Matthew Charles “Matt” Mullenweg is an American online social media entrepreneur and web developer best known for developing the free and open-source web software WordPress.
Early life and education
Matt Mullenweg was born in Houston, Texas on January 11, 1984. Mullenweg is a web developer and an online social media entrepreneur living in San Francisco.
Mullenweg is from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and studied jazz saxophone. During his spare time, Mullenweg is an avid photographer.
Mullenweg attended the University of Houston, majoring in Political Science, and in 2004, dropped out to pursue a job at CNET Networks.
Career
Mullenweg and Mike Little started WordPress in January 2003 from the b2 codebase. Later on, the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi joined the two. At that time, Mullenweg was only still 19 years old, and a freshman at the University of Houston. Mullenweg co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group with Eric Meyer and Tantek Celik in March 2004. GMPG wrote the first Microformats.
In April 2004, with Mullenweg’s fellow WordPress developer, they launched a hub for notifying blog search engines like Technorati about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic. The following month, a WordPress competitor called Movable Type to announce a radical price change, which caused thousands of users to seek another blogging platform.
In October 2004, the CNET recruited Mullenweg to work on WordPress for them and assist them with blogs, and new media offerings. Mullenweg dropped out of college, and the following month, he relocated to San Francisco. Mullenweg announced bbPress in December, he and the WordPress team launched WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn, which had more than 900,000 downloads in February 2005.
The release introduced their moderation features, theme system, and a redesign of the front and back end. In late March and early April, Andrew Baiou found on the WordPress.org website at least 168,000 hidden articles that were using a technique known as cloaking. Mullenweg admitted accepting the questionable advertisement and also removed all hidden articles found from the domain.
WordPress
In October 2005, Mullenweg left CNET to focus on WordPress and other related activities full-time, and after several days later, announced Akismet. Akismet is a distributed effort to discontinue comment and trackback spam using the collective input of every person using the service. In December, Mullenweg announced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet.
Automattic hired people who had participated in the WordPress project, including WordPress MU creator, Donncha O Caoimh, and Ryan Boren, lead developer. WordPress bundling and the Akismet licensing deal were announced with Yahoo! Small Business web hosting about the same time.
Mullenweg recruited Yahoo! Executive and former Oddpost CEO, Toni Schneider in January 2006, to join Automattic as CEO, making the size of the company to 5. An April 2007 Regulation D filing revealed that Automattic raised around $1.1 million. The following investors were True Ventures, Radar Partners, Polaris Ventures, and CNET.
Since 2008, Mullenweg supports an angel investment firm Audrey Capital, which has backed nearly 30 companies. In 2011, Mullenweg backed the Y Combinator startup Earbits. In January 2008, Automattic was able to raise an additional $29.5 million for the company from True Ventures, Radar Partners, Polaris Ventures, and The New York Times Company. According to Mullenweg’s blog, the funding was an outcome of spurned acquisition offers months before and the judgment to keep the company independent. The company had only 18 employees at that time.
The San Francisco Business Times stated that the traffic to WordPress was increasing more rapidly than for Google’s blogger service and expressively outshined its nearest competitor, Six Apart in January 2009. In February 2009, an interview conducted by Power Magazine referred Mullenweg as the Blog Prince and dispelled the myth that blogging was a passing trend and revealed that the company has seen at 10% month-on-month organic growth with over 15,000 new blogs hosted by WordPress each day.
In May 2006, China’s Golden Shield Project blocked WordPress due to Mullenweg’s unwillingness to comply with Chinese censorship. In April 2011, a Bloomberg interview described the impressive scalability of the company. Its monthly infrastructure costs were only $300,000 to $400,000 while powering 12% of the internet with 1,350 servers and 80 employees in 62 cities. The management of the global company eliminates all internal email but instead, communication is rooted in their P2theme.com blog theme.
Mullenweg became Automattic’s CEO in January 2014. Toni Schneider moved to work on Automattic’s new projects. Mullenweg has been a frequent speaker since 2006, at any events/conferences, including the global WordCamp events, Web 2.0 Summit, SxSW, YCombinator’s Startup School, the International World Wide Web Conference, Lean Startup Conference, and Le Web, etc.
Personal life
Matt Mullenweg is a Dvorak keyboard user and can type over 120wpm. Mullenweg is also on the board of Grist.org, the director/founder of the WordPress Foundation, and is the only non-company high-level sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.