MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT, FINALIST
Matt Mullenweg summarizes his philosophy of business with a quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic, has applied this to his way of thinking and makes money to provide great open-source software for the Internet.
Mullenweg founded WordPress in 2003, followed by Automattic in 2005, a network of Web services for online publishers that includes WordPress.com, Akismet and Gravatar. The Automattic network attracts more than half a billion unique visitors worldwide every month.
Mullenweg has overcome many challenges and naysayers throughout the life of the company and has learned from these challenges to improve and continue to grow the business. Mullenweg has continued to prove people wrong by maintaining a strong product.
Automattic has continued to innovate and stay relevant despite the fact that its main product, WordPress, is nine years old. The company switched from doing just blogs to all websites and now supports 16 percent of all websites on the Internet. The company launched its first IOS app for the iPhone just one year after its original release. At this time, Apple stated that there were no open-source applications. Mullenweg was unsure if the application would be denied or banned from the application store, but later his code and application were featured in an Apple keynote presentation.
He now says that mobile is causing him to rethink and reimagine each part of the application. The company continues to improve its products and expand its ability to move to smartphones and tablets. As one of the largest open-source software applications, Automattic continues to innovate and improve its product on a daily basis but still holds true to its core values.
HOW TO REACH: Automattic, automattic.com
