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How Matt Mullenweg built WordPress into a giant platform powering 1/4 of the Web (podcast)

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 i
Dylan Tweney 1 min read

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:

You can listen to the podcast in the player above.

Or, click here to get the MP3 of this episode of What to Think.

You can also listen to What to Think on Soundcloud.

And please subscribe to What to Think in iTunes, where you’ll get every episode delivered to the device of your choice as soon as it’s released!

Originally published on VentureBeat: How Matt Mullenweg built WordPress into a giant platform powering 1/4 of the Web (podcast)

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