Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a 'cancer to WordPress' and urges community to switch providers

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Matt Mullenweg attends TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014

Image Credits: Brian Ach / Stringer via Getty

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”

Mullenweg criticized the company — which has been commercializing the open source WordPress project since 2010 — for profiteering without giving much back, while also disabling key features that make WordPress such a powerful platform in the first place.

For context, WordPress powers more than 40% of the web, and while any individual or company is free to take the open source project and run a website themselves, a number of businesses have sprung up to sell hosting services and technical expertise off the back of it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg set up in 2005 to monetize the project he’d created two years previous; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14-year history, the bulk of which came via a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

Speaking this week at WordCamp US 2024, a WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg pulled no punches in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking to the stage, Mullenweg read out a post he had just published to his personal blog, where he points to the distinct “five for the future” investment pledges made by Automattic and WP Engine, with the former contributing 3,900 hours per week, and the latter contributing just 40 hours.

While he acknowledged that these figures are just a “proxy,” and might not be perfectly accurate, Mullenweg said that this disparity in contributions is notable, as both Automattic and WP Engine “are roughly the same size, with revenue in the ballpark of half-a-billion [dollars].”

Mullenweg has levelled criticism at at least one other big-name web host in the past, accusing GoDaddy of profiteering from the open source project without giving anything meaningful back — more specifically, he called GoDaddy a “parasitic company” and an “existential threat to WordPress’ future”.

In his latest offensive, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, he extended his criticism to the company’s main investor.

“The company [WP Engine] is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your open source ideals, it just wants return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to go vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to — someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?”

In response to a question submitted by an audience member later, asking for clarity on whether Mullenweg was asking WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said that he hoped every WP Engine customer would watch his presentation, and when it comes to the time when they’re renewing their contracts, they should think about their next steps.

“There’s some really hungry other hosts — Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressable, etc, that would love to get that business,” Mullenweg said. “You might get faster performance even switching to someone else, and migrating has never been easier. That’s part of the idea of data liberation. It’s, like, one day of work to switch your site to something else, and I would highly encourage you to think about that when your contract renewal comes up, if you’re currently a customer with WP Engine.”

‘A cancer to WordPress’

In response to the brouhaha that followed the talk, Mullenweg published a follow up blog post, where he calls WP Engine a “cancer” to WordPress. “It’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate.”

Mullenweg said that WP Engine is profiting off the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the commercial services company WP Engine.

“It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.”

Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product, because the core WordPress project stores every change that is made to allow users to revert their content to a previous version — something that WP Engine disables, as per its support page.

While customers can request that revisions be enabled, support only extends to three revisions, which are automatically deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends that customers use a “third-party editing system” if they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is simple — saving money.

“They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content,” Mullenweg contends. “It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content.”

TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for comment, and will update here when we hear back.

Cancer survivor launches Oncology Ventures to improve care

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Ben Freeberg - Oncology Ventures

Image Credits: Ben Freeberg / Oncology Ventures

Ben Freeberg was an associate at venture firm Alpha Partners when he suddenly passed out in the middle of the day. He sought medical help, and after running a few diagnostic tests, doctors didn’t find anything wrong with him.

“They told me I was overreacting,” Freeberg told TechCrunch. But a little less than 12 months later, he was diagnosed with Stage 3a cancer, and it became evident that the incident was the beginning of the disease. “If they detected my cancer earlier, I could have avoided multiple surgeries and maybe even a chemotherapy regimen.”

Being a cancer survivor shaped not only his life but also his career. He set his sights on launching a venture fund devoted to improving cancer care and research. Six and a half years after his diagnosis, Freeberg closed the inaugural Oncology Ventures fund with $30 million in committed capital.

It’s a challenging fundraising environment for emerging managers. But Freeberg’s personal experience and his background as a vice president at United Health’s VC arm Optum Ventures and at Thyme Care, a cancer care startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer, helped him. He attracted capital from prominent healthcare institutions including Cardinal Health, City of Hope and Moffitt Cancer Center.

Unlike other cancer-focused VC firms, including Reed Jobs’ Yosemite, which raised $200 million for its debut fund last year, Oncology Ventures doesn’t invest in drug discovery. The firm is focused on startups that improve care with the help of data and tackle challenges from early detection to choosing optimal treatment plans.

“Treating cancer is employers’ top healthcare cost now,” Freeberg said, adding that investing in startups that help decrease expenses and improve outcomes is a significant opportunity.

The firm, which writes checks ranging from $250,000 to $1.5 million, has already backed seven startups, including Gabbi, an early detection platform for breast cancer; Reimagine Care, a provider of virtual-first cancer and recovery care; and OncoveryCare, a teleclinic for cancer survivors.

Freeberg believes his own experience with cancer helps him connect with founders and win competitive deals.

“I’ve had founders tear up during meetings,” he said. “It was refreshing for them to speak with me about their mission and what they are trying to achieve.”

Freeberg, a solo GP, said he intends to eventually bring on another partner.

The firm’s advisory board includes Dr. Lee Newcomer, former chief medical officer of UnitedHealth Group, and Carolyn Starrett, CEO of Flatiron Health, an oncology information startup acquired by Roche for nearly $2 billion.

