Top 100 Matt Mullenweg Quotes
#1. Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.
Matt Mullenweg
#2. Automattic's mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.
Matt Mullenweg
#3. You can learn practically anything you want in the world online.
Matt Mullenweg
#5. For WordPress to be world class, it needs to have a sustainable model.
Matt Mullenweg
#6. I think that all services will have downtime. No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you've experienced before. It even happens to Google!
Matt Mullenweg
#7. The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact.
Matt Mullenweg
#8. The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition.
Matt Mullenweg
#9. I hope that people have more to say than 140 characters will allow them in their life.
Matt Mullenweg
#10. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#11. Money and salary is not a particularly good motivator in the long term.
Matt Mullenweg
#12. I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.
Matt Mullenweg
#13. You shouldn't restrict peoples' freedom on what they can and cannot do with code.
Matt Mullenweg
#14. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#15. The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.
Matt Mullenweg
#16. I drive a Prius and drink $10k bottles of wine. The wine isnt on Instagram. The Prius is.
Matt Mullenweg
#18. When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?
Matt Mullenweg
#19. Occasionally, if I'm in a rut, I find changing location helps.
Matt Mullenweg
#20. The power of the web is not in centralization; it's not in closed systems or anything like that. It's in its open nature, and that's what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years.
Matt Mullenweg
#21. When there's no one you can point to, or when something goes wrong, it's your fault - that level of responsibility and accountability is pretty interesting.
Matt Mullenweg
#22. One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,
Matt Mullenweg
#23. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#24. It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.
Matt Mullenweg
#25. The themes in WordPress drive a lot of design trends. It democratizes design ... You make a theme, and suddenly it's on hundreds and thousands of sites.
Matt Mullenweg
#26. Do what you love and don't focus on money - life's too short.
Matt Mullenweg
#27. I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.
Matt Mullenweg
#29. 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 every day is super revolutionary.
Matt Mullenweg
#30. Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.
Matt Mullenweg
#31. My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.
Matt Mullenweg
#32. Whenever there's a new form of media, we always think it's going to replace the old thing, and it never does. We still have radio, however long after TV was introduced.
Matt Mullenweg
#33. It's good to be in a role when you can learn something new.
Matt Mullenweg
#34. Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.
Matt Mullenweg
#35. I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.
Matt Mullenweg
#36. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#37. No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.
Matt Mullenweg
#38. There are 100 million blogs in the world, and it's part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help many more people start blogging.
Matt Mullenweg
#39. If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.
Matt Mullenweg
#40. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#41. The Google Voice service is a lifesaver for me. My actual phone number changes a lot, so having a canonical Google Voice number that doesn't change - it's actually my same number from high school - is indispensable.
Matt Mullenweg
#42. If you're going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it's the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.
Matt Mullenweg
#43. In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it's just nice to wake up without one.
Matt Mullenweg
#45. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#46. I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.
Matt Mullenweg
#47. WordPress, it's a complex tool; it's like the back of a digital SLR ... but that doesn't work on a phone.
Matt Mullenweg
#49. You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies.
Matt Mullenweg
#50. Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.
Matt Mullenweg
#51. Get the 1.0 out as soon as possible ... even if it sucks.
Matt Mullenweg
#52. If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.
Matt Mullenweg
#54. The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.
Matt Mullenweg
#55. It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.
Matt Mullenweg
#56. Red notification bubbles on any icon, including mail, drive me crazy.
Matt Mullenweg
#57. I don't care what hours you work. I don't care if you sleep late or if you pick a child up from school in the afternoon. It's all about your output.
Matt Mullenweg
#58. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#59. 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?
Matt Mullenweg
#60. Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.
Matt Mullenweg
#61. It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.
Matt Mullenweg
#62. With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.
Matt Mullenweg
#63. Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg
#64. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#65. Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that's where we're heading.
Matt Mullenweg
#66. Basically, if you believe in Moore's Law, and you believe that hosting is going to become more and more commoditized over time, not being a host is a good idea.
Matt Mullenweg
#67. Don't think about work in your bedroom or relaxation area.
Matt Mullenweg
#68. The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible. If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the Internet, live on the Internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you.
Matt Mullenweg
#69. If you have a fantastic idea you're really passionate about and are making $100,000 in your job, if you can set aside some of that to invest in servers or contractors or other folks, that's actually the best way to start a business in my opinion.
Matt Mullenweg
#70. Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data.
Matt Mullenweg
#71. Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most effective URLs available today.
Matt Mullenweg
#72. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#73. I'm really good at making software for publishing.
Matt Mullenweg
#74. When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.
Matt Mullenweg
#75. Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.
Matt Mullenweg
#76. Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.
Matt Mullenweg
#77. While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.
Matt Mullenweg
#78. I think it's really important for the independent web to have a platform, and to the extent that WordPress can serve that role, I think it's a great privilege and responsibility.
Matt Mullenweg
#79. A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers.
Matt Mullenweg
#80. We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.
Matt Mullenweg
#81. My own personal dream is that the majority of the web runs on open source software.
Matt Mullenweg
#82. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#83. If you were building a real-time game like one of Zynga's games, the WordPress model wouldn't work well for that.
Matt Mullenweg
#84. There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.
Matt Mullenweg
#85. The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.
Matt Mullenweg
#86. There's something very real about helping someone one-on-one.
Matt Mullenweg
#88. Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!
Matt Mullenweg
#89. What's best for advertisers on Twitter's platform isn't for there to be 20 different clients.
Matt Mullenweg
#90. In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society - rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they're painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.
Matt Mullenweg
#91. Technology is best when it brings people together.
Matt Mullenweg
#92. Simplicity can have a negative impact when it's the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.
Matt Mullenweg
#93. If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.
Matt Mullenweg
#94. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#95. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#96. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#98. You can't build everything and there is no more a killer feature. Everyone has a different killer feature.
Matt Mullenweg
#100. Environment plays a huge role in my ability to creatively focus and my mood - for better and worse.
Matt Mullenweg
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