Why Automattic spent $50M on Texts.com

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Equity brought Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress onto the show, along with Kishan Bagaria, the founder of Texts.com. Automattic bought all-in-one messaging app Texts.com for $50 million back in October, and today, we're digging into the transaction and what it means, and also the state of the written word online.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we
0:16.0	unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and
0:19.6	this is our Wednesday show where we sit down with a guest or two think about their work and
0:23.8	unpack the rest. Today we have a fine pair of guests that were recently in the news. We are talking to automatic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenwegg and Kishon Bugia, the founder of Text.com.
0:35.4	You've seen both companies in the news on Tech Ridge recently.
0:38.4	Matt Kishon, welcome to the show.
0:40.2	How are you guys?
0:41.2	Glad to be here.
0:42.2	We're going to not have video, so you have to use voices only. So, Matt, how are you going to not have videos so you have to use voices only so Matt how are you doing great
0:46.7	Really happy to be here? Kishon you're over in India. Thank you for dialing in so late at night.
0:51.7	How are you holding up?
0:53.0	Good.
0:54.0	So, Matt, the WordPress is the thing
0:56.8	I think automatic is best known for around the world.
0:59.6	It's an open source project.
1:00.9	Your company runs the
1:02.6	WordPress VIP side of that which full disclosure I believe
1:06.0	Tech Ranch is still sitting on top of and runs our site and I'll just say for
1:10.6	the most part doesn't go down and when it goes down it's usually our fault so
1:15.8	Yeah, the enterprise you know, it's funny because Tech Crunch started just as like Mike
1:20.5	Aerington's like free blog on WordPress.com and then scaled up to now of course be the institution
1:25.3	it is. Yeah we run now NASA Whitehouse.gov so it's very secure it never goes down but you can't mess it up yourself if you want to.
	...

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