Hey, welcome back to Community & Code.
I'm Chris Reynolds,
and my guest this week is Jonathan Wald.
If you've been in WordPress for any length
of time, you might have run into him.
He co-founded Guildenberg,
he spent time at Automatic,
he's over at Convesio now,
and he co-hosts a podcast called
Crossword.
And I want to be absolutely clear,
he has an extremely unfair radio voice,
one that puts me to shame,
and I'm super jealous.
We talk about his years in the WordPress
community, the .org forums,
whether WordPress is still the operating
system of the web,
Jonathan's been pulling on that thread for
a long time,
and he's got a take on it that
has almost nothing to do with the
software.
But the fun part of the conversation is
our hard left into homeschooling.
Both of us have homeschooled,
him as a kid, me as a parent,
and Jonathan reckons that never being
sorted into a social hierarchy is the
reason it doesn't occur to him to ask
permission for things.
He just does them.
Which is something that I've definitely
seen from homeschooled kids,
a level of confidence that at times can
border on audacity.
Sometimes that gets him into trouble,
but mostly it doesn't.
There's also encyclopedias,
philosophy class,
and some very strong opinions about the
Sun and Phoenix.
Let's get into it.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
And my human being that I'm with today
is Jonathan Wald, a longtime WordPresser.
You co-founded a consultancy a few years
ago called Guildenberg,
doing that in WooCommerce and stuff like
that.
Yeah, welcome to the show, Jonathan,
and tell us about yourself.
Chris, it's a pleasure to be here.
Tell us about yourself.
That's a pretty open-ended invitation.
I'm still having fun in this ecosystem
after all these years.
WordCamp US is coming up in just a
couple weeks,
and I'm excited to get a suntan and
bring in some heat.
It'll be a good time.
I think for me,
technology has been a part of my world
since i was a teenager growing up like
the internet brought me community and an
opportunity to connect with folks around
the world and i think it just has
just become this very natural segue
wordpress came into the radar for me about
twenty years ago and what initially drew
me into it was the experience that i
had with the community at the time which
was mostly on the dot org forums right
we weren't doing word camps or any of
that just yet
But I remember I came for the tech
and it was helping me solve a problem
I had at the time,
which was getting a blog to be integrated
into the types of sites that I was
working on.
But it was the helpfulness of the folks
who helped me figure out how to accomplish
what I was trying to do.
Oh, this is cool.
This is actually something I'd like to
contribute back to.
And the rest became quite the history.
Yeah, that's actually,
so it's funny that you mentioned that.
If you go back to the very first
post on this site,
I talk about sort of the origin of
how I kind of came up with the
idea for the show.
And it was sort of two things.
One of them was just PressConf,
because PressConf
Like the conversations at PressConf were
very much the sort of conversations that I
wanted to be having.
But before PressConf,
like a few weeks before that,
I had gone to my first DrupalCon.
And at DrupalCon,
there was a sticker that was in a
big rack of stickers that were free that
said, come for the code,
stay for the community.
That's cool.
Yeah.
And it was like...
I'd never heard it articulated that way.
That particular phrasing, I think,
is a thing in the Drupal community,
but the sentiment was something that I
very much identified with.
I thought it was really interesting that I
could go to a Drupal conference and find
the thing that I have felt for twenty
years in the WordPress community reflected
in a sticker that the Drupal community,
and rallied around this idea that the
Drupal community already held internal on
themselves,
and then
And so putting the two things together is,
like,
I want to have conversations where we talk
about this.
Like, this thing.
Whatever this is.
Like, we're here.
We do the code.
But, like, it's the community.
It's the people.
That's the thing that really keeps us in
this ecosystem.
It's interesting to me to see the impact
that the events have had.
I was a late arrival to the event
scene.
I went to WordCamp Long Beach.
It was my first WordCamp,
and I was also a speaker.
So I'd done some meetups.
I had some event experience,
but working asynchronously,
the internet allows you to work with
people all over the world.
I'd met a few folks from the WordPress
space prior to the WordCamp experience,
but it was pretty limited.
And then after experiencing that and then
starting to go to some of the bigger
ones,
WordCamp Europe in Vienna was my first big
one.
And it left quite the impression on me
and continues to do so.
Even as my reasons for going will shift
or the focus will change,
there's still something precious to me
about,
it's always great to see folks that you
already know, right?
