Words matter. These are the best Matt Mullenweg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.
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.
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.
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.
I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.
The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition.
The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.
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.
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.
Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.
From the first time I held an iPhone, the space has evolved quickly, and people have shifted from reading content on their desktops to smartphones and iPads, even long-form stuff.
Automattic’s mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.
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.
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.
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 were building a real-time game like one of Zynga’s games, the WordPress model wouldn’t work well for that.
I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.
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.
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.
I’m pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.
I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.
The biggest mistake we made at WordPress.com in term of infrastructure was buying servers.
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.
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.
The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.
Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it’s going to change the face of the desktop.
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!
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.
Environment plays a huge role in my ability to creatively focus and my mood – for better and worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.
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?
Simplicity can have a negative impact when it’s the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.
No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.
If you still use ‘admin’ as a username on your blog, change it.
I’m pretty cheap, to be honest.
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.
WordPress, it’s a complex tool; it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.
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 think it’s good to have different locations for different modes you want to be in throughout the day, and to keep them separate.
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.
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.
When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.
Just because someone uses Twitter doesn’t mean they shouldn’t use WordPress, and vice versa.
