Noel Tock, Ukraine, Enterprise and the future of WordPress

Simon Kraft: Right?

Noel Tock: We've kind of found our place in the world as WordPress. And sure, we always come out with new things and that's great. But some of that maturity is also how we consider the project. And for me, because I do humanitarian work in a place where everything is critical in one way or another, you get to see how important of a role different open source software plays, be it WordPress, be it Signal, be a tour, open street maps, whatever that may be. Open tools that empower people to do things even when they have nothing. And that I think is a very powerful frame that we as a community should be reminded of. I didn't go up there to remind people and say, do more, do this or do that. I actually went up there to essentially say thank you. Thank you to the community for building something that is so vital. And then going on to show the community enough different material and experiences either for myself or the world where you can see and feel how vital this is and really trying to zoom out to the biggest picture possible. And if you have that as your base view, that is almost a first principle then or a foundation of how you may approach the software in the future or be reminded of why you came here in the first place.

Simon Kraft: What's the conclusion out of all of that for the WordPress project as we know it today?

Noel Tock: I think it's a conclusion again that goes back to first principles of open source and that is that commits and contributions compound create more value together so when we collaborate to build things we create more value and as we invest more units of our contribution and effort into this project this then translates into the ability for the communities we power and help power through wordpress for them to then produce more units themselves. So because I have charities on WordPress, I can do more stuff than if I had to pay for something, if it took me more time, if it was very complicated, whatever it may be, this has made my life easier. But more importantly, I could do more with the same resources, having started with WordPress, than with nothing or something else that just, you know, was much harder to fit in. So it's really about this force multiplier that WordPress is for humanity.

Simon Kraft: How can we drive that forward in a meaningful way?

Noel Tock: Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's not a reactive thing. It's not us saying, hey, we need to drive this forward more. I think that feeling is why many of us are here in the first place, which was a proactive, hey, I kind of want to go check this out. Hey, I'll contribute. I know I'm not going to get anything back. You know, Petya had a great talk where she spoke about WordPress in Bulgaria, the impact that it has had. And she was someone who said, hey, I'm just going to translate WordPress to Bulgarian. That is a proactive feeling, a drive, a desire for purpose. I can't force anyone to have that. Many people just do it themselves, because at least I believe that most of humanity wants to do well. So naturally, when we have a conference with 2,000 people, there's a lot of people that want to do good and create good things. And sure, communities can go up and down with different issues and whatever it may be but that's a constant factor but ultimately it comes down to the individual's drive it's not something i can tell you you should commit more you should contribute more that's it brings nothing when someone feels it inside of them to do something for something specific inside of a project like wordpress be it contributing open data sets open 3d designs whatever it may be then they feel a niche that they have to scratch and most people don't stop till they've at least tried is.

Simon Kraft: That scratching an itch also what what made you do the work you do today like being in ukraine working in some from what i see online very very risky looking rescue missions.

Noel Tock: Yeah everything is purpose i don't do anything in my life that i don't want to do and for me there's a beautiful connection from wordpress to frontline evacuations and humanitarian work i do to anything else that is deeply interconnected to this feels good. This feels right. This is the right thing for me to do. I've been fortunate that I've had good jobs in the past and then was able to create my own little theme shop or whatever. And that gave me a lot of confidence, right? When those first like $99 came in on PayPal at 24 minutes past midnight, I thought, I was like, wow, I am a free man, you know? And at some point, you know, you build a business and you do other things and that gives you a lot of confidence to just act on the feelings you have about things and yeah at some point you know when you're in a place like ukraine you also meet people who don't have as much freedom and you feel a responsibility towards these people because they're not just people anymore they may be your friends they may be your neighbors your community i don't really believe in i have no connection to ukraine but to me i have i have a connection to people because borders don't necessarily define me. I feel much more connected on a global level than, you know, having to have a reason to go do something.

Simon Kraft: How did you going to Ukraine came to be in the first place?