That's a highlight.
There's something though about meeting
folks that you just would never have had
context to meet otherwise except for this
community space that you share together
and then showing up around the world.
I know it's not unique to WordPress as
you've experienced in the case with Drupal
there and I'm sure other open source
communities,
but it's something that it's been a real
highlight for me over the course of my
years in the space.
Yeah, well, it's funny that you mentioned,
because I was actually going to say that
I recently learned that WordCamp Long
Beach was the first time that you spoke.
And now I've learned that WordCamp Long
Beach was your first actual WordCamp.
I was at that WordCamp.
I also was speaking at that WordCamp.
And I went to your talk,
and I remember your talk.
Oh, wow.
because you were talking about i believe
uh you're talking about uh wordpress as uh
the c the operating system of the web
yeah yeah yeah um and i remember like
that was sort of a topic at the
time that was getting a little bit of
like like conversation around it like it's
kind of this abstract idea but i remember
um a friend of mine who i worked
with at uh web dev rami abraham
uh, have made a, a YouTube video,
which doesn't exist anymore.
And I'm so sad because he had done
a couple YouTube videos that were showing
like the future of WordPress and it had
like all this after effects.
And it was like a, uh,
like a VR H huds up display of
like the WordPress admin and stuff.
And I was like,
And hand controls to move things around.
And I was like, yeah, that's silly,
but also it's fun to see that sci-fi
applied to this thing that we're building
and think about, oh,
maybe the thing that we're building could
do that thing.
Maybe the thing that we're building could
power, I don't know,
a rocket ship or something.
I don't know.
um probably has more memory than the um
or uses more memory than than the rocket
the apollo a yeah right um but like
sort of transposing that onto like you
know now i i think about like um
like what do have your have your thoughts
about wordpress being the operating system
of the web uh have you thought about
it in those terms since uh that that
word camp or like um
How has WordPress sort of adapted or not
adapted to that idea, do you think?
Yeah,
for a bit of context for those who
may not be familiar with the idea,
I first came across it in some of
Matt Mullenweg's writings and some of the
conversations.
He dropped the thread.
And then I think for me,
my initial work was just pulling that
thread.
One of my first conversations with Matt
was on this topic and I wanted to
like
pick his brain further like, hey,
do you think that this is still relevant?
My thinking has evolved on it.
I think what always drew me to it
is that if you had the conversation with
someone more technical,
they'd be quick to point out, well,
this isn't an operating system in the
technical sense.
I'm like, well,
that was never my contention.
But for me, the starting point,
I've written a couple of pieces about this
over the years.
The starting point was this idea of like,
well,
what is an operating system and what are
the parts and pieces of it?
And an ecosystem around it was always an
interesting,
was always a key component of the
conversation for me.
And I think just what clicked for me
in that process was like,
I can already see how people are using
WordPress far beyond blogging.
To me,
this idea of it's empowering all this
creativity,
all this new capability that just wasn't
there before.
And many folks are using WordPress,
myself included,
especially back then at the time with some
of the projects I was working on.
Far beyond the scope of anything I
imagined,
at least it was publicly documented about
how you might use something like this.
Especially with WooCommerce being a great
illustration of where that's grown and
become or evolved.
I think what remains highly relevant to
me, Chris,
about the topic is less about the
technical.
One of the more exciting things over the
past couple of months,
or really in the past year or so,
was there was a couple of folks,
a gentleman in particular,
I'm forgetting his name,
who worked on a concept of WordPress in
a windowed mode,
like desktop version of it.
That got me pretty excited because it
brought back a lot of those ideas.
But what remains the draw to me is
is the ecosystem around WordPress.
That to me,
even it's much less about the software.
And I think that there's still,
there's a fairly big open question mark
right now about where WordPress is going
to evolve from a technical perspective.
I think folks making decisions still have
that like operating system,
like thinking as a part of the overall
vision of how do we set up WordPress
with these primitives,
these foundational pieces so that others
can build on top of it.
And what holds my interest to this day
just remains the size,
the shape of the ecosystem around
WordPress, which to me,
they has so much latent energy in it
that can be harnessed.
Um, and,
and I think that's what makes operating
systems interesting.
If you think about when we think of
a traditional operating system these days,
um, there's lots that technically exist,
but only a few that tend to be
interesting to folks.
