Matthew Mullenweg is the founder and CEO of the website that we are using right now, WordPress. In January 2003, Mullenweg and one of his friends, Mike Little, started working on WordPress. At that time, Mullenweg was a freshman at University of Houston and only 19 years old. Mullenweg wrote the first microformats in March 2004. Microformats are basically tags that help sort webpages by category for search engines. Within one month, WordPress was able to launch Ping-O-Matic, a program to notify search engines about blog updates. At this point in time, Movable Type, WordPress’ biggest competitor, drastically increased their price. This caused thousands of people to join WordPress because it is free for the basic features. In 2004, Mullenweg dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco to work full time on WordPress. He made the right decision. In February 2005, WordPress released WordPress 1.5 and it had over 900,000 downloads. Mullenweg continued to work hard and in October 2005 they released Akismet. Akismet is a program used to limit comment and trackback spam. Mullenweg announced that the company behind WordPress and Akismet is Automattic. In January of 2006, Mullenweg was able to get Toni Schneider, former Oddpost CEO and Yahoo! Executive, to join Automattic as CEO. In April 2007, Regulation D had numbers that $1.1 million had been raised for Automattic. Again in 2008, Automattic raised even more money with an additional $29.5 million. San Francisco Business Times reported in 2009 that the traffic for WordPress sites were growing faster than Google’s blog service. WordPress hit a major milestone in July 2011 with over 50 million blogs globally. Mullenweg took over as CEO in January 2014 and was able to quickly raise $160 million. This pushed the value of the company to over a billion dollars. At that point, WordPress had 22% of the top 10 million websites in the world. In 2011, Mullenweg was ranked #3 on Business Insider’s 30 Founders under 30 list for his creation of WordPress. Now in 2018, there are 79.7 million new posts on WordPress blogs monthly.
Whether he knew it or not, it sounds like Mullenweg got into the website industry at just the right time. Movable Type was increasing their prices, so there was a need in the market for a less expensive option. Also, WordPress probably had some reason for putting Toni Schneider as CEO, but when Mullenweg took over, it made a huge difference and they raised a large amount of money. This just shows how much passion he had for the business. The investors saw this and it made them want to invest in WordPress because they knew it had an excellent leader who knew what he was doing and would work hard to grow the business.