Episode 13
In this episode, Michelle had a great conversation with Carrie Wheeler, President of the Liquid Web Family of Brands. We discussed the past year at StellarWP, the future of StellarWP and Liquid Web, and a little bit of everything in between, including what the president of a corporation like ours does on a day-to-day basis.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe, brought to you by StellarWP.
Welcome to WP Constellations from StellarWP, bringing you stories from around the WordPress universe. We call it the StellarVerse around here. But when you get beyond StellarWP, it is the WP Universe and I love that. And today I’m really excited to be able to talk to Carrie Wheeler. Hey Carrie, how are you?
[00:00:35] Carrie: Morning. Good to see you, Michelle.
[00:00:37] Michelle: It’s so good to see you too. And I’ve been excited to have you come on as like the capstone of our year because it’s a really stellar year. I’m going to lean into the puns today. It’s been a stellar year at StellarWP.
[00:00:51] Carrie: It has been interstellar, if you might.
[00:00:55] Michelle: Exactly. Galactic even. Yes.
And you are, of course, one of the stars here at StellarWP and Liquid Web. And it’s just great to spend some time with you today. And actually, I’m just excited for people who don’t already know you to know you and learn a little bit more about you and what’s been going on with StellarWP. So I would love for you to just give us a little bit about your journey in tech and what’s brought you into your current role.
[00:01:22] Carrie: You know, I hate to give away my age, but I have now been in technology for three decades and so I’ve seen a lot. And sometimes when I reflect with my husband on our careers (we’re both in technology), it’s amazing the journey that we’ve been able to witness firsthand and participate in. I mean, how exciting is that?
I have a business degree. I had no intention of going into technology. And I was hired by a consulting firm. And my first day, they handed me a book on COBOL coding and said, welcome to consulting.
So I learned how to code. I was terrible at it.
But what I ended up finding out that I was actually quite good at was more design architecture.
And over time that evolved into what (really) I bring to the technology space, which is translating business problems into technology solutions and translating technical speak to business solutions. So really that’s been the foundation of my career.
I spent several years in consulting and then spent about two decades in telecommunications. So I grew up at MCI, AT&T and decided that while I loved it and I learned a lot, I decided that I really wanted to work with smaller businesses, and in a smaller business with small businesses, because you can see the impact you make every day.
And it’s one of the things I love most about Liquid Web, family of brands and our Stellar brands is you get to see firsthand the amazing things that our customers are doing on our platform. And it’s just so inspiring.
And so that’s been really enjoyable this last ten years, working more closely with small and mid-sized businesses.
But in terms of just that broad career, I mean, I can remember one of the first products I worked on was one of our first paging products, and you could get 140 characters a month for $69.
And so to think about working on that project, and that product which was amazing and made a ton of money for MCI to where we are now.
[00:03:48] Michelle: Right.
[00:03:48] Carrie: Tweets are a billion a day and free. It’s just been a great journey, and I’ve enjoyed every step of it, but I think I’m most pleased with where I am now and the people I’m working with now.
[00:04:00] Michelle: And this year, you became the president of Liquid Web family of brands, which includes Stellar, Nexcess, and Liquid Web, obviously, and then also Modern Tribe. So all of those things have kind of come together and, wow, it’s been fun to, I mean, I’m not going to lie. I think people know me. They know how much I love representation. And to have a woman sitting at the top of what we do here at Liquid Web makes me proud. So I don’t know if I have the right to be proud of you, but I really am. So I just want you to know that.
[00:04:32] Carrie: Thank you. We have worked really hard to create diversity and equality here at the company, and I think since Jim and I came to Liquid Web in 2015, the percentage of women at the company has grown 400%.
And the number we now are almost 50/50 for women in leadership.
And so it’s been a great journey, and we’re super proud of that. We don’t shy away from it either.
[00:05:00] Michelle: It feels really good to be in a role in tech where women aren’t the minority in a business. And so, yeah, the work that you’ve done shows and I’m truly appreciative of what allows those of us who are also women in the company to be able to hold the positions we do and not just have to say “yes” all the time, but also be able to bring our creativity and ideas and be heard. And I think that’s super important. So thank you for that.