And it's because of the ecosystems around
them.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
You think about particularly in the Linux
community,
the Linux distributions that get the most
traction tend to be the ones that have
the most active and vibrant communities
around them.
Yes, definitely.
When I was playing with Linux,
I was leaning towards Ubuntu and then
like, okay,
then I found Mint and like there's really
like through what other people were doing
and how they were doing it and like
the approach because like, you know,
every sort of flavor of Linux is
different.
is has a sort of a different philosophy
and like which one it's like a choose
your own adventure kind of you know and
wordpress and drupal for that matter also
have that sort of like choose your own
adventure-ness of it because like really
it's just a framework to put stuff into
yeah plugins are a great illustration of
that in the wordpress context right the
plugins that you choose and the adventure
that those plugins take you on can can
open up all sorts of paths and
possibilities and of course you can build
your own stuff and with with with ai
in particular these days we're in a we're
in an interesting moment it's hard one of
the things i've always enjoyed chris about
like the wordpress ecosystems and
ecosystem thinking in general is that you
can't really like we don't have enough
attention or bandwidth like in our human
brains to be able to like hold the
whole thing so you can do work to
understand the size and shape and and get
a sense of things like i've always been
drawn to this idea of like mapping
ecosystems and creating maps and maps are
great examples of
human centric interfaces that have like
just a lot of density in it.
And it's not about the literal accuracy,
even though that matters.
It's like, you're not going,
you choose a level of detail that's
practically useful for the human that's
using the map.
And as I think about the WordPress
ecosystem, that's a tricky thing.
It's so vast.
There's so many parts and pieces.
It's hard to understand how the impact of
the decisions that are being made today
are going to,
what ramifications that they're going to
have.
And I still find all that really
interesting and relevant.
And I'm really curious to see where this
little thing that we call WordPress goes.
And also the impact of projects around it.
The Drupal project remains relevant.
It's interesting to see how it's carved a
niche of its own over the years.
It's all quite interesting.
Yeah.
Well, the question,
one of the questions I always ask everyone
is sort of what got you into tech?
And what sort of brought you into whatever
thing that you're doing?
What what is?
What is the thing that that?
When did you start getting interested in
technology broadly?
And and what?
What was exciting to you then?
So I had an advantage or disadvantage,
depending on how you look at it,
in that I was homeschooled all the way
up through end of high school.
And that gave me the opportunity to...
Yeah,
just experienced technology at a young
age, we had a computer.
We,
my first computer was an Apple two GS,
I learned basic programming on it and
loved it,
like just being able to go through and,
you know,
work on something and be able to see
the the cause and effect and change lines,
like I wouldn't really understand
everything,
but I could see how
I could change a line in the code
and see what the impact of that would
be yeah like in the output and that
just yeah I think from a young age
I had a curiosity about technology and was
just really drawn to what it opened up
for me it gave me an opportunity to
connect with folks with shared interests
around the world one of my first
communities that I was a part of was
um a homeschooling like forum where I met
with like other homeschoolers and and then
uh
Yeah,
I think it's been a pretty natural
progression as a early or late teenager.
Like as I started to look at what
my career options were,
I wasn't thinking about technology as a
career.
i was thinking about like i'm going to
get into real estate and investing and
sort of all these these things and i
did a couple of internships and the thing
that was useful in all of those is
that they were seeing me as a techie
like a technologist i was a young guy
who was comfortable with tech and i was
curious and suddenly i ended up in
situations where like i'm like oh wow i'm
Like I landed this project over here.
I'm building a site for these guys over
here and just kind of following wherever
that led.
And that's what ultimately put me in a
situation where I was building a site and
they wanted this thing called blogging.
And I was like, all right,
let me go figure that out.
And I came across WordPress.
I've been on blogger for a bit and
I knew that that wasn't going to work
for what they wanted.
And then that brought me into that
community experience.
But I think as a whole,
technology has just always been
interesting for what it's enabled.
And yeah, I think as a young person,
the internet just provides so much access
to learning, to context, to relationships,
to resources.
And even though the internet has changed
quite a bit over the years,
just the core value proposition has
remained.
And I found technology to just be really
useful and something that I still enjoy
learning about new things.
I'm going to segue because I have a
vested interest in hearing about your
homeschool story because we homeschooled
our kids.
And I feel like I feel like one
of the things,
especially like family who have and who
come up through the traditional school
system like.
The question that we always get is like,
well, what about this?
