Why working from home is good for business | Matt Mullenweg

TED Talks Daily

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2019

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the popularity of remote working continues to spread, workers today can collaborate across cities, countries and even multiple time zones. How does this change office dynamics? And how can we make sure that all employees, both at headquarters and at home, feel connected? Matt Mullenweg, cofounder of Wordpress and CEO of Automattic (which has a 100 percent distributed workforce), shares his secrets.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a special episode of TED Talks Daily featuring entrepreneur and co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenwig.
0:08.2	It's from The Way We Work, an original video series from TED. In each episode, leaders and thinkers offer practical wisdom and insight into how you can adapt and thrive at work when the rules are always changing.
0:22.3	You can find season one of the way we work on TED.com.
0:26.7	The basic problem with working in office is you're just not in control of your work environment.
0:35.0	Howdy. My name is Matt and I'm the CEO of Automatic, the company behind WordPress.com,
0:39.8	Jetpack, and WoolCommerce. We're coming up on over 800 employees, and they live everywhere,
0:45.4	from California to Alabama, Mississippi, to where I live in Texas. They're also in 67 countries,
0:51.1	Canada, Mexico, India, New Zealand. Some of them choose not even to have a home base.
0:55.4	They're nomads. Whether they're in RVs or traveling through Airbnbs, there are new places every day,
1:00.4	week or month, as long as they can find good Wi-Fi. We don't care where they are.
1:04.2	Our focus on distributor work wasn't something to happen accidentally. It was a conscious choice
1:08.5	from the very beginning. In fact, you'll probably notice I don't
1:11.4	use the word remote because it sets up the expectation. There are some people that are essential,
1:15.2	some that aren't. I use the word distributed to describe what we do, where everyone is on an equal
1:19.0	playing field. I think a distributor workforce is the most effective way to build a company. The key is
1:23.6	that you have to approach it consciously. When we start a WordPress, many of the first 20
1:27.8	hires were people who I'd never met in person, but we'd already collaborated online, sometimes for years.
1:32.6	I wanted to continue that as the company grew for one simple reason. I believe that talent and
1:37.4	intelligence are equally distributed throughout the world, but opportunity is not. In Silicon Valley,
1:42.5	you have the big tech companies fishing from essentially the same
1:44.8	small pond or bay.
1:46.0	By making the company distributed, we can fish from the entire ocean.
	...

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