[00:05:23] Carrie: Well, at the end of the day, we’re a meritocracy, so performance matters, and you hire the best people for the job and you give them a voice and let them show their creativity and good things happen.
[00:05:33] Michelle: Absolutely. So what does a typical day look like? Your schedule is crazy because we’ve been trying to get together for a while, and your schedule. My schedule, whatever. But your schedule is insane. So tell me, what do you do? What does a typical day look like for Carrie Wheeler?
[00:05:51] Carrie: Well, it’s funny. Sometimes people think in my position, I probably control my own calendar, but really, I don’t always control my own calendar. There’s a lot of context switching. There’s a lot of things that come up last minute. But in general, I have a philosophy that you should approach your time right. Your time is the most valuable thing that you have, and my time is the most valuable thing I have to give to this company in terms of where I focus and how I help the team and how I help our customers. And so I start each week and each day purposefully, right? So I always feel like I should spend a percentage of my time with customers, a percentage of my time on strategy, and a percentage of my time on making sure the operations are running smoothly.
And that varies day to day in any one day. Today I have this podcast that we’re doing, which is great, and then I’m meeting with some potential investors, and then I have a really interesting call later with a potential client and our legal team to see if we can come to terms on some advanced security options that they require. And then, it’s December, so I’ll have some budget meetings later today, and then anything can happen along the way, right? A customer escalation. Our investors might give me a call and have a question.
But in general, I spend most of my time either working on our strategic plans, making sure we’re executing, or helping the team break down barriers to execute on really important product development initiatives or strategic initiatives, and spending time with my team and doing some development and coaching. So generally, my calendar is every 30 minutes from, say, 8:30 to 6:30 most days. And my time is very fluid. I don’t really do the Monday through Friday nine to five thing.
I’m sort of like support 24/7, 365. So you just sort of have to stay flexible.
[00:08:01] Michelle: I remember when I was like a previous career, when I was working in higher education, and I ran a team at the University of Rochester, and I said to my daughter, she’s like, can you come to this tonight? Or whatever? She was like, maybe eight or nine at the time. I said, oh, I can’t.
I have a work engagement. She said, but you’re the boss. Don’t you have people to do those things for you? And I said, oh, honey, that’s not how it works. When you’re the boss, you have all the responsibilities.
[00:08:26] Carrie: It’s so true. Well, first of all, everybody has a boss, so it’s cool to have the responsibility I do, and I’m really proud of the team, but I have a boss, my boss has a boss and they have a boss too. And so you just have to sort of roll with that.
[00:08:47] Michelle: Absolutely.
In 2021/2022, there was like a counter going on at Post Status of all the acquisitions that were happening in WordPress and there seemed to be this like, and we were involved in that quite a bit. As a matter of fact, that’s when I came on board with GiveWP. So over the last few years, Liquid Web has acquired quite a few WordPress products.
What’s the impetus for Liquid Web to be “all in” on WordPress and WordPress products and WordPress hosting, that kind of stuff? Can you give us a little bit of a background for that?
[00:09:20] Carrie: Yeah, it’s been a great journey. I think when I first came to Liquid Web I really didn’t know much if anything, about WordPress.
I was really what I would consider a complete newbie in that ecosystem. And one of the things that Jim and I have always focused on in the businesses that we’ve had is it all starts with your customer, right? What is your customer doing on your platform? What do they appreciate? Why do they spend their hard earned money with you?
And so the first year we were here, we went into great lengths to understand what our customers were using our hosting platform for. And what we found is over 50% of the workloads on our core hosting, whether it was dedicated servers or VPS, were running WordPress.
Really we sought to understand and started meeting people in the ecosystem of WordPress, talking to our customers, many of which our customers were influencers in the ecosystem. And so we really started learning about that and decided, well, if 50% of our customers at a minimum are running WordPress, then we should be engaged in that ecosystem. And the more we learned about it, the more we loved it, right?
It’s creative, it runs 43% of the sites on the Internet. I mean it’s a massive ecosystem full of creative, professional, interesting people.
And our small businesses depend on it, right? They run on it and they depend on it and helps them pay their bills and put food on their table. So it’s a really important sort of what I would call cultural and technical ecosystem that’s very fascinating.
