Matt Mullenweg

Mat Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress and the current CEO of Automattic. Matt went to a performing arts high school to study jazz. From a young age however, he developed a great interest in computer coding. Throughout high school he earned income by building websites for his fellow musicians. He eventually graduated and went to The University of Huston to study political science. While there, he started blogging on the open source b2 platform. After realizing he was interested in forking the platform he contacted Mike Little to start helping him with the idea. Th two of them came up with WordPress by forking the b2 codebase. They started getting a steady stream of downloads, but the company did not take of until its main competitor, Movable Type, was affected by a licensing charge. Through the development of WordPress, Mullenweg noticed a big problem with the platform. Spam blogs that were being written. Through this he founded Automattic who’s main goal is to work on WordPress.  By 2009 WordPress was one of the most popular blogging sites in the world having over 15000 posts daily. In 2021 the company was valued at over 7.5 billion dollars.

As technology has changed Mullenweg has found himself to be a major advocate for open-source publishing on the web. WordPress has been one of the main advocates. Open source is simply a cite that allows its users to access the underlying code and adjust it as they see fit. This has led him to found WooCommerce which is essentially open source Shopify.  

Matt Mullenweg is a primes example of letting passion shape ones career. He is incredible passionate about open sources cites an it is through this passion that he has founded incredible companies.