In this week’s podcast, I talk with Matt Mullenweg, who created WordPress as an open-source blogging platform twelve years ago and turned it into a parallel, for-profit company called Automattic ten years ago.
[Click the image above to hear the MP3 of this podcast.]
Since then, WordPress has grown into one of the most successful platforms on the Web. According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 24.2 percent of all known websites — and 60.4 percent of websites for which W3Techs is able to determine the content management system. I can’t think of any other content system that owns such a dominant share of the Web.
But WordPress is more than just a blogging tool; it’s an extensible platform and a massive open-source community. In this podcast, Mullenweg explains how he created the blog, nurtured the community, and how he balances the needs of an open-source project with those of a for-profit company. And that company, Automattic, is worth over a billion dollars, according to its most recent investors.
Mullenweg is a sincere, low-key, and remarkably effective CEO who does things very differently than most tech execs. I think you’ll enjoy this conversation with him.
Also in this episode, Jordan Novet and I tell you what to think about:
- The launch of Windows 10 (and Microsoft’s newfound humility)
- GitHub’s massive new funding round
- Uber’s surprisingly high quarterly losses
You can listen to the podcast in the player above.
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Originally published on VentureBeat: How Matt Mullenweg built WordPress into a giant platform powering 1/4 of the Web (podcast)