Valar Labs debuts AI-powered cancer care prediction tool and secures $22M

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abstract biotech

Image Credits: Microbio

Putting AI to work in the healthcare industry is a tricky business; it’s even more so in oncology, where the stakes are especially high. Biotech startup Valar Labs is aiming high but starting small with a tool that accurately predicts certain treatment outcomes, potentially saving precious time for patients. It has raised $22 million to expand to new cancers and therapies.

Every cancer is different, but many have established best practices honed over years of testing. Sometimes, however, that means going through months of a given treatment regimen in order to find out whether it works.

Bladder cancer is one of these, Valar’s co-founders explained to TechCrunch. A common first treatment recommended by oncologists, called BCG therapy, has about a coin-flip’s chance of working — which is actually pretty good! But wouldn’t it be nice to not have to flip that coin to begin with? That’s the problem Valar is trying to solve.

CEO Anirudh Joshi said that the team met one another at Stanford, where they were looking into AI support for clinical decision-making. In other words, helping both patients and doctors decide which treatment path to take, whether it’s out of two or a dozen.

“What we learned is that the majority of cancer patients today, their treatment plan is really unclear,” Joshi said. “They have options, but it’s hard to say what will do well — you just have to try stuff. So our whole idea was to make this an informed decision. In bladder cancer treatment, only one in two patients responds to standard care. If we knew which patient was which, we wouldn’t have to waste a year of therapy on something that doesn’t work.”

Valar Labs co-founders (from left) Damir Vrabac, Anirudh Joshi and Viswesh Krishna.
Image Credits: Valar Labs

The first test they’ve developed, called Vesta, is focused on this specific situation. And it isn’t some theoretical software solution: The team worked with a dozen medical centers around the world to study over 1,000 patients and learn what exactly makes them respond to certain therapies.

There are two components to the process: first, a visual AI (or computer vision model) trained on thousands of histology images from cancer patients. These thin slices of affected tissue are increasingly being scanned and inspected by experts, though the process can be somewhat approximate.

“This super-high-resolution image tells you a lot about what’s happening at the cellular level of a tumor,” explained CTO Viswesh Krishna. “We run our models on this image to extract a very large amount of features, similar to a genomic panel; we generate thousands of histological reads [i.e. important image features], and take the most important ones that pathologists may be looking at, but can’t really quantify. They might see that they’re different but can’t measure the differences between them.”

Example of a processed histology slide — if you look closely, you can see individual features and cells outlined.
Image Credits: Valar Labs

Joshi was careful to add they are not trying to replace the pathologist, but augment them. You might think of it as a smart microscope that helps an expert make exact measurements in things like cellular damage, immune response and other structures indicative of how the disease is progressing or being inhibited.

“In the end, the doctor is always in the driver’s seat. This is just more data, and they like it. And bringing tests like this is a grounding external perspective, and patients really like that,” Joshi said.

The imaging component, the team noted, was trained on tons of data and is generalizable across many domains and cancers; counting lymphocytes in breast cancer tissue is largely the same task as doing it in skin cancer tissue. But what that count, or any of the other quantifiable biomarkers the model can identify, says about the patient’s likelihood to respond to treatment is much more limited to specific conditions.

Accordingly, the second component of Valar’s system is what really needs to be dialed in on a particular clinical situation. And to that end, the company has demonstrated that, in the specific case of bladder cancer and the standard treatment regimen, its test is far more accurate a predictor of success than any other metric out there.

Risk factors like age, health history, whether one smokes and so on are variably predictive of certain treatment outcomes, but these are “very crude,” Joshi noted. Valar claims that their AI models “outperform all those variables [in predictive power], and are independent of them” — meaning they can be used in addition to the standard risk factor, not just in place of them.

They also noted that it has been important to keep the results interpretable: The last thing doctors or patients need is a black box. So if it says a patient will respond well, that is supported by “because their immune system is doing A and their nuclei are doing B, etc.”

Image Credits: Valar Labs
Image Credits: Valar Labs

The company, which was founded in 2021, has spent much of its effort building out the image model and its first clinical model, for the aforementioned BCG therapy in bladder cancer patients. As Valar noted in a recent announcement, the test identifies individuals with triple the normal risk of not responding to BCG, meaning (at the care team’s discretion) it is likely a better move to try something else. If that saves even one month of wasted effort, it could be life-changing for some.

As anyone who’s lived through cancer care can tell you, not only is every day of treatment incredibly valuable, but confidence is hard to come by. Valar may not offer certainty (near impossible in oncology), but it could be a powerful arrow in caregivers’ quivers.

Coinciding with the impending release of its first product, Valar has closed a $22 million Series A round led by DCVC and Andreessen Horowitz, with Pear VC participating.

“The fundraise was perfectly timed,” Joshi said. “We were able to complete this validation, and now this funding will help fuel the commercialization of Vesta, and at the same time we’re starting to expand to other cancer types.”

The founders said they hope to steadily expand, using a commercial lab model much like genomic testing has followed in recent years, COO Damir Vrabac said: “It’s very similar to these other tests that came before us, it doesn’t add any friction to the health system.” That will hopefully allow them to put the cost on insurance providers, and ultimately lower the cost of care altogether by avoiding unnecessary and ineffective treatments.