The Mind of Matt Mullenweg
The WordPress founder reflects on his early days at UH, the teachers who influenced his thinking and the future of the written word online.
By Sam Eifling
It was more than 20 years ago now that Matt Mullenweg was a student at the University of Houston, bartering for saxophone lessons. These were the dial-up days, before social media as we now know it, when simply logging on was a chore for most Americans and building websites was still a specialty skill.
Mullenweg had his own website, of course, and would chat with other Houston-area jazz musicians in simple online forums and a community site called Jazz Houston, where he kept track of friends’ upcoming gigs. Before Instagram, before text alerts, there was this simple iteration of the internet. The barriers to getting online were higher than they are now, but once you were there, the culture was homespun.
“I was looking for every place I could leverage some of these really talented musicians’ time to train me to be a better musician,” Mullenweg says. “So I would build websites in exchange for lessons. It’s really about using technology to connect people, which is what I think technology does best.”
Mullenweg’s life has expanded since 2003, when he was a UH undergrad 30 developing WordPress, which has long been among the foundational platforms of the web. He’s still the CEO and founder of Automattic, a company valued at $7.5 billion after a 2021 investment round.
WordPress celebrated its 50th release over the summer, a milestone both impressive and, for its regularity, almost quotidian. Like each of the previous releases, this version, Dorsey, is named for a jazz artist.
As far and as fast as he has traveled since he was coding for alto sax lessons, Mullenweg can still trace his trajectory back to those days in Third Ward, where he was studying classic literature, blogging ahead of his time and working to make the advantages he had as a netizen in Houston available to the greatest number of people. Eventually, he left his philosophy and political science studies unfinished and moved to San Francisco to work for the media company CNET.
Mullenweg (right) and Ernie Manouse, Houston PBS senior producer and host, at a fireside chat at the 2024 Cougar 100 Awards.
Mullenweg (right) and Ernie Manouse, Houston PBS senior producer and host, at a fireside chat at the 2024 Cougar 100 Awards.
Yet Mullenweg still reps Houston and UH with passion. The “about” section of his website closes with a shoutout to 18 specific teachers who “had a big impact” on him. The professor Mullenweg recalls as the most influential during his time at UH was the late Ross M. Lence, widely regarded upon his death in 2006 as one of the most dedicated and decorated educators ever to work at the University.
“He was the professor who really was a sort of trigger for me to look deeper or work harder,” Mullenweg says. “He introduced me to the classics — Thucydides, Plato — and really sharpened my mind to some of the best thinkers of the previous ages.”
Mullenweg’s faith in the written word was on display, literally, in those undergraduate days. In a 2003-vintage blog post still living on his website, ma.tt, he posted a photo of his readings at the time. On the shelf are a mix of classic works by Machiavelli, Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, Bonaventure, and, yes, Plato and Thucydides, alongside such modern essentials as the MLA Handbook and William Zinsser.
Also on the shelf: Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” a prescient sociology of American solitude. Even as a teenager, it seems, Mullenweg was in conversation with voices from hundreds, even thousands of years ago — while also considering how the written word might close the growing distances between his fellow 21st-century Americans.
Mullenweg encourages everyone to play with the new, early generation of large language model artificial intelligence tools. Shake hands with Claude, open up OpenAI, strike up a chat with ChatGPT — they are “intelligence on tap,” he says, and their future is yet to be written. Bad actors will use them for nefarious ends, creating misinformation ahead of elections or designing evermore efficient weaponry. But he has faith that for all the pitfalls new tools bring, people will also figure out effective defenses.
“The written word is as important as ever,” Mullenweg says. “If I had a bet on anything, I would bet on writing.
“The joke is that the hottest new programming language in San Francisco is English. With the large language models — which are a mathematical matrix, multiplication, next token, et cetera — basically we’re finding intelligence derives from language. … So the command and mastery of that is very, very worthwhile. And now we’re teaching it to computers as well.”
“The written word is as important as ever. If I had a bet on anything, I would bet on writing. The joke is that the hottest new programming language in San Francisco is English.”
<Advocating Open Source>
The internet has changed monumentally in the days since he was first building WordPress along with Mike Little, his cofounder, using the blogging platform b2/ cafelog as a foundation. But Mullenweg’s mission has remained remarkably steady from age 19 until now, at age 40.
He and WordPress have always been pivotal advocates for open-source publishing on the web — that is, creating and maintaining a platform with an underlying code available for anyone to access and modify as they see fit. If you’ve surfed the web with the Firefox browser or typed on an Android phone, you’ve used software built on an open-source base.
“Open source is basically this radical philosophy that if you are using software, you should be able to see how it works,” Mullenweg says. “You should be able to change it; you should be able to control it, modify it. This is not how most of your proprietary software works, but I believe it’s for a free society.”
Mullenweg is a longtime advocate for open-source web publishing: the idea that "if you are using software, you should be able to see how it works."
Mullenweg is a longtime advocate for open-source web publishing: the idea that "if you are using software, you should be able to see how it works."
