Meet a Programmer Who Turned an Open Source Tool Into a $7.5 billion Empire
Crazy Journey to Inspire Young Programmers
Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress.com and its parent company Automatic.
Automattic is currently valued at $7.5 billion.
In recent news, Automattic bought back $250 million worth of shares from their current and former employees.
This is the story of programmer Matt Mullenweg who built WordPress from scratch.
40% of all websites on the Internet are built with WordPress.
WordPress.org was originally created as a not-for-profit blogging platform.
Matt was an enthusiast of both blogging and open-source software. His big idea was to build a platform that would allow anyone to create a blog.
He received job offers from many tech giants, but he turned down almost all those job offers. It was simply because if he had joined any of the tech giants he had to give away his intellectual property rights.
Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has around 2,000 employees worldwide. Automattic’s workforce is distributed around the world.
What was Matt’s childhood like?
Matt grew up in Houston along with his sister.
His mom managed the family and his dad worked as a computer programmer mostly for oil companies.
As a teenager, Matt was looking for a potential career as a musician.
He was interested in the saxophone because his dad liked to play it.
He attended a performing arts high school. The school had a fantastic atmosphere and he used to earn money playing the saxophone.
He played the saxophone in various places such as different Italian restaurants.
Why didn’t he choose music as a career?
“At the school, some of the kids were true prodigies I was pretty decent but had to work super hard to get there…and I was not the best…It just became clear.”
Matt’s dad had a computer for work, but when he got a computer for home, Matt got into computers.
At first, he used to tinker with a couple of games, but over time he got involved with different internet communities.
According to Matt:
The community would form around a shared interest. It was about other people and you get to know about the other 20 folks that were there…There was a chat system called IRC…It was a kind of text-based slack.
How did Matt learn to create websites?
In 2000 or 2001 it was much more complicated to put together a website.
Matt learned how to put up a website in high school. He did it with the help of books and a lot of trial and error.
There were many websites publishing software such as GeoCities, Dreamweaver, FrontPage and many others.
Most of the time, he was clicking all the buttons on any particular piece of software and then seeing what happened.
This is how he managed to learn about any software.
At that time, Matt started a photography website called footman. On that website, he used to post photos. To launch that website, he used open-source software called Gallery.
It was primarily a PHP script that would allow photos to be posted online. (That was the time before Flickr and Facebook.)
Matt started wordpress.org with a stranger
When Matt was learning to code.
He got involved with an open-source blogging platform called b2 cafelog. He liked the platform and proposed some code changes for the blogging platform b2 cafelog.
The lead developer of b2 liked Matt’s code.
Matt was asked to create a ticket and submit the code.
The submitted code by Matt was quickly accepted and later became part of the official release.
Everyone who updated the software later was running Matt’s code.
“I got this like a complete high of like oh my goodness there are hundred and hundred of websites running code that I wrote…which was a thrill.”
Matt started contributing code to the b2 platform frequently.
The b2 platform had many other contributors around the world.
The lead b2 developer, Mitchell, held the keys to the entire b2 platform.
In the year 2002, Mitchell, the lead developer, left b2. He was the benevolent dictator of the project. Since Mitchell left b2, there was no possible way to make new code changes to the platform.
That’s why people from all over the world stopped contributing to b2.
How Mike discovered Matt Mullenweg
Matt kept blogging about everything that was happening at that time with b2.
He wrote a blog post titled The Blogging Software Dilemma.
Matt mentioned that he wanted a blogging platform unlike anything else.
He wanted something really beautiful that had great typography for publishing blog posts. He mentioned that the platform should be simple, like Blogger, and it should be hackable like b2.
The code must be really beautiful and flexible.
Because b2 cafelog was open source and GPL-licensed, the work that lead developer Mitchell had done was not lost.
Through this post, Matt wanted to tell others in the community that even if someone disappeared from the planet, the code that person created would never be lost.
People could easily take that code and continue to build whatever they want.
After the post went public, a man named Mike Little commented that if Matt wanted to work on such a project, he would love to work together.
That’s what both Mike and Matt ended up doing.
They took the b2 cafelog code, forked it and used it as a base to create something new.
Matt and Mike used to chat with each other on IRC but never met for at least three years. They both used to send blocks of code to each other and also talked through comments on the code.
Where does the name WordPress.org come from?
Mike and Matt had their b2 fork.
