From the early days of blogging to the rise of AI, Brian Alvey has helped shape how the modern web works. The CTO of WordPress VIP joins Ship Happens to unpack what’s changed, what’s broken, and why open source still powers the internet’s most important innovation.
WordPress VIP, to trace the modern web’s evolution—from the first blogging platforms to today’s AI‑driven, platform‑dominated internet.
Brian shares lessons from co‑founding Weblogs Inc.—the company behind Engadget and Autoblog—and how publishing challenges have both changed and stayed the same. He explains how AI is rewriting the economics of software development, making design and testing resources nearly limitless while undermining traditional publishing models. When bots and AI agents extract content without attention or attribution, the long‑standing audience‑to‑site contract breaks.
Per and Brian explore how WordPress VIP supports enterprise publishers, regulated organizations, and compliant networks, including FedRAMP‑level customers. They discuss the constant tension between flexibility and control, why enterprise buyers often don’t use the products they approve, and how founders benefit more from domain and sales expertise than from technical pedigrees.
Brian describes open source as the first of five “equalizing waves” in technology. In an AI era where large‑language models thrive on open data, open source has never mattered more. WordPress’s decades‑long “give it away” philosophy continues to prove that transparency and community outlast short‑term advantage.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
• How the early web became today’s platform economy
• Why AI changes software’s cost and incentive model
• What threats AI browsers pose to publishers
• The challenges of scaling WordPress VIP for enterprise security & compliance
• How open source fuels LLMs and long‑term innovation
• Why openness remains the foundation of a durable internet
(00:00) AI Is Changing Everything About the Web
(00:36) Introducing Brian Alvey from WordPress VIP
(01:54) How the Early Web and CMS Shaped Modern Development
(03:26) Why Brian Went Back to Coding
(04:46) The Problem with Infinite Design and QA Cycles
(07:00) From the Blogosphere to Web Enshittification
(10:43) How Bots Broke the Open Web
(13:44) Will AI Browsers Replace Websites?
(15:43) WordPress VIP, Web Standards, and the Future
(18:29) What Enterprise Really Needs from Software
(21:03) Why Enterprise Software Has a Trust Problem
(23:18) Why You Should Hire a Sales Cofounder First
(25:15) The Reality of Enterprise Workflows
(26:47) How Open Source Is Leveling Up
(30:56) The Business of Monetizing Open Source
(35:19) What Happens When You Give It All Away
(39:59) Is WordPress Becoming Legacy Technology?
(43:32) Final Thoughts with Brian Alvey
Brian Alvey is the Chief Technology Officer at WordPress VIP, the enterprise platform from Automatic powering major publishers, brands, and government organizations worldwide. A veteran of early web publishing, Brian co‑founded Weblogs Inc.—creator of Engadget and Autoblog—later acquired by AOL. Over nearly three decades, he’s led teams at the intersection of media, software, and open source innovation. At WordPress VIP, he focuses on balancing enterprise‑grade security and compliance with the openness that drives web progress.
Brian Alvey — LinkedIn
Per Krogslund - LinkedIn
Learn more at Docker.com
[00:00:00] Brian Alvey: So I just think right now what you're able to do today is things you just never dreamed you could do. In consumer sales, the best product wins. When you're buying a phone and you're buying a a pack of gum, like the best one wins. In enterprise, the person you're selling to doesn't use a product. So the best product doesn't win.
[00:00:19] Brian Alvey: If we could just, I don't know, build this thing that we're talking about without kind of the constraints of the framework of WordPress and the backwards compatibility and the 60,000 plugins that we need to make sure, and those are only the plugins we know about, that we need to make sure work right. Um, wouldn't this be so much easier?
[00:00:36] Per Krogslund: So, welcome to Shape Happens, a podcast where I sit down with the smartest people in the industry to talk about the skills, techniques, and mindset that helps you shape amazing software. Today I am talking to Brian, Allie. CTO of Word, VIP. And Brian is one of those rare builders who's been shaping the web since most of us didn't realize that this would become an industry.
[00:00:56] Per Krogslund: So from early online media to founding Web Blogs Inc. To turning WordPress into a serious enterprise infrastructure with WordPress, VIP. So personally, I've spent a decade working in, in content management and open source surfing. Brian's career very much intersects with so many of the landmark decisions and trade offs that this defined this space.
[00:01:14] Per Krogslund: So I'm just very excited to hear both about the early days and also where we are now with, with, um, online platforms publishing and well open source as well. So thank you so much for being on the show, Brian. I look forward to our conversation.
[00:01:37] Brian Alvey: Yeah, I look forward to it too. That was a nice way to say, I'm old where you say, you know, he's been doing this for a long time. That's right. That was like, you did it really well.
[00:01:45] Per Krogslund: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Um, but I, I am, I am old as well. I just, um, yeah, that's what the, the younger kids also call me old, like, so.
[00:01:54] Per Krogslund: Alright, so, um, well let's start with the, with with the theme of being old, I guess, to show you've been, you've been building websites like long before, you could say country management was even a category. So you know about the fundamental problems of, you say publishing stuff on the internet and, um, like what problems have, have never really went away.
[00:02:14] Per Krogslund: Maybe did they just change shape? What is, what's still like true for the publishing like business today?
[00:02:19] Brian Alvey: Yeah, I would definitely say that, that, um, it is, it is funny or sad that we are still trying to solve light's, image, library problems or how to format content or something like that. It's completely, completely nuts.
[00:02:31] Brian Alvey: Um,
[00:02:32] Per Krogslund: yeah,
[00:02:32] Brian Alvey: that we're still doing that. That means that people like you and me who've done this five, eight times, you know, we've been through this, like we are very, um, useful. Right. Uh, if, and, and so I'll, I'll answer it a different way, which is, you know, I was like you said, I've been doing this a long time.
[00:02:46] Brian Alvey: So the first websites that I built were in 1995. There was no, there was no word for cms. There were no cms. Um, I learned that you could hook up a database and make forms for people to edit content and I was kind of doing. Uh, uh, CMS is be, you know, eight or so years before WordPress existed, right? So by the time WordPress came along, I've been doing it a long time and I didn't think WordPress is gonna last.
[00:03:06] Brian Alvey: We can talk about that later. Um, because it did it last, it outlasted everything I ever built, right? Yeah. I built 20, you know, 25, 30 CMSs. Um, and so if you, if you look at all of that, I, I built those things, but I kind of stopped being a developer in 2004. I started running teams about 10 years into the web and building teams and not coding anymore.
[00:03:26] Brian Alvey: Then, and then two magical things happened that changed that when you talk about you and me still being in the game and having so much to offer and helping, uh, mentor other people and bring them along and, and adding value to a project. Um, the company before I joined Automatic WordPress, VIP, uh, the WordPress company, um, I ended up working on native apps, but in React Native.
