Matthew Charles " Matt " Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American online social and web media entrepreneur living in San Francisco. He is famous for developing free and open source WordPress software, now managed by The WordPress Foundation.
After resigning from the University of Houston, he worked at CNET Networks from 2004 to 2006 until he quit and founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com (which provides free WordPress blogs and other services), Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy , and others.
Video Matt Mullenweg
Early life and education
Mullenweg was born in Houston, Texas, and attended High School for the Performing and Visual Arts where he studied jazz saxophone. He studied at the University of Houston, majoring in Political Science, before he left in 2004 to pursue a job at CNET Networks.
Maps Matt Mullenweg
Careers
In January 2003, Mullenweg and Mike Little started WordPress from the b2 codebase. They soon joined the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi. 19-year-old Mullenweg, and a freshman at the University of Houston at the time. He founded the Global Multimedia Protocol Group (GMPG) in March 2004 with Eric Meyer and Tantek ÃÆ' â € Å"ikik. GMPG wrote the first of Microformats. In April 2004, with their fellow WordPress developers, they launched Ping-O-Matic, a center to tell blog search engines like Technorati about blog updates. The following month, the competitor WordPress Movable Type announced a radical price change, prompting thousands of users to search for other blog platforms; this is widely seen as a critical point for WordPress.
In October 2004, he was recruited by CNET 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, Texas, the following month. Mullenweg announced bbPress in December, Mullenweg and WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 "Strayhorn" in February 2005, which has more than 900,000 downloads. This release introduces their theme system, moderation features, and redesign of the front and back. In late March and early April, Andrew Baio discovered at least 168,000 hidden articles on the WordPress.org website using a technique known as cloaking. Mullenweg recognizes receiving dubious ads and removing all articles from the domain.
Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress and related activities full-time, and announced Akismet a few days later. Akismet is a distributed attempt to stop comments and trace back spam by using the collective input of everyone who uses the service. In December, he announced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Automattic employs people who have contributed to the WordPress project, including key developer Ryan Boren and creator of WordPress MU Donncha O Caoimh. Akismet license agreement and WordPress bundling announced with Yahoo! Small Business web hosting around the same time.
In January 2006 Mullenweg recruited former CEO of Oddpost and Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO, bringing the company's size to 5. A April 2007 rule, filing shows that Automattic collects about $ 1.1 million. Investors are Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and CNET.
Mullenweg runs an angel investment firm, Audrey Capital, which has supported nearly 30 companies since 2008. In 2011 it supports Y Combinator startup earbits.
In January 2008 Automattic raised an additional $ 29.5 million for companies from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and the New York Times Company. According to Mullenweg's blog, funding was the result of an acquisition offer that was rejected several months earlier and the decision to keep the company independent. At that time the company has 18 employees. One of the plans reported for funding is in a forum service called TalkPress.
In January 2009, San Francisco Business Times reported that traffic to WordPress sites grew faster than Google's blogger service and significantly outpaced its closest competitor, Six Apart. A reporter at eMarketer called Mullenweg an "entrepreneur and visionary" and compared the momentum of WordPress with its competitors to increase Facebook's popularity on MySpace.
In February 2009, an interview with Power Magazine called Mullenweg "the Blog Prince" and dispelled the myth that blogging is a passing trend and reveals that the company has seen organic growth of 10% month to month with more than 15,000 new blogs hosted by WordPress every day.
In May 2009, Mullenweg's reluctance to comply with Chinese censors meant that WordPress.com was effectively blocked by the China Golden Shield Project.
The Bloomberg interview in April 2011 illustrates the company's impressive scalability. The monthly infrastructure costs only $ 300,000 to $ 400,000 while turning 12% off the internet with 1,350 servers and 80 employees in 62 cities. Global company management excludes all internal emails but conversely communication is rooted in their P2theme.com blog theme.
In July 2011, WordPress blogs passed 50 million milestones, generating more than 50 million blogs globally.
In April 2012, Pingdom reported that "WordPress really dominates the top 100 blogs" and is used by 49% of the top 100 blogs in the world. This is a large increase of 32% recorded 3 years ago. In May 2012, All Things D reported that "WordPress now empowers 70 million sites... and expects to generate $ 45 million in revenue this year." The success of the company is also reflected in the very low level of staff reductions - the company currently has 106 employees and has only employed 118 employees.
In January 2014 Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic. Toni Schneider moved to work on a new project in Automattic. In the announcement Mullenweg joked "it is clear that no one in his twenties has to run the company.", And a few months later in May collected $ 160 million in additional funding for the company, valued the company in over a billion dollars, and WordPress was cited as empowering "22 percent of the world's top 10 million websites."
Since 2005, Mullenweg has been a keynote speaker at various conferences/events, including global WordCamp events, SxSW, Web 2.0 Summit, Startup School from YCombinator, Le Web, Lean Startup Conference and International World Wide Web Conference.
Awards and acknowledgments
In March 2007, Mullenweg was named # 16 of the 50 most important people on the web by PC World, which was reported as the youngest on the list. In October, Mullenweg acquired the Gravatar service and is rumored to have turned down a $ 200 million offer to buy his Automattic company. In 2008, Mullenweg received the Information Technology Innovation Award - presented by Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University to those who have applied Information Technology to create new business opportunities.
In July 2008 Mullenweg was featured on the cover of Linux Journal . Later that month the story of the San Francisco Chronicle placed him on the cover of the business section and noted that he was still driving a Chevrolet Lumina and WordPress.com was ranked # 31 on Alexa with 90 million monthly page views. In September, Mullenweg was named the 30 Best Entrepreneurs under 30 by Inc. Magazines and one of 25 Most Powerful Persons on the Web by BusinessWeek .
In December 2010, Mullenweg was awarded the TechFellow Award Winner in "Product Design and Marketing". In January 2011, Business Insider enrolled Mullenweg as # 3 of their 30 Founders under 30 lists to create WordPress, the power behind many new startups.
In March 2011, Mullenweg was named one of the 10 most influential people online to change the face of the internet by Business Insider . In October 2011, Mullenweg created the Vanity Fair 's Next Establishment prestigious list of increasing talents in technology, media, policy, and business. In December 2011, Mullenweg was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social/Mobile for the impact he made in the blogging world through open source.
As of May 2012, Mullenweg is listed in the Forbes' Mostlast Influential Investor in AngelList. In December 2012, Mullenweg enrolled in the 2012 Forbes's 30 Under 30 in Media.
Personal life and philanthropy
Mullenweg is a Dvorak Keyboard user and can type more than 120wpm. He is on the board of Grist.org, founder/director of the WordPress Foundation, and is the only high-level sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.
Mullenweg supports a number of philanthropic organizations including Archive.org, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Long Now, and Innocence Project. He is also a member of The Well in the non-profit "Charity: Air" organization (with which he traveled to Ethiopia in February 2012) where he supports the provision of safe and clean drinking water for people in developing countries. For his 28th birthday he started a campaign that earned over $ 28,000 for the purpose, and then over $ 44,000 for his 30th. Mullenweg is the main supporter of The Bay Lights project, both as the first donor and then help complete the project with a $ 1.5 million donation.
See also
- Browse Congratulations
Note
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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