Episode 16: Glitch CEO Anil Dash on Strengthening Values in a Distributed Startup

12/12/19 • 56 min

Read more about Anil Dash in “To Remake Tech, Remake the Tech Company“

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

Anil Dash didn’t like the direction the web was going, so he joined a tech company that promised to take web development back to its indie roots. That company became Glitch, a semi-distributed company based in New York City. In this episode, Matt and Anil talk about the good old days of blogging and how the ideals of those pioneers inform the way Glitch treats its employees and its product.

The full episode transcript is below.

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MATT MULLENWEG: A lot of tech companies talk about prizing “people over profits,” but Glitch is a startup that is serious about these ideals, and holds itself publicly accountable for sustaining this commitment as the company grows.

That’s partially because Glitch’s CEO is Anil Dash. Anil’s an old acquaintance of mine — he’s one of the early pioneers of blogging. Over the last twenty years he’s developed a reputation as something of a tech prophet — not just for predicting what’s going to happen next, but for holding the industry’s feet to the fire.

Glitch is a partially-distributed company that runs a social platform for building and sharing web applications. To do that, they’ve developed a workplace environment that centers around employees’ well-being. I’m interested to hear from him how his company has aimed to go beyond platitudes and create a genuinely equitable and respectful workplace, and to learn where their semi-distributed structure fits into that goal.

Alright, let’s get started.

MATT: Anil, you have been blogging forever.

ANIL DASH: [laughs] Roughly, yes. In geological time, it’s short, but in human years it’s 20 years.

MATT: How did you start and what keeps you going?

ANIL: People in my life were tired of hearing me rant about things. So they were like, “Go put it somewhere else.” [laughs] And at the time I had a really long commute. I was commuting by train an hour and a half each way. I mean it was really — it was like three hours a day on a train and I was going nuts.

MATT: Wow.

ANIL: You didn’t have Wi-Fi back then. So I had a giant Dell laptop and I was like, “I’ve got to learn how to do more with HTML.” I knew the basics but I wanted to do it. I would do it, literally just practicing on local on my laptop, on Internet Explorer 5 or something, whatever it was at the time, and I thought “Oh, I could take these rants in my head and put them out here onto the internet.”

Right about the time that I had that idea in maybe summer of ’99, I saw the first couple sites. I was like, “Oh, this is what I could do. I could organize it this way.” I saw Peter Merholz’s site, PeterMe, and then very quickly discovered a couple of others. And so these pioneers were doing it, and I thought, I don’t think I can write like them but I think I’ve got something to say.

It really felt like it was the right time too because I had started in maybe July and by September the Pyra team had built Blogger and the Danga team had built LiveJournal. Even just the fact that there was software to me meant “OK, this is legit.”

MATT: So 20 years later?

ANIL: 20 years later.

MATT: Dashes.com.

ANIL: Yes.

MATT: Why do you blog now?

ANIL: One, it’s part of how I think. My wife will always say, “You’re staring off into space like you’re writing something.” She just knows that it’s this thing where I’m collecting my thoughts. Certainly one of the most important things to me is, I think better and organize my thoughts better and share my ideas better when I write it, and it introduces a rigor to what I’m sharing. I love that push to accuracy and push to quality. It makes my thinking stronger.

Some of it’s just, I like to write. For a long time, I had no other place to do it. I was lucky, after I had written a million words online people asked me to write for things. [laughter] You know? I got a column in Wired and I was like, “Where were you all ten years ago?”

MATT: Cool.

ANIL: But nobody was trying to hire me to write so I might as well put it out there. And that’s still true.

MATT: ...

Read more about Anil Dash in “To Remake Tech, Remake the Tech Company“

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

Alright, let’s get started.

MATT: Anil, you have been blogging forever.

ANIL DASH: [laughs] Roughly, yes. In geological time, it’s short, but in human years it’s 20 years.

MATT: How did you start and what keeps you going?

MATT: Wow.

MATT: So 20 years later?

ANIL: 20 years later.

MATT: Dashes.com.

ANIL: Yes.

MATT: Why do you blog now?

MATT: Cool.

ANIL: But nobody was trying to hire me to write so I might as well put it out there. And that’s still true.

MATT: ...

Previous Episode

Episode 15: Inside the Grand Meetup

Read more about the Grand Meetup in “The Importance of IRL in a World of Screens.”

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

On this episode of the Distributed podcast, we get an insider’s look at the Grand Meetup, Automattic’s annual weeklong all-staff event, where employees have an opportunity to collaborate, learn from one another, and hang out face-to-face. Folks from across the company share what makes this gathering so special, talk about social cohesion in the context of a large distributed company, and reflect on what’s great (and what’s tough) about the distributed lifestyle.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

Mark Armstrong: Okay go.

Josepha: The song that’s in my head right now is “Good morning. Good morning.” My name is Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I shouldn’t say it like a question. That is my name. My name is Josepha.

Mark: Great to see you. Thank you for stopping by the Automattic podcast booth. Josepha what do you do with Automattic?

Josepha: Great question. A little bit of everything. I am the lead of the .Organization Division, which is the division that supports and helps to guide a lot of our open-source work with the WordPress project itself.

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Mark: Who are you? Tell me your name.

Aaron Douglas: My name is Aaron Douglas. I am a Mobile Wrangler for Automattic. My official job title is actually Chief Tater Tot Officer — I neglected to change that and it just stuck. I work on the WooCommerce mobile app as my primary thing, but everywhere around Automattic I try to help out where I can.

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Mark: OK. Here we are in the hallway again. What’s your name and what do you do at Automattic?