There were five or six other forks of b2 and people were trying to use the b2 code to create something meaningful.
At the time, Matt was an active part of the blogging community. People involved with that community used to meet at a coffee shop or bar and hang out to talk about blogging.
When Matt told about a platform that Mike and Matt were building, one of the bloggers named Christin thought of the name WordPress.
Matt liked the name WordPress and went ahead with it.
A lot of people who were previously involved with b2 liked what both Matt and Mike were doing. Most of them migrated to this new project.
If you look carefully at the history of WordPress.org, you’ll notice that it never started as a business, they both just wanted to make blogging easier and more fun for everyone to contribute.
This was one of the hobby projects of everyone involved in the project (WordPress.org).
The idea of one big thing that revolutionized blogging
Officially, both Mike and Matt released WordPress.org to the world in May 2003.
Most of the bloggers around the world who had used any type of blogging software were excited about WordPress.
Additionally, developers from various online communities were enthusiastic about WordPress.
Before WordPress launched, Matt reached out to the folks at b2 and asked them to contribute to one project instead of working on separate projects.
He asked them to work on one big thing and they started contributing to WordPress.
At launch, WordPress had five or six designated developers, but hundreds of developers had made minor changes or tweaks to it.
When WordPress.org was first released, hundreds of people started using it in their daily lives to write blogs.
What was the total cost of running as more people start adopting WordPress.org?
As more people started using wordpress.org, a bigger server was needed.
There were no Amazon web services(AWS) at that time.
They rented a server that was like a box in a building somewhere. You could interact with it online.
The total money needed to operate and rent a server was $425/month.
At that time, only the servers were the main cost.
To pay for the cost of the server, Matt used to build websites and computers. He also made money playing the saxophone in some places.
Job offers from companies like Yahoo and CNet
Matt Mullenweg received job offers from a bunch of big tech giants.
These companies wanted to hire Matt because they wanted him to work on some important things for them.
Some of these companies include Yahoo and CNet.
Cnet was one of the first Internet media companies. They had built a content management system before.
The salary that Cnet offered Matt was around $90k.
Matt’s income at the time was around $1k/mo. For 20-year-old Matt, an offer of $90,000 was like winning a lottery ticket.
Matt accepted a job offer from Cnet for the following reasons:
“They allowed me to retain the intellectual property of the code I was creating…Normally when you join a company like Google you sign over the rights for everything you create there…for me Intellectual Property rights are incredibly important.”
How did he know about IP as a 20-year-old?
“I just read a lot of blogs online and also coming from a music background I was very familiar with IP rights…I am still a big believer in copyright.”
Matt used to work as a program manager at Cnet.
At Cnet, he was only assigned to special projects.
Matt’s experience with WordPress.org helped the folks at Cnet get things set up quickly.
While working at Cnet, he also contributed code to the non-profit organization wordpress.org.
What made Matt launch for-profit WordPress.com?
Matt pitched the then CEO of Cnet:
WordPress.org is cool, but it’s complicated to set up…we can make it easy to just click a few buttons and set up your blog. I think it’s going to be popular…let’s do it…
The entire Cnet team decided they didn’t want to get into the blog hosting business.
Matt was so excited about this idea that, while working at Cnet, he launched his company named Automattic.
Matt hired the first few employees for Automattic.
The idea was to create commercial entities that would be add-ons to WordPress and provide easy hosting. They wanted to create something that would allow anyone to work with WordPress without being a developer.
If the average person wanted to have a blog and didn’t know how to code, he or she could use it and launch a blog.
Matt raised $0 to run the Automattic company initially
Matt Mullenweg bootstrapped the company at first.
Matt was using his money to fund the whole project. He used his credit card and salary from Cnet to get started.
According to Matt:
I definitely over-extended Myself.
When things started moving within the company, he realized that his salary and his credit card money were not enough to finance the for-profit version of WordPress.
Matt remembers a case where someone contacted him to advertise on WordPress.org.
The cost of advertising on WordPress.org was around $2,000 per month.
The advertiser wanted his website to rank higher on Google for some valuable keywords. He told Matt that since people copy the content available on their website, that’s why they can’t rank high on Google.
He wanted Matt to provide a link to his website on WordPress.org. This would have helped them rank higher on Google.
The keywords that the advertiser wanted to rank for were valuable, such as various diseases.
To help this advertiser, Matt invented a new way to spam users.
