Matt Mullenweg fills Automattic's board with two authors and two IRL co-founders after a failed ouster

A merchant with a WooCommerce store who fills in a vendor-risk form this week will reach a box asking who oversees the supplier's chief executive. Automattic is the parent of WooCommerce, WordPress.com and Tumblr ^[19], and on paper the answer there is the chief executive himself. In his announcement to staff, Mullenweg wrote that "for purposes of Delaware law, I am the CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary," according to TechCrunch ^[12].

The ties TechCrunch reports between Mullenweg and his new directors are personal. He and Howey both hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2018 ^[7]. Chan recently reposted his tweet about Spacefast, Automattic's AI site builder ^[8]. He described Khatachryan as "a founder and builder" ^[9]. IRL, the app Khatachryan and Desai co-founded, shut down after investigations found that nearly all of its users were bots ^[10]. In the same announcement, Mullenweg said: "We had the most interesting board meeting in a decade (since the Woo acquisition)" ^[13].

Who sits on this board matters less than who holds the votes, and I think a slate of career directors would hit the same limit. Mullenweg controls 84% of the vote, he said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 ^[4]. That leaves 16% for every other holder combined ^[22]. The previous board included Toni Schneider, a founding CEO of Automattic, and Gen. Ann Dunwoody ^[5]. Its move against him lasted "33 hours and 20 minutes," Automattic told TechCrunch ^[3].

Procurement teams tend to tell themselves that a vendor's board sits between its chief executive and a bad call. Automattic's customers have a CEO whose own account is that he "was denied even a brief extension to consult with independent legal counsel" and then "took the steps necessary to reverse that action" ^[20][23]. The board never publicly shared its reasons for trying to remove him ^[14]. Automattic told TechCrunch it hoped to comment soon ^[21]. TechCrunch wrote that the change of legal counsel raises questions about whether the fight is tied to the company's lawsuit with WP Engine over trademarks ^[16]. WP Engine's lawyers accused Mullenweg in July of destroying evidence, court filings show ^[17].

For the merchant with the form, two questions sort the response. The first is the share of revenue or publishing that runs on a service Automattic hosts and operates for you. The second is how many weeks it would take to run that elsewhere. A large share with a slow exit justifies a written exit plan and a current export of your data kept off Automattic's systems. Where the share is large and the exit fast, one rehearsed move tests the estimate. A small share goes in the risk file with a note about the board. The plan costs staff time now. So far the cost of this fight has fallen inside Automattic, on the directors and officers who left ^[5][6].