Like the best screeds, it doesn’t offer answers. Just provocation.

The company I’m joining is a fifty-person software startup headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Australia and Slovakia. Originally founded in Melbourne, Australia, Nitro has grown rapidly over the past five years. They’ve built a substantial, profitable software licensing business from scratch while also driving over 40 million downloads of their family of free products.

It’s a great time to be joining Nitro. We’re going to take our successful desktop application business and build on it as the foundation for some exciting new initiatives that will live in the cloud. While I can’t go into the details just now, I’m extremely excited about the possibilities ahead for Nitro and our customers. Our goal is to revolutionize the way people work with documents. (Call us ambitious.)

As CMO, I’ll be building and leading a team of talented and highly motivated folks to aggressively establish Nitro’s brand, energize customer growth, and launch the new services we are planning.

We’re living and working in times of extreme change and volatility, particularly in the software world. If there’s a constant, it’s that those companies focused on innovation and great user experiences will continue to see outsized growth. Nitro is very well-positioned for the future, and I’m happy to be joining them now.

A good traveler has no fixed plans / and is not intent upon arriving.

Sonic fraternal twin, amazing result. Edited together from separately posted clips, some years old.

h/t @aweissman

Such a choice is possible because of the most fundamental change in Earth history that the Anthropocene marks: the emergence of a form of intelligence that allows new ways of being to be imagined and, through co-operation and innovation, to be achieved. The lessons of science, from Copernicus to Darwin, encourage people to dismiss such special pleading. So do all manner of cultural warnings, from the hubris around which Greek tragedies are built to the lamentation of King David’s preacher: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…the Earth abideth for ever…and there is no new thing under the sun.” But the lamentation of vanity can be false modesty. On a planetary scale, intelligence is something genuinely new and powerful. Through the domestication of plants and animals intelligence has remade the living environment. Through industry it has disrupted the key biogeochemical cycles. For good or ill, it will do yet more.

- Oliver Morton, from his Economist essay “The Anthropocene: A man-made world”.

Perhaps one of the things Mullenweg can be most proud of is that his platform and the economy that has developed around it sustains the livelihood of probably hundreds of families and thousands of people, drawing on a wide range of talent in a loyal, dedicated community. Between theme developers who sell their products on marketplaces like ThemeForest, companies that make WordPress products and employ support staff, product managers, developers, designers, lawyers, accountants and more, and Automattic itself, the reach is huge.

When open source loyalists say that their philosophy can change the world, you only need to look as far as WordPress to see that mantra in action.

/via The Next Web, h/t ma.tt

A sure sign I've been working at Automattic a long time - my first thought was, "Can we rent this for a meetup?"