Matt used the CSS code in such a way that if you visited the website in a browser as a user, the external links would be invisible. If you visited the WordPress.org website as a bot like Google, it would appear that external links are present on the website.
Since Google uses bots to index the website. Matt’s strategy would have helped the advertiser get millions of new users for valuable keywords.
In simple words, Matt Mullenweg just accepted money from a spammer to spam valuable wordpress.org users.
“It’s difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
Later, Google found out about the CSS code. The folks at Google were pissed off when they discovered that this simple CSS code had fooled their search engine.
So, Google decided to remove WordPress from its search. It was like being erased from the Internet.
Matt Mullenweg betrayed the trust of thousands of people by doing this.
After this, Matt fixed the code and wrote a blog post in which he publicly apologized. Eventually, Google forgave Matt and they put WordPress back on the search engine.
Leaving Cnet to create anti-spam software
Matt left Cnet to focus on Automattic.
The first commercial product that Matt created was called Akismet. He named the software after his sister. It is an anti-spam software.
It is a machine learning system that analyzed millions of blogs for spam patterns and then Akismet returned a thumbs up or thumbs down.
If it returned thumbs up, comments had legit meaning otherwise it was spam.
This would help people automatically remove spam from their websites. No manual intervention is required to identify spam. Akismet was free for personal use, but for commercial use, one would have to pay fees.
Matt had decided early on that WordPress.com would remain free, his business model would be to sell plugins for WordPress.
Why did Matt raise money?
Each Automattic employee was from a different city. They were spread all over the world.
At the time, Automattic was earning around $20k/month.
Matt realized that if something happened and they stopped making money in this situation, the company would not be able to pay next month’s wages.
He began to feel the responsibility of those people who were associated with the Automattic company and trusted Matt.
It wasn’t like money was needed to run the business, but Matt wanted to have some cash in reserve so he could patiently build things or, in the worst case, the employees could find other jobs.
Initially, when Matt met with investors, they asked him to hire for different roles such as CEO, CTO, and other high-level positions in the company.
Matt didn’t want to hire for any of those roles.
Later, Matt meets Tony Schneider who previously sold one of his companies to Yahoo and was impressed to talk to him.
Matt hired him to be the CEO of Automattic. Hiring Tony Schneider as CEO helped Automattic raise funds from private investors.
At the time, when Tony was CEO of the company, Matt’s title was President of Automattic.
How did WordPress.com attract people to adapt its platform and service?
According to Matt:
It’s all the word of mouth…one thing we did at the time was all the websites running WordPress by default in the template said: “powered by WordPress”.
If you visit any website running WordPress, you will see a link showing you that this website is powered by WordPress. You would click the link and explore WordPress.
If after your exploration phase you liked wordpress.com, you could easily give it a try.
Also, in the beginning, Matt loved reading various people’s blogs.
Whenever someone complained about things like “Ohh… My website is getting slow”, Matt used to tell them about the WordPress.com service
A $200 million acquisition offer and Automattic’s current valuation
The Automattic team had around twenty people at the time.
In 2007, Matt owned more than half of the company and received an offer to sell wordpress.com for $200 million.
For a company that has only been around for 2 years, this was an exceptional deal.
Matt at that age of 23 would have made around $100 million.
He began to think about it seriously.
He thought, does he need to retire at such a young age? When he questioned himself, he found the idea of retirement boring.
He asked his sister, mom and dad a serious question. If they had $100 million in their bank, what would they do with that money? They wanted to buy a super cool car, buy a house and go on a vacation.
To do all this, he only needed $5 million.
What would he do with the rest of the money?
What he wanted at that point in life was to code every day and roam the world to meet new people. He wanted to work with people that he would enjoy working with and that’s it.
Once he seriously questioned himself. The only answer he got was not to sell the company at such a young age.
In 2009, WordPress got 10 million downloads
Before 2009, the WordPress team added a feature that WordPress could not only run your blog but also manage an entire website.
That feature turned out to be one of the key features of WordPress.com.
It helped WordPress become a content management system. Until that time, WordPress was a journal or blog software.
Later, larger companies were attracted to WordPress because they could manage all the pages of their website through it.
Current Valuation of Automattic
In the year 2021, Matt Mullenweg announced that the company is now valued at $7.5 Billion.
In their journey, Automattic has acquired companies like WooCommerce, Tumblr, Simplenote and several others.
Thank you for this piece. 👍
nice share Sanjay