927: A Phone Call from Someone Who Mattered | Matt Gustke, CFO, WooCommerce

“He was without a doubt my favorite executive at my favorite company,” comments Gustke, recalling the late Rajiv Dutta, who as the CFO of eBay at the time called Gustke to invite him to lunch.

“The lunch turned into a full day, which then became a dinner and a meeting with the whole team, which then a week later led to my joining eBay to build out its IR function,” recalls Gustke, who as a research analyst had already established a rapport with Dutta by having frequently queried the CFO and summoned his comments as part of his regular research coverage.

“At the time that I joined eBay, I honestly viewed it as sort of a 1- to 2-year working sabbatical during which I would get to see a company from the inside, but I eventually ended up being part of the eBay family for 12 years,” continues Gustke, who once more credits Dutta with extending his “leave” and ultimately helping to point him down the CFO path.

Gustke tells us that Dutta was often known to be generous with praise: “I guess it was a couple of years into my eBay journey when Rajiv came up to me and said, ‘You know, investors don’t want to talk to me anymore because they just want to talk to you, which is freeing up so much of my time to do other things—so I want to say thanks.’”

However, as it turned out, Dutta had more than praise in mind.

“The next thing he said was, ‘And now I need you to go into a different role—what would you think about leading FP&A for eBay International?,’” reports Gustke, who after giving Dutta an affirmative response first began serving in his new international role from California before relocating to Switzerland for additional finance responsibilities that would eventually lead to heading up eBay’s European finance team.

As he continued to grow his experience across multiple finance disciplines, Gustke became a candidate for more senior leadership positions. In 2010, he garnered what would be his first CFO appointment when he was named CFO of StubHub, the online ticket broker acquired by eBay in 2007.

Still, Gustke wants us know that one of his most important lessons wasn’t gleaned from life among finance’s rank-and-file but instead at a research team’s conference table—and perhaps the very one where he first met Dutta.

Says Gustke: “Long ago I stopped worrying about asking stupid questions in meetings. I figured that if something wasn’t clear to me—and I’m at least of average intelligence—it wouldn’t be clear to someone else. It turns out that more often than not, my questions led to better conversations, new insights, and a clearer mandate as to what was to be done after the meeting.” –Jack Sweeney

Automattic has always been a fully distributed company, with nearly 2,000 employees working from 95 countries and speaking about 120 different languages. The company itself is about 20 years old, and we’re still privately held by investors that include, among others, Tiger, Salesforce Ventures, Insight, Iconic, True Ventures, Wellington, and BlackRock. So, we have a great list of marquee investors.

WooCommerce is the leading open source e-commerce platform. We power 23% of the top million online stores, which by some measures makes Woo the number one e-commerce platform on the Internet. Woo launched as an independent company in 2011, when at the time they were a developer of themes to style your website. They were acquired by Automattic back in 2015—so, about 8 years ago—and then quickly developed to fill a need for broad e-commerce capabilities for WordPress sites. Because Woo itself is free—as are many of the extensions that merchants need—it generally provides the lowest total cost of ownership for an e-commerce platform.

We earn revenue in multiple ways. Our largest source is payments—as with most e-commerce platforms—both through revenue-sharing agreements with payment partners like Stripe and PayPal and through our own payment product, Woo Payments. We also earn revenue from strategic partners in areas like marketing and shipping, tax, and so forth, and these are generally revenue-sharing agreements as well.

We also earn money through our own marketplace, where we monetize certain paid extensions that may have been developed by us or by any of the hundreds of thousands of third-party developers who create very specific extensions to support specific use cases. We don’t really disclose a lot of specific numbers about Woo, but I’ll share that it’s a very healthy business. Our revenue growth is north of 30% year-over-year, and the business continues to be profitable, as it has been for quite some time.

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