The WP Minute+

Eric Karkovack (00:00)
I wanted to bring this forward a little bit because you've done all this stuff for decades, right? You said you were fighting all these fights and how did you end up at Automattic and like what's your role there now? Like, and how is that different from what you were doing? If it is different.

Jeffrey Zeldman (00:16)
It's very different. It's great. I love the company. ⁓ So I worked for myself for 30 plus years and the market was changing. I noticed that even people like Ethan Marcotte, who were also a brilliant freelance, ⁓ were starting to take gigs in-house. And I thought, well, he's doing it.

I had a studio and the studio, Happy Cog still exists. They're based in New York. They do terrific work, but I'm no longer affiliated with it. So I, I left Happy Cog. I started Jeffrey Zeldman Studio. ⁓ but I gave up all the clients that I had on Happy Cog because I left Happy Cog and I was struggling with clients. ⁓ had a client I loved, but they were slow to pay.

It's quite possible that I misunderstood the language in our contract. I thought they were always late. may have thought they may have anyway, it got to a point where I just asked, asked a lawyer to write to them. Doesn't nothing else. You're not being sued or anything, but just like my client, Jeffrey's element informs me that he's having trouble collecting Baba. And two things happened. They cut me a check right away and they said, we're not working with you anymore. Of course not. They were insulted. I get it.

I knew when I get it, I'm going to get paid and I'm going to lose a client, but I needed the money right now. So I was thinking, all right, if I were to work in, in-house somewhere, where would I go? And the only place I could think of was Automattic because it's an open, well, because of open source WordPress for starters, right? And WordPress isn't always the prettiest tool to use.

It's not the simplest or most obvious tool to use because it's very powerful ⁓ and very extensible. It's an ecosystem. powers 43 % of the web or 44 % of the websites now. It's incredible. Mostly free, right? Mostly people downloading it, installing it on their own server. If you as a webmaster could do that.

Eric Karkovack (02:34)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Zeldman (02:41)
If you're not, there's plenty of places that will host WordPress that specialize in it. We have one, but there are others. They're all, you know, optimized for it. They work well. And I just thought, and I knew Matt, I'd met him. I met him when he was 19 at South by Southwest. I was, I was giving a talk on stage and I had just been introduced to Matt and I call, I think he was 19. He might've been 22. I don't know.

Eric Karkovack (02:59)
wow.

Jeffrey Zeldman (03:11)
I just picked, he was very young and he, and, and some colleagues had just started WordPress and it was standards compliant from the get go and

It persuaded me to stop hand coding my site, which I did through the early mid 2000s. I continued to hand write HTML every day and page spinner or, and because I just, enjoyed that. I enjoy, like I enjoyed writing and then like loading on my browser and going, yeah, that doesn't read, right? Like I needed to see it in the layout. I didn't.

Eric Karkovack (03:36)
Same here.

Jeffrey Zeldman (03:53)
I didn't mind not having a WYSIWYG environment, I just, was used to it. ⁓

WordPress was amazing and this kid, so I called him up on stage. said, Matt Mullenweg, I know you're in the audience. Can you please come up? And I went, this guy is the future and what he's doing, what he's working on is the future. it's one of the few times I've been accurate in my predictions. ⁓ Who knew it was gonna become, it really worked. Who knew it was gonna be so huge? So I'm looking around.

Eric Karkovack (04:20)
Yeah, that worked out.

Jeffrey Zeldman (04:29)
I ⁓ spoke to a recruiter who was helping a colleague of mine who was also an elder statesman in the field. you get to a point where it's harder to find a job that's suitable for you. And she said, who do you know? I said, well, I know Matt Mullenweg. I've had dinner with him a few times. And she said, well, you should talk to Matt. I said, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And I talked to him.

Actually, I initially approached him as a client for my Jeffrey Zeldman studio business. And I said, you have an amazing company, but I don't think automatic.com is telling that story. And I'd love to help you redesign and rewrite it. And he said, what do you mean? So I wrote a bunch of emails saying, well, I did this and I think I do that. And bear in mind, I haven't spoken to you about this. I don't really know if any of this is right. These are just some ideas.