And then part of our strategy has always been we help businesses online make money online and there’s so many ways to do that in the WordPress ecosystem, whether you’re a designer, a developer, a creator, a freelancer, or you’re a small business leveraging that technology.
So we did a ton of research. We expanded our footprint in our cloud platform to run WordPress, WooCommerce and even Magento as well.
And when we started learning about that, we identified the top 20 reasons or types of sites and stores that people are building on the Internet.
And we believe that technology trends towards simplification and abstraction. And we started coming across all of these wonderful plugin companies that had one goal in mind and that was to make WordPress easier, right, to facilitate the continued growth of WordPress as a platform.
And so we made a list and a framework of the top reasons that developers and businesses are trying to make money online using WordPress. And then we set out a strategy to go acquire them, right?
And it’s all the reasons you would think. It’s ecommerce; it’s donations; it’s learning; it’s ticketing and event management; it’s personal use, right? So there’s all sorts of reasons, but we had a really distinct strategy and went to acquire those, all in an effort to make WordPress easier to use for the community. And that’s a journey, not a destination. We’re still working on that, but that’s really how it evolved.
And we couldn’t be more pleased to have StellarWP, a culmination of really impressive products that help the ecosystem.
[00:13:21] Michelle: Obviously I agree, because I continue to work here and love the things that we do. One of the things that impresses me, I will tell you, I was freelancing, right? So between my career in higher education and coming to work at Give and now at Stellar, I freelanced for five years and I probably was using WordPress for at least six years before I even knew there was a community-like ecosystem. Like I was buying plugins, I did that kind of thing. But the community is what I think elevates us beyond just an ecosystem where people are buying and selling and things like that into this amazing, just weird, wonderful group of people all over the world. And what I think is impressive, and I’m not blowing sunshine up your skirt because this is true, but what I really think is impressive is that you go to WordCamps. I’ve seen you at WordCamps. I’ve watched you talk to, not just like not looking over people’s shoulders to see who’s impressive that you can talk to, but who wants to talk to you and our regular customers. And hey, this person just has their blog, not this multimillion dollar website. And I love watching you be in the community and doing those things. So thank you for being that person who really does care.
[00:14:34] Carrie: I really enjoy it. I mean, the thing is, I learn the most from talking directly to folks like that.
I’m just always fascinated by what people are trying to do and accomplish. And so that’s where you really learn the most. And you just meet really cool people to add to your kind of network of humans, I guess so. I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. I don’t get to go to a lot of the local ones. I’ve been to Birmingham and Atlanta when they’re close to here. Of course, I was in San Antonio a couple of years ago, so I don’t get to go as many local ones as I’d like to, but certainly the larger ones quite a bit.
[00:15:19] Michelle: Before we continue with the rest of our questions, you’ve mentioned Jim a couple of times. For people who are listening who don’t know who Jim is, can you just tell us who Jim is so that I don’t forget to introduce him.
[00:15:31] Carrie: He is Jim Geiger. He’s our CEO, our chief executive officer.
It’s kind of a new organization called Cloud One Digital. As everyone knows, Liquid Web, that’s traditional hosting products. We have Nexcess, which is a really good e-commerce platform. And then we have our Stellar brands and Modern Tribe that make up our Liquid Web brands. But we also have some other really large companies within our holding company, Servers.com, we acquired in April of 2023. And they’re primarily focused in Europe. They do really large scale bare metal platforms. So Jim is my boss. He’s our CEO.
[00:16:19] Michelle: Back to that “everybody has a boss,” right?
[00:16:21] Carrie: Everybody has a boss. I have a great one. And speaking of advancing women in technology, he’s been my champion for 15 years now.
That’s who Jim is. So when I talk about Jim, my boss and partner, we’ve been together so long now that we’ve gone through this journey together. And so he just, where he goes, I go, and vice versa. So he kind of rolls off my tongue without thinking that people might not know who he is.
[00:16:49] Michelle: Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we mentioned who he was.
So when you think about Liquid Web and StellarWP, of course, because that’s my little corner of, ok it’s not little, but that’s my corner of the web. What do you think makes us such a great place to work?
