Matt Mullenweg Quotations

I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat - all that matters is their work.

For me, open source is a moral thing.

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.

We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

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. So, on the whole, I think the power that online distribution confers is a positive thing for society. Online we can act as a fifth estate.

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.

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.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors - a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.

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.

Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.

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

If I were to wish for two things, they would be as much bandwidth as possible and ridiculously fast browser engines.

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

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

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.

Money and salary is not a particularly good motivator in the long term.

Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data.

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

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.

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.

Whenever there's a new form of media, we always think it's going to replace the old thing, and it never does. We still have radio, however long after TV was introduced.

Love is great, but not as a password.

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

My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.

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

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.

Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!

Basically, if you believe in Moore's Law, and you believe that hosting is going to become more and more commoditized over time, not being a host is a good idea.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Jeffrey Zeldman had an astonishing ability to craft a seductive coolness using educated references, dry humor, and retro/organic imagery.

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

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

Just because someone uses Twitter doesn't mean they shouldn't use WordPress, and vice versa.

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

We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.

The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.

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.

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? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.

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?

Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.

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

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.

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

What's best for advertisers on Twitter's platform isn't for there to be 20 different clients.

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.

Environment plays a huge role in my ability to creatively focus and my mood - for better and worse.

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

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

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

The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.

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.

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

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

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

Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.

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.

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

The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition.

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

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.

A lot of the early adoption of WordPress was actually from thousands and millions of individually hosted instances, so a lot of the people who ran WordPress were on their own.

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.

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

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.

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

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

No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.

It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.

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.

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

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

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

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 pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.

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.

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.

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.

If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it.

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

In every aspect of life, I consider myself incredibly fortunate.

Before the widespread rise of the Internet and easy publishing tools, influence was largely in the hands of those who could reach the widest audience, the people with printing presses or access to a wide audience on television or radio, all one-way mediums that concentrated power in the hands of the few.

I don't think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks... but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use.

You can't build everything and there is no more a killer feature. Everyone has a different killer feature.

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

WordPress, it's a complex tool; it's like the back of a digital SLR... but that doesn't work on a phone.

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.

Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.

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?