Matt Mullenweg
22 statements across 1 episodes · 4 bullish · 2 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Mar 21, 2022 by Matt Mullenweg · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Matt Mullenweg's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Matt Mullenweg, oldest first
Mar 21, 2022 neutral
Mar 21, 2022
Mar 21, 2022 neutral
Every company acquired by Automattic eventually abandoned its physical office
“Usually what happens is when the company joins, we acquire them, they say, oh, we really need their office. We say, okay, we'll pay the rent, we'll keep it going, we'll keep the lease going. But then once they start to learn our way of working, fewer and fewer…”
Mar 21, 2022 positive
Open-source contributors helped WordPress outpace superior competitors through faster iteration
“When WordPress started, it was worse than all the other software out there. It wasn't very good. It didn't have all the same features and everything like that. But because there were literally later hundreds of people working on it from all over the world, it …”
Mar 21, 2022 negative
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…”
Mar 21, 2022 positive
Automattic built a razor-and-blades model with free WordPress and paid add-ons
“Part of the idea was that WordPress would always be free, and that's maybe the razor, but perhaps we could figure out some razor blades we could sell, some add-on services that would be really most useful to people who are using it more seriously, and then bus…”
Mar 21, 2022
CNET leadership rejected Mullenweg's pitch to build hosted WordPress internally
“I had gone to CNET and said, hey, WordPress is cool, but it's really complicated to set up. If we can make it easy, you just click a few buttons and you get a WordPress, I think that'd be really popular. Let's do that. And that was my pitch to CNET. And I even…”
Mar 21, 2022 neutral
Automattic received a $200M buyout offer with only 20 employees
“Because we were only 15, 20 people at the time. I still owned well over half the company. And so this idea that the for-profit company that we'd been building for about two years was gonna be, had this offer. A very serious offer turned a million dollars was r…”
Mar 21, 2022
Automattic raised $10M at a $200M valuation for secondary liquidity
“So what they did was they took the two hundred million dollars, and they said, okay, that'll be the valuation of the company. We'll do a new round of investment, but instead of putting in one million dollars, we're going to put in ten million dollars into the …”
Mar 21, 2022
Mullenweg joined CNET because it allowed him to retain code IP
“And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there…”
Mar 21, 2022
Mar 21, 2022
Mar 21, 2022 negative
Mullenweg: Employee job-hopping is the fault of companies, not workers
“I think that the people joke about, or they criticize that people jump between companies. There's no loyalty anymore. But I think that's the fault of the company, not of the people. It's that they're not treating people like they want them around for 20 years.”
Mar 21, 2022 positive
Mullenweg turned down a $200M buyout to keep his dream job
“And when I really thought about it, what I would most want to do. I would want to code every day. I'd want to travel the world and meet WordPress users all over the world. I'd want to make software that people used and do it with people I enjoyed working with.…”
Mar 21, 2022
Mar 21, 2022 neutral
A Houston blogger named Christine coined the name 'WordPress'
“One of the bloggers named Christine thought of this name WordPress, and she called me. She was like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. There's this name, and the .org is available. You should go for it. And I just fell in love with it. So that's how we chose the…”
Mar 21, 2022 neutral
Default backlinks in early WordPress installs boosted developers' search rankings
“Every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word Matt, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, Photomat.net, et cetera, is the number one site…”
Mar 21, 2022
Mullenweg incorporated Automattic via LegalZoom, paying early staff $1,000 monthly
“I incorporated Automatic on a website like LegalZoom, like one of these, like you press a few buttons and it becomes a C Corp. So I incorporated the company, and yeah, just started to pay the first few people. You know, not a lot, like a thousand bucks a month…”
Mar 21, 2022 positive
Mar 21, 2022
Mar 21, 2022
Mullenweg and Mike Little forked abandoned b2/cafelog code to create WordPress
“And so that's what Mike and I ended up doing, was we took the code from B two cafe log, kind of this abandoned code, and we did what an open source is called, we forked it, F-O-R-K. And start, use that as the base to start creating something new.”
Mar 21, 2022
Mullenweg's early paid project was a $500 website for his saxophone teacher
“He paid me, you know, 500 bucks, and I made him a website. But then, for no good reason, actually, I put forum software on his website, so there was, like, this forum where people could post, and you could ask him questions, but really, it just became, like, a…”