Tech entrepreneur and Houston native shares why flexibility is the future of work

distributed work

Houston-born Matt Mullenweg joined the Greater Houston Partnership for a fireside chat on his tech company Automattic's success of distributed work. Photo via ma.tt

The pandemic and the measures companies have taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have opened employers eyes to non-traditional ways of working. An increased percentage of the workforce pivoted to remote working this year — in some cases, this was the first time employees were allowed to work from home.

But not having a traditional office setup is far from new to Houston native Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. He started his company with remote team members basically from day one. In a virtual fireside chat with Scott McClelland, president of H-E-B Food & Drug, for Greater Houston Partnership's Houston NEXT: An ERG Summit last month, Mullenweg describes why he feels confident that a remote — or distributed, has he defines it — workforce is the future.

"Words are really important, and when I hear the word 'remote,' I think there's a central office and then there's someone who's not part of it," Mullenweg says during the chat. "So, we were trying to think of something that captured the fact that we were close to each other in our work — we're just not physically in the same place most of the time. 'Distributed' is what we came up with."

For Mullenweg, this way of running his business was advantageous for the company at its founding in 2000. Since those early days, Automattic, WordPress's parent company, has raised around $700 million in venture funding and made around 20 acquisitions. This success, Mullenweg says, is in part due to distributed work.

"All of this is designed to create a really robust network so that the work can continue regardless of location or anything," Mullenweg says on his workforce structure. "This especially during the early days, allowed us to work two or three times faster than our competitors because when they were doing five days of work a week, we were doing 15 days of work a week."

Mullenweg's plan for distributed work has been the subject a series of blogs, a podcast, and even a TED Talk. As passionate as he is that it is the future of the workforce, he realizes there's a process to getting there, and it's going to take time. He explains a five-tiered process that focuses on strategic culture changes and tech optimization.

"I think you need to have a culture and a way of working that allows people who aren't physical co-present with their colleagues to be productive," Mullenweg says. "The truth is not every company is there yet."

While Mullenweg always believed the rise of distributed work would reach milestones throughout his lifetime, the pandemic might be accelerating crucial steps toward the growth of this type of workforce. Especially since, as Mullenweg explains, this isn't the last major event that's going to occur and prevent in-person work.

"We're all hoping COVID to be gone as soon as possible, but this isn't the last thing like this. I'm sure there are going to be other issues that require us to be more decentralized in the future," Mullenweg says. "If you can get good at that as an organization, you'll be primed to succeed in the coming decades as a business."

Ultimately, distributed work has a lot of potential in the modern workforce, and the structure can do wonders for business advancement as well as employee moral.

"One thing we've found is that when people are really happy and fulfilled, they bring their best selves to work — they're more creative and have more energy," Mullenweg says.

Houston NEXT: An ERG Summit - Fireside Chat with Matt Mullenwegwww.youtube.com

Mayor Sylvester Turner talked parks, innovation, firefighter salaries, and more at the Greater Houston Partnership's State of the City. Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

5 things Mayor Turner promised Houston in his State of the City Address

Looking forward

In the 2019 State of the City Address hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership on May 20, Mayor Sylvester Turner took the stage at the Marriott Marquis in front of over 1,500 Houstonians.

Some of the obvious topics were of course on the table — pension reform, hurricane recovery, job growth — but Mayor Turner surprised attendees with the announcement of a public-private parks program and again alluded to the re-envisioned of Astroworld.

Here's what all the mayor promised in his address.

Public-private partnerships for Houston parks

Houston's major parks have undergone major transformations lately backed by private investments — Buffalo Bayou Park, Memorial Park Conservancy, and Bayou Greenways 2020, to name a few — but the city would like to shift focus to smaller, neighborhood parks across the city. To do this, Mayor Turner called for 50 companies to sponsor 50 parks.

"Today, I am asking the Greater Houston Partnership, the Houston Parks Board, and the Parks Department, to help me bring together 50 companies to form a citywide coalition for our neighborhood parks — primarily in underserved communities," Mayor Turner says.

