A Word from the Founder – Matt Mullenweg
Here are some of the interesting points that came up in a recent extended interview J.J. Colao of Forbes.com did with WordPress Founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg. Talking points were shared on WordPress releases, market share, funding, revenue sources, mobile, and other interesting insights about the future of WordPress and Automattic.
- On Web Presence: WordPress now powers 22% of the Web, including Forbes.com
- Mullenweg became CEO of Automattic in January 2014 after being chairman for 8 years.
- On WordPress releases: The next WordPress release isn’t expected this year but Mullenweg hopes maybe in a year or two.
- Automattic is basically a big experiment hoping to create something that’s fully open source to the core, that becomes a big Internet-scale business.
- Revenue composition is 80% from WordPress.com subscriptions, 10% each from WordAds and VIP
- People who are hosted on Amazon or GoDaddy or those places also have a set of products for them under Jetpack.
- On Mobile: A new interface that works fluently whether you’re on the desktop, a tablet or notebook is currently being built targeting half or a plurality of active users by the end of the year.
- On the future of Automattic and WordPress: 10 years from now, Mullenweg wants it to be an organization that has thousands of people – to build, in a completely distributed, open source fashion, a 10 or 20 thousand-person company.
- On Mullenweg’s management style and hiring policies: “Don’t worry about whether your team hired someone that put you over budget for the year. Something like that has nothing to do with creating great products.”
- On Touch Technology: “We’re not going to launch anything anymore ever again, that’s not responsive. I want to be more of a mobile company but as we do that I don’t want to lose the things that make us the engine of the independent Web.”
Mullenweg’s aggressive and visionary approach to delivering a product that is open, diverse, and which can be widely adopted by tens or thousands or millions of users is not an easy task. But then again, to quote his own words, “I didn’t sign up for easy.” Here’s to an exciting WordPress future for the world wide web.
Check out the complete transcript of the interview on Forbes.com
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