Matt Mullenweg Quotes

People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they’ll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users.

When there’s no one you can point to, or when something goes wrong, it’s your fault – that level of responsibility and accountability is pretty interesting.

You don’t need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it’s what they do, not who they are.

Sometimes you might feel blogs are like TV: You have a thousand channels, but nothing good is on.

You shouldn’t restrict peoples’ freedom on what they can and cannot do with code.

I think it’s good to have different locations for different modes you want to be in throughout the day, and to keep them separate.

I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad.

When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.

I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.

From the first time I held an iPhone, the space has evolved quickly, and people have shifted from reading content on their desktops to smartphones and iPads, even long-form stuff.

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.

With Akismet, there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective?

If you’re going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it’s the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.

Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

If you were building a real-time game like one of Zynga’s games, the WordPress model wouldn’t work well for that.

In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it’s just nice to wake up without one.

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age – its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience.

When I first got into technology I didn’t really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most effective URLs available today.

If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.

130 of Automattic’s 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There’s the Apache model, which is design by committee – great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That’s what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

The themes in WordPress drive a lot of design trends. It democratizes design… You make a theme, and suddenly it’s on hundreds and thousands of sites.

Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that’s where we’re heading.

Ultimately, Captchas are useless for spam because they’re designed to tell you if someone is ‘human’ or not, but not whether something is spam or not.

I don’t care what hours you work. I don’t care if you sleep late or if you pick a child up from school in the afternoon. It’s all about your output.

I’m pretty cheap, to be honest.

I really enjoy computer networking.

Simplicity can have a negative impact when it’s the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.

The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible. If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the Internet, live on the Internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you.

Love is great, but not as a password.

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can’t win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.

If you have a fantastic idea you’re really passionate about and are making $100,000 in your job, if you can set aside some of that to invest in servers or contractors or other folks, that’s actually the best way to start a business in my opinion.

There are 100 million blogs in the world, and it’s part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help many more people start blogging.

Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.

Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.

The biggest mistake we made at WordPress.com in term of infrastructure was buying servers.

For WordPress to be world class, it needs to have a sustainable model.

I think it’s really important for the independent web to have a platform, and to the extent that WordPress can serve that role, I think it’s a great privilege and responsibility.

The rise of broadband and growing ubiquity of Internet access excites me the most. The world changes a lot when, no matter where you are – in the middle of a deserted highway or in a bustling city – you can get high speed broadband access.

The power of the web is not in centralization; it’s not in closed systems or anything like that. It’s in its open nature, and that’s what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years.

One of my favorite programs that we didn’t make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I’m trying to reduce that.

For me, it always comes back to the blogger, the author, the designer, the developer. You build software for that core individual person, and then smart organisations adopt it and dumb organisations die.

Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.

For me, open source is a moral thing.

In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society – rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they’re painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.

I’m really good at making software for publishing.

Don’t think about work in your bedroom or relaxation area.

I learned a ton of things during my time in CNET.

WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.

Has anyone ever said, ‘I wish I could go to more meetings today’?

Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we’re thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there’s a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they’re making.

There’s something very real about helping someone one-on-one.

Red notification bubbles on any icon, including mail, drive me crazy.

Automattic’s mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age – its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.

I hope that people have more to say than 140 characters will allow them in their life.

When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn’t blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?

There is no moderator or ombudsman online, and while the transparency of the web usually means that information is self-correcting, we still have to keep in mind the responsibility each of us carries when the power of the press is at our fingertips and in our pockets.

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia – lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that’s meaningful.

Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium.

Occasionally, if I’m in a rut, I find changing location helps.

I don’t have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.

The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.

Particularly if you’re a good engineer, there’s a lot of ways you can make money, but to actually have an impact on the world is rare, and when you find an opportunity for that, it’s very special.

You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies.

It’s good to be in a role when you can learn something new.

It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.

I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.

I think that all services will have downtime. No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you’ve experienced before. It even happens to Google!

The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I’m addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I’m not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.