| Matthew Charles Mullenweg | |
|---|---|
 Matt Mullenweg in Milan (2008) |
|
| Born | January 11, 1984 Houston, Texas (USA) |
| Alma mater | University of Houston |
| Occupation | Founder & CBBQTT[1] Automattic Principal, Mobius Ltd[2] Lead Developer, WordPress Foundation |
| Known for | WordPress, Automattic & Mobius Ltd. |
| Website | |
| ma.tt | |
Matthew Charles "Matt" Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas) is an online social media entrepreneur, web developer and musician living in San Francisco, California. He is best known for developing the free and open source web software, WordPress, which is now managed by The WordPress Foundation. In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet, which provides free WordPress blogs and other services. He writes the blog. ma.tt, a domain hack.
Since quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted most of his time to developing open source projects. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, including Canada's Northern Voice and the WordCamp events organized around WordPress software.
Mullenweg attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts where he studied jazz saxophone.[3] Mullenweg is also a Dvorak Keyboard user.[4]
Career
In June 2002 Mullenweg started using the b2/cafelog blogging software to complement the photos he was taking on a trip to Washington D.C. after participating in the National Fed Challenge competition. He contributed some minor code regarding typographic entities and cleaner permalinks.
Several months after development of b2 had stopped, in January 2003, he announced[5] on his blog his plan of forking the software to bring it up to date with web standards and his needs. He was quickly contacted by Mike Little and together they started WordPress from the b2 codebase. They were soon joined by original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi. Mullenweg was only nineteen years old, and a freshman (studying philosophy and political science) at the University of Houston at the time.[6][7]
He co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group in March 2004 with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. GMPG wrote the first of the Microformats[citation needed].
In April 2004 with fellow WordPress developer Dougal Campbell, they launched Ping-O-Matic[8] which is a hub for notifying blog search engines such as Technorati of blog updates. Ping-O-Matic currently handles over 1 million pings a day.[citation needed] The following month, the principal WordPress competitor Movable Type announced a radical price change[9] which drove thousands of users to seek alternate solutions. This is widely regarded as the tipping point for WordPress.
In October 2004, he was recruited by CNET[10] to work on WordPress for them and help them with blogs and new media offerings. He dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco from Houston, TX the following month. Mullenweg announced bbPress in December,[11] which he wrote from scratch in a few days over the holidays.
Mullenweg and the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 "Strayhorn"[12] in February 2005, which had over 900,000 downloads. The release introduced their theme system, moderation features, and a new front end and back end redesign. During late March and early April, Andrew Baio found at least 168,000 hidden articles on the WordPress.org website that were using a technique known as cloaking.[13] Mullenweg admitted accepting the questionable advertisement and removed all articles from the domain.[14]
Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005[15] to focus on WordPress and related activities full time, announcing Akismet several days later.[16] Akismet is a distributed effort to stop comment and trackback spam by using the collective input of everyone using the service. In December, he announced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Automattic employed people who had contributed to the WordPress project, including lead developer Ryan Boren and WordPress MU creator Donncha O Caoimh. An Akismet licensing deal[17] and WordPress bundling[18] was announced with Yahoo! Small Business web hosting about the same time.
In January 2006 Mullenweg recruited former Oddpost CEO and Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO, bringing the size of the company to 5. An April 2006Regulation D filing showed that Automattic raised approximately 1.1 million dollars in funding,[19] which Mullenweg addressed in his blog.[20] Investors were Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and CNET.
In March 2007, Mullenweg was named #16 of the 50 most important people on the web by PC World,[21] reportedly the youngest on the list.[22] In October, Mullenweg acquired the Gravatar service[23] and was rumored to have turned down a US$200 million offer to buy his company Automattic.[24]
In January 2008 Automattic raised an additional US$29.5 million for the company from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and the New York Times Company.[25] According to Mullenweg's blog the funding was a result of spurned acquisition offers months before and the decision to keep the company independent. At the time the company had 18 employees.[26] One of the reported plans for the funding was in a forum service called TalkPress.[27]
In July 2008 Mullenweg was featured on the cover of Linux Journal wearing a Fight Club t-shirt.[28] Later that month a San Francisco Chronicle story put him on the cover of the business section and noted he still drove a Chevrolet Lumina and WordPress.com was ranked #31 on Alexa with 90 million monthly page views.[29] In September, Mullenweg was being named to the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 by Inc. Magazine[30] and one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web by BusinessWeek,[31] again the youngest on BusinessWeek's list.
In 2009, Mullenweg was named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society for his contributions to information technology and culture. Mullenweg told USA Today that Automattic was profitable, had 35 employees, had gotten an office on Pier 38 in San Francisco, and had landed CNN as a client for WordPress.com.[32]. In May, Mullenweg's unwillingness to comply with Chinese censorship WordPress.com was effectively blocked by China's Golden Shield Project.[33]
Notes
- ^ Matt on Automattic Official website
- ^ Matt Profile at Digital Web magazine
- ^ Matusow, Cathy. "The Blog Age." Houston Press. October 28, 2004. 1. Retrieved on May 18, 2009.
- ^ On the Dvorak Keyboard Layout
- ^ Photo Matt » The Blogging Software Dilemma
- ^ Kaufmann, Zach (January 2009). "Do You Blog On WordPress? Thank Matt Mullenweg". Young Money 7 (6): 2. ISSN 1098-8300. http://www.youngmoney.com. Retrieved 2009-02-08.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Photo Matt » Spring Ping Thing
- ^ About Six Apart - Mena's Corner
- ^ Photo Matt » Houston Press and CNET
- ^ Photo Matt » Announcing bbPress
- ^ WordPress › Blog » Announcing WordPress 1.5
- ^ Waxy.org: Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam
- ^ Photo Matt » A Response
- ^ Photo Matt » Leaving CNET
- ^ Photo Matt » Akismet Stops Spam
- ^ Yodel if you Hate Spam « Akismet
- ^ WordPress › Blog » WordPress on Yahoo
- ^ Company Information: AUTOMATTIC INC
- ^ http://photomatt.net/2006/04/12/a-little-funding/
- ^ http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129301-page,2-c,techindustrytrends/article.html
- ^ Photo Matt » Number 16
- ^ Automattic Acquires Gravatar
- ^ Automattic Spurns $200 Million Acquisition Offer
- ^ Times Company in Group Investing in Blog Publisher
- ^ Act Two — Matt Mullenweg
- ^ For a native of Houston, the big time
- ^ Linux Journal Contents #171, July 2008
- ^ Founder of blog platform gets venture funding
- ^ Inc. Magazine: Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30
- ^ http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0929_most_influential/14.htm
- ^ USA Today: WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers' best friend
- ^ AFP: Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China
External links
- Official website
- Matt's interview with CMS Critic
- Matt at a Web 2.0 panel in the University of San Francisco - Apr 2008
- Interview with Matt Mullenweg
- BlogInterviewer.com Interview with Matt Mullenweg about WordPress
- Interview on Digital Web
- Linux Link Tech Show interview (audio), 2006
- Guardian Unlimited profile, November 4, 2006
- Wizard of WordPress video Part 1 and Part 2 on CNET, May 16, 2007
- Interview with Matt Mullenweg on WPCandy
- Conversation with Matt Mullenweg - Intruders tv video
- Biography of WordPress With Matt Mullenweg
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