And what about that?
And what are their, you know,
what kind of jobs or colleges are they
going to go to?
Or like, are they missing out on?
There's this assumption that because
you're not going through the traditional
school system,
that there is a deficit there.
And I'm interested in hearing about your
experience,
but also like what sort of if you
maybe can talk about it or know,
like what was the sort of thought process
that your parents had in choosing to
homeschool rather than putting you through
the normal academic system?
That's a fun topic for a mix of
reasons.
So my wife today is an educator,
has taught for ten years,
and she took a couple years off and
is actually going back to school in the
fall.
So we talk about this a lot.
And for the past couple of years,
she's been educating our now
nine-year-old.
For my parents,
so my father passed when I was quite
young.
And which added even more,
made it even more interesting,
the decision that my mom made to
homeschool us.
I was the oldest of three brothers and
she homeschooled us up until, well,
up through high school.
And in high school,
we were living in California at the time.
We enrolled in a charter school program
which provided us with a teacher who'd
visit on like a monthly basis and also
gave us resources.
So we got computers through the school
system, which was a big deal for us.
That opened up a whole bunch of new
possibilities.
And then we started junior college in the
last couple of years of high school.
which was a really positive experience.
I had that question going into it.
How am I going to do in this
like setting?
And suddenly my brother and I,
I was seventeen.
He was fifteen at the time.
We're in junior college classes together
and we did really well.
And that answered a lot of the questions
in my mind of like and it wasn't
so much all that we knew.
It was our the curiosity that had been
cultivated through that homeschool
experience.
I remember reading encyclopedias for fun.
It probably helped that mom wasn't a fan
of us watching much TV,
so we'd get bored.
And that, like, all right,
I got all these encyclopedias here.
Might as well dig in.
But going into a school setting and doing
junior college when we did,
I just found it interesting and found
that, yeah, we can apply ourselves.
We can do well in this.
The social thing is interesting.
there's always benefits and trade-offs for
whatever the choices you make, right?
The benefit of a homeschool experience is
the ability to curate and like, you know,
refine what you're doing around interests.
And it's gotten,
there's so many great resources available
today.
My mom, especially as we got older,
you know,
she put more of her energy into working
as a single mother to provide for us.
So she was less involved in our direct
education and,
and there was a one might argue like
too much freedom that we had um but
it's what facilitated so much of the time
that we spent online like learning things
and my brother took up graphic design out
of interest and just put a ton of
effort into learning how to use
illustrator and sort of do all this stuff
and i took an interest in communities and
um yeah i think uh
I think there's with anything there,
there are benefits and trade-offs.
I found that like the concerns that folks
had about like, Oh,
you're not going to be like socialized in
a homeschool setting.
The only thing that I really struggled
with in retrospect is I had a harder
time relating to my own age group growing
up.
Yeah.
I've more,
I'd spend more time talking with adults
and, or, you know,
folks that were younger,
but my own age was just kind of,
I found it harder to relate and,
And that's something that stuck with me
for a good amount of time into my
early adulthood.
But yeah, it was a good experience.
There's so many little nuggets in your
story that I see and identify with.
Like the idea of having a...
well, reading for fun, or reading, like,
being is having a special interest,
essentially, in a particular, like,
thing that is, like, not just, like,
reading encyclopedias for fun, but also,
yeah,
relating to and interacting with adults
more easily than people of your own peer
group, and, like,
having a sort of a weird...
um, I don't want to say distance,
but like, there's like,
there's like a thing there, like,
especially when,
when sort of reentering like normal
society or whatever.
Right.
Because so, so my son, uh,
we homeschooled all through up, uh,
through, throughout, through high school,
um, and gave him a graduation.
Um, and then my daughter, um,
we did one year of high school and
then they, um,
they went to an actual high school.
So they, they joined,
as a ninth grader,
even though they had one year of
homeschooled high school,
so they're a year older.
And we did that partially because we
wanted to be a little bit tentative about
that transition.
It's been...
My son had gone to a couple years
of a charter school before we pulled him
out.
And my daughter had been through a
semester of kindergarten.
And we pulled them out.
At the same time,
but at the time what we saw with
my daughter in particular was like she had
this like very vibrant personality that
the longer she was in class,
the more that got dimmed.
Interesting.
And we're like...
We do not want to dim this light.
We want them to feel,
to be their whole person, right?
