beeper
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Automattic
Automattic gives away the engine, then sells the calm: hosting, security, commerce and support for people who would rather publish than babysit servers. Two decades in, its bet on the open web has become a sprawling business - and a test of how much one company can steward without closing it off.
Eric Migicovsky
Eric Migicovsky is a Canadian hardware entrepreneur who invented the Pebble smartwatch in 2012, raising $10.26M on Kickstarter in the most-funded campaign of its time. After Pebble's $40M sale to Fitbit in 2016, he served as a Y Combinator partner, then co-founded Beeper — a universal messaging app that sparked a major Apple antitrust investigation before selling to Automattic for $125M in 2024. Now back to his roots, he's reviving the Pebble brand under Core Devices with fully open-source hardware and software.