Katsushi Kawamori

Thoughts on Automattic and WordPress: To get his CEO title back, if Matt stacked the board, held an emergency board meeting fired everyone then appointed a new board to reinstate him as CEO and fire the interim CEO then he now risks a shareholder class action lawsuit. The fired board still has rights as they represent significant shareholders, they can use the courts to even get an injunction to remove Matt as CEO again. Automattic has declined in value 83% in 5 years. Their revenue is likely bad, like really bad for such a decline to happen. The lawsuit between Matt and WP Engine is going to trial and resumes again at the end of the month. The facts of the case are not in Matt’s favor, and WP Engine likely wins their case which could result in millions of dollars of penalties to Matt and Automattic. Matt could even be recommended for criminal charges for extortion, which could result in probation or jail time. The board was likely trying to put Matt on leave before the trial to try and save the company and perhaps even settle the case (just speculation). The board and Matt obviously have differing opinions on how to handle the lawsuit. Now everyone who was on Matt’s board and inner circle will now be suing him for fiduciary duty, negligence, and other misconduct. Automattic is now going to have to deal with losing the WP Engine case, and a shareholder lawsuit that includes major VC firms, BlackRock, and Salesforce. The company will be blacklisted from any kind of venture capital while these lawsuits play out. Matt’s only hope at this point is to find an investor stupid enough to buy out the other investors in a down round. If they’re even willing to sell. The other investors might prefer to sue and not sell just to stick it to Matt. If Matt cannot find another investor all he has left is the companies revenue which is in major decline but he just fired the CFO. There’s a good chance they won’t be making payroll sooner rather than later. Which means more layoffs. The most likely way Automattic can get more money is if Matt steps down and a new executive team is able to get existing investors to bail the company out while they turn things around. But now that those investors have been removed from the board or fired they aren’t going to do this until Matt is removed. Matt’s likely only choice if he is able to remain as CEO is either settle with WP Engine and take the financial hit, or just lose and take the hit, layoff most of the company, go down to a skeleton crew, and stock pile as much cash as possible for as long as possible so he has working capital to rebuild. Meanwhile fend off investor lawsuits who have unlimited access to lawyers and funds who can pretty much drown Automattic in legal fees until they recover what’s left of the assets. What this means for WordPress? Less developers, less resources, and less leadership meanwhile AI continues to eat into their bottom line. As the Internet moves towards becoming an agentic AI Internet, WordPress’s only hope is to become an agentic system. Merely using WordPress as a data store is not enough. It has to pivot to become part of the agentic stack but there’s really no one to drive such a radical change to the project and Matt would never allow it as it breaks 20 years of legacy development. Now with the pending lawsuits, being cut off from venture capital, and pissing off some of the biggest investors in the world things aren’t looking great. I take no pride in this, as it means the destruction of the open web as we know it. Something I contributed many years of my life to building is now being destabilized and destroyed. It’s a shitty feeling, and I wish we had solved open source governance more effectively so this never could have happened.