Member-only story
A Programmer Turned an Open Source Tool Into a $7,500,000,000 Empire
Crazy Journey to Inspire Young Programmers
Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress.com and its parent company Automatic.
Automattic is currently valued at $7.5 billion.
In recent news, Automattic bought back $250 million worth of shares from their current and former employees.
This is the story of a programmer Matt Mullenweg who built WordPress from scratch.
40% of all websites on the Internet are built with WordPress.
WordPress.org was originally created as a not-for-profit blogging platform.
Matt was an enthusiast of both blogging and open-source software. His big idea was to build a platform that would allow anyone to create a blog.
He received job offers from many tech giants, but he turned down almost all those job offers. It was simply because if he had joined any of the tech giants he had to give away his intellectual property rights.
Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has around 2,000 employees worldwide. Automattic’s workforce is distributed around the world.
