Matt Mullenweg

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Template:Short description Script error: No such module "infobox".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".Script error: No such module "Check for clobbered parameters".Template:Wikidata image Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the free and open-source web publishing software WordPress, and the founder of Automattic.

Early life and education

Mullenweg was born January 11, 1984, in Houston, Texas, to Chuck and Kathleen Mullenweg and grew up in the Willowbend neighborhood.[1][2][3] His older sister was born in 1974. His father, who died in 2016, was a computer programmer who worked for Brown & Root, and encouraged his children to start using home computers at an early age.[4][5] His mother was a stay-at-home parent.[6] The Mullenwegs were raised Catholic.[7] He attended Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, studying jazz and playing the saxophone.[8] Mullenweg suffered from migraines as a child that forced him to miss extended periods of school.[9] He attended the University of Houston for two years, studying philosophy and political science. He dropped out after his sophomore year in 2004 to work for CNET, which promised him that he could allocate time to the development of WordPress.[10][9]

Career

File:MattMullenwegWordCampJena2009 001.jpg
Mullenweg at WordCamp Germany 2009

Mullenweg began blogging in 2002 on the open source platform b2.[11] B2 developer Michael Valdrighi abandoned the project and Mullenweg took it over in 2003.[12] He and Mike Little created a b2 fork that year they called WordPress and published it under the GNU General Public License.[12][13][14]

In March 2003, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) with Eric A. Meyer and Tantek Çelik. In April 2004, he helped launch Ping-O-Matic, a mechanism for notifying search engines about blog updates.[15]

In October 2004, he was hired by CNET who would allow him to develop WordPress part-time as part of his job. He dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco for the position.[16]

Automattic

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Mullenweg at WordCamp Bulgaria 2011

Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress full-time.[17] Soon after he announced Akismet, an initiative to reduce comment and trackback spam.[18] In December, he founded Automattic, with Akismet and managed web hosting service WordPress.com as its flagship products. In January 2006, Mullenweg recruited former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO.[19]

Since 2006, he has delivered an annual "State of the Word" speech on the progress and future of the WordPress software, named after the State of the Union address.[20][21]

In 2011, Mullenweg purchased the WordPress news website WP Tavern.[22][23]

File:Matt Mullenweg 01.JPG
Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe 2013

In January 2014, Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic. Schneider moved to work on new projects at Automattic.[24] Mullenweg received the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment in 2016, for "helping to democratize online publishing".[25]

Public disputes

On several occasions, Mullenweg has publicly challenged competitors to WordPress and WordPress.com. He has stated that he prefers to settle disputes in the court of public opinion and described his approach as "brinksmanship", noting that the potential cost of legal action could put Automattic in a "tough spot".[26]

In 2008, shortly before WordPress 2.5's release, Six Apart's Movable Type published "A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide"—a comparison of their CMS with their rival, WordPress—as a company blog article that Mullenweg characterized as "desperate and dirty".[27][28][29] In 2013, developers on the digital marketplace Envato were banned from speaking at WordPress events after he criticized the platform for selling WordPress themes with the graphics and CSS components under a proprietary license instead of the GPL.[30]

File:Interview Matt Mullenweg (35015322000).jpg
Mullenweg being interviewed at WordCamp 2017

In 2016, Mullenweg accused Wix.com, a competitor to WordPress.com, of reusing WordPress's mobile text editor code in Wix's own mobile app without adhering to the terms of the GPL. Despite the license's requirement to publish anything built with GPL code under the GPL, Wix's CEO claimed that the company open-sourced their forked version of the component and satisfied the license's terms[31][32] before the app switched to its own fork of the MIT-licensed text editor that the WordPress editor was based upon. The new fork added a clause to the MIT license that forbids redistribution under any other license.[33]

In 2022, Mullenweg criticized GoDaddy for not reinvesting in the WordPress project sufficiently.[34]

File:Matt Mullenweg 2024 TC Disrupt.jpg
Mullenweg at the 2024 TechCrunch Disrupt

On January 9, 2025, the representative of the WordPress Sustainability team, Thijs Buijs, resigned via WordPress.org’s Slack channel, citing dissatisfaction with Matt Mullenweg’s December 24, 2024, Reddit post titled “What drama should I create in 2025?” highlighting concerns about what he described as “unsustainable leadership”.[35] In response, Matt Mullenweg thanked Thijs Buijs for reminding him of the existence of a sustainability team, announced its disbanding, and subsequently closed Wordpress.org's #sustainability Slack channel.[35]

Tumblr

Mullenweg began a three-month sabbatical from his role as CEO at the beginning of February 2024.[36] During that time, Mullenweg engaged in a public feud with a transgender Tumblr user who, frustrated with the failure of Tumblr (owned by Automattic) to address transphobic harassment, posted that she wished Mullenweg would die in a comedic way. The user was subsequently banned. Responding to user uproar, Mullenweg addressed the ban in posts on his personal Tumblr blog, in which he characterized the post as a death threat, and shared private account information about the user. Mullenweg also responded to individual commenters on Tumblr in posts and direct messages, and went to Twitter to respond to the banned user's tweets about the situation.[37][38] A few days later, transgender employees of Tumblr and Automattic made a post on the official Tumblr staff blog characterizing his response as "unwarranted and harmful" and stating that he did not speak on their behalf. They also said that the user's post was not a realistic threat of violence and not the reason for her ban.[39]

WP Engine dispute

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Audrey Capital

Mullenweg is a principal at angel investment firm Audrey Capital, which he co-founded in 2008 alongside Naveen Selvadurai and Audrey Kim.[40]

since 2024Template:Dated maintenance category (articles)Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters"., the company lists investments in companies such as CoinDesk, MakerBot, Sonos, SpaceX, Ring, as well as software companies including Calm, Chartbeat, DailyBurn, Memrise, Genius, Nord Security and Telegram. It has also funded startups that provide services to web developers including Creative Market, GitLab, NPM, SendGrid, Stripe and Typekit.[40] From 2017 to 2019, Mullenweg also served as a board member for GitLab.[41]

Mullenweg has employed a team of contributors to WordPress through Audrey Capital since 2010, who work separately from Automattic.[42][43]

On the 20th anniversary of WordPress' initial release, Mullenweg announced a scholarship program aimed at the children of significant contributors to open-source projects.[44]

See also

References

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  10. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  11. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
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  29. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
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  35. ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
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  40. ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  41. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
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  43. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  44. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".

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External links

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