Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing and founding the free and open-source web software WordPress, and its parent company Automattic.
| Known for | Developing WordPress.com |
|---|---|
| Website | ma.tt |
After dropping out of the University of Houston, he worked at CNET Networks from 2004 to 2006 until he quit and founded Automattic, an internet company whose brands include WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Crowdsignal, and Tumblr.
What is Matt Mullenweg’s Net Worth and Salary?
Matt Mullenweg is an American online social media entrepreneur and web developer who has a net worth of $400 million. Matt Mullenweg is best-known as the lead developer of the free and open source blogging platform WordPress which is managed by The WordPress Foundation. He is also the founder of Automattic, Inc., the for-profit web development arm of WordPress.com. In 2009 Matt reportedly turned down a $200 million offer to sell Automattic. In August 2019 Matt announced that Automattic had acquired Tumblr for $3 million. He also announced Automattic was acquiring 200+ Tumblr employees. His empire also operates Gravatar, Akismet, and Crowdsignal. Among his other endeavors, Mullenweg worked at CNET and co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, which wrote the first of the microformats in 2003. As of this writing Automattic has raised $986 million over a dozen rounds and its most-recent valuation is $1.2 billion.
Net Worth: $400 Million
Date of Birth: Jan 11, 1984 (39 years old)
Place of Birth: Houston
Gender: Male
Profession: Entrepreneur
Nationality: United States of America
Early life and education
Mullenweg was born in Houston, Texas, and attended the 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 dropped out in 2004 to pursue a job at CNET Networks.[5] Mullenweg was raised Catholic.
Career
In January 2003, Mullenweg and Mike Little started WordPress as a fork of b2. They were soon joined by original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi. Mullenweg was 19 years old, and a freshman at the University of Houston at the time. In March 2004, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. GMPG wrote the first of the Microformats. In April 2004, with fellow WordPress developers, they launched Ping-O-Matic, a hub for notifying or “pinging” blog search engines, like Technorati, about blog updates. The following month, WordPress competitor Movable Type announced a radical price change, driving thousands of users to seek another blogging platform; this is widely seen as the tipping point in WordPress’s popularity.
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 the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” in February 2005, which had over 900,000 downloads. The release introduced their theme system, moderation features, and a redesign of the front and back end. In 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. Mullenweg admitted accepting the questionable advertisement and removed all articles from the domain.[16]
Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress and related activities full-time,[17] and announced Akismet several days later.[18] 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 Ó Caoimh. An Akismet licensing deal[19] and WordPress bundling[20] 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 2007 Regulation D filing showed that Automattic raised approximately $1.1 million. Investors were Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and CNET.
Mullenweg runs an angel investment firm Audrey Capital, which has backed nearly 30 companies since 2008. In 2011, he backed Y Combinator startup Earbits.
In January 2008, Automattic raised an additional $29.5 million for the company from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and the New York Times Company. 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. One of the reported plans for the funding was in a forum service called TalkPress.
In January 2009, the San Francisco Business Times reported that traffic to WordPress sites were growing faster than for Google’s blogger service and significantly outstripped its nearest competitor, Six Apart. A reporter at eMarketer called Mullenweg “quite an entrepreneur and visionary” and compared WordPress’ momentum over its competitors to Facebook’s growing popularity over MySpace.
In February 2009, an interview with Power Magazine called Mullenweg “the Blog Prince” and dispelled the myth that blogging was a passing trend and revealed that the company has seen a 10% month-on-month organic growth with more than 15,000 new blogs hosted by WordPress each day.
In May 2009, Mullenweg’s unwillingness to comply with Chinese censorship meant WordPress.com was effectively blocked by China’s Golden Shield Project.[29]
A Bloomberg interview in April 2011 described the impressive scalability of the company. Monthly infrastructure costs were only $300,000 to $400,000 while powering 12% of the internet with 1,350 servers and 80 employees in 62 cities. The management of the global company excludes all internal email but instead communication is rooted in their P2theme.com blog theme.
In July 2011, WordPress blogs pass the 50 million milestone, powering over 50 million blogs globally.[31]
In April 2012, Pingdom reported that “WordPress completely dominates top 100 blog” and is in use by 49% of the top 100 blogs in the world. This is a huge increase from the 32% that was recorded 3 years ago. In May 2012, All Things D reported that “WordPress now powers 70 million sites… and expects to bring in $45 million in revenue this year.” The company has a very low rate of staff attrition: 106 employees whilst has only ever hired 118.
In January 2014 Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic. Toni Schneider moved to work on new projects at Automattic. In the announcement Mullenweg joked “it’s obvious that no one in their twenties should run a company.”, and a few months later in May raised $160 million in additional funding for the company, valuing the company at over a billion dollars, and WordPress was cited as powering “22 percent of the world’s top 10 million websites.”
Since 2005, Mullenweg has been a frequent keynote/speaker at conferences/events, including global WordCamp events, SxSW, Web 2.0 Summit, YCombinator’s Startup School, Le Web, Lean Startup Conference, and the International World Wide Web Conference etc.
From 2017 to 2019, Mullenweg also served as a board member for GitLab, Inc.
WordPress
While Mullenweg was a freshman in college in 2003, he and English developer Mike Little launched WordPress, a free and open-source content management system. Originally created for blog publishing, the platform grew over the years to support various other types of web content, including mailing lists, media galleries, online stores, and learning management systems. In late 2004, Mullenweg was recruited by CNET to bring WordPress to the website and help the company with blogs and other media offerings.
Global Multimedia Protocols Group
Also while still in college, Mullenweg co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. The group wrote the first of the microformats, XFN, and developed methods to represent human relationships through the XHTML Friends Network.
Automattic
In the summer of 2005, Mullenweg founded Automattic to operate his growing portfolio of web services. His first major brand released through the company was Akismet, which works to filter spam from online comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages. Shortly after that, Mullenweg launched WordPress.com, a platform for self-publishing that grew into the most popular host for blogging in the world. In early 2014, Mullenweg succeeded Toni Schneider as CEO of Automattic.
Since its founding, Automattic has expanded exponentially by raising millions of dollars in venture capital and making many high-profile acquisitions. It has added to its portfolio such brands as Longreads, Gravatar, Sensei, Cloudup, WPScan, Newspack, and Jetpack. Other notable assets include the microblogging and social networking website Tumblr; the personal journaling app Day One; and the technology company Parse.ly, which provides web analytics and content optimization software to online publishers.
Speaking Gigs
Beyond his entrepreneurial projects, Mullenweg does regular speaking engagements at events around the world. He has presented at WorldCamp events, SxSW, the Lean Startup Conference, and YCombinator’s Startup School, among other places.
Honors and Awards
Mullenweg has earned numerous honors for his contributions to technology and business. In 2008, he received the Information Technology Innovator Award from Temple University. Over the subsequent years, he appeared on several lists of the most influential people on the web, including lists by BusinessWeek, Business Insider, and Forbes.
Philanthropy
On the philanthropic side of things, Mullenweg supports such non-profit organizations as the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, and the Innocence Project. He has also made major donations to the group Charity: Water and the “Bay Lights” art installation in San Francisco.
