Davos Newbies

In yesterday’s New York Times, second-rate biographer AN Wilson pontificated on the premiership of Tony Blair. I know there is always a mystery about the Times’s choices for its once-prestigious op-ed pages, but I would have thought that someone with a bit of a record on political observation would be the natural choice. Instead, Wilson was able to vent without any apparent need to check facts on the Blair legacy.

Here is a paragraph that particularly got my goat:

Then there was Blair the Efficient, who told us he would improve the educational system, transportation, hospitals: in all these areas, Britain is in a parlous state, with railway accident rates reminding us of the 19th century and true literacy levels much lower than those of the Victorians. As many as one-quarter of British parents now pay for ruinously expensive private education for the children. That is the measure of Mr. Blair’s success with the schools.

Maybe I’m missing an attempt at satire, but there is hardly a true word in the paragraph. Wilson states that one-quarter of parents go private. Where does that figure come from? The true figure is 6.3% of students in England and Wales attend private schools. According to the CIA World Factbook, 99% of the population of the UK is literate. I’m not sure what Wilson means by “true literacy”, but I’m sure it was lower by any measure in Victorian times. I haven’t sourced statistics on railway accidents per mile, but most people reckon the problems with trains in Britain can be traced to the misguided privatization scheme of the former Conservative government. Health? There are certainly tons of problems in the National Health Service, but the health outcomes for the population are better on average than in the US, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

If you want to read thoughtful, well-argued, well-supported analyses of the Blair decade, turn to Philip Stephens in the Financial Times, David Marquand in The Guardian or even the epistolary responses of David Aaronovitch and Matthew Parris in The Times (of London).

My take? I think Stephens gets it pretty much right. Blair led a much-needed transformation domestically and achieved more than he is given credit for and less than many hoped. His social democratic stance has become the political norm in the country, which is wholly to the good. Outside Britain, he did a lot for Africa, the Balkans and the drive to combat climate change. But he will forever be correctly tarred for his terrible misjudgment on Iraq.

Matt Mullenweg, the father of WordPress, provides true insight into the thinking of a good, innovative entrepreneur. Would that they were all like this. Makes me proud to be a WordPress user.

I hardly ever quote at length, but this is worth it in full:

One thing I’ve noticed about talking to certain types of press, particularly mainstream, is that they have a pattern in mind before they write about something, and the better you conform to the pattern the more coverage you get.

I think what they really want is an unusually young founder, possibly with a partner, who stumbled on an idea in an epiphany moment, implemented it in days, and then enjoyed overnight success, preferably capped with some sort of financial hook such as a huge VC funding or selling out to a large company for millions of dollars.

It’s not uncommon to get leading questions trying to hit a point in the above patterns… Yes, WordPress really is four years old. I was 19. No, I didn’t create it alone, if I did you would have never heard of it. Actually, it entered a rather crowded field, not even close to being first. No, not planning to sell it, there isn’t really anything to sell, it’s more of a movement. No, I didn’t make 60 million dollars in 18 months.

What’s worst is I think these stories sell a false promise and hope to people outside of the industry — it attracts the wrong type of entrepreneurs — and inside of the industry it distracts us from what really matters.

Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another bandwagon me-too content management system with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.