Open source as a concept lies somewhere between a utopian ideal and a shrewd commercial strategy, and its adherents span that spectrum. You want to set up a personal website, for free, in approximately zero time? WordPress is your place. Or maybe you want to build up a site for a brand on the scale of Time, TED, Vogue, Microsoft, PlayStation, Wired or Snoop Dogg? That, also, is something WordPress can handle — and has.
“My life goal was to democratize publishing,” Mullenweg says. “Now I’ve expanded that to democratize publishing commerce and messaging. For publishing, WordPress is about 40% of the way there. We got 40% of the websites on the internet on open source.”
Also within Automattic is Mullenweg’s effort at replicating that success with commerce: Its product WooCommerce “is like an open-source Shopify.” And Beeper, an acquisition made earlier this year, pulls more than a dozen messaging applications into a single node for users to see all their scattered communications at once.
Software should simplify things, he says, not complicate them. If you doubt Mullenweg’s commitment to that philosophy, note the now-famous WordPress tagline, “Code is poetry.”
Credit: Peter Adams for the Faces of Open Source Project
Credit: Peter Adams for the Faces of Open Source Project
“Matt Mullenweg says something about open source that I remind people about to this day, which is that open source takes longer,” says Mike Schwartz, CEO of the Austin-based, open-source business software company Gluu and host of the podcast “Open Source Underdogs.” “It’s easier to just jump out there and build a product. As a commercial company, it’s harder to build consensus with a community. But you end up with a better process, a better product.”
Treating the internet as a creative, freewheeling place also means you never know exactly what you’re going to wind up with. In 2019, Automattic bought the micro-blogging platform Tumblr (“one of our greatest competitors back in the day,” Mullenweg says) for reportedly less than $3 million, a tiny fraction of the $1.1 billion Yahoo paid for it just six years earlier.
If you haven’t been on Tumblr, just picture a youth-driven digital playground that produces most of the best memes you’ve seen on Instagram and which spares you the blue-check tantrums of X. It’s also a place where people can onboard themselves for other Automattic products. This summer the company announced it was going to migrate a truly stunning number of Tumblr pages — half a billion, give or take — to run on WordPress.
That one of the biggest goof-around blog platforms in existence would fit nicely on the infrastructure Mullenweg started in 2003 doesn’t strike him as a bit odd. The thrum of the internet has always required remixes and mashups. He points out that it was a blogging notification device in the design of RSS (really simple syndication) that later became the delivery system for podcast episodes. Every time you get a notification that a new episode has dropped on your favorite pod, you can thank a feature that dates back to the late ’90s/early 2000s, when the developer and writer Dave Winer was mostly concerned with distributing his newsletter, DaveNet.
“You build these tools, and what humanity builds on top of them is the exciting part,” Mullenweg says. “I’m just making canvases and paintbrushes and colors. The world does all the creative stuff with it. And that’s exciting to me.”
“You build these tools, and what humanity builds on top of them is the exciting part. I’m just making canvases and paintbrushes and colors. The world does all the creative stuff with it. And that’s exciting to me.”
<Stepping Up By Stepping Back>
Automattic has nearly 2,000 employees in more than 90 countries, and as the CEO, Mullenweg spends a great deal of time thinking about how to maintain and grow that workforce. The best and brightest minds in tech have their choice of where to work, he reasons, so culture becomes a deciding factor in attracting talented workers.
In his company culture, he strives to find people who want to build for a long-term future. And one ingredient in that is granting every employee a sabbatical every five years.
Mullenweg points out the concept of a day of rest goes back to the opening pages of the Bible and the Sabbath. After five years of work, an employee is eligible for two to three months of paid time off.
Earlier this year, he finally got around to taking his first sabbatical. It had taken him 18 years, because something always came up. “I was the biggest hypocrite in this,” he says. “But it’s hard for a CEO to do.”
Eventually, he had to admit he was in charge, inspired by tech investor Jerry Colonna, who encourages leaders to ask: How am I complicit in creating the conditions that I say I don’t want?
In Mullenweg’s case, he had built an organization that required his presence in order to function. So he had to do something about it.
In the winter, he finally stepped away. He traveled to Japan. He played chess. He spent quality time with horses. Threw a banger of a 40th birthday party. Saw the total eclipse from a plane. Rowed a small craft to Alcatraz Island. He took a step back from his job for the first time almost since his undergrad days, surveyed his life and gave himself space to inhabit a world totally different from his own yet fully his.
“Normally, every day, I wake up and my priorities are Automattic priorities,” he says. “What does Automattic need? It’s like having a child — that’s your priority.
“Even mentally removing that and saying, ‘All right, this is not my thing.’ We’re going to mentally say, ‘Someone else is responsible. I don’t have to worry about it. What do I want to do?’”
That has always been the question at the heart of the internet. What do you want to do? Your answer necessarily builds on what has come before — as surely from your latest decisions as it does from Greek dramatists and Danish existentialist philosophers. Every day is open, yours to modify as you see fit.
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