Matt Mullenweg
Founder & CEO, Automattic. On 6 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the open-source content management system. He is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr.
6shows
6appearances
135statements
35resolved
29supported
2contradicted
83%fully supported
76said about them ↓ Everything Matt Mullenweg said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Mullenweg: Tumblr was mismanaged by Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon
“It had been mismanaged, I think under Yahoo and AWOL and Verizon, and we felt like we could turn it around.”
Mullenweg: Wix violated copyright by making derived WordPress code proprietary
“What we often go to bat for and fight for, including with this company called Wix, is what they did was they took our code, and then the code they derived from it, so the modifications they met, were, they said were proprietary and secret to Wix. And so what w…”
Mullenweg: Open Source Eventually Dominates Every Market It Enters
“So I believe that open source comes to dominate any market that enters over time. And the key word is over time because sometimes it takes many decades.”
Mullenweg: It is easier to slack off in an office than in distributed work
“I think it's easier to slack off in an office than it is in a distributed environment.”
Fully distributed organizations outperform in-person companies across all metrics
“Level five is where I believe that the organization in a distributed fashion is outperforming at every single level, productivity, quality, employee happiness, everything, any in-person organization. Because you've embraced all the power, all the special featu…”
Mullenweg: Proprietary software is an evolutionary dead end
“And I believe all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end.”
Mullenweg: Web will fill with AI spam, but high-quality content survives
“There is a version of AI that the web gets filled with spam and, you know, everything. I think that will happen and it doesn't matter because ultimately what we're looking for is that discernment, that quality.”
Mullenweg: Automattic enforces strict neutrality between WordPress.com and third-party hosts
“The rest is that help the host. So they cannot preference part of the rules. They can't reference WordPress.com over any other host in the world. WordPress.com gets access to all the same code APIs, everything that everyone else does.”
Mullenweg: Automattic Hired 1,200 Remote Workers During COVID and Productivity Suffered
“Our culture suffered. Like we were not as productive during COVID. People thought, oh, this must be, I had other CEOs. This must be great. You just, you're, you must be running at full speed. I'm like, no, I hired 1200 people the past year that have, the past …”
Automattic uses zero internal email, relying entirely on internal blogging
“We have no email. We communicate via blogging and yeah, it's very global.”
Mullenweg: Competing for SF Talent Was Fishing in a Small Pond
“Like I'm a big believer in in-person and physical space. A big part of automatic culture is actually meetups where we would bring either the whole company or teams together a few times a year. But it just felt like the best, most talent in the world was not in…”
Mullenweg: Automattic pays identical salaries regardless of employee geography
“So something we didn't do when we started, but we switched in like, was paying the same salaries regardless of geography, right? It's the same work. It's the same job. You're creating the same value for the company and the and the customers. So you should make…”
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
Mullenweg: Successful platforms capture only 5% of ecosystem revenue
“And I kept finding this ratio that's like 20 to one everywhere in successful platforms, not in fake platforms, like it's not on the Facebook platform. Facebook made like 90% of the dollars in that ecosystem, but in others.”
Mullenweg: Open source can power 80% to 85% of the web
“And I believe we have the ability to create a national monopoly of 80, 85% of the world's websites running on open source.”
Commercial spin-outs usually damage their underlying open-source projects
“The history of most companies coming out of open source projects is that the open source project really suffers.”
Mullenweg predicts 99% of crypto token issuances will go to zero
“One, I think there's a lot of, 99% of those are going to go to zero. There's a, but there's also some in there that'll be category changing and change the world.”
Mullenweg: The WordPress ecosystem generates about $10 billion annually
“The WordPress ecosystem, I would estimate to be about ten billion dollars per year.”
Mullenweg: Commits to Finding Liquidity for Any Shareholder Wanting Out
“I tell all my shareholders, like, if you ever want to sell a share, I'm your man. I don't know what the price is, but I don't want to lock them up.”
Mullenweg: Monthly or Quarterly In-Person Meetups Are Ideal for Remote Teams
“It's not daily. It's not weekly. Those are not the right answers. And so it's probably closer to a monthly, quarterly is a real sweet spot for this.”
Mullenweg: All Automattic business units besides Tumblr are very profitable
“Now, fortunately at our business, all the other businesses are doing very well and very profitable.”
Mullenweg: WooCommerce will likely equal all other Automattic businesses combined
“WooCommerce is our e-commerce platform, which, you know, today can be Probably will be as large of all, as all of our other businesses combined.”
Mullenweg: Open source is the future of humanity
“Open source is the future of humanity and it's important that we create more of it.”
The other half of the tape: Matt Mullenweg's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 72 times in 20 episodes across the shows. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 37Harry Stebbings 16Tony Schneider 5Ed Cooke 4Guillermo Rauch 3Joost de Valk 2Tony Conrad 1Sahil Bloom 1
Statements about Matt Mullenweg, by other people (4)
De Valk: Matt Mullenweg and Automattic cannot afford to acquire Yoast
“I don't think he can afford us, first of all.”
Schneider: Automattic selected only 3-4 monthly priorities from 30+ potential tasks
“Matt and I always kept a running list of all the things we wanted to work on, or maybe should be working on at some point, and Usually had like dirty or 40 things on it, probably even more because there's a lot of growth and a lot of ideas everywhere. And then…”
Fulkerson: Most founders fail when monetizing open-source software
“Matt's a great guy, and he was one of the few who traversed that successfully.
There's, most don't, right?
I mean, they just don't.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 38
20VC 32
the Startup Ideas Podcast 2
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2022 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 21 mentions in 3 episodes 7 per episode
- 1750 With $12m in ARR Yoast CEO Says Wordpress Couldn't Afford to Acquire
- 20VC: True Ventures' Toni Schneider on How Being CEO @ Automattic (Wordpress) Made Him A Better Investor, The Biggest Lessons from Automattic on Running Successful Remote Teams and The Right Way For Investors To Show Founders They Have Their Support (Note
- 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 1430 Can You Do 50% Consulting, 50% SaaS On Top of Open Source CRM Framework?
- 20VC: Hiten Shah on The Right Way To Think About Depression, Control and Burnout, Why Nobody Really Knows What They Are Doing and How One Should Receive Advice As A Result & How To Gain Self-Awareness As A Leader
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 15 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- 1146 How Joomla Pays Bills With $0 Revenue, Opensourced
- 1190 The 1 Metric GitLab CEO Follows Thats Driven $10m+ in ARR
- 977 How Mindtouch Landed $1m+ Customers, $7m ARR Bootstrapped, Now $20m+
- 1164 Want Your Own Alexa, Without Amazon Influence? Mycroft Raises $8m For Opensource Voice Stack
- 931 Qualtrics "Well Past" $250m in ARR, When Will The Go Public?
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 5 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Matt's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Automattic | 1 | 36 | 88% 15/17 | full record on How I Built This → |
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Automattic | 1 | 32 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Automattic | 1 | 25 | 67% 6/9 | full record on 20VC → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Automattic | 1 | 19 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Top Founders → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Automattic | 1 | 15 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Automattic | 1 | 8 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |