One of the many lies in Silver Lake and WP Engine’s C&D was their claim that Automattic demanded money from them moments before our CEO Matt Mullenweg gave his keynote at WordCamp US.
That is not true. Automattic asked for a verbal agreement that WP Engine would give some percentage of their revenue back into WordPress, either in the form of a trademark agreement or employee hours spent on core WordPress.
For transparency, Automattic is publishing the full term sheet WP Engine was offered on September 20th. Given WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence since September 20th these terms are no longer sufficient.
Lee Wittlinger and Heather Brunner had ample time to resolve this conflict. In an effort to continue our transparency, here are some of the meetings we’ve had with WP Engine over the past 20 months:
February 2023
- February 23: Matt Mullenweg (Automattic CEO) and Heather Brunner (WP Engine CEO) meet for lunch at Eunice Restaurant in Houston.
March 2023
November 2023
- November 28: Matt and Heather Brunner speak via phone.
January 2024
- January 26: Matt and Heather Brunner meet via Zoom.
- January 28: Matt, Toni Schneider, and Heather Brunner meet via Zoom. Matt was heading out on sabbatical and Toni would be continuing discussions as Automattic’s interim CEO.
February 2024
- February 5: Toni and Heather Brunner discuss trademarks and commercial agreement.
March 2024
- March 22: Toni and Paul Maiorana from Automattic meet with Heather, Ezinne Udezue, and Ramadass Prabhakar from WP Engine.
- March 29: Toni and Heather Brunner discuss agreement terms via email.
May 2024
- May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with WP Engine via email.
June 2024
- June 12: Steve Deckert from Automattic meets with Victor Yuan, Carl Hargraves, Ezinne Udezue, and Ramadass Prabhakar from WP Engine.
- June 26: Steve follows up with Victor Yuan. Victor requests a call.
July 2024
- July 3: Steve and Jesse Friedman from Automattic meet via Zoom with Victor Yuan from WP Engine to review the terms a second time.
- July 16: Steve follows up with Victor Yuan, expressing concern about the timeline.
September 2024
- September 17: Mark Davies (Automattic CFO) and Lee Wittlinger (Silver Lake managing director and WP Engine board member) meet via Zoom.
- September 19: Mark and Lee Wittlinger meet via Zoom.
- September 20: Mark and Lee Wittlinger meet by Zoom.
On September 19 and 20, Lee Wittlinger and Heather Brunner did not answer any of Matt’s calls.