How serendipitous that a WordPress website about young entrepreneurs could easily contain an article about the man who founded the business himself. He dropped out of the University of Huston, worked for CNET in 2004, which is a year after he started WordPress with Mike Little. At the time he founded WordPress, he was only 19 years old (this was before he dropped out of college). His employment at CNET was largely to encourage him to work on WordPress full time. Now to say that Matt Mullenweg had “tunnel vision” on WordPress would be erroneous, in his time working on the platform he also launched “Ping-O-Matic” which told blog search engines about blog updates. A few years later, he left CNET to focus more on WordPress. While working separate from CNET he also released Akismet and announced that the company Automattic was the company that would now be responsible for WordPress development and releases. WordPress exploded from there, growing faster than anyone could’ve imagined, and only continues to grow to this day. WordPress is home to hundreds of thousands of blogs, and the COVID-19 pandemic only solidified his role as a hugely successful and prominent player in the web-hosting game.
To this day, Matt Mullenweg puts emphasis on the benefit of working from home through his own writing and a TED-Talk he did on the topic. He also puts money towards various charities including a charity designed to bring clean water to Ethiopia and was a major donor to The Bay Lights project. Not only is his drive to finish and improve WordPress admirable, Matt’s ability to keep several “side” projects going at the same time is impressive. Even more impressive when you realize that not only is he able to multitask, he is able to stay involved with external things that will affect WordPress and keep his efforts focused while also branching into a variety of projects.
In our current day and age the pressure to live the perfect academic life by going to college and getting a stem degree and then pursuing grad school, is rampant despite the many cases that prove it to not be the path always leads to success. Matt Mullenweg shows this was not the path for him with his tremendous success despite being a college dropout.
It is very impressive that he achieved his dream with the need for college. It is also interesting that we are using his platform to learn and we are discussing him as an entrepreneur in his platform. Lastly, it is great to see he is giving back after achieving his dream.
It is neat that Matt had so many irons in the fire at one time. This is probably part of why he was innovative – he was exposed to lots of different fields and ideas. Interesting that he dropped out of school; he was certainly very successful!