Brandon Kraft: Hi, I’m Brandon Kraft. I’m a Code Wrangler working with our Jetpack plugin.

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Mark: What is your name?

Sheri: Sheri Bigelow.

Mark: And what do you do at Automattic?

Sheri: I am an Excellence Wrangler.

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Rocío Valdivia: My name is Rocío Valdivia. I am from Spain and I’m a Community Wrangler at Automattic.

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Achaessa James: I’m Achaessa and I’m with the Legal team.

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Will Brubaker: So my name is Will Brubaker. I am the Chief Mechanical Officer.

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Erin Casali: So hello, I’m Erin Casali, often referred as “Folletto,” and I currently work as the Design Lead of Jetpack. And how long? It’s been a while now, six years.

Mark: Where are we now, here?

Erin: So we are — I think — in Orlando, because we are inside a hotel, and have been a while, so I’m not entirely sure where we are? Your hotels look all the same. But we’re in Orlando. I lost count of time. I think we are on day three or four of the Grand Meetup.

Mark: It really is a blur, isn’t it?

Erin: It is.

Mark: Thank you for being here.

Matt Mullenweg: Howdy howdy, I’m Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, and the host of the Distributed podcast. Those voices you just heard? Those were Automatticians — folks who work for Automattic — and today we’re going to be hearing from them about this year’s Grand Meetup, and more broadly, what distributed work means to them. Back in September, Automattic held its annual Grand Meetup, which is the one time during the entire year that pretty much everyone at Automattic gets together in one place. The other 51 weeks of the year, we all work from different places all over the world — over 70 countries now. So this is a chance for some of us to meet face-to-face for the first time, and for everyone to catch up with old friends, discuss our work and align around our goals, and hear great talks from folks like Stephen Wolfram (who was a guest on this podcast a few weeks back). We set up a recording booth at the meetup and talked to a bunch of folks from around the company to hear about their experiences with distributed work. My colleagues Mark Armstrong and Ben Huberman were on the ground, asking questions throughout the meetup. Mark and Ben are from Automattic’s Editorial team, and they’ve also been helping out a ton with this podcast. We’ll kick things off with some Automatticians talking about why meetups matter for distributed teams, then get into an interview with Megan Marcel, our Director of Global Events & Sponsorships, about what it takes to pull off this huge event wi...

Next Episode

Episode 17: Matt Mullenweg Reflects on Distributed Work in 2019

Read more of our 2019 takeaways in “Eight Lessons from the Distributed Podcast So Far.”

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

To close out the year, our host Matt Mullenweg is joined once again by Automattic’s Mark Armstrong to discuss the state of distributed work as we transition into a new decade. Matt discusses his key takeaways from his 2019 conversations on the podcast, and reflects on his year as the CEO of a growing distributed company.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, howdy. Here we are. We made it: the last episode of 2019. The finale of our first season of the Distributed podcast, with me, Matt Mullenweg.

We’re currently in the thick of planning a fresh slate of episodes for next year. We’ve got the first female 4-star general in the U.S. Army, a guy who grew up in a family of Argentinian sheep ranchers and now runs a distributed blockchain company. Business leaders, thinkers... I’m really excited for next year overall.

But December is also a great time to reflect. So that’s what we’re going to do now — reflect on some of the great conversations we had in 2019 and talk about where we think distributed work is headed in 2020.

Today I’m joined once again by my colleague Mark Armstrong, who works on a bunch of editorial things at Automattic. He’s been very involved in developing this podcast from day one.

MARK ARMSTRONG: Hey Matt, how’s it going?

MATT: Pretty good, pretty good. It is the end of the year so it’s exciting. I’m actually on my support rotation this week so if anyone contacts WordPress.com support they might get me.

MARK: Yeah, feel free to take a break from this interview to do some live chats if you need to jump in there. [laughter]

Well, Matt, thanks again for having me on. I have been enjoying the podcast all year and I am curious to understand some of your takeaways from the interviews on this podcast. And also, it’s been a big year for Automattic itself, so [I’d like] to understand a little bit about how the changes at Automattic have changed how we work as well.

But first I want to go all the way back. I want you to tell me a little bit why you wanted to do this podcast in the first place.

MATT: As we were scaling Automattic — and continue to scale — I meet and interview a lot of really fantastic leaders — in technology, outside of technology — who don’t know how the distributed thing works. And they have a ton of experience leading teams, running products, etcetera, but not in a distributed manner.

And so it’s combined with two things happening. One, there are more and more distributed companies than ever, all over the world, many who we’ve had on the podcast already, a lot who are coming up, that were showing that it works and that you could create a world-changing, ultra-competitive company without even a single central office.

And two, there weren’t as many materials or information for how to run something larger than a small team or a freelancer but smaller than the whole thing. I guess the target audience for me for this [podcast] is really managers. People who are managing maybe for the first time, maybe for a long time, distributed teams. Just having that point of reference for how other companies do it and what are the best practices they can take away from it.

I also hope that people at Automattic are listening to this. [laughs] Many of our colleagues are people who are in this very situation. And the first line of our creed is “I’ll always be learning,” and so I hope that people have been learning from this because I know I certainly have been.

MARK: I think it helps clarify what we think and what we believe about how we work, day in and day out, just hearing the other perspectives from the other companies and the other executives or product people within those teams on how they work similarly or differently from us has been hugely helpful.

I think you hit on another point too, which is a lot of the remote work materials that are out there right now are very much about selling the lifestyle versus looking at the reality of what’s happening inside. Do you find that’s the case?

MATT: The lifestyle is definitely part of what ...