Latest from Chris Morrison
Sixteen years in and now valued at $7.5 billion, Automattic has found a multitude of strides, even as it strives to own ever more of the media market.
Featured Article
How doing everything wrong turned Automattic into a multibillion dollar media powerhouse
Nothing has been automatic about the success of Automattic. Today, for those who haven’t been paying attention, the company looks a bit like an overnight success story.
Featured Article
There’s nothing Automattic about balancing commercial growth with an open source developer community
The tech industry has made a full 180-degree turn with regard to open source in the 16 years since Matt Mullenweg founded Automattic, the commercial backer of open source CMS, WordPress.
Featured Article
Can social and e-commerce transform the future of the open web?
WooCommerce began life as WooThemes, a small design firm that didn’t look very different from the many others that created WordPress themes.
Featured Article
The future of remote work is text
It’s impossible to talk about Automattic without talking about remote work. The company is a role model and innovator in this area: It has been entirely remote since 2005, and at 1,700 employees, it has helped prove that a remote workplace culture can succeed at scale. But “remote” has taken…
Featured Article
The Klaviyo EC-1
E-commerce is booming as retailers race to transform their brick-and-mortar footprints into online storefronts. By some counts, the market grew an astonishing 42% in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and estimates show that online spending in the U.S. will surpass $1 trillion by 2022. It’s a bonanza,…
Featured Article
How Klaviyo transformed from a lifestyle business into a $4.15B email titan
Startups are stories of feverish dreams and obsessive fears. Short of hearing it from the source, a glimpse into the inbox of a founder would be the best way to experience the travails they endure on the way to building a business. A customer finally makes a purchase, a VC…
Featured Article
How Klaviyo used data and no-code to transform owned marketing
Email is the communication medium that refuses to die. “Eventually, every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?” wrote the venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2007. Three years later, he updated readers that other forms of…
Featured Article
Marketing in 2021 is emotional and not just transactional
Brands are emotions made physical. The clothes we wear, the media we consume, the devices we use — all signal not only to others what we value and see in ourselves, they also are a way to construct our very identities. Experimenting to deepen that bond has been at the…
Featured Article
Drama and quirk aren’t necessary for startup success
Many of the stories in our EC-1 series tell tales of startups in the wilderness hacking out green field opportunities. Klaviyo is a different breed of company: One that went into an established market and challenged powerful incumbents, ultimately finding success with a new, more data-oriented generation of email marketers.…
Our recently published EC-1 on Roblox recounts the origin story and growth prospects of the company. But there’s one more piece to the story: what Roblox’s impact will be on…
Featured Article
Digging into the Roblox growth strategy
Could Roblox create a new entertainment and communication category, something it calls “human co-experience”? When it was a small startup, few observers would have believed in that future. But after 15 years — as told in the origin story of our Roblox EC-1 — the company has accumulated 90 million…
Featured Article
The Roblox EC-1
Gaming has always been a part of human culture, but what may have once been a passive pastime enjoyed by some is now an ultra-competitive and lucrative business market with huge players duking it out for dominance. The video game industry has grown from its nascent console roots into an…
Featured Article
How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company
There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of success, barely gotten any recognition or attention. Why has Roblox’s story gone mostly untold? One…
As tech has grown, policy debates have become an important pastime. Today’s tech industry aspires to replace human drivers with self-driving cars, secretaries with AI assistants, permanent jobs with gigs…
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. There…