Noel Tock: I'd say there's a couple early like building blocks of my life where, let's go to the oldest one. I've been working with animal charities or humane societies for 17 years, 18 years or so. Very, very, very extremely part-time, helping with websites and things like that. But just, you know, at least getting a feel for it. Then with 27, I'm 43 now. With 27, I said, I'm going to have my own business by the time I'm 30. And I'm going to work in NGOs or, you know, have like a big kind of contribution to NGOs when I'm 40. So it's a sense of urgency around life. Because I've come from humane societies, which are dog shelters or animal shelters, you realize there's a lot of crazy people, right? Like they're just nuts. They have no idea of fundraising, admin, any of that stuff. And that's okay because they're incredible with animals. The passion is incredible. So dogs bleeding out on the side of the street, you know, they jump out of the car, they'll take their t-shirt off, cover the animal, you know, like try their best. And you always want passionate operational people like that. And I knew that at the same time, there's been a lot of good advice of, you know, first do some business, then get into charity work. And I'm happy I did that because I feel like I bring like a different facet to that. I'm able to compliment extremely passionate people or dog experts, right? So two of the people I work with, Pavel and Sveta, are both multiple national champions of hunting with dogs, so gun dogs. So, you. Shoot a bird or whatever and then the dog just gets it and all that kind of stuff which is quite popular in east ukraine so i think pavel's won 19 championships in ukraine which is probably more than everybody else combined and sveta has done show dogs and a bunch of other things she's also trained search and rescue dogs so you understand like they are in some ways they are crazy dog people and i was you know hoping to bring that facet to it which i think i did you know i brought a lot of like stability around marketing and strategy and how do we set these things up how do we do things but you know at some point you know you're driving through a place like volchonsk and explosions going off and you also realize you're the crazy person too so it's been a long way around to answer your question now very directly about how did i actually get into ukraine as opposed to this sort of backbone to everything a friend called me up and asked me if i could help.

Simon Kraft: Did your friend call and be like hey could you be on the next train to ukraine and.

Noel Tock: He's like hey i'm doing rescue of dogs in ukraine he said you should come and i'm like okay i'll come as soon as my hip surgeries are done i was supposed to have hip surgeries then uh got new images they said actually the muscles around your hips look good and i already had like an airbnb booked and stuff which is really silly and uh i just i walked out of the doctor's office i was three meters away from the doctor's office and i called him i said i'm coming where are you now you know i think a lot of life is people ask themselves too much the question why why should i do this why that why that the point is i think the more important question with a lot of things is why not it's much easier to answer the question why not and then you're not looking at the fear or the downside or what does that mean you just why not, it's a very there's a lightness to it and it's it's much easier to answer from the gut than it is to answer of why so.

Simon Kraft: What are your plans now i mean you're in basel right now.

Noel Tock: Obviously i.

Simon Kraft: Guess you'll be going back to ukraine.

Noel Tock: Yeah i'll take take a bit of time off now visit family and all that kind of stuff and then towards the end of july or so i head back in country i.

Simon Kraft: Guess that's what you do all that you're not there 300.

Noel Tock: No no no i'm there probably like 60 of the year i'd say that yeah it's just a nice tie in to wordpress because i will view wordpress as a form of humanitarian software so for me there's macro micro kind of things i do and so wordpress i started off in a different place with wordpress you know like being you know the person who created the first meetup group in switzerland becoming a co-founder of wordcamp europe i've led two of the swiss wordcamps a lot of community stuff of just like hey let's bring people together Now I feel like I'm trying to transition more into the purpose of WordPress for what it means for people who don't know WordPress or not part of WordPress, but they are part of trying to solve real problems in the world. And it's great that I can balance that with having an agency whereby we do enterprise WordPress, we run things at scale, we have big ideas, we're ambitious about things. And it means that we have a bit of a ping pong between, you know, enterprise, and then the sort of open source contribution, humanitarian side of WordPress. And being able to be playful like that, between these different areas of WordPress always keeps things vibrant, interesting. New ideas always come to be. Last night, we had the announcement of the Farah project. I'm just very impressed by the press release and everything that has been said, because it obviously lines up with the values of democratizing publishing, and then adds this layer of governance and decentralization. But I think it will probably spark a wave of innovation and sort of renewed interest because of the ability it provides to do things.

