:27] Speaker A: It's a good example of, you like the people, you may like the products, and there's a part of how they sell the products doesn't align. That's not to say anything bad about the people or the products, but it's more of a, yeah, like you said, it's less aligning with the open source idea behind WordPress as a project. Yeah, it's hard to explain without turning this into an entirely separate podcast. On that topic, Matt Madeiris and I talked about this topic as well in the third episode. Within, you know, there's also the scale, the size of the content that they put out, which becomes a difficult thing to find a way around. They are ubiquitous in presence, more than you realize. Let me put it this way. No, but all in all, that is a super interesting project that I genuinely hope to see get way more traction than it currently has. Because we need a solution that is also not just solving the stuff that you're mentioning. Because one of the things I don't hear you mentioning directly, but I'm pretty sure it's part of how you do things, is it elevates Wordpress on a professional level. There's a market that we're slowly but surely entering. One of the reasons I asked what is your definition of enterprise? I've worked at an enterprise company. I've been part of the team that evaluated software where licenses of one, licenses cost a million to start with, and then it had to be implemented for probably four or five times that. The ERP systems like PeopleSoft and Oracle and stuff like that. So I understand how that side of the market works and that's quite different from what most people in the WordPress ecosphere say or call enterprise. [01:15:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. [01:15:45] Speaker A: But having said that, I think this is a project that has the ability to move things upscale without losing sight of joke public. In terms of I have a small website and I maybe have some premium functionality, but nothing too fancy. But if you can service both without one or the other feeling like they're in a bad place, that's a perfect position to be in. [01:16:13] Speaker B: It's not trivial. Yeah, it's important work. It's not trivial. And I'm glad you're picking up on the thread. I think for me, the fact that I had the five years of full time enterprise experience, I'm not losing that anytime soon. And ultimately right now it's a bit of a switch to focus on the SMB. The small business needs to solve those problems at scale. But I feel like the scrutiny, the work that you do to think about the enterprise is part of what gives people confidence that they're going to be able to go from small to large. So it needs to be there from the onset. So it is part of my thinking and part of why I want to have at least a couple of enterprise products that we're always working with. And yeah, if we get this balance right, they both feed each other in really healthy symbiotic ways. Yeah. [01:17:04] Speaker A: By the sound of the stuff that you're thinking about and adding to the mix as a whole, it sounds like you are. So it then is just a matter of maturing it as it goes. And when we do have that App Store available, yeah, it makes sense to approach it from that perspective of professionalism, uplift everything, quality goes up and therefore the perception goes up, which is, I think, something that I think there's, I think there's still a lot of people not fully understanding what power we have as a community. Yeah, it's a great point in not just this particular area, but the hole is so large that it's quite easy to get to lose track of the impact that we have. And yeah, I see what you're doing as a very interesting step in helping the community as a whole, not just the actual thing that you're building. [01:18:05] Speaker B: Well, part of what I've enjoyed the most is I've got a clear vision. I'm personally loving this work. It's been this joy, though, of getting to be part of growing a team around it, because ultimately, which is right at the heart of this idea of a guild like work with the best people that care about this, this means I'm also working with people that I end up disagreeing with on things. I want that tension. Yeah, it's like representing the different interests by the time we get to. Are you coming out to Cloud Fest in March next year? [01:18:36] Speaker A: Yes. [01:18:37] Speaker B: I'll have a lot more. I think they'll be public and sort of worked out by then. So cloud fest, to me, is an important part of both our strategic relationships and the way we work with hosting. I've been doing a lot of work to kind of line up some timelines around Cloudfest, so a lot more we can talk about. [01:18:55] Speaker A: Cool. I look forward to it. And for today, I thank you for providing this wonderful insight into what the Gildenburg Project does. Thank you so much. [01:19:05] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Remcus. Appreciate it.