If we work together, I'll have a much better, more accurate, more brand appropriate idea. I'll have a better idea of your business issues and how the website can help that. And after, I don't know, 11 of these emails, Matt said to me, well, not gonna redesign automatic.com. love it, but I'll give you a job. And I went, well, if there's ever any place where I could be okay in house, it would be this place. So I did it.

And I'm really glad I did. It took me a while to find my proper niche. You asked what I do now. I work on employer brand mostly, which is what does it feel like to work here? What's unique about this place? Not only about what we make and how we make it, you know, the whole open source part, but also we've been, ⁓ we've been working at your home. You know, ⁓ we've been remote.

only from the very get-go. ⁓ A friend of mine wrote a book, The Year Without Pants, after working here for a year. ⁓ But we're more than that. sort of out, we now call ourselves a distributed company because it's where it's remote first, asynchronous first, and it's supported by getting together every once in a while. So, you know, like, you know,

Eric Karkovack (06:27)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Zeldman (06:52)
who walks faster than you, who walks slower than you, who else liked going to the park, who preferred going to the gallery. You just learn about the things about the people. And you do a lot of work. We do maybe once or twice a year, we'll get together in person. But the rest of the time I'm here. This is my apartment, it's a New York apartment. And it used to be big for a New York apartment. But ⁓ when it was me, a wife, and a baby.

Eric Karkovack (06:55)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Zeldman (07:21)
and it was not my workplace, I had an office, but now it's, you know, now it's my daughter and her guy and ⁓ three cats. And so anyway, I put up this wooden screen just so you wouldn't see the assorted chaos in my living room slash. also, do my, this is also a music studio now, my living room. have keyboard right here. You can't see it, but I'm hitting it.

⁓ I have a recording software inside my Mac. I do so much stuff from this little seat here. I wanted to block it off a little visually in case. ⁓ Yeah, just to present a slightly less chaotic truth.

Eric Karkovack (08:10)
Hey,

chaos is okay with me. I've got some chaos behind me as well. it sounds like you're where you want to be though.

Jeffrey Zeldman (08:19)
Yeah, I'm very happy there. I'm very happy there. ⁓ We have, one of the things we have at our company, we have a lot of really smart, really talented people and almost everybody, I say almost because it's impossible for to be everybody, but almost everybody's super nice too. Like I've worked with, I worked at an ad agency where everybody was really gifted and everyone was super intelligent.

And, you know, very professional clients, but everyone was very competitive and, you know, again, secretive and like, you know, we were always in shootouts, you know, my ads gonna win. No, my ads gonna win, you know, I'm doing it like puppet show. I'm not doing it like the way people actually spoke. It was more, it was less transparent than that. But ⁓ people are very supportive here. We have ⁓ a neurodiverse community here. We have queer community here.

Eric Karkovack (08:58)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Zeldman (09:18)
We have black community here and ⁓ people of color community. So we have all these communities inside community built around the open source community, ⁓ the WordPress community, and then our other products, which not that many people know about, but they're awesome ⁓ because we don't advertise. We don't do any marketing. We just make this stuff. Now that could change tomorrow, but I don't know.

And even though I have a big title, Matt gave me the big title because I weigh in on design and writing and all kinds of things and across many teams. But my primary job is still, I'm a writer writing about ⁓ what it's like to work here and things we do for employees. We helped an employee bring his mother from Iran to the U S where she could get better treatment for.

a cancer that she had developed. we helped, mean, our HR team went to bat making sure that she could migrate and getting all the permits and everything. that's, know, but I love writing stories like that. It gives me hope when, yeah. And yeah, I'm very happy there. So I plan to stay here until I stop working and I don't plan to stop working. I mean, eventually they'll probably go, you're decrepit.

Eric Karkovack (10:20)
Wow.

Yeah, it sounds very fulfilling.

