Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process.
Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.
It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.
However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!