[00:03:47] Per Krogslund: And
[00:03:48] Brian Alvey: React Native was just like JavaScript from 20 years ago. Yeah. And I was coding again. I felt so powerful that me and a like a senior developer, I did all the other roles, you know, CMO, chief Revenue Officer, like sales, everything. Except I was a junior developer and he was a senior developer. So it was a really cool team.
[00:04:01] Brian Alvey: And so I felt like, oh, maybe I'm not done. Maybe I'm back in the game. And then today with Claude and everything that we're doing, cursor, all these things, I am more powerful developer today than I ever was in my entire career. Probably combined.
[00:04:15] Per Krogslund: So you're back to developing again after taking, um, like a decade long hiatus from
[00:04:19] Brian Alvey: after managing.
[00:04:20] Brian Alvey: Exactly, yeah. After, after becoming a coach and thinking, I can't run on the court anymore with all the other players, I'm out there running around people. So it's, it's kind of fun. I mean, they're all going really fast now too, but it is, um, it is a lot of, it's a lot more fun to build than manage.
[00:04:34] Per Krogslund: Yeah. So how do you feel about the way we try to solve problems today?
[00:04:38] Per Krogslund: Like we have, we have Claude, we have, we have a lot of assistance. Do you feel we, we try to solve problems in a different way today than we did maybe 10, 15 years ago?
[00:04:46] Brian Alvey: Yes, because the math is completely different. The best projects that I've ever worked on had an abundance of designers. So we did this project, uh, called the Daily, this iPad app like 10, 15 years ago.
[00:04:59] Brian Alvey: So they basically said, let's make an iPad newspaper. And so I was brought in to do the CMS side. My friend's company came in to do the app side. And what I learned from my friend, this guy Ben Lamb and his company, um, he's now the one who's bringing back the direwolves. The woolly mammoth and all this stuff with colossal biosciences, right?
[00:05:13] Brian Alvey: That crazy thing. Like he's a really cool guy, but back in the day, he was just building apps for money for, for companies. And his trick that he had was he would have like six designers working on things. So when they said, okay, what are the screens gonna look like for this app? What are we gonna show to Steve Jobs and Murdoch?
[00:05:29] Brian Alvey: What's our show, our product? He didn't say like, oh, we're still waiting on Wave one designer. It's gonna take them weeks, right? He's like, no, no. I have six designers. I have five great designs to show you, or 12 or 20 great designs to show you. And there was an abundance of design. That's only happened a few times in my career where you have an abundance of some role and you have too much of it and you're like, it's like a luxury that never happens.
[00:05:50] Brian Alvey: So usually like when I got to to work with SEIP, they had one product designer and everything would take months. Now we have more, but we had one at the time. And I was like, oh, this is terrible. I need, I need more designers. Like, I want, I want what Ben, what Ben does, what Ben does. And if you think about that too, there are other roles in software like qa.
[00:06:07] Brian Alvey: So the QA team is like the last team, the quality team, the, the, uh, the, the people who make sure everything's good, like they're kind of a luxury as well. So the last team you hire when the economy goes bad and you have to shrink, they're the first team you fire. I've done it. I've watched people do it. I feel bad about it.
[00:06:22] Brian Alvey: But today you look at all those roles and you say. I have a hundred designers, I can have a hundred different versions of this tomorrow. I can, I can walk through a ton of these and you don't have to wait. You're not blocked by anything anymore. And then same thing on the quality end. You can write tests like, it just, it's like, you know, it's like I don't have time to write tests, I don't have time to do these things.
[00:06:43] Brian Alvey: But now you have kind of infinite resources to write tests until you've got more tests than you've ever had in your life. So I just think right now what you're able to do today. Is things you just never dreamed you could do because you didn't have the resources. And today you do.
[00:07:00] Per Krogslund: That's cool. So I, I wanna stay a little bit on the, on the theme of like how it was in the olden days and also how it is today.
[00:07:06] Per Krogslund: Yeah. Uh, so, and like again, I think I talk about being old. I remember this, you know, the, when the, when the internet was like fun and in insincere, um, you know, going back to when, you know, Robert Scobel was kind of a rock, rock star and everyone believed that blogging was the future of the internet. Um, and know you were also part of the recreation of Eng Gadget, Eng Gadget and Auto Block and these like, and it felt like it was all these like small little islands of very passionate people who wrote about something they just really liked.
[00:07:35] Per Krogslund: Um, and it feels like today, and I think Cory Doctor called, calls this like in ification of the internet, that we are kind of moving away from this like, like today's like impossible to figure out like what kind of washing machine you, you should, you should buy, because. When you go to Google, it's like, it's just full of paid AdWords or influencers who are paid to say that's the best washing machine and so on.
[00:07:55] Per Krogslund: So like, whereas before you could find that person in Alabama who was just like super passionate about washing machines. Um, so how, so how do you, how do you feel about the modern internet? Like when you've been part of this, like you could say publishing of more passionate people going to the through the world thing.
[00:08:10] Brian Alvey: I have like three big answers for you. So, so the first one is, um, it is really funny because when Jason and I decided we're gonna make a blogging, Jason Calcan and I decided we're gonna make this blogging company. We were like, how many blogs do we think we need for the two of us to run it and make, you know, I don't know, 200 grand a year and like, like live Well, you know, like that was our, it was our dream and we thought we need like 200 and it turned out we needed like 30 because we got great people like Peter Rojas to create and Gadget and the team that made auto blog, right?
[00:08:35] Brian Alvey: So we did really well with that. But when we were doing it, um, when we started. The whole blogosphere, the whole blogging community was like, these schmucks are late. Like these people are like, they're, you know, we don't come into our little cold, cold community. We've been around 6, 7, 8 years, 10, you know, nine years.
[00:08:52] Brian Alvey: Um, you know, we hate you. You're, you're, you're new. And when you look back, Jason and I were early, early blogging, right? Like we were at the beginning of blogging when you, you know, 2003, 2004. Um, it really hadn't happened. So it's funny to have so many people hate us for being late to the party. And then now people look back and we were early and like, again, just so old, a lot of people forget it, you know?
[00:09:12] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:09:12] Brian Alvey: It's, it's just that old. Um, another thing is when you think about the fact that we went into this space blogging or Web 2.0, or really the conversational ReadWrite web kind of thing, the, the two way web with comments, um, that was before social media, so none of these things existed, right? Uh, we were starting to cover some of the early social media, um, six degrees and things like that in the MySpace, right?
[00:09:33] Brian Alvey: Uh, way before Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. And, um, if you look at that, you do think there was something really interesting going on there and somebody would, you know, lose their job, which is what happened in 2001, 2002, all these journalists lost their job. So in 2003, 2004, they're blogging and then Google Ads comes out.
[00:09:50] Brian Alvey: So now I can put some ads on my site and I can make money. I can throw my book and I can do speaking again, and my career takes off. So there's this thing where you can make money there and the second somebody spots something, you can make money. Everybody kinda rushes in and ruins it, right? Like they thought we were rushing in and ruining it.
