Matt Mullenweg Quotes

If you make the Internet, live on the internet.

I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat - all that matters is their work.

My own personal dream is that the majority of the web runs on open source software.

The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

If I'm on the titanic I want to be steering.

I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.

I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office - just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight.

A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.

I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.

I don't have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.

Technology is closing the gap between what one can imagine and what one can do and as a result the equality of opportunity is unmatched in human history.

There's no financial aspect to stats.

The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr's own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there's healthy import and export traffic both ways.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you've created until it's out there.

Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.

I don't have a Wikiquotes page.

It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.

130 of Automattic's 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they'll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users.

For me, it always comes back to the blogger, the author, the designer, the developer. You build software for that core individual person, and then smart organisations adopt it and dumb organisations die.

You can't build everything and there is no more a killer feature. Everyone has a different killer feature.

One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.

The rise of broadband and growing ubiquity of Internet access excites me the most. The world changes a lot when, no matter where you are - in the middle of a deserted highway or in a bustling city - you can get high speed broadband access.

Simperium seems like a genuine utility for our own apps, and for other people as a service. And Simplenote, as a product, I love, and it's just darn handy.

Simplicity not simplistic.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors - a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

Get the 1.0 out as soon as possible...even if it sucks.

If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.

If you're building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.

If I were to wish for two things, they would be as much bandwidth as possible and ridiculously fast browser engines.

Do what you love and don't focus on money - life's too short.

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands everyday is super revolutionary.

I am the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, I think it sucks.

Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, were thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think theres a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things theyre making.

WordPress, it's a complex tool; it's like the back of a digital SLR... but that doesn't work on a phone.

You can learn practically anything you want in the world online.

One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I'm trying to reduce that.

As an entrepreneur making decisions for your company, always go back to your first principles of what's important to you and why you started in the first place.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas.

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

From the first time I held an iPhone, the space has evolved quickly, and people have shifted from reading content on their desktops to smartphones and iPads, even long-form stuff.

Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.

The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad. So, on the whole, I think the power that online distribution confers is a positive thing for society. Online we can act as a fifth estate.