Matthew Mullenweg was born in Houston, Texas in a small town. He attended The High School for Visual and Performing arts where he studied jazz saxophone. After graduating high school, he attended The University of Houston and studied political science. In 2004, he later dropped out of college to pursue a job he received at CNET Networks. You may ask yourself, why did a political science major drop out for a job opportunity at a tech company? Good question.

While enrolled in The University of Houston, he had an interest in blogging. During a trip to Washington D.C. in 2002, he used a blogging software known as b2/cafelog. Shortly after begging to use the software, it began to get dated. So, together, Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg decided they were going to revive the dated software. After forking the software to bring it up to the modern day standards, WordPress was created.

Resume to 2004 and that’s where CNET Networks hired Matt to work on their blogs and overall media of the company. While he was doing that, he worked on WordPress. In 2005, Matt left CNET to pursue WordPress full time. Over the course of just a few years of leaving CNET and focusing on WordPress full time, he created three separate tech businesses that all tied into WordPress. The most prominent of the three is Akismet, which is a community based program that helps trackback spam and comments.

At age 31 today, Matt Mullenweg is worth a combined 40 million dollars. He still owns and runs WordPress and is also highly involved in giving back to the community of entrepreneurs. Matt’s story goes to show if you are determined enough and have a dream, anything is possible to obtain.