Automattic Rebuilds Its Board After 33-Hour Fight for Control
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has appointed a new board of directors, weeks after the previous directors voted to place him on paid leave in an attempt to remove him from the board. TechCrunch
Mullenweg shared the new lineup with staff on Friday, Sept. 25, in the company's announcements channel in Slack. The note closed a brief fight over control and put formal authority back with the founder.
The new directors are author Hugh Howey, who wrote the Silo book series, author Amy Chan, who wrote Breakup Bootcamp, IRL co-founder Henry Khatachryan, and Krutal Desai, who co-founded the social app IRL with Khatachryan. Mullenweg, who founded Automattic and has served on its board since 2005, remains as CEO and director.
Three advisers were named alongside the board. They are Curio Studio co-founder Jaime Waydo, June co-founder Matt Van Horn, and KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah. Their roles were described to staff as advisory, separate from board membership.
Earlier in September, the prior board had voted to place Mullenweg on paid leave. He regained control 33 hours later, removing or accepting the resignations of the directors involved. The interval was brief. Authority never fully transferred.
During that interval, Chief Financial Officer Mark Davies served as interim CEO, a temporary stand-in. After his return, Mullenweg told staff that for purposes of Delaware law, the U.S. state rules under which many companies are incorporated, he holds the roles of CEO, President, Treasurer and Secretary. That consolidation leaves no doubt about who can sign for the company.
Automattic is the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr and WooCommerce. Mullenweg co-founded WordPress and has been Automattic CEO since 2014. He left his prior role in late 2005 to found Automattic, and also serves on the non-profit boards of EcoAmerica, Illuminate and the WordPress Foundation.
For anyone who builds websites and stores on Automattic systems, the broader context here is stability. A full board replacement after a 33-hour control contest puts formal authority in one person. Decisions have a clear owner. Escalation paths are short. The tradeoff is less internal check on that owner, which puts more weight on steady execution and uptime to keep trust with customers and self-hosted operators, people who run WordPress software on their own servers.
In my view, the makeup of the board is worth noting. Two authors, two founders from a consumer social app, and advisers drawn from product, analytics and hardware startups is an uncommon mix for a company running publishing and commerce platforms at scale. It favors creator and end-user perspective over enterprise software or infrastructure operations experience. That can sharpen product judgment. It can also leave gaps in audit, compliance and large-systems oversight that will need to be covered elsewhere in management.
Over the longer term, the pattern still points toward continuity. Publishing and commerce tools work best when the underlying platform stays available, predictable and open to extension by outside developers. A settled board, even one closely aligned with the founder, gives teams a basis to plan against. If this reset ends the governance dispute, engineers and publishers get what they need most, which is a quiet stretch to ship.