[00:10:05] Brian Alvey: We thought everybody after us was rushing in and ruining it. But there's kind of this, this concept, like anything worth being deemed will be gained. If Spotify says they'll pay you to make music on our platform. People will put up blank tracks and do weird things and try to game the system to get a payout.
[00:10:19] Brian Alvey: So there's that. But also, I love that you mentioned Corey Dau because he wrote a really good thing about, I think it's the, um, reverse, uh, syns or whatever they, the thing about like. Us and how we work with bots, right? He's a very, very smart person. Um, uh, and so, um, there's a lot of people thinking about the space, and I just think that, um, it's, it's not, it's not so much about that.
[00:10:41] Brian Alvey: It's, it's, uh, actually a really smart, a smarter thing. One of the people I work with, uh, James LaPage wrote a, wrote a five part series on AI just like a week ago, so you haven't seen it yet, but he talks about kind of what all changed in this. Bots are going to websites. They don't look at ads. The contract between the audience and the sites is broken.
[00:10:57] Brian Alvey: They can't make money. AI is taking their content. Like how do you, how do you make it as fair as it was back in the day? And one of the things he said was, if you, if you think about it, the, the web was originally like a weird digital mirror, a very small thing of reality, right? So you have your business and you have your website.
[00:11:14] Brian Alvey: Your website was a small marketing channel. 10 years later, your website is the number one. That's where your business runs. And your stores like, don't matter, you shut your stores down, your website matters. Now with things advancing to the, the personalization level with LLMs and all of this, it's like the complete digitalization of all business.
[00:11:32] Brian Alvey: So all business and all, all everything has moved online. So I don't think you could avoid the fact that the whole planet is online. All business happens online, all fraud happens online, right? Like, uh, like the good and the bad is all there. So I think that's really what happened is the web is just what we do.
[00:11:51] Brian Alvey: There is no offline necessarily. Even that's tied to online. That's it. So I think that's the, the problem is it was fun back then, but there weren't that many people there. Now the whole planet is there and there are different incentives.
[00:12:02] Per Krogslund: Yeah. Yeah. I guess also you, you have these, you have these big platforms now.
[00:12:05] Per Krogslund: You have like, a lot of, a lot of outlet for people is controlled by, you can say a few big players, like Google kind of decides what's findable still, and Facebook kind of decides what, what kind of voice people can have. Whatever. Like we could say it's a big part of the demo de democratic conversation that, that, you know, can you, can you even say something?
[00:12:23] Per Krogslund: Will it even be found by people if you see something that's like whatever. Um, so I guess this was a big difference that you now have these, like, it moved away from guy in Alabama blogging about washing machines to writing like posts on Facebook about it. And he's like highly dependent that Facebook will then actually like, make his stuff appear.
[00:12:40] Per Krogslund: Um, yeah, so, you know, the distribution is different today than it was back then.
[00:12:45] Brian Alvey: Correct. No, if you think so, Palantir is making CMSs. Palantir is like the military and weapons company, right? They, they did some deal with Fox where we're gonna come in and build you the newsroom of the future so that if somebody who's like makes that much money off the government, military world, politics, all of that is saying, Hey, we think we're gonna join the CMSs and you know, take out, take over all of that.
[00:13:06] Brian Alvey: There's something very important about what journalists are typing that matters to them. And again, like all the things are happening online. Anything worth gaming is, you know, will be game and people are here, you know, there's no, there's no avoiding it.
[00:13:19] Per Krogslund: Yeah. And you talked about this, like the contract between the, you can say the site and the audience and you have, you have these bots coming in and taking the content and maybe, hopefully it's, it is because they're using it to then serve the content to the person who is maybe interacting with their personal agent.
[00:13:33] Per Krogslund: Maybe that's the future of news that you just have an agent that kind of tells you what's important to you and so on. So the, the website itself might be even less important. Like it might not even matter that the website exists, it's more about the continent.
[00:13:44] Brian Alvey: So what you just described, that there's a website that AMAs all of this stuff, takes all the signals, finds the things that are just important to you and tells you about them is Facebook 10 years ago.
[00:13:54] Brian Alvey: So social came through and did this, and social was a threat to publishers and stores, having a direct relationship with their audience and our customers. AI and LLMs is a whole different team because at least Facebook would still send some people through. They would still show your video. They would still let you have an, uh, build an audience.
[00:14:11] Brian Alvey: Even if they own the audience, they'll let you build that community. AI is completely different, like Google's disco browser, which I'm now on the wait list for, like, just takes, you know, like whatever research you would do. So I'm going to Berlin in a month and uh, you should come to Denver. With my team, we're having a meet, we have meetups all, all over the planet.
[00:14:26] Brian Alvey: Automatic, has a couple thousand people all over the place, and we don't have offices, so we have meetups all the time. I'm leaving for Barcelona tomorrow. I'll see you in Berlin. Um, I know exactly. It's good. And in between that, uh, Tokyo and, uh, so, so it, it's a lot of fun. But, um, when we do that, and I'm planning the trip, I'm looking in Airbnbs, I'm looking at hotels, I'm looking at, you know, what are we gonna do on the activity day?
[00:14:47] Brian Alvey: And I'm putting, pulling together all these things, and the Google disco browser is, tell me what you're looking for. I'll find you the six sites that matter, the 10 sites, the five, eight or trips, the guides, the whatever, those kinds of things. Um, you know, bookings and all that stuff. And, um, I will pull it together into an experience that is a remixed, custom built website for the research projects you were doing.
[00:15:07] Brian Alvey: So a lot like notebook, ln, but now as a browser for anybody, for your mom and do this thing, you know, and my mom can go like plan stuff and she can do it and browse and that does not show ads. That does not show the original websites very often. You know, you can kind of go to them, but then you can just say, I don't really wanna look at the six tabs you opened.
[00:15:24] Brian Alvey: Just, just tell me what's good and let me make a checklist on the side and plan this. So there is, um, as much of a threat as social was to publishers and that contract that you'll be paid with attention bots don't look at ads, you know, there is no attention. Um, so there's something new that has to be done.
[00:15:42] Per Krogslund: Yeah. I think we wanted to, to play a little bit over in the context of WordPress as well. Like what do you think it means for, for a platform like WordPress if, if like publishing basically becomes irrelevant and, um, yeah. Users don't even care where the content comes from and that Yeah. So,
[00:15:57] Brian Alvey: so yeah.
[00:15:59] Per Krogslund: Go ahead.
[00:15:59] Brian Alvey: So, so it depends. So no, so there's kind of casual publishers, the bloggers and things like that, but then there's, you know, media companies, so, so WordPress, VIP, uh, just to kind of frame where we are automatic as a company is, you know, created by, uh, Matt, the co-creator of WordPress. It's like the WordPress company.
