Stephen Wolfram on 28 Years of Remote Work

Read more about Stephen Wolfram in “The Machine that Turns Ideas into Real Things.”

Stephen Wolfram started out on an academic career path, but eventually realized that founding a company would allow him to pursue his scientific work more efficiently. He’s served as a remote CEO of Wolfram Research for the last 28 years. In this episode, Stephen shares with host Matt Mullenweg — another remote CEO — his perspective on the value of geo-distribution, and the processes his partially-distributed company uses to make world-changing software. 

The full episode transcript is below.

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MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, howdy. Welcome to the Distributed podcast. I’m your host, Matt Mullenweg. 

I got the chance to catch up with today’s guest, Stephen Wolfram, because my company Automattic invited him to give a talk at our annual company meetup in Orlando, Florida. This is a magical occasion where all 950+ Automatticians (which is what we call ourselves) get together to meet up face-to-face. This gives us an opportunity to hang out, break bread, and collaborate over the course of a few days. We also invite a number of speakers, smart people like Stephen.

Stephen’s been leading Wolfram Research for 32 years, which is a really long time for a tech CEO. The company has pioneered a lot of different technologies in computation and education. Wolfram Research has about 850 employees, many of whom are scattered across 29 countries, so it’s pretty close in size to Automattic. 

But Stephen’s been doing the remote CEO thing for way longer than I have — about 28 years! So naturally I wanted to pick his brain, which is an amazing brain, on why he chose to go the partially-distributed route, and learn about how he’s led his company remotely for longer than just about anybody. 

Alright. Let’s get started. 

MATT: Welcome. This is Distributed with Matt Mullenweg, and today we have Stephen Wolfram, who is the Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, known for things such as Mathematica, an amazing tome called A New Kind of Science — which I guess you worked on for about ten and a half years — created Wolfram Alpha, which is one of the intelligence engines behind Alexa and Siri…

STEPHEN WOLFRAM: Siri and other things, yeah.

MATT: Yes, and of many other things. And just an incredible amount. I encourage you to google him. Go down the rabbit hole of all the amazing stuff and people he’s worked with and everything. Thank you so much for joining today.

STEPHEN: Nice to be here.

MATT: Part of the reason, in addition to all those fun things, that I wanted you to be here is your company is a similar size to Automattic, around 800-900, and is geo-distributed as well.

STEPHEN: Yes.

MATT: You have been a remote CEO since 1991.

STEPHEN: That is correct.

MATT: And your company goes back to..?

STEPHEN: Late ’86.

MATT: Possibly one of the older geo-distributed companies I’m familiar with.

STEPHEN: I think so. I mean, I know —  

MATT: It’s got to be one of the longest, if it’s not—  

STEPHEN: Yes, you’re right.

MATT: Maybe there’s something out there but that’s got to be one of the longest.

STEPHEN: Right.

MATT: That’s pretty cool. What caused you to be geo-distributed at the beginning?

STEPHEN: So OK, the first thing was, I started the company. This was the second company I started. The first company I started, I started when I was 21 years old and that was in Los Angeles, and that company was a pretty traditional company. It was venture-capital funded, I brought in a CEO, I didn’t CEO it myself, I was the technical person —  

MATT: Did they call it adult supervision back then?

STEPHEN: No, no they didn’t. I mean that company went through various mergers and things and eventually went public some time in the 1990s in a very undistinguished IPO. So anyway, so my first company was not distributed at all, it sat in this building near the Los Angeles International Airport. [laughter] 

I was involved in basic science and I had developed this area of science that I guess now gets called complexity theory, and so I tried to figure out what university would give me the best deal to start a research center in this kind of science. So I went around to lots of universities, and the one that won that was the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. But I said, “OK, I’m going to start a company that builds the tools that I want to have for myself and that I perfectly well know are going to be useful to lots of other people in the world.”

So we started the company in Champaign, Illinois, which is not probably most people’s first choice for where to start a tech company, even back in 1986, but it was great. We got terrific people from the area — it’s a good university, producing a lot of interesting graduates. We were the only game in town, so to speak, and I think we’re still the largest tech operation there. So we started in a slightly outlying place. Then [we] got off to a very quick start, up to a couple hundred employees, maybe 150 or something. I was injecting ideas into this thing at a very high rate.

MATT: So when you inject ideas, you’re coming and saying, “Hey we should do this thing.”

STEPHEN: Yes. And getting more and more frustrated that they weren’t getting done. I have to say that just a few years ago we finally finished my 1991 to-do list. 

MATT: Ha! [laughter]

STEPHEN: So it’s done, that one is — it finally, finally happened.

MATT: That one’s… Yeah, the thing that got you to leave is now all the way complete. 

STEPHEN: Yes, right. My original plan had been to build these tools that will, among other things, allow me to do the basic science that I wanted to do. I said, “Let me step back a bit and let me go off and spend some chunk of my time doing basic science, and let the company grow up and we’ll see what happens next. Maybe there will be a coup and somebody else will say ‘I can run this better than you can’.”

MATT: So everyone was in the office except for you?

STEPHEN: Not quite. What happened was — I’m trying to remember how many people weren’t in the office at that point, but I was definitely the main go-offsite person.

MATT: What were the tools at that time? Was that because you had been in a university setting and were familiar with email or internet?

STEPHEN: Yes, well I started using email in 1976. So that was —  

MATT: That was pretty familiar to you.

STEPHEN: Yes, right. It was modems dialing up. My email would arrive in bunches every 15 minutes. And I was on the phone a bunch. I had hired a chief operating officer.

MATT: I was going to ask what the exec team looked like. You had a COO who could be the on-the-ground lead?

STEPHEN: Right, who was with us for six or seven years. And he did a good job of maturing the company from being high-growth to something which had good systems in place and could roll forward. 

MATT: And this second iteration of the company, did you also raise venture capital, or did you decide to take a different approach to have the longevity?

STEPHEN: No, no, not at all. Version two — I was the CEO from the beginning and forever type [of] thing, no outside money ever. It’s been a shame for me that I’ve never really had a quote “business partner.” I think of myself as pretty average at business kinds of things but I’m not totally incompetent. 

Personally I view it as an optimization. You can do things that are very commercial, but a little bit intellectually boring. And it tends to be the case that you’re doing a lot of rinse-and-repeat stuff if you want to grow purely commercially, so to speak, or you can do things that are wonderful intellectually, but the world doesn’t happen to value them and you can’t make commercial sense that way. And I’ve tried to navigate something in between those two where I’m really intellectually interested and where it’s commercially successful enough to sustain the process for a long time. 

MATT: I love finding that intersection.

STEPHEN: Oh yeah.

MATT: And it feels like now that the world has caught up a little bit to voice assistance and the natural language processing stuff you’ve been working on forever, that you found — is that the main business model for Wolfram Research now?

STEPHEN: No, no.

MATT: Oh, I would’ve thought that licensing drove it because there must be billions of users of these voice assistants.

STEPHEN: There are. Yes. And it’s a good source of revenue. At this point it’s fairly diverse. There’s a big chunk of licensing software but a lot of that — there’s, for example, the academic sector, there’s site licenses to universities where basically the goal is to make the software free for people to use at universities, and we’re complete now in the U.S. in the sense that all the major universities have site licenses. So if you’re any kind of major university in the U.S., you will be able to use our software for free. And there’s a lot of commercial use of software where we