First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantanamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy’s and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-women Jass Orchestra, they had Clint Holmes leading vocals and I got Frank Sinatra / Count Basie vibes, so great to see such a tight big band.
Manager mode assumes that existing systems will surface the best options. When I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2022, I delegated the crucial analyses and decisions about my care to others. In late 2024, when my cancer reappeared and my doctors told me I had exhausted the standard of care and there were no trials for my situation, I realized that assumption might, quite literally, kill me. Founder Mode was my only option.
Founder Mode meant going deep on every diagnostic and treatment option. It meant assembling a team of physicians and scientists to work from first principles to understand what was possible beyond standard protocols. Together, we paved new roads to access the very cutting edge of science and technology. Today, thanks to the efforts of many people around the world and the support of my wife Karen, I currently have no evidence of disease.
Sid was already very inspiring before this journey, and this is especially impressive. Elliot Hershberg has the full story and analysis, including some predictions for the future of cancer treatment.
I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance (which became TikTok), Alibaba, Uber, DoorDash, Zoom, DJI (which changed the drone industry and argubly modern warfare), and many more I’m probably not even aware of.
When I first met Jeremy in 2014, I was amazed that a late-stage financial investor could understand Open Source so well, and he immediately grokked what Automattic was doing in a way that I think has little parallel in the world. (Today, it reminds me of Joseph Jacks at OSS Capital.) Deven Perekh of Insight Partners led Automattic’s 1.16B valuation Series C round, making us one of only forty “unicorns” (private companies valued over a billion dollars) at the time, and one of the reasons they beat out others as the lead of the round was that GIC/Jeremy was a LP of Insight so they could directly co-invest. GIC is so intensely private I couldn’t even mention them in the announcement at the time even though they were the catalyst for the round. Since then, Jeremy has become a close friend and advisor, and he even took me to my first Grateful Dead concert.
Eleven years later, this is his first podcast! Jeremy shares incredible alpha around China, AI and its adoption in the enterprise, how asset allocation is evolving, and at the end, a beautiful tie together of the Grateful Dead and Open Source.
Today the legendary Om Malik celebrates his 50th time around the sun. For many that know him, Om defies definition: He’s first a writer, and finally always a true friend, but in between he’s an investor, photographer, oenophile, closet Bollywood fan, critical thinker, and sartorialist. He’s also been my friend and confidant for over a decade now, and I cannot wait to see what his next 50 years bring for him and the world.
Here’s some snaps of Om over the years, from 2008 to just a few weeks ago when he was blonde for a few days. Happy birthday, buddy. 😀
My father, Chuck Mullenweg, passed one week ago today. After over a month in ICU he had just been transferred to long-term acute care in a different hospital and we were looking forward to a tough but steady road to being back home when he took an unexpected and sudden turn. I’ve started and stopped writing this dozens of times since then and words continue to fail me.
Here’s the rememberance that ran in the paper a few days ago:
It is impossible to overstate the influence my father has had on every part of my life: Why did I play saxophone? Dad did. Computers and programming? Dad did. Travel? He was frequently stationed overseas and even when we didn’t visit he would always bring back a cool gift for myself and my sister. He drove me to the HAL-PC office (local non-profit) every weekend where I’d learn so much fixing people’s broken computers and being exposed to open source for the first time. His O’Reilly “camel book” on Perl was the first scripting I learned, and he pointed me toward Mastering Regular Expressions which became the basis of my first contribution to b2, texturize.
We were in a father / son bowling league. I remember admiring his work ethic so much: he’d get up before dawn every morning and put on a suit, grab his briefcase, and go to work. He often went in on weekends and I loved to go with him because they had “fast” internet at the office and I could read Dilbert and about Babylon 5. He was a voracious reader and learner, and loved tinkering whether it was cars or networking. In the other room I can hear a bitcoin mining rig he set up a few years ago. He was independent minded and unafraid to question the status quo.
There’s a photo somewhere of my dad mowing the lawn and me following behind him with a toy lawnmower, which is a perfect metaphor for how I’ve always followed in his footsteps.
I’m at a loss.
Parents are there literally the day you’re born, and it’s hard to imagine a life without them. Most people reading this will outlive their parents, and deal with their mortality and often difficult and painful final days as those who brought us into this world exit it. I’ve been reading and reading all the writing I can find on this topic, but nothing really prepares you for it, and nothing makes it better to go through. It’s terrible.
He wasn’t someone to tell you what the right way to live was, in fact he was incredibly open minded. He didn’t tell you, he showed you how he lived his life from a place of integrity and trust, how he was in his relationship with my mom, how he was in business. He wasn’t flashy and seldom talked about his accomplishments or all the people he had helped out along the way. Many of the stories of appreciation coming in I’m hearing for the first time. In getting his books and taxes together this past week I was humbled by how simply he lived this season of his life, not into material things but cherishing relationships and his quiet life in the suburbs with my mother.
My biggest blessing has been my family. Every one is the most supportive you can imagine. So inspiring… much of what I’ve done in the world was in the context of making my parents proud, and their relationship to each other and the amazing man my dad was has set a bar I hope to approach in my lifetime. The last few years he got much better about showing his pride in my sister and I, and even more importantly saying “I love you,” the three words that are among the best gift we can give each other. Don’t forget to use them, even if it feels cheesy or embarrassing, and for those of you with parents still around please give them some extra time and a hug for me. This was unexpected, we really believed he was on an upward trajectory. You never know when the words you share with someone might be the last.
One of the original WordPress developers, Alex King, has passed from cancer at far too young an age. Alex actually got involved with b2 in 2002 and was active in the forums and the “hacks” community there.