And I think that that has worked.
I do feel like they are way more
independent.
They are way more like...
know what they want and know what they
like.
Um, and so when they did go into,
into school again, it was,
it was an adaptation of like learning the
system and how to operate in the system.
But with all of this sort of like
side experience and knowledge that put
them on a maturity level that were like
way past, you know,
like more so than even like the,
the year age different,
but like they were far, you know,
more because they've,
they had done things themselves.
They had felt, had the creativity and the,
and the freedom to explore their own
interests and whatever that, and that,
that's a very,
that's a very homeschooling thing.
it is it's interesting to see um because
again i think i think these days much
more in terms of like benefits and
trade-offs right like there's there's
definitely there's definitely benefits to
more traditional school experiences and
i'm learning to a lot of it does
come down to the nature of the the
child as well like my i was pretty
adamant about homeschooling initially
but my sixteen-year-old, he's now sixteen,
as a five and six-year-old,
he just did so well going into a,
like he went to school from the outset,
and he was so social, and he just,
he thrived in a school environment.
It was a smaller school,
he had a great teacher,
and the teacher is really what made all
the difference for me.
I'm like, wow,
this is just a great educator,
and
now being married to an educator who also
homeschools.
And our nine-year-old will actually be
going into the sixth grade classroom with
her that she'll be teaching because he's
well advanced in the majority of the
subjects.
I think for me,
it was interesting to see...
It was interesting to see the things that
would probably have been,
for better or for worse,
refined out of me in a school setting
that didn't going into adulthood.
I think one of the things that you
get in a school setting is for better
or for worse,
there's a lot of peer feedback and things
that get quashed or encouraged based on
the dynamics and where you are in the
social hierarchy.
you don't get any of that in homeschool
and i think in my case there's a
lot of things that i've noticed about me
going into adulthood and into my career
where it doesn't occur to me to not
ask questions of something or to just to
challenge the status quo or to like you
know feel a uh i don't i don't
feel a need to ask for permission around
just many things where it's like oh well
i remember like even this whole like
operating system thing
I remember seeing Matt write about it or
talk about it.
And then it was interesting to me.
And in the first conversation,
I went to him looking for answers and
more input on it.
And then he gave me some great feedback.
And I saw that he was focused on
other things.
And he was focused more on WordPress as
a product.
And I was like, oh, well,
I could run with this.
I could take this idea further.
And let's see where we take it.
And I just did.
And I'm like, well, I'll talk about it.
I'll see if anyone else finds this
interesting.
And it didn't occur to me to not.
And that gets me into trouble
occasionally.
But I do see that as something that
could have been quashed or discouraged in
a more traditional school setting.
Again,
it really comes down to the teachers
because great teachers also recognize
those moments and bring it out of kids
and encourage it.
I'm also really grateful for the...
the several years of the charter school
teacher who came out to visit us,
she had a huge impact because she saw
my writing potential, for instance.
And she held me to a higher standard
where she's like, hey, Jonathan,
I know that you're capable of more than
I'm seeing you put in effort-wise,
even though you're not motivated in this
area.
She's like,
I want you to get into poetry.
I want you to submit for a contest
over here.
I want you to put some more effort
in this thing over here.
And I did and continue to reap the
rewards to this day for the effort that
I invested then.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
it's so fun and cool to talk about.
I think there's so much.
I think that there,
it definitely does depend on the school
and the educators and the experience.
But so much, like,
especially when we were talking about
pulling our kids out,
there was a lot of discussion.
And this is so, this is like,
you know, I don't know,
fifteen years ago or something.
there's a lot of discussion like in TED
talks and stuff about like the the school
industrial system as it yes existed yes
and the idea that it came out of
the Industrial Revolution to just
basically
fabricate a bunch of worker cogs that are
in the machine and then continue operating
in the machine of commerce.
And, you know, when you're doing that,
then you're trying to get these identical
little cogs so that they operate in the
system that is going to be...
You want that uniformity.
Yeah, exactly.
And...
you know obviously people are different
and uh like particularly like you know my
my partner and i are are both very
creative we went to a school like we
met at a school that like was very
sort of counter-cultural and let us create
our own major and that was the reason
why we went there yeah um and and
so like we obviously already had these
ideas of like well there's there's other
things that aren't just this like and like
it's funny because like
the thing that I tell about my college
experience is like, yeah, I got a degree,
but what I actually learned was how to
bullshit.