Jeffrey Zeldman (10:48)
You can't walk anymore. You have to stop working for us. But that's what they're to have to fire me at some point, I think, because I don't want to leave. Yeah. It's like I have this crowded small apartment in New York, but they're going to drag me out of it in a box. Like I'm the kind of New Yorker who wants to stay here. I know it's crazy. I have friends living everywhere else who have houses for less than I pay for an apartment who, you know, they can

Eric Karkovack (10:55)
Well, I love that they're gonna have to drag you out of there and,

Jeffrey Zeldman (11:18)
They can have guest rooms. They have all kinds of stuff that I can't have here. ⁓ And it's not like I'm going to the Metropolitan Museum every day. It's not like I'm taking advantage, but I'm just the kind of person who this place vibes right for me and I'm happy there. And that's how I feel about Automattic. Not for everybody, but for who, it's right for you, you'd be very happy. So I don't think I knew I was gonna get to make a pitch for that when I came on the show, but I...

Eric Karkovack (11:45)
Hey, we're all for it.

Jeffrey Zeldman (11:47)
Good. And I feel we need more brilliant people working on WordPress and our other products. And we need more people, you know, helping to save the open web, which, you know, is under so many threats right now.

Eric Karkovack (12:04)
Well, was

the last thing I wanted to ask you, actually. ⁓ What role can WordPress and open source play in keeping the open web alive and thriving and kind of keep pushing us forward on accessibility and standards and privacy, especially? That's another big one that we need to tackle.

Jeffrey Zeldman (12:24)
Privacy is huge.

Privacy is huge. And when you're working with AI, how do you guarantee privacy? If you're using an AI tool to say, look at every message I send all day long, look at every comp I make, read every article I publish, and tell me every day, what's the most important... After a week, tell me what patterns do you see in my work? How can I improve my work? That, to me, is an okay use of AI. ⁓

How do you give AI access to everything you do and make sure that it won't say, I hear you're in Queer-O-Matic. ⁓ When did you know you were queer? No, it's not supposed to do any of that, right? So ⁓ just as an example, ⁓ I think with AI now, I think one thing WordPress can do is say, all right, you're not allowed to scrape this site for content, period, or the owner of this site

will let you scrape this site for content, but you have to pay them a certain amount because they're losing advertising revenue or subscription revenue or whatever it is. So help to compensate the people we serve as we all deal with this huge change in the ecosystem. Similarly, WordPress can ⁓ say, right, you know.

Five years ago, if you had a coffee shop, you could make a WordPress website, but half the time, someone's going to type into ChatGBT or into Claude or whatever, ⁓ where's there a coffee shop near me? They should still be able to find your coffee shop. It should still be able to grab the information from your website. It should provide a link to your website, like, know, words won't do it, go look at the pictures. Basically, since we know...

that these huge companies are going to be grabbing and these huge new tools are going to be grabbing content without necessarily recompensing the people who create the content, the web will die. Five years of that and there'll be no new content left and then it'll just be bots scraping what bots wrote to serve to bots. it'll just be, so how can we continue to serve the human beings here?

whether they use AI or not, whether they like AI or not, how can we help them deal with this change that's coming at us from all sides? ⁓ I think that's a really important role that WordPress can play. don't know what... I know that the website of the future, which is something one of our advisors talks about, ⁓ I don't know that it's any different from the website of now.

but it's going to have to have underpinning to it under the surface that makes it more easy, that makes it easy not only for Google to find, but for all these bots to find. Like, how do I make sure that my content is getting to the agent that's going to book my client, that's going to book this user's airline tickets? And how do I still let them know that they should come to my website if they have a problem with the ticket or whatever?