[00:16:13] Brian Alvey: We, we fund the WordPress project and have a lot of people working on it. Um, but the, my Par company cares about consumers, you know, $3 a month, $30 a month accounts. The 200 million plus bloggers on that wordpress.com VIP only cares about like a thousand companies. Mm-hmm. But you've heard of all of them.
[00:16:29] Brian Alvey: And the tens of thousands of sites are like, it's like News Corp, N-B-C-C-B-S, Al Jazeera, like tons of, and the White House and nasa. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and, and then businesses like Salesforce banks, things like that. Right. So we care about just this enterprise slice, and we look at the high end media production.
[00:16:45] Brian Alvey: So when you talk about, you know, what goes into content, the work that goes into it, these, you know, newspapers and magazines, you know, rolling Stone puts a lot of work into, you know, the 800 steps to make an article. So they can't just have it shown to bots with no ads, right? They have to make, have to find a way to make money off of this.
[00:17:01] Brian Alvey: And so we look at those conveyor belts and how you help them do these things cheaper, right? Do these things faster, do these things better. And one of the things that you made me think of was, you know, we are, I would say WordPress is, is an expert platform for scaling and, and for creating content and scaling yesterday's websites.
[00:17:19] Per Krogslund: Hmm.
[00:17:19] Brian Alvey: The websites of all the stuff we discussed and the gadgets and the auto blogs, all those kinds of things. What is tomorrow's website? What does it mean when you're serving this up into these, can you create standards? One of the beautiful things about WordPress is when somebody comes out with a standard robots.txt or, or, um, you know, llms.txt right?
[00:17:37] Brian Alvey: The new, the new robots.txt um, or any of these kinds of things. MCP servers, uh, these other like, um, uh, frameworks. If, if, if WordPress doesn't adopt them, I think they have a hard time becoming a thing. But if WordPress says, okay, we we're, we're gonna support this standard. The whole world supports that standard.
[00:17:57] Brian Alvey: 'cause 43% of the web runs on WordPress. I think we have, we don't know what the website of the future is going to look like, right? We don't know how you're going to still describe things into your personal blog or write articles for a sports site or put up pages about soft, uh, software products from, uh, salesforce.com.
[00:18:15] Brian Alvey: We don't know what that's gonna look like, but we, we hope that if you're on an open platform. The open platform will figure it out. The community will figure it out. You'll steer towards that value and the sales system will stay intact.
[00:18:29] Per Krogslund: So you mentioned a little bit about, um, these big enterprise sites that really have like this 800 step way of producing content because Yeah, they're professional business.
[00:18:37] Per Krogslund: They do it in a very specific way. They have all checks and balances. So WordPress, we, IP is this something you help them do or facilitate? Is that, like, is that part of your offering of like a VIP platform?
[00:18:48] Brian Alvey: Yeah. In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. So I wish we could build for everybody and maybe in the future we will just build everything everybody wants.
[00:18:55] Brian Alvey: Right? You know, you think about now, uh, people make software for an audience of one. You know, a friend of mine had this, um, this game controller from like windows from 20 years ago, whatever that sits on the side with like couple buttons and little screen, right? It's a little game game pad and it doesn't work for Macintosh's.
[00:19:09] Brian Alvey: So he was like, okay, I'll go find the spec. I'll go, I'll work with Claude. One day later, he has it working for his Mac. He can push button, button three and like slack fires up and button four, tell this his microphone, right? And a little screen tells him what's going on. That was for an audience of one. I don't know who else owns those things are on eBay.
[00:19:26] Brian Alvey: You can't buy them anymore, right? So, so you can build software for an audience of one. So I hope that for the workers, VIP customers, the enterprise customers, you can actually build the one-off stuff that they need either with agency partners or ourselves. Uh, but for the most part, that's, that's what we do.
[00:19:40] Brian Alvey: We, we provide, we try to provide services that work across all of them. DDoS protection. Great. You get all that. The, the in browser challenges, what they call it, defensive mode, you know, to make sure we can, you know, reduce bots, the analytics, parsley, all those kinds of things kind of work across all of them.
[00:19:53] Brian Alvey: We try not to do specific things for them because they all have very specific needs. But anyway, I don't know. The feature may be that we actually can do everything.
[00:20:01] Per Krogslund: Yeah, we'll
[00:20:01] Brian Alvey: see.
[00:20:02] Per Krogslund: So this whole, this whole layer between a standardized platform such as WordPress or any kind of other like open source piece of infrastructure.
[00:20:08] Per Krogslund: And then you have this layer on, on customization on top. And yeah, that might be taken away from like not taken away, but just done in a very different and maybe more cost effective way with AI in the future.
[00:20:17] Brian Alvey: The pieces that are in there though, so you mentioned there's infrastructure stuff, but things like we we're FedRAMP moderate certified.
[00:20:21] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:20:22] Brian Alvey: So the government's allowed to use this. So there are a whole bunch of. Horrible gauntlets of checklists of like, uh, you know, penetration tests and all these things that we have to do. But yes, if you think about, if somebody, if you see WordPress to somebody, right? 'cause you talked about the early days of blogging, Hey, I'm gonna run my, you know, I'm gonna run the White House's website on, or NASA on WordPress.
[00:20:40] Brian Alvey: You're like, well, you're gonna hacked and it's gonna be, it's not gonna be fun. I can't do what you need. And so, VIP is here to prove like, we can do what you need and you won't be happy.
[00:20:50] Per Krogslund: Cool. Okay. Uh, and yeah, I guess also that whole like fedra and compliance, this is still like, this is, this is a big value for people, even though kind of like a hidden thing.
[00:20:57] Per Krogslund: It's not a technical feature, it's just like compliance is just important for this like, segment you're working in. So,
[00:21:03] Brian Alvey: well, I'll, I'll tell you, uh, the, I dunno, the kind of, the, the sad part about it is there's the, the difference between enterprise and consumer sales.
[00:21:10] Per Krogslund: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:10] Brian Alvey: Uh, it's taken me, I dunno, my whole long career to figure this out.
[00:21:14] Brian Alvey: The difference between enterprise and consumer is sort of the difference between what Steve Jobs would do and what Mark Benioff would do. And they would actually argue about this because Steve Jobs thought Mark Benioff's job was kind of dirty. You know, you're selling ERP software to CIOs and that's kind of gross ING's
[00:21:28] Per Krogslund: list.
[00:21:29] Brian Alvey: Exactly. No, but, and that thing, and so like, well, why does he think it was dirty? I was trying to unpack this because we are running an enterprise division inside a massive consumer company. Our company owns our parent company owns Tumblr. That's a free blogging platform. They own, you know, journaling apps and, and clay and, uh, you know, uh, beeper and, you know, all, all these things, all these consumer apps.
[00:21:48] Brian Alvey: And they very much have a mind of consumers. And I, I was, for a while, I thought the tension between us and them was they really, really like $3 a month customers and we like million dollar a year customers, right? Like, and that's the difference, but it's not that simple. Um, in consumer sales, the best product wins.