And that's like actually the most valuable
skill that I got because part of the
process that we did to get our degrees,
we
We didn't do grades.
Each student would do a self-evaluation,
and their teacher or their faculty advisor
would do a written evaluation,
and the faculty evaluation is what would
go on your file.
And then, yeah, you'd get a pass-fail,
but they'd have an evaluation,
which means that you would actually hear
about what you did well,
what you didn't do well,
and it would be in response to your
self-evaluation what you felt like you
were working on.
That's cool.
And then at the end,
you had to do essentially defend why your
major should exist,
like what it is and what you did
and like what all the pieces are.
And you had a couple faculty,
like your faculty advisor would be there
and talk about what you did and whatever.
But it was sort of like.
uh, a statement of purpose kind of like,
and also like in front of like a
panel, um, to be like, and like,
obviously it's a little bit ceremonial.
Like there's not very many people are
going to say, yeah, no, you're bad.
But like, it really was like, can I,
can I put all these ideas together?
And for me, like, yeah,
the reason why I say bullshit is because
like,
can I bullshit my way out of this?
Can I put all these things together and
make it sound good enough that I'm able
to defend the thing?
And honestly,
like being able to defend your ideas is
a thing that is the single most
transferable skill that I've pulled.
It doesn't matter the classes that I took.
And to do it honestly and in a
way that like you can be satisfied with
it,
you're not just like pushing your way
through where it's like,
I've done the work.
And even if I'm making stuff out of
thin air,
it's like you can have a confidence in
it that I'm like,
this feels good to me.
Yeah.
There's something there.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
I went last year actually and re-enrolled
in college.
I started out working towards an MBA.
You get very philosophy major vibes.
Well, here's what's interesting.
I actually took a philosophy course last
quarter and thoroughly enjoyed it.
And it's making me think that I might
try to go more down an interdisciplinary
route to actually finish.
But the reason why I started is that
I had noticed just gaps in my...
So much of what I've done has been
based on just experience and trying to
figure things out.
So I took several quarters of accounting.
I did business law.
And it's been,
getting back into like college level
mathematics,
it's been invaluable for me and just
further anchors how much I like learning.
What's been interesting about it, Chris,
I think a lot about like designing around
constraints,
especially as humans with our limited
capacity and attention.
And even though all of that information is
technically just available to you online,
like I didn't have to go to a
college course to learn accounting,
but it was a forcing function.
And I actually learned accounting over the
course of like the formality,
the ceremony, the process of enrolling,
having an educator on the other side of
it.
this day and age,
what made it possible was the fact that
even though it was my local college,
it was asynchronous.
So I was able to do all but
the testing like remotely.
And I found it to be like a
counterintuitively, just a great move.
Now at this stage in my life, um,
the social component just somewhat sadly,
I guess,
we're just not interesting or relevant or
even practical because I'm working,
I've got a family.
Um, and, uh, but I just, um,
I love education.
I love learning new things.
It ended up being a bit of a
goldmine for me of just stepping into a
more structured formal process.
It's hard too because I also want to
do well with it.
There were a few times where I'm like,
this is a little insane.
I can't believe I'm doing all this right
now.
I've been thoroughly enjoying it and
continuing to do so.
Yeah.
Talk about, uh,
talk about Guildenberg for a little bit.
Like what is, uh,
what is the story of, of Guildenberg?
How did that form?
And what actually were you doing when you
were doing it?
I mean,
I know what you were doing a little
bit, but yeah.
Super interesting.
So I coming out of my time at
automatic.
I wanted to focus on the broader WordPress
ecosystem.
And I had an initial vision,
which I wrote about quite publicly.
And then I started working with a few
folks to build out some of these ideas
where it's like, how can we do conscious,
proactive work to grow the WordPress
ecosystem?
What does it look like?
And I had a lot of big ideas
in my head at the time where things
became quite practical.
I had a couple of folks I was
working with initially.
And then I met Tammy Lister in the
process.
And, you know,
I had some initial things that we tried
with Guildenberg.
success.
A lot of things just like I found
this is what that I guess the willingness
to just go in and try things or
maybe the confidence slash hubris at
times.
Hey,
I'm going to just try this big thing
and then oh wow,
that did not work as I expected.
