Breaking the stereotype, many common people coming from nowhere, have become the most important and influential leaders of the tech industry. Few names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc., pop up in each person’s mind as their innovations are playing an so important role in our lives. These innovations have also introduced new trends. One such trend is blogging. And when we hear the word ‘blog’ how can anyone forget the name of WordPress?
WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites, preferably used by most of the bloggers, small businesses, etc. It is one of the best CMS available, which does not require much knowledge of coding language to set up one’s own website. Introduction of WordPress revolutionized the whole internet and today 30% of the internet sites work on the WordPress. That’s a huge achievement. And all the credit goes to the man behind the idea – Matt Mullenweg.
Early Life
Born on 11th January 1984, in Houston, Texas, US, Matt went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He studied jazz saxophone in his school. Further, he went to the University of Houston to pursue the degree in Political Science. But, soon he dropped out in 2004 and accepted a job at CNET Networks. He worked at CNET for two years then quit to start his own venture Automattic.
Matt was never into computer programming. When he was just 18, he used to post blogs on b2/cafelog, an open-source blogging platform. But, after some time, he came to know that the lead developer of this platform had quit and the company had stopped developing it any further. This is when Matt decided to develop the b2 codebase blogging platform according to the web standards of that time. He posted this information on his own blog and soon was joined by his fellow coder Mike Little. They made some key improvements and added some more features to the platform, and this is how the revolutionary WordPress was born, in January 2003.
Rise of Career
Soon after, Matt and Mike were joined by the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi in the development of WordPress. Matt was just a newbie in his college at that time, and he had already co-founded his another venture Global Multimedia Protocols Group, in March 2004. Next, Matt launched a hub, where one could get notifications about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic.
WordPress was still seeking a huge audience to get on the global level. In May 2004, a strong competitor of WordPress, called Movable Type, made some changes in their prices, which led thousands of people looking out for an alternate platform. Fortunately, WordPress was available and caught everyone’s attention.
Now that WordPress was receiving a good response, CNET offered to recruit Matt to work on WordPress for them. He grabbed the opportunity and dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. A couple of months later, came the big announcement of bbPress. And, in February 2005, Matt along with the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhorn’. It introduced several top features like themes, moderation features, and redesign of front and back end.
Matt left CNET, in October of the same year to focus completely on WordPress. Just within a few days, he announced Akismet – an effort to stop comment and trackback spam. Later, in December, there came another venture called Automattic, the original company behind all his other ventures. Matt under Automattic, recruited all the people who had contributed to the development of WordPress.
In January 2006, Toni Schneider was appointed as the new CEO of Automattic. Exactly two years later, the company raised about $29.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and New York Times Company. This was due to the increasing popularity of WordPress among the bloggers and various other funding offers from investors. By that time WordPress had a team of 18 people working.
In early 2009, WordPress was growing faster than anyone had ever imagined and was witnessing 10% growth each month. The platform was hosting around 15,000 new blogs daily. The growth kept increasing each year, tremendously. In April 2012, it was reported that WordPress empowered more than 70 million sites and made a revenue of $45 million that year.
Matt took the CEO position in Automattic, in 2014, and raised $160 million to take the company’s value to a billion dollars.
Personal Life
Matt has won several awards due to his achievements. Business Insider named him among the top 10 most influential people for changing the face of the internet. In February 2011 he was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for the impact, he has made on the blogging world.
Matt supports a number of non-profit organizations and philanthropic organizations like Archive.org, Innocence Project, Charity: Water foundation, and many more. He is currently living in San Francisco.
Harshal Pawar is an avid reader, a TV show addict, and a writer. He has a personal blog brainwork.wordpress.com where he jots down his articles and poetry about love and life.
He is currently pursuing film-making and wishes to bring the words written on a paper to the screen. More of all he is a scorpio.