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About Matt Mullenweg

Myself in my best dress

Howdy. My name is Matthew Mullenweg. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I write code, prose, and music. I love taking photos.

WordPress

I am a founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by over 31% of the web, including this site. The website says WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” but more importantly WordPress is a part of who I am. Like eating, breathing, music, I can’t not work on WordPress. We celebrated 15 years of WordPress in 2018. (I was 19 when I started. I’m 34 now.) The project touches a lot of people, something I’ve recently begun to appreciate. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much.

Every year I give a “State of the Word” speech. Here’s the 2017 edition.

Professional

I used to do consulting and go to school in Houston, then I moved to San Francisco where I worked at CNET Networks. I left in late 2005 to found a company called Automattic, which is now the force behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Longreads, The Atavist, and many other products. Our mission is to make the web a better place.

Though Automattic is my main focus I also advise and invest in startups through my company Audrey Capital. You can peruse the portfolio of companies on the Audrey site.

See also: Wikipedia (needs updating), CrunchBase.

Distributed Work

Much like WordPress sought to change the way we publish on the web, Automattic has set out to change the way we work. We are an entirely distributed company — with more than 800 employees working from more than 62 countries, and no physical headquarters. We are a company that works on, and for, the web.

Causes

These are the charities or organizations that I support in a way that is significant to me. Some are working on basic survival issues, and some are addressing problems that we’re lucky to have in this modern technological age, but all are important to me: Archive.org, Alaska Wilderness League, Apache Foundation, Bay Lights, charity: water, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Grist (board), Innocence Project, Long Now Foundation, Rothko Chapel, Samasource, US-Ireland Alliance.

Press, Podcasts, and Speaking

A few notable links:

For more, here’s an archived collection of articles about my work over the years, as well as podcast interviews and past speaking engagements. I’ve also spoken at hundreds of WordPress events and WordCamps.

If you need a press/conference headshot, try this or this.

32 replies on “About Matt Mullenweg”

[…] To see what im going on about, scroll to the bottom of this page and look at the image. The first version by Matthew of Photomatt it was brought out when wordpress first introduced the idea of plugins. Since then the script has not been updated or republished anywhere, and on googleing it, I found no answers and yet more questions as to why it didn’t and wouldn’t work. Also none of the posts I found where older than 2004. Anyway I have updated it and fixed the following bugs: + White space on left had side is removed, the white lines would overlap the black border and make it look bad – Fixed. + Would not work in current version of wp, kept giving errors and crashing wp. – Fixed + Set so that when posts are deleted and edited not just created the image is updated. […]

[…] Matt Mullenweg anuncia en su bitácora el nacimiento de WordPress.com. El contenido del sitio alternativo a WordPress.org, la dirección oficial del popular sistema de publicación, es por ahora todo un misterio. Así que si quieres estar al tanto, lo mejor que puedes hacer es suscribirte a la lista de notificaciones que se ha habilitado y esperar noticias, buenas noticias quiero decir, que para las malas ya están los telediarios […]

[…] cool gak la blog style dia kan. hehe I am the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and thousands of other sites around the world. The website says WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” but more importantly WordPress is a part of who I am. Like eating, breathing, music, I can’t not work on WordPress. The project touches a lot of people, something I’ve recently begun to appreciate. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much. source […]