Simon Kraft: A bit of a tangent.

Noel Tock: Please last.

Simon Kraft: Time i interviewed.

Noel Tock: You which.

Simon Kraft: You probably forgot because it was ages ago was in 2018 in belgrade.

Noel Tock: I was gonna say it.

Simon Kraft: Was wordpress in 2019.

Noel Tock: That was my my prediction yeah yeah i think you know my my predictions have mostly been along the lines of wordpress is getting pushed deeper in the stack it's less of a customer facing tool it's more of like a tool and backend, right? And I think if 10, 15 years ago, you walked around and you asked people at WordPress where it was, everybody would kind of say, oh, it's a blogging tool. It's a blogging tool. Very customer, consumer facing. And now we've, you know, we've lost a lot of that due to just the inactivity of marketing and product marketing. And then also the rise of other solutions and website builders, right? Like in 2008, there wasn't a Squarespace or a Webflow or whatever. In that regard, there was a few other things kind of brewing, starting, but...

Simon Kraft: Not in a meaningful way.

Noel Tock: Yes, not a meaningful way. Thank you. And that's changed a lot. And that's obviously led to the sort of stagnation of WordPress growth. But at the same time, we are 43% of domains on the open web. Let's go.

Simon Kraft: That is a big one.

Noel Tock: Yeah, it's a big one. Like to me, that number is a lagging indicator. Anyway, it's not representative of any kind of future success. But it is a very large number. And you have to ask at some point, like where does saturation kind of occur? And i think i predicted peak wordpress had already passed uh when i did belgrade and that was true because i think 15 16 was our peak in terms of consumer interest.

Simon Kraft: Not necessarily market share but that was.

Noel Tock: Yeah yeah exactly it was a market share no no no but it was peak wordpress in terms of just the interest you know that growth curve and a gradient wasn't there wouldn't.

Simon Kraft: You have loved to be wrong on that prediction.

Noel Tock: I mean that would have been crazy i don't know what that would have like meant for us it feels like the software would have had to be fundamentally different, You have to think like a lot outside the box. Does WordPress somehow evolve to become like a web operating system of some sorts for people, right? Like, does it take both content knowledge? Does it also do chat? Is it like Notion, right? Does it like how many of these elements does it try to incorporate into one thing and then become not just a website, but then an application of many things, right? And I think that's where Headless tried to go a bit, but we never were able to capitalize on Headless product marketing. We never engaged in that. So we missed out on a lot of that opportunity, even though WordPress had more capabilities out of the box than the emerging cool Series A startups that like content full or whatever.

Simon Kraft: Well, you mentioned the marketing team not being there, really.

Noel Tock: So the foundation or automatic or whatever doesn't have a professionalized marketing team that has a annual budget, has KPIs to deliver against. This project should probably have given its size yeah so you know in some ways that's why on the enterprise side we created the scale consortium and that's a handful of wordpress enterprise agencies trying to come together to tell a more consistent and succinct enterprise wordpress message so we're trying to bring our product marketing together to have a bit of a enterprise product marketing facet whatever you want to call it but we really needed that across almost all of WordPress for these different verticals. Because it was cool when WordPress was the all-in-one, you know, in 2010, you could advertise it like a Nike shoe or an iPhone or whatever, you know, just one tagline, you sell the thing, everybody loves it, everybody uses it. But at this point, every single vertical and niche we compete in has three dedicated competitors inside of it that have airtight messaging, positioning that is very, very specific to that vertical and that niche or that geography. And that makes it very hard for people like us in enterprise where your brand and the perception you have in the industry is very important. That's also the same place where we got the statements or quotes such as no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. Right. And that's a big enterprise kind of thing. So perception is important.

Simon Kraft: That's true. What's the biggest competitive for WordPress in the enterprise segment?