Scott McClelland, president of HEB Food and Drug and board chair of the GHP, offered up HEB as a corporate partner for the program on the spot, despite the formal details of the program not yet being disclosed. Mayor Turner did specify that the park sponsorship would be a commitment over a few years.

"The 50 for 50 effort will touch every district in the city. All Houstonians should have easy access to welcoming, well-maintained, safe, and fun parks," he says.

A developed innovation corridor and a resurgence of AstroWorld

In both in his introductory address and fireside chat with McClelland, Mayor Turner talked about the emergence of Houston's innovation ecosystem. He cites the 140 percent increase in technology jobs as well as the 3,000 reported startups that call Houston their home. He mentions that Silicon Valley-based accelerator program Plug and Play is preparing to enter the market and another 25 million investment from the Houston Exponential fund of funds is expected.

"We're not walking; we're sprinting," Mayor Turner says. "There is no better place for an [innovation] ecosystem to take place than Houston."

Mayor Turner also credited Rice University's The Ion project as a major source of growth for the city's innovation ecosystem.

"We are building an innovation hub and corridor — in collaboration with academia, thank you, Rice, for loaning us the Sears building on South Main, and the energy and tech companies."

When discussing the innovation district, the mayor also gave a shout out to Travis Scott for being the "instigator" of a new AstroWorld-like theme park the city has in the works, but no details were disclosed in the address.

Rethinking Houston's transportation system

As Houston's population continues to grow, Houstonians spend more and more time in their cars fighting traffic. The mayor called for action to reimagine Houston's transportation.

"Our city has changed, the region is changing, and our transportation, transit, and mobility must change," he says. "People want options, and we must give them options."

Mayor Turner alluded to the Metro Next plan that will be on the ballot this November. While he didn't go into much detail, he encouraged support for the plan.

A raise for the Houston Fire Department

McClelland started the fireside chat with a question about the state of things after Proposition B's repeal following being deemed unconstitutional. The proposition, which originally passed last fall, would have matched Houston firefighters' salaries with police officers.

The mayor says that with the repeal, no layoffs or job cuts will be made within the Houston Fire Department. He recognizes that firefighters are in need of a raise, but it must be one the city can afford.

"Our firefighters are deserving of a pay raise," Mayor Turner says. "What I've put forth is 9.5 percent over three years, but look, my door is open."

The best is yet to come

Mayor Turner wrapped up his address on a positive note, saying that the city's growth will continue.

"The state of our city is strong, resilient, and sustainable," he says. "The best for us as a city has yet to come."

All of these initiatives on the mayor's agenda are working for toward uniting and enhancing Houston.

"We are building one complete city," he says. "And we work together, we win."

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Rice University researchers unveil new model that could sharpen MRI scans

MRI innovation

Researchers at Rice University, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have developed a new model that could lead to sharper imaging and safer diagnostics using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.

In a study recently published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, the team of researchers showed how they used the Fokker-Planck equation to better understand how water molecules respond to contrast agents in a process known as “relaxation.” Previous models only approximated how water molecules relaxed around contrasting agents. However, through this new model, known as the NMR eigenmodes framework, the research team has uncovered the “full physical equations” to explain the process.

“The concept is similar to how a musical chord consists of many notes,” Thiago Pinheiro, the study’s first author, a Rice doctoral graduate in chemical and biomolecular engineering and postdoctoral researcher in the chemical sciences division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in a news release. “Previous models only captured one or two notes, while ours picks up the full harmony.”

According to Rice, the findings could lead to the development and application of new contrast agents for clearer MRIs in medicine and materials science. Beyond MRIs, the NMR relaxation method could also be applied to other areas like battery design and subsurface fluid flow.

“In the present paper, we developed a comprehensive theory to interpret those previous molecular dynamics simulations and experimental findings,” Dilipkumar Asthagiri, a senior computational biomedical scientist in the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in the release. ”The theory, however, is general and can be used to understand NMR relaxation in liquids broadly.”

