Wild to think that it’s already been a year since I posted “Thanks Dow Jones, Hello Automattic” on my very first day at Automattic.

Thinking about the last year, it’s easy to sum up the experience so far with just two words: Amazing & Rewarding. A bit cheesy, I know, but 100% true 🙂

My other strong feeling about the last year is that above all else, people matter. When I think back to some of my M&A work in prior jobs, and various due-diligence projects where we did a deep dive on a company, I always held to the belief that beyond a stellar P&L, smart biz model, and various technology assets — what made a company truly great were the people.

And in that regard I’ve been fortunate in my current role at Automattic to be surrounded by smart, talented and motivated people who are also truly the kind of people you want to hang out with and play pool 🙂

Lastly with these kind of anniversaries, it’s always fun to look back and see what’s changed. Here are a few stats for WordPress.com from when I joined VS today:

May/June 2007 – Biggest traffic day: 8.07 million pageviews
May/June 2008 – Biggest traffic day: 35.5 million pageviews

May/June 2007 – Number of blogs on WordPress.com: A bit over 1 million
May/June 2008 – Number of blogs on WordPress.com: 3.36+ million

May/June 2007 – Unique visitors to WordPress.com: 40 million
May/June 2008 – Unique visitors to WordPress.com: 168 million

And as they say — the best is yet to come.