But you learn a lot from it and
there were some things that remained
interesting and I saw an opportunity to
to say, okay,
even if the idea of building out,
because we were looking at like building a
platform and like all this infrastructure,
I was like, well, that's not really,
it's not going the way that I expected
to,
yet there's still a lot of value to
be provided here and just connecting the
dots between folks and opportunities.
And when I met Tammy and she came
on board eventually as a co-founder along
with Luke Karbis,
The focus shifted.
She really opened my eyes to a lot
of gaps in product thinking.
You can become pretty dangerous when
you're curious and interested in learning
things.
And you can go into something like, oh,
I now understand this.
I know this thing.
But that doesn't mean you understand it.
And in my work with Tammy...
um yeah i got to it opened my
eyes to a lot of things that i
just didn't actually know that much about
and the opportunities that i saw in um
and that we saw together in combining the
product thinking with more of like this
business development thinking and we saw
the real world impact that we were able
to have with the members of the guild
that we were working with and just getting
folks connected with each other thoroughly
enjoyed it and what ended up happening
this was uh near the end of last
year
um i i knew some big changes were
coming up um my wife and i were
she was praying we knew we're gonna have
a baby and gildenberg had gotten to a
point where we were actually quite happy
with its growth trajectory and tammy and i
were starting to shift our focus to
putting more energy investment into the
product side of things which is always
what we've been interested in and one of
our members convecio
we'd had the privilege of a front row
seat to all of their growth.
We've been working actively with them for
over a year and saw some of the
areas that they were focused on.
We'd helped them with some acquisitions.
And that just prompted thinking on our
part where it's like, well,
I wonder what if we were to work
with them more directly and just become a
part of the team?
And we ended up deciding to do that
in pretty short order,
where it meant that Tammy was able to
step into a role as chief product officer
where there was entire like product teams
and she could just jump into that and
then do that thing full time that we
were trying to earn our way into doing
just a little bit because consulting work
was the majority of what we were doing.
And for me,
it meant that I could focus business
development energy on one company rather
than spread.
I was basically doing fractional business
development work for just a bunch of
different
different companies in the space,
which I thoroughly enjoyed.
It was also something where knowing that I
was about to have a baby,
that I was also going back to college
and going through all these other
transitions.
There was like a sanity check for me
at one point where it's like,
this feels a lot more sane to focus
my energy and efforts on one company
that's doing really interesting things in
the space.
And so that's what we've done.
And I've been super happy with it.
And it's only...
Picked up the pace since then.
With Guildenberg as a whole though,
I'm really grateful for the time and
experience.
It gave me a chance to test in
practice a lot of the ideas that I'd
had prior and see.
Also,
I think the thing that remains the
highlight for me,
It's fantastic to be able to make a
grounded connection where it's like you
see an alignment of interest between two
products or two organizations and then
like help them find that aligned interest
and then kind of just get out of
the way and get to see some cool
things happen as a result of that.
That remains the highlight for me.
It's fantastic.
Like the people that we got to work
with through the process and still get to,
like a lot of what drew me to
the opportunity at Convesio was to see the
work that they were doing
outside of the hosting space,
which is where they started and focusing
on commerce and payments and sort of all
of that.
So it's been quite the ride.
I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
Yeah, I really, I,
I think that that networking component is
really interesting.
Um, like the, the,
the part of it that I sort of
saw was a lot of like, Hey, we,
we know all these people and,
and we're just kind of here to like
connect this dot over here to this dot
over here.
And like you to go,
you should have a conversation and.
And it's very much like,
I think about Courtney Robertson,
what she does, the skill that she has,
which is partially her job as a developer
advocate, I think that's still her title,
at GoDaddy,
but really is more about who she is
as a person and a member of the
WordPress community is...
like knowing the people and then knowing
who to like,
which strings to pull and tie together and
say, okay,
you two go in a room and talk
about this and you two need to talk
about this and like,
kind of like almost like air traffic
control sort of thing.
Yeah, that's an important part of it.
And I think the experience with Tammy also
taught me where it's not,
it's often not enough if you're thinking
longterm to just like see an alignment of
interest or make the connection.
What I saw work incredibly well is like
when,
when Tammy would look at things through a
product lens and we would look at this
through the lens of like,
what is their product level alignment
between these two organizations?
that gave a clear path for them to
actually get something done.
Because that was often the challenge,
where it's like two parties or more would
see like, oh,
there is an opportunity here.