[00:17:06] Carrie: Well, I think people talk about culture a lot, and it’s hard to put your finger on that. To me, specifically, is we have a super simple philosophy and that is we want to work with smart people that we like.
[00:17:23] Michelle: Right.
[00:17:24] Carrie: And I think what really makes this a great place to work is we’ve amassed a team of people at every level in the organization that are curious, that love technology, that love solving problems, that do hang up the phone from their day at work and then start doing technology as a hobby. We’re very adventurous when it comes to being technologists, and I’ve always been fascinated by it.
So what I really enjoy about our ecosystem, whether you’re in Stellar and focused on WordPress or you’re an engineer in hosting, working on cloud infrastructure, everybody is passionate about technology and they’re super smart and curious.
And one of the things we try to be is the most helpful humans in hosting, and we strive to do that for our customers, but we strive to do that internally as well. And we’re not always perfect at that.
I mean, it is work, after all. It can be stressful at times. But I think for me it’s the shared passion for technology, the fact that we have smart, curious people, and that the foundation of every interaction we have is we start with respect.
I think everyone has a lot of respect for each other, regardless of your role or what you’re focused on.
And I think that makes a difference. And the way that I’ve seen that play out so interestingly, this year is before 2023, Stellar was a separate kind of business unit from Liquid Web, and Modern Tribe was a separate agency. And this year we decided to bring those teams together and it’s frankly been magical.
[00:19:20] Michelle: It’s been amazing.
[00:19:22] Carrie: Yeah. The interaction between the teams and the learning, and it’s influenced our product strategy. It’s just when you put smart people together who have a passion about technology, magical things happen.
I think that’s what I love about being here and that’s what I think makes us different.
[00:19:39] Michelle: I 100% agree with all of that. Of course, I love our Stellar team. I don’t have as much opportunity to interact with some of the other teams that we have just because we’re in our work bubbles and things like that. But I will tell you a quick story. I host with Nexcess. So I’ve got several websites hosted on Nexcess and I didn’t understand how to make something happen, so I had to access support, and it’s not because something was going wrong. So I want to say that right off, that it was incredibly user error, but that’s okay. And so I opened a chat through my portal as a customer and the person at the other end had no idea who I was and that I worked for the company and things like that. And I got incredible support, incredibly clear instructions and was able to follow up. And then afterwards I pinged the person in Slack. I’m like, hey, that was me. I just want to thank you for the great help. I gave you a five star review also, that kind of thing, so it’s really nice to know. Yeah. So even not knowing that you’re an internal person, you’re getting incredible care through the support team. And I thought that was pretty cool. So I wanted to share that with you, too.
[00:20:43] Carrie: It’s funny, I call into support every once in a while for a variety of reasons. And I keep telling our support team, you guys need to give me an authentication code because we’re very focused on security and I’ll call in. And not everybody. “Hi, this is Carrie Wheeler.” Not everybody…I’m like, no, I work here.
I just need you to transfer me to someone or I was just testing our response time.
But it is amazing because I get someone different every single time and it’s always enjoyable.
[00:21:16] Michelle: It reminds me of, I can’t remember who it was, but there was a comedian who was locked out of his own show. He was 30 minutes late to his own show because the people at the back door didn’t know who he was and he didn’t have a ticket to get him through the front door. So how you’re treated at that particular point of time? Everybody’s treated.
[00:21:35] Carrie: I’m the problem. It’s me. Promise.
[00:21:38] Michelle: I am who I say I am. That’s wonderful. I love that.
So when you look back over the last year, what are some things that have happened at Liquid Web that I’m going to use the word delighted. I love the word delighted. But what has delighted you over the last year?
[00:21:54] Carrie: Well, I think. Oh, gosh, I know I’ve already talked about it, but I have gotten the opportunity to lead the Stellar team this year and that has been a delight.
I knew people sort of, I’d see people at WordCamps and I knew them, but I didn’t get a chance to work with them and learn from them. And that’s been amazing. The Modern Tribe team, which is our agency that we own, they’ve been working on rebranding Liquid Web. So intent new brand coming up in 2024 and watching them interplay with our hosting team and our Stellar team, that’s been amazing and it’s elevated everybody. Everyone is so much more engaged working with new, talented, fresh ideas. So that’s been a delight.
