The rumor I saw when all this started implied it was.

I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.

The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.

I have worked at Automattic for ~7 years. I don't see the history of bad ideas coming from Burning man.

Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.

If you're currently at Automattic... any idea who your current CEO actually is? :) What's all this like internally?

Matt is Automattic's CEO.... I see what you're doing... ;)

We/I want to build useful things. This is a distraction. I believe Automattic is a net benefit for the web and look forward to having more focus to continue delivering on that. Internally, were focused on that.

Are there ideas coming from Burning Man?

:) Not sure.

I feel like the only way this makes sense is if "ideas" is a euphamism for drugs.

Sounds like you've never worked for a CEO with "ideas." One time a CEO made the whole R&D team switch to "aspect oriented programming" because he had read a blog post. Another time we had to switch to C# because he had heard it wad better than Java.

Trust me, you don't want a CEO with "ideas."

I worked for a company with co-CEOs. The ideas CEO left and the company tanked. I think there's a right way to have an ideas CEO but maybe a balance helps keep them from switching everybody to C# on a whim. A CEO without ideas seems like a recipe for at best stagnation and at worse just fleecing the company of value and taking a golden parachute.

It’s 100% about the quality of the ideas, isn’t it.

I agree no ideas is just a path towards irrelevance.

The CEO doesn't necessarily have to have the ideas. How many ideas do you think Tim Cook had regarding products at Apple?

Spending time at Burning Man can completely detach you from reality