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Matt Mullenweg | |
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Born | Matthew Charles Mullenweg January 11, 1984 Houston, Texas, U.S. |
Education | University of Houston |
Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur, Founder & CEO, [1] Automattic Principal, Audrey Capital [2] Lead Developer, WordPress Foundation |
Organization | Automattic |
Known for | Developing WordPress.com |
Website | ma |
Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American entrepreneur and web developer. He is known for developing WordPress and founding Automattic.
Mullenweg was born and raised in Houston, Texas. His father, Chuck, was a computer programmer. Mullenweg was raised Catholic. [3] He attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. After graduating from high school, he studied philosophy and political science at the University of Houston, eventually dropping out in 2004. [4] [5]
In January 2003, Mullenweg and Mike Little started WordPress as a fork of b2. [6] They were soon joined by original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi. Mullenweg was 19 years old at the time. [7] [5] In March 2003, he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. In April 2004, he helped launch Ping-O-Matic, a mechanism for notifying search engines about blog updates. [8]
In October 2004, he joined CNET to work on WordPress, dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco. [9]
Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress full-time. [10] Soon after he announced Akismet, an initiative to reduce comment and trackback spam. [11] In December, he founded Automattic, with Akismet and WordPress as its flagship products. In January 2006, Mullenweg recruited former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO.[ citation needed ]
In January 2014, Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic. Schneider moved to work on new projects at Automattic. [1] From 2017 to 2019, Mullenweg also served as a board member for GitLab, Inc. [12]
Mullenweg, together with Naveen Selvadurai and Audrey Kim, runs the angel investment firm Audrey Capital, which has backed nearly 30[ as of? ] companies since 2008. [13]
Mullenweg began a three-month sabbatical from his role as CEO at the beginning of February 2024. [14] Later that month, Mullenweg engaged in a public feud with a transgender Tumblr user who, frustrated with the site's failure to address transphobic harassment, posted that she wished Mullenweg would die in a comedic way. The user was subsequently banned. Responding to user uproar, Mullenweg addressed the ban in posts on his personal Tumblr blog, in which he characterized the post as a death threat, and shared private account information about the user. Mullenweg also responded to individual commenters on Tumblr in posts and direct messages, and went to Twitter to respond to the banned user's tweets about the situation. [15] [16] A few days later, transgender employees of Tumblr and Automattic made a post on the official Tumblr staff blog characterizing his response as "unwarranted and harmful" and stating that he did not speak on their behalf. They also said that the user's post was not a realistic threat of violence and not the reason for her ban. [17]
Mullenweg sat on the board of non-profit magazine Grist.org. [18] Mullenweg has supported the Apache Software Foundation, [19] [20] The Bay Lights , [21] and Charity: Water. [22] [23]
WordPress is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, mailing lists and Internet forum, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems and online stores. Available as free and open-source software, WordPress is among the most popular content management systems – it was used by 43.1% of the top 10 million websites as of December 2023.
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Gravatar is a service for providing globally unique avatars and was created by Tom Preston-Werner. Since 2007, it has been owned by Automattic, having integrated it into their WordPress.com blogging platform.
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WordPress.com is a web building platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of the WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for registered users and is financially supported via paid upgrades, "VIP" services and advertising.
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress. The company's name is a play on founder Matt Mullenweg's first name and the word "automatic".
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Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
BuddyPress is an open-source social networking software package owned by Automattic since 2008. It is a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. BuddyPress is designed to allow schools, companies, sports teams, or any other niche community to start their own social network or communication tool.
David Karp is an American webmaster, entrepreneur, and blogger, best known as the founder and former CEO of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr.
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Simplenote is a note-taking application with Markdown support. In addition to being accessible via most web browsers, cross-platform apps are available on Android, Linux, Windows, iOS, and macOS.
Thomas Preston-Werner is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.
Mike Little is an English web developer and writer. He is the co-founder of the free and open source web software WordPress along with Matt Mullenweg.
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational technology company that focuses on media and online business. It is the second and current incarnation of the company, after Verizon Communications acquired the core assets of its predecessor and merged them with AOL in 2017. The resulting subsidiary entity was briefly called Oath Inc. In December 2018, Verizon announced it would write down the combined value of its purchases of AOL and Yahoo! by $4.6 billion, roughly half; the company would be renamed Verizon Media the following month in January 2019.
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