We’ve launched some new products, and we’ve used some different methodology to launch products. And seeing how it’s engaged our technology teams, that has been a delight.
In my role, mostly I get problems, right? Somewhere, something in my world is breaking right now.
I mostly get problems, but I also get really interesting feedback and customers reaching out to me directly, just telling me personally how what we did changed the trajectory of their business and therefore their livelihood. And so that is always super delightful, I think, too, just with all this change, we’ve also given so many team members new opportunities, and just watching people step into roles and grow in their career, it’s really rewarding for me to watch folks step up. And I don’t know if anyone watches The Bear. I’m in season two, and I won’t give any away.
[00:24:10] Michelle: Love it. Love it.
[00:24:11] Carrie: But, yeah, I watched it and I was like, do I like it? I don’t know. I’m stressed. It’s great. There’s acting. I don’t know. But anyway, so I’m in season two, and one of it is one of the chefs offers one of the kitchen staff kind of a bigger job. And the smile on her face and the pride was just like, I was like, that’s it. That’s the magic right there. Just believing in folks.
I think that’s the thing that’s delighted me. I have a lot of new people in my life, and so that’s been amazing. The acquisition of Servers.com has given us geographic expansion. That’s been very very cool. I would say also getting to go to Greece was very cool.
[00:24:58] Michelle: Greece was awesome.
[00:24:59] Carrie: Yeah, Europe was pretty cool. That we did the boat and the agency for the team, which was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. And we jumped off the top of the boat. So that was delightful.
[00:25:18] Michelle: Very fun. Absolutely. Yeah. I had never been to Europe. That was my first trip to Europe, and so it was all new. And I have to say, the food was like, I’ve always loved Greek food, but having it in, like actual Greece, I’m ruined forever. It was so amazing.
[00:25:35] Carrie: It’s delicious. And seeing some of those artifacts and just being like, these artifacts are, well, I’m going to mess up the years, but they’re ten times older than America.
[00:25:47] Michelle: Right?
[00:25:47] Carrie: It’s crazy.
[00:25:48] Michelle: Yeah, exactly. We say that we have an old house and it’s 200 years old, and people in Europe just laugh.
[00:25:57] Carrie: Yeah, it’s like, you watch and you’re like, this wall was built in 1486.
[00:26:01] Michelle: Okay, well, yeah, that’s a little older. It’s a little older for sure. No, I think that’s great. Also, this year has been amazing to watch people grow the way that we’ve redistributed across Stellar and bringing in Modern Tribe and all of that has just allowed our teams to just grow. And it’s just been amazing to watch new people come in and to see people just take ideas and run with them and, yeah, it’s been pretty awesome for sure.
Absolutely. Very cool stuff. So without giving away any secrets, although you did say rebranding, I have to tell you, my brain first went to, ooh, new swag because we all love a new rebrand and a fresh line of swag.
[00:26:46] Carrie: Item in the budget for that. I’m like, don’t forget, everybody’s going to want a t-shirt.
[00:26:50] Michelle: That’s right. But without giving away any real secrets that you can’t talk about yet. (You could tell me afterwards, though. We’ll keep it between us.) What are you excited about with the future of Stellar and Liquid Web?
[00:27:01] Carrie: Well, I think 2024 for us is going to be a year of transformation and we have a number of new products that we’re going to be introducing into the ecosystem. One of them in the Stellar world is coming out this week. Get that out this week, please.
The new product strategy, I’m super excited about that. And there’ll be some really interesting things coming out about our brands, about our product strategy, how they all fit together.
We are very focused on AI.
I know there’s a lot right now. AI is the answer. What’s the question?
But our philosophy is that while a lot of people can worry about AI taking over the world, we’re going to worry about how AI can do what we want to do, the things that complement our strategy. Which is to improve our service to our customers and make WordPress easier.
[00:28:09] Michelle: Right.