[00:22:04] Brian Alvey: When you're buying a phone and you're buying a pack of gum, like the best one wins. In enterprise, the person you're selling to doesn't use the product. So the best product doesn't win. It's, I've got the FedRAMP certification. I, I met you at this conference. You, you know, this other thing about me, the person buying from you doesn't use the product.
[00:22:23] Brian Alvey: Yeah. And so you're not actually incentivized to make the best product. I'd like to, I'd want to make the best product. So that's the biggest tension between kind of our consumer parent company and our enterprise division. And just in the world, like you were saying, um. Those incentives are strange. So how do you build a division?
[00:22:40] Brian Alvey: How do you build an enterprise work as company that is both selling to the buyer who doesn't use the product and checking all the boxes, compliance, all those things you need, but also still making something that's the best product.
[00:22:53] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:22:53] Brian Alvey: Um, you're kind of doing two jobs in.
[00:22:55] Per Krogslund: Yeah. Yeah. It is like, I think for anyone who's used enterprise software, it's just a different world.
[00:22:59] Per Krogslund: Like anyone who's used SAP or ServiceNow or whatever, it's this, it's like, why, why are we using this? But it is, that is, that is the thing. What, what, what most people don't know is that, yeah, these people didn't choose this. This was procurement. That
[00:23:10] Brian Alvey: the buyer doesn't use the product. Yeah.
[00:23:11] Per Krogslund: Yeah. It's, and the thing that
[00:23:12] Brian Alvey: It's pretty dirty.
[00:23:13] Brian Alvey: It is dirty. Steve Jobs was right. You know?
[00:23:15] Per Krogslund: Yeah. Yeah. People don't appreciate the art of good software and enterprise. They don't care. Um, I had a question here, MyIT actually. What's the most common mistake that founders make when they jump from this like, kind of cool product into enterprise platform?
[00:23:26] Per Krogslund: But I thing it's exactly that, that they don't
[00:23:28] Brian Alvey: Yeah, you have don't
[00:23:29] Per Krogslund: really, if it is cool.
[00:23:30] Brian Alvey: That correct? Yeah. So, so I'll, I'll tell you, it's funny because, um, I've said this, so I, I've coached more than a thousand startups, you know, to go pitch on stage. I've been a judge. I helped run big giant conferences, right?
[00:23:40] Brian Alvey: And I've seen so many pitches and so many of these people and everybody that, that wants to be in these, like, I've got this great idea, I just need a technical co-founder. And I, I was way ahead of the game. I was way ahead of the curve by saying, no, you don't need a technical co-founder, you need a sales co-founder.
[00:23:55] Brian Alvey: You need somebody with a Rolodex who's, you know, the, you know, somebody with a list of contacts for anybody who doesn't know what a Rolodex is, um, who's been in a, it been in a particular, who has sold to movie studios, who has sold to healthcare, who has sold to pharmaceutical companies, right? Something like that.
[00:24:09] Brian Alvey: You need that person who can get you your first 10 and then your first a hundred customers on their way to a thousand. That's what you're missing. I don't care about technical co-founder. And today I would say it's even funnier. You don't need a, you know, you don't need a whole team. Uh, there's this guy, uh, Ryan Carson who did these conferences a long time ago, is a really tall, uh, tall guy.
[00:24:28] Brian Alvey: Yeah. Yeah, he is really cool. Uh, so he's running a thing right now where they're like, it's like a, I dunno, $300. They get your divorce done instead of, instead of $60,000 for divorce, it's like 300 bucks. And it's this really crazy early days platform for him. But it's like, there's one, he's got a co-founder.
[00:24:43] Brian Alvey: Who knows about divorces and law in all the states in the US and he is the entire everything else he's built, the whole thing, the whole platform, everything. So I I, I, as much as I was right that 10, 20 years ago, you don't need a technical co-founder. You really don't need one today. You need a sales co-founder.
[00:25:01] Per Krogslund: Yeah, and I guess it was like a subject matter. If you're doing something like divorces, you need like the subject matter expert that kind of understand divorce law and what is important to do this like product in a good way, but. The tech is just an abstraction, a above that like market understanding, I guess.
[00:25:15] Brian Alvey: Correct. So take, so take, you know, you mentioned newsrooms before, the 800 follow steps, there's a conveyor belt. So, so also the, the difference in between consumer content creation and enterprise content creation is in consumer content creation. You and me, we have a blog, we have a, we have a X account, we have a, whatever, an Instagram.
[00:25:30] Brian Alvey: There's like five stages we go through. We have an idea, we come up with a title, we write the thing, we, we, uh, we edit it and then we publish it. Maybe we're promote it five or six steps. The new and, and, and when that piece of content goes along, those six steps, you and I follow that piece of content because we're the only person there.
[00:25:46] Brian Alvey: We are literally moving the food down the conveyor belt and doing every stage in enterprise you have the 812 steps. Somebody is standing just at the headline writing spot, wiping headlines. They're on a loop that never moves. They don't travel with the content. So that's really the other difference here.
[00:26:00] Per Krogslund: Yeah, it's kind of twitching everything around. Like you don't really need to understand your code you're writing anymore. Like anyone can be a programmer. But yeah, but not everyone can understand a problem in a, in an industry and really, right. Translate it into like, what are they actually telling the AI to do?
[00:26:14] Per Krogslund: Like, you still need that thing. You can't just like, you can't just like make things up if you don't understand the problem.
[00:26:18] Brian Alvey: Well, so that, so that's you and me. That's that thing of the, I have my software architecture skills from 30 years ago. Those haven't changed. Understanding these parts need to hand off smoothly.
[00:26:27] Brian Alvey: These things need to run, there have to be checks to make sure, yeah. That this stage was completed correctly. There's a, a guide that you can do a, a checking out QA step, right? But you can automate all that. So I just feel like, yes. Understanding the problem doesn't mean you don't need software engineers.
[00:26:40] Brian Alvey: Doesn't mean you don't need designers. You know, you still need them, but get buy ones, don't get regular ones that are doing it manually, like in the old days,
[00:26:47] Per Krogslund: actually. So one thing I wanted do I talk to you about is really open source because Yeah. WordPress is, open source is one of the most well-known open source platforms out there.
[00:26:55] Per Krogslund: You have like 40% of the internet is powered by this and it's, it's always the, it's always the thing that comes up when people talk about the success of open source. Um. I think just like for WordPress, VIP, how, how important is it actually that this thing is open source?
[00:27:09] Brian Alvey: I love this question. Uh, so I think about, I think about this a lot because I didn't come from open source, right?
[00:27:14] Brian Alvey: I, I've used a lot of open source, but I'm not, I'm the person who builds, you know, like a couple dozen content management systems, you know, specific platforms for the thing that you're doing and then sells into the highest bidder. Like I'm, I'm a, like a arms margin, you know, like I'm the Tony Stark in the background there, right?