The team has also made its code available as open source to encourage its adoption and further development by the broader scientific community.

“By better modeling the physics of nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation in liquids, we gain a tool that doesn’t just predict but also explains the phenomenon,” Walter Chapman, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, added in the release. “That is crucial when lives and technologies depend on accurate scientific understanding.”

The study was backed by The Ken Kennedy Institute, Rice Creative Ventures Fund, Robert A. Welch Foundation and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Houston-area lab grows with focus on mobile diagnostics and predictive medicine

mobile medicine

When it comes to healthcare, access can be a matter of life and death. And for patients in skilled nursing facilities, assisted living or even their own homes, the ability to get timely diagnostic testing is not just a convenience, it’s a necessity.

That’s the problem Principle Health Systems (PHS) set out to solve.

Founded in 2016 in Clear Lake, Texas, PHS began as a conventional laboratory but quickly pivoted to mobile diagnostics, offering everything from core blood work and genetic testing to advanced imaging like ultrasounds, echocardiograms, and X-rays.

“We were approached by a group in a local skilled nursing facility to provide services, and we determined pretty quickly there was a massive need in this area,” says James Dieter, founder, chairman and CEO of PHS. “Turnaround time is imperative. These facilities have an incredibly sick population, and of course, they lack mobility to get the care that they need.”

What makes PHS unique is not only what they do, but where they do it. While they operate one of the largest labs serving skilled nursing facilities in the state, their mobile teams go wherever patients are, whether that’s a nursing home, a private residence or even a correctional facility.

Diagnostics, Dieter says, are at the heart of medical decision-making.

“Seventy to 80 percent of all medical decisions are made from diagnostic results in lab and imaging,” he says. “The diagnostic drives the doctor’s or the provider’s next move. When we recognized a massive slowdown in lab results, we had to innovate to do it faster.”

Innovation at PHS isn’t just about speed; it’s about accessibility and precision.

Chris Light, COO, explains: “For stat testing, we use bedside point-of-care instruments. Our phlebotomists take those into the facilities, test at the bedside, and get results within minutes, rather than waiting days for results to come back from a core lab.”

Scaling a mobile operation across multiple states isn’t simple, but PHS has expanded into nine states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arizona. Their model relies on licensed mobile phlebotomists, X-ray technologists and sonographers, all trained to provide high-level care outside traditional hospital settings.

The financial impact for patients is significant. Instead of ambulance rides and ER visits costing thousands, PHS services often cost just a fraction, sometimes only tens or hundreds of dollars.

“Traditionally, without mobile diagnostics, the patient would be loaded into a transportation vehicle, typically an ambulance, and taken to a hospital,” Dieter says. “Our approach is a fraction of the cost but brings care directly to the patients.”

The company has also embraced predictive and personalized medicine, offering genetic tests that guide medication decisions and laboratory tests that predict cognitive decline from conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s.

“We actively look for complementary services to improve patient outcomes,” Dieter says. “Precision medicine and predictive testing have been a great value-add for our providers.”

Looking to the future, PHS sees mobile healthcare as part of a larger trend toward home-based care.

“There’s an aging population that still lives at home with caretakers,” Dieter explains. “We go into the home every day, whether it’s an apartment, a standalone home, or assisted living. The goal is to meet patients where they are and reduce the need for hospitalization.”

Light highlighted another layer of innovation: predictive guidance.

“We host a lot of data, and labs and imaging drive most treatment decisions,” Light says. “We’re exploring how to deploy diagnostics immediately based on results, eliminating hours of delay and keeping patients healthier longer.”

Ultimately, innovation at PHS isn’t just about technology; it’s about equity.

“There’s an 11-year life expectancy gap between major metro areas and rural Texas,” Dieter says. “Our innovation has been leveling the field, so everyone has access to high-quality diagnostics and care, regardless of where they live.”

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