[00:28:09] Carrie: And so we’re going to leverage it in a number of ways. We’ve got some really cool capabilities already introduced with Learndash. You’ll see that come out with Kadence. And we think that there’s ways to really accelerate building sites and stores, leveraging AI, and really accelerate and simplify the support and service we give our customers. So you’ll see a lot come out from that with us.
And I think one of the things I do worry about the WordPress platform is there are a number of competitors that have come on strong and while they don’t have near the penetration in terms of number of sites and storage that they’re supporting, their growth rate is significantly higher than WordPress in general. And so I do think that as a community interested in furthering WordPress, we have to figure out ways to make it easier to use. Now there’s always going to be, and there should be those folks who want all the power and flexibility and customization and capability. That’s never going to go away and that is good for a certain set of sites and stores. But new entrants coming into the ecosystem, particularly what I’m interested in, which is small and mid-sized businesses, they need it easy, they need it cost effective. And right now we’ve seen this in some of our efforts. You get a customer on the platform and if they can’t figure out how to use it easily, they go to a different platform. And so you’re going to see a lot in our strategy about continuing to make WordPress easy, leveraging AI and integrating our tools and providing more help and support for new entrants to learn how to use the platform.
[00:30:04] Michelle: I think that’s great. I saw somebody post, first of all, I don’t remember the company and I wouldn’t out them even if I did, but they said something along the lines of they’re this hidden gem in WordPress. And I thought, we’re not hiding anything. Why are you hidden?.
I think we do a really good job of not hiding how great we are, right? Because like sing it, if you own it, own it.
[00:30:30] Carrie: Well, at the end of the day, we are a business, right? And so it’s hard to make money if you’re hidden, but.
[00:30:36] Michelle: Exactly. Strategy.
This is way back, maybe 1015 years ago, I was sitting at a business type training that I’d been to and the first question the person said is, who in this room considers your business the hidden gem in your region? And everybody’s hand went up and they’re like, why are you hidden? And we all were like, this big paradigm shift kind of thing happened right then and there. So it’s like, don’t hide.
And yeah, I think when you talk about that there’s more than WordPress. And how do we make WordPress accessible? Things that we’ve been doing, like LearnDash Cloud for example. Like, yeah, maybe you have built this incredible site on a platform that isn’t WordPress, but you want to use LearnDash so you can link to your LearnDash Cloud site. That’s phenomenal. That is a way that we can be integrating with other platforms for people who have spent time and money and energy not to have to just trash their site, move something else to use our product. So I love that kind of innovation. I think we’re really doing a good job there.
[00:31:37] Carrie: Yeah, I think when you think about WordPress and kind of the old days, less now you’ve got it like, okay, well, I want to use the application now I need to pick a host. So I have to pick a plan, then I have to install my WordPress and then I have to figure out my plugins and then I have to… Well, then what do I do, right? So I do think that this whole abstraction from hosting and hosting being included in your initial experience I think is critical. And we’re certainly down that road aggressively.
[00:32:07] Michelle: Yeah, I think it’s fantastic.
So what else do you want to share with our audience? I’m sure there’s things you would like to talk about that I didn’t think to ask you. What would those be?
[00:32:17] Carrie: Well, I would say, oh gosh, that’s a good question.
I think a couple of things. One is engage in the ecosystem, right? I mean, 2024, we’re past COVID.
Hopefully travel costs will start to come down. But really engage in the community. Go to the WordPress events and invite people that are not just part of the active community.
[00:32:50] Michelle: Right.
[00:32:50] Carrie: Like so often I’ll go to a WordPress event and it’s great to see everybody that we know. But what I’d really love to see is, hey, who are we bringing to the WordPress community? Can be a little bit tight, right? Even though it’s massive, there’s a lot of people that are in it and know it and interact consistently. How do we take that and broaden it to the broader set of users and interdependent folks? And how do we collectively, while respectively, competitively, I suppose, work to make WordPress easier.
How do we compete against Shopify and Wix and Weebly, and make it compelling and not necessarily in an inorganic I mean, I’m Sorry, in an organic way, but in a coordinated fashion.
[00:33:49] Michelle: Right.
[00:33:50] Carrie: I think that’s important for us to think about as a group of interested parties.
So I think maybe there’s something there I would say is how do we reach out? And maybe people don’t join the community as fervently as you and I do.