[00:27:28] Brian Alvey: Selling these platforms, you know, for a lot of money. I'm not the one who gives it away. And then I look at Matt and he like builds one CMS and gives it away. And it's worth more than all my other stuff combined, right? Like you, you know, like I was pricing mine wrong. I joked that I should, should have been free.
[00:27:41] Brian Alvey: Uh, but that, but that alone doesn't do it, right? So open source is really interesting and I'm really, really, really glad that you said WordPress is one of the sort of the success stories of open source. When you look at this and you, you name 10 things, I think the whole planet, everybody would have WordPress in their top 10.
[00:27:56] Brian Alvey: You know, stories, you know, there's Linux, there's, you know, MySQL, there's some other stuff. But, um, but I like to look at this as, as, um, over time looking backwards like waves of equalizing technology. Okay? So we're all sitting around and, and nobody can afford to run a giant database because we can't pay for Microsoft and Oracle.
[00:28:13] Brian Alvey: And then open source comes along. So the first of five waves of equalizing technology in my life with open source. And it was where now you have, you know. An Apache web server. You have MySQL, you have all this open source software, you don't need to pay Roberts Swls company, Microsoft, like you mentioned, uh, back in the day for all this stuff.
[00:28:28] Brian Alvey: Um, and so that came along and like all of a sudden, oh, I can build a thing and I can compete with companies that their could, their advantage was they were paying for Oracle, they're paying for Microsoft.
[00:28:38] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:28:38] Brian Alvey: Okay, great. Next wave of equal technology was the web. I have a word. I have, I have a.com and New York, New York Times is a.com.
[00:28:45] Brian Alvey: I can compete with them for a little while. Yeah. Like I, I'm as famous as they are. I, I'm, I'm on the same, we all leveled up. Everybody's on the same, yeah, on the same playing field. Um, the next, we, uh, wave after the web with the cloud, and so there's docker and containerization in that, right? The fact that you could, you know, um, containerize all these things and put them somewhere and kind of use them as you need them.
[00:29:06] Brian Alvey: The wave after that was mobile, which couldn't have come without the cloud, without web, without open source. So mobile. Then the last, the fifth one in my lifetime is LLMs and ai. You know, the, the real AI AI's been around forever, really, the LLMs. Um, and if you look at those, it's, um, it's completely powerful.
[00:29:23] Brian Alvey: So you talk about open source, that's the first of the five waves in my lifetime, where it just leveled the playing field and anybody could do anything. And I think it's still really powerful. You know why I would say open source is even more important today. Because if you look at my friend that did that game controller and rewrote that software, he couldn't rewrite the Mac os to work with that, that little game, that game pad thing on the side.
[00:29:46] Brian Alvey: He had to write other stuff. He had to, and you. That only works when you can look at repos, look at code. So finding the specs, being these things, um, WordPress, WooCommerce, all these things that are open source, you know, even other either, you know, group, all things like that. Anything out there, um, I think they have an amazing advantage, which is.
[00:30:03] Brian Alvey: What is the software that LLMs have been trained on? Is it SWIFT code and, uh, Mac Os and all these things? No, they can't see that. Nobody's training them on that. So broadly, when you look at how do I build software Next js, open source, things like that, uh, react, all those things, right? Those are really vague.
[00:30:22] Brian Alvey: So I feel like open source not only was the first movement that propelled all of this stuff that makes it all possible. Linux, right? The fact that every device runs these things, you know, raspberry PIs, all this. All the way to now. I think open source has never been more important.
[00:30:35] Per Krogslund: Yeah, it's actually, it is also a very good point actually.
[00:30:37] Per Krogslund: I never thought about that. But people who are still using, you can say closed proprietary systems and they try to use an LLM to work with those, like where do they find the information? Like did they have no knowledge of these closed guidance? It's just like, can't get, can't get any help and need to, I guess, go back to the PDF manual or whatever they're using.
[00:30:54] Per Krogslund: Um, yeah, that's a, that's a good point. Um, so I think, um. There's been some controversy around like WordPress and no need to dive into that, but I think there's always this, you could say political side or passion of open source people of like, you can't make money with open source, and I think open source people are the worst at this thing.
[00:31:14] Per Krogslund: It's always like if anyone's tried to make money with open source, there's always other open source people yelling at them that they're not being like true to the mission of opensource and so on. I think like you, you again, like you're dealing with selling or, uh. Open source software to inspire customers.
[00:31:27] Per Krogslund: I know it's not the software itself. It's like the, it's the, it's the governance. It's like the, all the things, but, um,
[00:31:33] Brian Alvey: peace
[00:31:33] Per Krogslund: of mind. Right. You
[00:31:34] Brian Alvey: right. So
[00:31:34] Per Krogslund: build
[00:31:34] Brian Alvey: peace of mind. Peace of mind. Right, right. It's, it's a funny thing. It's not, it's not that.
[00:31:38] Per Krogslund: No. And so it's more like, so you've never felt this, that, that workplace, VIP was kind of like extracting value from the community, like you're using open source pieces to kind of run a business.
[00:31:49] Brian Alvey: People say No, no. It's a very funny thing. Okay, so, so two quick answers on that. So one is we work with a lot of other people's open source software, right? Yeah. So, um, uh, Datadog, open source, something, I think it's called Factor for like scanning, you know, uh, NX logs and pulling data in collecting, uh, data, right?
[00:32:06] Brian Alvey: Um, and we use that. We try to use other open source things because we give away so much and. If anybody ever thinks, I mean, I understand within the WordPress ecosystem, you know, who's being a bully, who hates, who, who's gone to war with whatever. Like, there's a lot of that, and that goes back and forth. But, but if you, one of the things that kind of sold me, this is four years ago this week that I came in and joined.
[00:32:27] Brian Alvey: I worked as the, um, the, when I was doing that, I listened to a couple of podcasts that Matt Mullen have been on, just to kind of get a sense of what's, where's his head right now, because I've known him since work Best year one, you know, and, and, and we've stayed in touch and we're good friends. But I really didn't know, like what does he believe in, what does he think?
[00:32:44] Brian Alvey: And one of the really interesting things I heard him say today, I would just throw all those podcasts and notebook lm, and I would just wait and it would summarize it. I listened to these, I listened to these like a fool, you know, like, like, you know, whatever, one half. And so one of the things he said was, he, he, he thought it was really interesting that in the WordPress ecosystem, WordPress is such a big, you know, billions of dollars being made on this thing that automatic, his company only captures like 1% of all that money.
[00:33:11] Brian Alvey: 99% of that is the WP Engines, pantheons agencies, like all those other people are out there making money off of this GoDaddy, right? There's all of these things. Um, in WooCommerce we probably capture more of that, more than 1% because we're like, it's, it's very tightly, it tied to automatic. But, um, but I, I think the comparison he made at the time was like Wix, or Squarespace, I think it was Wix.