What do we do about it?
And for me, I think I knew intuitively,
but it's taken a while to learn.
It's like you can't just make something
happen.
The work is to find where the alignment
of interest is.
Sometimes it's unobvious.
And I think looking at things through a
product lens,
uh, just led, um,
led to a lot more practical, like, okay,
here's the thing that you guys can
actually do.
And here's the place to start.
And, uh, yeah, I think, um,
I think that that's a bit a lot
and that's led to me thinking even more
holistically since then, where it's like,
it's not just that you find the commercial
alignment.
Sometimes it's like also about cultural
alignment between two organizations and
how they're working and,
And I think within the vein of like,
and where we started with this like
operating system and ecosystem thinking,
what I especially enjoyed about it and
remains,
I think the key interest for me is
the opportunity that any of us have to,
to shape an ecosystem through making these
informed connections and through like
seeing an opportunity.
And it's like some of the best things
that I got to work on over the
past couple of years were,
when someone would seemingly out of the
blue who knew what I was trying to
do, it was like, hey,
you should talk to so-and-so.
And then that just opened up a big
opportunity that wouldn't have been on my
radar at all.
And yeah, I've thoroughly enjoyed that.
Yeah.
So you mentioned WordCamp US.
I assume that you're going.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm going.
Yeah.
What are you looking forward to in
Phoenix?
So Tammy and I are going to be
doing a talk together.
This will be our first time sharing the
stage, which I'm pretty excited about.
I'm a little bit nervous.
I'm going to have to up my game.
um and uh yeah tough competition looking
forward to um uh the folks that you
know it's great to see um folks that
we are already know yourself included and
meeting new folks um and uh experiencing
the heat i can't i can't wait
have you have you not experienced the uh
phoenix summer before oh i have actually i
i my grandfather had a lawn care business
and i've been in phoenix in the summer
yeah i mean i i i definitely like
i've definitely been uh through arizona a
few times in the middle of summer uh
and also utah is not too far off
um although we don't get quite as as
hot but the thing the thing that i
say like when i when i went to
press comp this last time and i was
in the cab uh and it had been
it had been hot it was like it
was like ninety degrees i think when i
landed um and that was rare for what
march i think it was ah um uh
so that was that was uncommon um but
we were talking about about the heat and
i'm like yeah
I know, because I've been here,
the thing that I think about when I'm
in Arizona in the peak of summer is
that it feels like the sun is actively
trying to kill me.
like it's it's not like anywhere else
chris let's bake them it's anywhere else
it's like oh it's hot but like no
it's actually like actively painful like
to be to spend an extended period of
time but then you know you just don't
do that is is what so what you
you learn
Even though it's a bit of a joke,
it is also serious that they take air
conditioning seriously.
Yeah.
Well, you would have to, right?
You have to if it's going to be
a bit habitable.
Yes, I'm looking forward to it, though.
Yeah, no, I, I, I'm definitely, I'm,
I'm down.
I'm looking forward to it as well.
Um, it'll be my first, uh,
flagship WordCamp that I'll be speaking
at.
Um, so I'm pretty excited about that and,
uh, yeah, looking forward to,
to reconnecting with all the folks.
Cause yeah, that's the, that's, that's,
that's what it's about.
That is what it's about.
Well, thank you, Jonathan, for coming on.
Thank you all who may be listening to
this now or in the future.
Where can people find you online should
they desire to?
Yeah,
jonathanwold.com is my personal website.
I've been having more fun working on it
lately.
I've got a blog that...
is not seeing some love in a while
but it's it's on my mind and my
contact information is all there and um
i'm also like on the wordpress slack and
uh yeah um you also have a podcast
yeah you use this this uh amazing uh
radio voice uh relaxing soothing radio
voice uh for for the power for the
powers of good with your your podcast
Mostly, mostly for good.
Yes.
I actually have a couple of podcasts,
but the one that's, yes,
so I have Crossword,
which is a podcast I do with Luke
Karbis on the WordPress ecosystem.
And occasionally we have some,
we always have fun and occasionally we
have some good output from that as well.
Only occasionally.
Yeah.
Well, thanks again, Jonathan,
for coming on.
Thank you,
everyone who are watching and listening to
this in the future.
And yeah, we'll see you on the internet.
Thanks for having me, Chris.
I'll see you in a few weeks.