But we’ve expanded the ecosystem a bit. So I would say engagement is super important.
And I would say continue looking for ways to integrate the hosting component, make the onboarding easier.
I think that’s what I would say.
[00:34:33] Michelle: Absolutely. I agree with that 100%. Some of the things that I think are exciting about this next year as well is I know that we’re going to have a presence at WordCamp Asia, Wordcamp Europe. I’m sure we’ll be wherever. They haven’t told us yet where Wordcamp US will be. Maybe by the time we actually put this episode online, we’ll have heard. I don’t know. I’m hoping within the next week we’ll know where WordCamp US will be next year. And I know that we will absolutely have a presence at those places as well. And I agree. I love meeting people that I don’t already know. And I often say I have so many friends in WordPress. I have friends all over the world in WordPress, but I love when somebody comes up to me who I don’t know and asks, can you tell me this or can you tell me that? And I’ll even tweet beforehand, like, if I don’t know you, please come say hi, because I know everybody else. I can say hi to them anytime. But I want to meet you. There’s room at my table. Plop yourself down in that chair because I want to know who you are, too.
[00:35:29] Carrie: That’s right. And what problem you’re trying to solve. Like how can we help? Problem, that’s the fun part, is helping people solve the problem that they’re trying to do, because it’s always about something new and interesting.
As we were talking before the podcast, I would like to try to make Asia. I’m not sure if I’m going to, I have it on my calendar to go to that and then I always go to WordCamp US. So wherever that will be.
So that would be fun. I think if you have the good fortune to be able to go to one of those, but also engage in the local ones too, because actually the local ones, I think are great for a training bed.
[00:36:15] Michelle: Right.
[00:36:15] Carrie: I love the thing about those is all the breakout sessions are really about learning how to use tool, so those are really cool.
[00:36:24] Michelle: Yeah. And I know you know this, but for the people who don’t know this, so many of the Liquid Webbers and Stellarians, (I call us Stellarians), I don’t know if that’s the right word, actually. Not only speak at local WordCamps, but are integral to running those. So a lot of us are on the organizing teams or lead organizing those. I’m also a mentor for other camps, so I helped several other camps this year make sure that they did what they needed to to get done. We have a lot of people probably, I don’t know, at least 70 people that I can name right off the bat that are speaking at and helping make sure that those local events and meetups are running.
And I love that we support that with what we do.
[00:37:14] Carrie: I’m amazed by your work, by the way.
[00:37:18] Michelle: Thanks. It’s one of those things where you look back and you see how you’ve been able to achieve what you’ve been able to achieve. And that’s never because I set out on a trek alone. It’s always because other people joined me and bolstered me and taught me. And I feel a big responsibility, but not in a negative way. A responsibility to help others to achieve what they want to do with WordPress as well. So if I can be part of that journey, that makes me happy.
[00:37:49] Carrie: That’s amazing. I’m amazed every day.
[00:37:51] Michelle: Thank you. Well, it’s been so awesome to have this opportunity. You and I don’t get an opportunity very often to just sit and chat. So it’s really nice to actually have that time with you today and to dig a little deeper and learn some things about you that I didn’t know about.
[00:38:05] Carrie: Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Thank you for inviting me.
It’s been great. I appreciate it. And it’s good to see your face.
[00:38:14] Michelle: Yes, likewise.
[00:38:15] Carrie: Everybody have a great end of 2023 and a wonderful 2024.
[00:38:20] Michelle: Absolutely. And we’re going to have you back at the end of every year to do a capstone.
Let’s do that. Well, yeah. Well, let’s get it on the calendar now for next year so we can switch it three or four times with whatever happens in the schedule.
[00:38:31] Carrie: That’s right.
[00:38:32] Michelle: Let’s do. Thank you so much, Carrie. And for everybody, happy holidays and we’ll see you all in 2024.
[00:38:40] Carrie: Bye bye.
[00:38:47] Michelle: WP Constellations is a production of StellarWP, home of The Events Calendar, LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, Iconic, SolidWP, Orderable, and Restrict Content Pro. Learn more about the StellarVerse at StellarWP.com.