[00:33:34] Brian Alvey: He said, you know, in the Wix ecosystem. A hundred percent of the money goes to Wix. Yeah. Like they're, you know, they're capturing a hundred. You know, so compare these things. It's really interesting how much, I don't know, like how, how bad can you be if you're capturing like less than 1% of the money and you're making all everybody else money.
[00:33:51] Brian Alvey: Uh, I don't know. I think they're doing a very good job of, of being much more givers than takers. Yeah. And um, and again, I think that's why it's one of the more successful products.
[00:33:59] Per Krogslund: Yeah. Yeah. Again, I, I also, I spent 10 years in open source CMS and every time we had a paid feature, which was maybe even this cost 99 euros or like a lifetime thing, and they were like, you greedy, you greedy amount of like,
[00:34:10] Brian Alvey: I know, I know.
[00:34:11] Per Krogslund: Isn't,
[00:34:12] Brian Alvey: it's, it's, it's tough when you start with the, when you start with the price of free. It's very hard to charge because then you are that greedy person that they hate.
[00:34:20] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:34:20] Brian Alvey: But, uh, I don't know, it's kind of funny. So, so for, for VIP I'd say it's different because again, we're, we're, and I don't wanna spend like only time about governance, but there's so many other things we do, migrations and consulting and things like that, that, you know, really being a partner and helping, um, and architectural stuff and, and, you know, different engagements.
[00:34:36] Brian Alvey: But, um, but no, it's not, um, it's really not all the software. It's not all about tech. Uh, no. And I, and I don't know, I know we give so much away, so,
[00:34:44] Per Krogslund: yeah,
[00:34:44] Brian Alvey: I, I don't, I don't feel that at all.
[00:34:46] Per Krogslund: No, you shouldn't. I think you shouldn't. Like WordPress has done amazingly and been amazing value to the world. I don't think you should be bad about judging about anything.
[00:34:53] Per Krogslund: But I wanted, like, I wanna also ask about, so you have, you could say this open source impact you've had, and then you have the, the business itself. Um, so like there's a line between, you could say, protecting open source ideals and then also protecting a business. So is like. Like WordPress food, decide where that's it.
[00:35:11] Per Krogslund: Is that Matt, is that a Matt decision of saying, we, we have a line here that's, it's more important to be a business than being open source ideal here?
[00:35:19] Brian Alvey: So, uh, I have two answers for you. And they're both, yes. Uh, the answer yes is that yes. I feel like every single thing in our company, kind of even hiring everything kind of goes across his desk.
[00:35:29] Brian Alvey: So he does make all the decisions. So any decisions he can make or his decisions, I don't, you know, like I can make little decisions or whatever do, do something in my little space, but, but in terms of, I mean, work is not mine. We're best, you know. It sort of belongs to the planet, but he steers if he owns the, the, the name, the trademarks, the stuff.
[00:35:43] Brian Alvey: Um, and so all of that does go through him. Um, what, what's, it's really interesting because I, I feel like when you, when you ask a question like this, you're coming from an angle of like, you know, people are angry about this, or you're not giving enough, or whatever. Um, we have, well, I have the, I have the opposite opinion.
[00:35:59] Brian Alvey: Again, it's not because I feel like giving stuff away is good, or I like, oh, I, you know, I'm in the open source religion. It's in my, you know, it's not, I'm in, I'm in, you know. Um, like capitalism, like that, that religion not opens source religion. Right. Uh, I come from that. Um, it is strange. Uh, we, I, I'll, I'll tell this another way because we just had the sales meetup where I dialed in and I told they were in Mexico.
[00:36:22] Brian Alvey: I told 'em all this, I couldn't make it there. I was in a blizzard in New York and, um, we told them, um, one of them asked like, can we do more proprietary stuff? Mm-hmm. Can we do more things that we don't give away? We just built real time into, into WordPress. It came from VIP. We're putting it into wordpress.com and Jet Pack.
[00:36:38] Brian Alvey: We're putting into consumer download and, sorry, not consumer open source free downloadable wordpress.org. Okay. Right. So it's gonna be in the next WordPress. Everybody can do real time collaboration like Google Docs, but it came from us and our sales team is like, can we have a window where we have it exclusively for six months so we can go out and sell it?
[00:36:52] Brian Alvey: Or can we keep it for six years or 60 years? And I go, no. And we had this little debate about what we can and can't give away. And I'm on the side of don't give it away, just charge for it. But I, I understand what the company's position is and what WordPress's position is, and I had to explain that. If you look at what would our leadership decide to do in any given case, they always err on the side of giving it away, even to our competitors, even to go sell it better than we do.
[00:37:20] Brian Alvey: And I explained that I think, I don't know when this was, if it's still true today or whatever, like if you rank all the companies that make money off of WordPress, I think automatic is number four. Just GoDaddy. There's other, there's other ones out there they mentioned, you know, a blue house I think is one of them.
[00:37:33] Brian Alvey: Um, but there's like, there's three other, or, and maybe it's eight today. Maybe it's two today. I don't know. I don't know what the rankings are now, but when I joined, we were number four at selling this thing. So we will build something, put the most resources into building it, give it away to the planet, including our competition.
[00:37:49] Brian Alvey: And the premise is if they're better at selling it than us and we go outta business, that was our fault. Matt is looking at like, can WordPress survive another a hundred years? It's been here 2023, whatever. Can it survive another a hundred years? Can it survive past him? And every decision he makes is, is, is on that.
[00:38:06] Brian Alvey: Our sales team hates it. Our enterprise sales team thinks it's disturbing. Why don't you put, why don't you put window moats around this thing? Why don't you put exclusive exclusivity? Why don't we build proprietary stuff? All of those words, I feel like. They'll get you fired. You can't, you can't talk like that.
[00:38:21] Brian Alvey: You know, like in this company, that's, I understand you're in an enterprise sales role and you're doing the right thing for your customers and your, and your job and your, and your numbers. But that's not what, that's not what WordPress is all about. It really is give it all away, and if somebody else can sell it better than us, it survives.
[00:38:38] Brian Alvey: WordPress survives. It's pretty wild.
[00:38:41] Per Krogslund: Yeah, it's pretty wild, I guess. It's, that's, I guess that that's the interesting tension of like having an open source business. And it, it's, it's definitely interesting. I think also like, part of it being an open platform is like if you didn't release the real time feature, someone else would.
[00:38:55] Per Krogslund: And maybe it would be one of, and then all of a sudden they have a, they have a better product than you. And then it's not even about being better at selling. They, you're like just holding things back and making your product worse because you wanna sell to a cup point.
[00:39:06] Brian Alvey: Correct. And so do those other people, so if one of those other big players built real time, would they open source it?
