24: How WordPress Creator Matt Mullenweg Writes

I was recently in Hong Kong for a tech conference where I met Matt Mullenweg. For those of you who don’t know who Matt is, Matt took a piece of open source blogging software 12 years ago and started modifying it and improving it, and eventually turned it into WordPress, the content management software which powers 24% of all websites on the internet today.

Matt is the CEO of Automattic, which is the company that manages wordpress.com and offers a range of products and services that are part of the WordPress ecosystem. Automattic today is valued at over a billion dollars.

Matt runs a very different company, and that’s something I go into with him in this conversation. For the most part, nobody needs to go into an office. Their 400 employees work at home or in shared offices in dozens of countries around the world. Matt hopes to scale that up to 4,000 someday.

They also rarely use email and instead use an internal blogging platform they created called P2 which they use to communicate.

In the first half of the conversation we talk a lot about WordPress and Matt’s vision and plans for WordPress, and for his company, Automattic.

In the second half of our conversation we talk about writing. Matt talks about several things, like:

• Why writing is one of the most important skills he looks for in the people that he hires
• He talks about the importance of writing to his work as the CEO of a company that is now valued at a billion dollars
• He goes through his own writing process and shares some of the books that have inspired him to become a better writer
• And he explains why he believes that “an ugly blog with incredible content will win over a beautiful blog with crappy content”

As always you can find the show notes to this episode, including a link to a new book that is being written about WordPress, which Matt invites you to download for free.

And you can pick up my free guide to writing well over at writewithimpact.com/episode24.