Matt Mullenweg Quotes

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

There's no financial aspect to stats.

Simperium seems like a genuine utility for our own apps, and for other people as a service. And Simplenote, as a product, I love, and it's just darn handy.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,

If I'm on the titanic I want to be steering.

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

If you make the Internet, live on the internet.

I drive a Prius and drink $10k bottles of wine. The wine isnt on Instagram. The Prius is.

The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.

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

If you're building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.

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.

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

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you've created until it's out there.

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!

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

Technology is best when it brings people together.

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

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

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

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.

As an entrepreneur making decisions for your company, always go back to your first principles of what's important to you and why you started in the first place.

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.

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

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

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

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'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.

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

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

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

One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.

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.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I'm trying to reduce that.

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

I'm pretty cheap, to be honest.

My own personal dream is that the majority of the web runs on open source software.

Simplicity not simplistic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact.

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

It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.

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.

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.

The Google Voice service is a lifesaver for me. My actual phone number changes a lot, so having a canonical Google Voice number that doesn't change - it's actually my same number from high school - is indispensable.

I really enjoy computer networking.

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary.

Love is great, but not as a password.

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

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

Do what you love and don't focus on money - life's too short.

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

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

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

I am the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, I think it sucks.

The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it, all I wanted to do was hack around on the Web. Now the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the Web.

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

Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.

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

I don't have a Wikiquotes page.

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.

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.