⁓ so I think it's that negotiating the rift that AI is temporarily creating and hopefully only temporarily between creators and every, and the thing we want, which is come to my website and do a, you know, come to my website and do B come to my website, subscribe, check out my advertiser. Don't do any of that. I even, even if I have a free website, that's not monetized like zeltman.com. ⁓

I still want people to come to it. I still want you to read my words the way I laid them out, if at all possible. Yes, you can read them in RSS. Yes, you can read them any number of ways. Yes, you can have, you know, can read them scraped onto LinkedIn or whatever, but I also want you to come here because I like my new design and I want you to see it. So I think ⁓ these are challenging years. ⁓ A lot of people are stressed.

Eric Karkovack (16:27)
you

Jeffrey Zeldman (16:44)
There's all kinds of political turmoil going on at the same time. There's health issues going on, war. Like it was already crazy enough. Like if AI hadn't come out now, if it had come out during the Clinton administration, when everyone was like, history's over, we won the cold war. There's nothing to worry about. You know, which was never really true, but ⁓ we believed it. And we were, you know, I would be like, all right, I see an existential threat to my job.

Eric Karkovack (16:47)
Absolutely.

We believed it.

Jeffrey Zeldman (17:13)
But it could also be an enhancement to my productivity that helps me stay employed longer. I don't know, but I'll figure that out because, you know, it's the Clinton administration. I'm not worried. Whereas I don't know what the newspaper headlines are going to read every morning. And I'm, you know, always scared to look, but I have to look. I would say that we have our work cut out for us.

I'm glad that the initial web took longer, that we had 30 years to figure it out instead of three years. I worry that we're moving too fast in some ways. ⁓ I have concerns that two years from now, I won't be able to do my job without 50 AI helpers, and then the AI companies are going to go, okay, it's now $2,000 a month. I worry.

Eric Karkovack (17:47)
Yeah.

That's a real threat.

⁓

Jeffrey Zeldman (18:10)
It's a real threat. think, so you should always be able to do your job by yourself. And there are certain things you should only do by yourself, like illustration, creative writing. the other thing is, when I think about the pollution, I think, well, China is going to catch up with us in AI and Chinese AI will be solar powered. And eventually America will be drag kicking and screaming and the West generally will be drag kicking and screaming.

to using solar power instead of poisoning water or using burning gasoline to answer somebody's question. ⁓ So I'm optimistic. I'm not optimistic about the immediate future, because I think it's the kind of chaos that maybe we like and also the kind of chaos we don't like at all. It's like, don't know what, it's like... ⁓

Eric Karkovack (19:01)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Zeldman (19:09)
Lord of the Rings. It's like one challenge after another. Like at a certain point, can we just put the crown on this guy and walk away? Can we be done? It's been 17 hours, you know. But that, it's a, I'm gonna start a newspaper called Interesting Times. I'm not gonna start it, but that's, it's an idea. Interesting Times, Interesting Times, because that's what we're both blessed and cursed to live through right now.

Eric Karkovack (19:14)
Yeah.

That's an idea though.

Jeffrey Zeldman (19:38)
Yeah.

Eric Karkovack (19:40)
Well, Jeffrey, I thank you so much for your time. I thank you for sharing the history and what you're doing today. And I also thank you just for all the contributions you and the folks you worked with have made to the web because you've made all this possible. That's something we need to take time to say thank you for ⁓ more often because...

Jeffrey Zeldman (19:44)
You too, Erica.

Eric Karkovack (20:01)
We take all this for granted, all the standards and all the cool stuff we have now. So thank you for spreading the word about that and helping it happen.

Jeffrey Zeldman (20:12)
Okay. Well, thank you, Eric. And congratulations on 30 years in the biz. And ⁓ congratulations. This is a great podcast. It's an honor to be on it. And ⁓ I'm looking forward to going, God, did I say that? When it comes out.

Eric Karkovack (20:18)
Thank you.

Hey, we can edit out any part you want but But thanks to all of you for watching and listening Be sure to visit us over at the WP minute comm slash subscribe you can get our newsletter support the work that we do here at the WP minute because we are Sponsored we are user Supported and sponsor supported so without you. We can't do this. So thanks a lot and we will see you next time

Jeffrey Zeldman (20:36)
Nah, it's okay.