Such a wonderful interview with Matt Mullenweg by The Verge, discussing Automattic’s purchase of Tumblr.
Put aside the riches to rags story of Tumblr (sold to Yahoo for $1.1B in 2013, sold to Automattic for $3M in 2019 – supposably) and instead focus on the well meaning intent of both Verizon and Automattic:
Their top priority was not trying to maximize the purchase price. There might even be a corporate reason for the purchase price to be lower, for taxes or something. They were really looking for where the best home was going to be. That was really where we tried to optimize the deal, especially in terms of bringing over close to 200 people. We’re taking them all on. I am aware of some of the details of some of the bidders. You know they were not planning to keep much, if any, of the team going.
We did more of a Berkshire Hathaway approach: we really want to bring over the management team, take what was working well, which is Tumblr’s engagement, and grow from there.
Wonderful.