Alex had a background as a designer before he learned development, and I think that really came through as he was one of those rare people who thought about the design and usability of his code, the opposite of most development that drifts toward entropy and complexity. One of my favorite things about Alex was how darn tasteful he was. He would think about every aspect of something he built, every place someone could click, every path they could go down, and gave a thoughtfulness to these paths that I still admire and envy today.
As an example look at his project page (essentially a category archive) for the Post Formats Admin UI, isn’t that clever and intuitive how the posts connect together, and when more time passes in the thread it’s shown as a break. It’s classic Alex: something simple and thoughtful that in hindsight is so gobsmackingly obvious you wonder why everything doesn’t work that way, but you never would have imagined it beforehand. And Alex wouldn’t just imagine it and do it for himself, he released his best work as open source, as a gift to the community and the world, over and over and over again.
Back when WordPress was getting started Alex was a celebrity of the b2 world, his hacks (plugins before plugins) were some of the coolest ones around. We had a ton of overlapping interests in web standards, photography, development, and gadgets so we frequently read and commented on each other’s blogs. I would never miss a post on his site, and that’s back when we were both doing one or more posts a day. To get a sense of Alex it’s worth exploring his blog — he was a clear thinker and therefore a clear writer. The straightforward nature Alex wrote with was something I always admired about him.
The list of what Alex was one of the first to do in the WordPress community is long, and in hindsight seems gobsmackingly obvious, which is the sign of innovation. I smile when I think of how he moved from the Bay area to Denver before it was cool, or his love of scare quotes. Once there was something going on in WordPress and he called me to talk about it, I was so surprised, he said the number was right on my contact page (and it was) but even though it had been there for years no one had ever called it before, but that was just the type of person Alex was, always reaching out and connecting.
Adam Tow, myself, Barry Abrahamson, Alex King; Photo from Adam Tow’s post.
I’m not sure how to include this next part: I couldn’t write last night — I was too tired. After falling asleep I had one of those super vivid dreams that you can’t tell are dreams. There had been some sort of mix-up on Twitter and Alex was still alive, I visited Colorado with my sister and saw him surrounded by family at a picnic table, all the rooms were taken so they put me on a floor mattress where I slept. Tons of his friends were around and we took pictures together, he was excited about the better front camera on the 6s+. (Alex understood mobile all the way back to the Treo days.) It was all very ordinary and in a group setting, until we decided to walk alongside a small highway, past some grain silos, to meet the group at a bar. The walk was just the two of us and we talked and laughed about the big mix-up and he asked about this post, what was going to be in it. He got most excited and emphatic with the part about him being a developer with great taste, and a clear writer William Zinsser would be proud of, so I like to think that those were two things he was proud of. The overwhelming emotion I remember was joy. Waking up was disconcerting, part of me wants to believe part of Alex’s spirit was there, where another more logical part thinks my mind was just going through the denial stage of grief. Regardless I know that Alex will stay in the minds of people who knew him for many years to come.
Code that Alex wrote still runs billions of times a day across millions of websites, and long after that code evolves or gets refactored the ideas and philosophy he embedded in WordPress will continue to be part of who we are. Alex believed so deeply in open source, and was one of the few people from a design background who did. (Every time you see the share icon on the web or in Android you should think of him.) I like the idea that part of his work will continue in software for decades to come, but I’d rather have him here, thinking outside the box and challenging us to do better, to be more obvious, and work harder for our users. He never gave up.
I just logged into Friendster and it’s really fast. Like Orkut fast. Their markup looks good too. Russell Beattie continues the PHP discussion with Is PHP Really More Scalable Than JSP?
Loïc Le Meur Blog: MT and WordPress meet :=) I didn’t get to see Loïc again on Friday like we originally planned, but in the short time we met I got a good impression. People assume that behind the scenes we’re all at each other’s throats, that it’s all WordPress vs. MT vs. Drupal vs. TextPattern vs. Blogger vs. whatever, but it’s actually the opposite. Though there may be some professional differences (you say po-tah-to, I say PHP) everyone is genuinely friendly. Behind the tools are normal people, not super-villians. While meeting with a large potential WordPress user I suggested they also check out Typepad and Blogware because I’ve personally used each and they seem like solid platforms worthy of investigation. I hung out with Anil half of the days I was in San Francisco. Life is too short to waste karma on blogging, and while I get as passionate about the issues as anyone, at the end of the day we’re all contributing something positive to the medium. Of course, Mingus would say “They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.”
Kitten’s Friendly Comments 1.0, allows you to whitelist friends and moderate everyoneelse. Haven’t tried it myself yet, but how can you not like a name like that?
I saw Ernie had done some work on the new Yahoo sites so I thought I’d log in to check it out. Notepad was… a textarea. Calendar was cool. Contacts still had all the information I had imported 4 years ago, which I thought was pretty neat. When I went to the mail tab, however, I was greeted by this not-so-friendly notice:
Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.
Why is my account inactive?
Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because either:
You have not logged into your account in the last 4 months, or
You have asked that your mail account be deactivated
What does this mean?
All emails, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted
All messages sent to saxmatt02@yahoo.com are being bounced back to the sender
You can still use your Yahoo! ID to access other registered services on Yahoo!
Deleted information cannot be recovered
Protect your account!
Subscribe to Yahoo! Mail Plus and you will not be required to sign in […]
I got tired of typing. I think everyone at Yahoo should be banned from using exclamation points for a month, even in their code. I hope I didn’t have anything important in that email account.
