Automattic board puts founder-CEO Matt Mullenweg on leave
The company's chief financial officer takes over as interim chief executive. Mullenweg says directors conspired against him.
Automattic's board has placed Matt Mullenweg, the company's founder and chief executive, on what it calls a leave of access.
The company's chief financial officer becomes interim chief executive, according to Inc., which reported the move.
Mullenweg has said that directors conspired against him. The wording of his response has not been published in full.
The terms of the leave have not been set out. Nor has the vote that produced it, or the timetable for any return.
That matters because a leave of access is not a resignation and not a dismissal. It suspends the chief executive's reach into the company while leaving the formal question of who runs it open.
For founders, the mechanics underneath a move like this are the whole story: who sits on the board, how many of those seats the founder controls, and whether the founder's shares carry votes that outweigh everyone else's.
Those details decide whether a board can remove a founder at all, or only ask them to leave. In Automattic's case they have not been made public.
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and WooCommerce.
The practical lesson is older than this week. A founder's protection is written into the articles and the shareholders' agreement long before there is a boardroom dispute, and it is close to impossible to retrofit once there is one.
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