Noel Tock: I feel like we've seen some splitting. There was probably a time when it was AEM, Adobe Experience Manager. And obviously, Adobe Experience Manager is now part of a larger suite, which is Adobe Experience Cloud. So you have the personalization, advertising, media assets, it creates quite a comprehensive suite. And the products that took that all in one suite approach were known as DXPs, digital experience platforms. And that was a thing, you know, five, six years ago and never really took off because at some point, also because of the drive of COVID and the increase of just so many online tools, funding and everything, we started getting lots of small good products and being able to put together your constellation of small good products became more of a composable stack as opposed to the all-in-one suite. So we see fragmentation in many ways where people could have a large CMS or they make it like a large CMS could be like .CMS or WordPress or Sitecore or something like that. And then a small CMS could be more like a headless one, like Sanity, which is beloved by developers, but still, you know, a bit of a challenge to be at that enterprise kind of scale because it lacks some of the features, let's say WordPress has. So there's a fragmented landscape, but ultimately it will come down to Adobe Acquio, which is in front of Drupal, Sitecore to a certain to a certain extent, and then Optimizely, which was previously the A-B testing software, but acquired EpiServer, which was an old CMS, which was quite popular in the Nordics and the European region. So yeah, it's a diverse landscape that, again, back to my other comment, like, which vertical are you in? Which geography are you in? That has a larger impact, you know? What was WordPress's biggest competitor in the U.S. In 2007? Do you know?

Simon Kraft: No idea.

Noel Tock: I would probably say Joomla.

Simon Kraft: Was Joomla big in the U.S.?

Noel Tock: At the time, I think so. What was the biggest competitor of WordPress at the same time in Switzerland?

Simon Kraft: I don't know. If Switzerland did anything like Germany, it was probably something like Type 3.

Noel Tock: Exactly.

Simon Kraft: Yeah.

Noel Tock: Completely different geographies. And I mean, that was a time when, you know, there was like three CMSs in the world. So we already had, you already saw the break, you know, just the diversification at this point. And you can just multiply that by a thousand today.

Simon Kraft: DXPs never really took off.

Noel Tock: Yeah.

Simon Kraft: You still believe in Altus though.

Noel Tock: We don't call it a DXP. I mean, not anymore. No, no, no. But you did. We think that the needs behind DXP are valid in terms of what people are trying to achieve. And yeah, we try to go down that route of providing that all-in-one suite, but like a light version, like DXP light, I guess. The WordPress version, because we also have personalization, A-B testing and things like that. And also wanted to create a larger ecosystem around CDPs and integrating with CDPs or CRMs. Yeah, it came quickly, left quicker. I think that's probably the way to look at it again because of how I described the composable sort of push and the amount of innovation that was happening there and open source is a big part of that right when we look at Next.js and everything like we're talking about thousands of open source tools which is fascinating so even in my presentation yesterday when I looked at the top 50 charities in Ukraine and I think 8 or 12 of them or 10 of them were on custom sites it was almost all next wow yeah well.

Simon Kraft: Let's see what the future holds for wordpress then.

Noel Tock: Yeah i think it's a specialization you know it's uh you can't just expect wordpress to be one size fits all i mean that ship has sailed a long time ago you do have to niche down specialize like even us as human made you know we could just be a global wordpress agency 10 years ago 15 years ago and now we are active as a enterprise agency in north america within higher education for instance we did harvard gazette like this this is a vertical we go after because we feel that has a higher chance of success interesting okay.

Simon Kraft: I would love to to talk about humane.

Noel Tock: And strategy with you but we have.

Simon Kraft: To have to wrap things up thank you so much for.

Noel Tock: Your You're more than welcome. Thank you.

Simon Kraft: Stay safe out there.

Noel Tock: We'll try.

Simon Kraft: And I will catch you again, maybe next year. And then we see.

Noel Tock: We'll do a catch up on predictions.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Sounds like a plan.

Noel Tock: Thank you so much. Thank you.