[00:39:13] Brian Alvey: For the most part, they have, they've been pretty good about the different things that they've built. Some major, major things that are out there that they've built. They're open source. So I think, I think everybody kinda holds each other in check, but, but I think your questions have been about like the outside world versus kind of automatic and kind of that, you know, that like who, who's pissed off at who, and I'm saying even at, even inside our company, it's the same thing.
[00:39:34] Brian Alvey: And I watch them make decisions that are kind of for the good and it annoys me. 'cause I kind of want like, what about for the money? So, so, and I, I understand the frustration, but the frustrations are inside our company too, and what wins is WordPress will be here a hundred years from now.
[00:39:48] Per Krogslund: Yeah, I think that's a good, I think I was a, you can't have a company where everyone is just thinking about the idealism of open source and no one thinks about the money.
[00:39:55] Per Krogslund: Like you people have to get paid to do a good job and be here a long time. I actually have a spicy question for you. Like, if you had to like build a business like this tomorrow, would you choose WordPress or do you think, is that what you, would you worry that it's a legacy platform?
[00:40:07] Brian Alvey: For everything I said about WordPress being good at adopting a standard and making it something the whole world does, I feel like they take forever to do that.
[00:40:13] Brian Alvey: We take forever to, you know, our, our media library needs work. Uh, we have, you know, certain things we do in block, but you can't do this other thing. And every time, I think my, my gosh, if we could just, I don't know, build this thing that we're talking about without kind of the constraints of the framework of WordPress and the backwards compatibility and the 60,000 plugins that we need to make sure, and those are only the plugins we know about, that we need to make sure work right.
[00:40:36] Brian Alvey: Um, wouldn't this be so much easier? And one of the best technical leads, my old co-founder for another business is Guy Max, uh, max Sch smelling. He goes, um, we're talking about the blocks and the block editor, and he was explaining because Google Docs, when we, when we're talking about the real time mode, we working, you and me working in a Google doc and you and me working together in real time in WordPress, it's not as smooth in WordPress, but that's because Google Docs is kind of just like a bunch of soup.
[00:41:01] Brian Alvey: It's just like a fluid long, it doesn't have blocks. There's no real concept there. In ours, we have these blocks, and he was explaining, yes, that feels clunkier. And yes, it's kind of a pain, and wouldn't it be nice if we just had a big open canvas, but there's a reason why we're doing blocks and there's a reason why they're powerful and these other systems don't have that.
[00:41:18] Brian Alvey: So he kind of convinced me that, yes, we're slow and methodical about that, but once we put a primitive into WordPress, we do it at a really high level that you can hook into everything. You can't go and hook into paragraphs and tables in a Google Doc in the way that you can in WordPress. It's just, there's so much machinery and scaffolding and such a framework, uh, uh, going on inside WordPress that there's so much of that you would have to create that I think you would, might be making a mistake to say, I'm going to do this thing that I wanna do, and I'm just gonna leave WordPress behind, because there's so much thought that went into that so much craft.
[00:41:54] Brian Alvey: Uh, so, so I think it's, I think you could, there's trade-offs, but I wouldn't say it's just easy. Oh, work guys is 20 years old. Just skip it and start again. It's really hard to ignore all the modern thought, the fact that it's mostly JavaScript and React, not PHP anymore. Right. Crazy.
[00:42:12] Per Krogslund: Yeah. But also, doesn't it, it must also feel tempting to kind of look at this thing.
[00:42:16] Per Krogslund: Ah, well first I, I would probably be able to bang something together in an ai you doing a day and it'll be a much better thing on day one. Ask me again in six months,
[00:42:24] Brian Alvey: and I might, and I might say, you're right. Just do it. Just do it from scratch. Like you literally do it from scratch. But the things, the LLMs that are helping you do it from scratch.
[00:42:31] Brian Alvey: Or looking at WordPress and using all those smarts and using all those decisions to build the thing you're gonna build, right? So it just depends on what you're doing. I've seen people do weird things in WordPress, like build, basically build an, an auction site like eBay where the, the posts are the, are the auctions and the comments or the bids and it's, it's a terrible idea, but their business took off and, and, and it works, but it's hard to scale.
[00:42:52] Brian Alvey: So, I don't know. I think there are things you. I, I don't know what you shouldn't do in WordPress. You know what I mean? So it it, it's pretty, you know, I've seen people do, but, but like today, like you can kind of fix anything. I don't know.
[00:43:02] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:43:02] Brian Alvey: It's history.
[00:43:03] Per Krogslund: History has shown, history has shown that whatever you built, you can build it in WordPress properly.
[00:43:07] Per Krogslund: So it's true, it's true. Might not be a great experience, but you can,
[00:43:11] Brian Alvey: you can, but it saves you the time creating users and permissions. And like, there's, again, I, I don't, I think WordPress, it's so unfinished. And you have to finish it with plugins and hooks and all the things I was talking about. Yeah, that really, it just saves you a couple years of, you know, scaffolding for your app.
[00:43:26] Brian Alvey: So to me it's like a framework in, in that sense. Yeah. So would you say I'll skip, you know, I don't know, some other framework? I don't know.
[00:43:32] Per Krogslund: I think that's a wonderful conclusion to our conversation. Anything you want to like, point people towards, like anything you wanna recommend saying, this just blew my mind, or this is just something you should look at?
[00:43:40] Per Krogslund: Or any just like final word of advice.
[00:43:43] Brian Alvey: No, I, it's very funny. I would, I would mention things and three days from now we'll have new things and the things that actually would sound old, but that's the nature of
[00:43:50] Per Krogslund: the world.
[00:43:50] Brian Alvey: Yeah. Like if I talk about the, you know, so, so it's funny because, because we're, you know, we're recording this, it was like a claw bot was really huge.
[00:43:57] Per Krogslund: Yeah.
[00:43:57] Brian Alvey: And then they said you can't call it Claw Bot anymore and had become mold bot. And you wake up the next day and it's called Open Claw. Like you can't keep up with the name of the thing that is changing your job across three or four days or weeks. So like anything I mention today, if somebody watches this a month or a year from now, I'm gonna sound stupid.
[00:44:15] Brian Alvey: You know, I'm just gonna sound like I had no idea. Like you had, you had no idea. Old man, we just talked to our phone and it, you know, holograms come out. I don't know. So, no, no, there's nothing I, I give up, I give up on mentioning hot things. Yeah,
[00:44:27] Per Krogslund: I think that, I think that makes sense. You can always recall Dr.
[00:44:30] Per Krogslund: Irv. I think that's a classic, but that's like, that's my recommendation, not your, so anyways, I think. Thank you so much for your conversation, Brian. I think, uh, um, this was very insightful. I love hearing about both the old days and also your perspective of, of the, of the present day and maybe what's, whatever is the future.
[00:44:45] Per Krogslund: Um, so as a follow words, as always, this show was brought to you by Docker, the open platform, the building, shipping, and running applications. So thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time. Thanks.