Top 100 Matt Mullenweg Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Sometimes you might feel blogs are like TV: You have a thousand channels, but nothing good is on.
Matt Mullenweg
#5. Red notification bubbles on any icon, including mail, drive me crazy.
Matt Mullenweg
#6. It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.
Matt Mullenweg
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. Get the 1.0 out as soon as possible ... even if it sucks.
Matt Mullenweg
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.
Matt Mullenweg
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. I don't have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.
Matt Mullenweg
#23. 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
#24. If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.
Matt Mullenweg
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it.
Matt Mullenweg
#28. A lot of the early adoption of WordPress was actually from thousands and millions of individually hosted instances, so a lot of the people who ran WordPress were on their own.
Matt Mullenweg
#29. 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
#30. A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers.
Matt Mullenweg
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.
Matt Mullenweg
#34. 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
#36. When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.
Matt Mullenweg
#37. I'm really good at making software for publishing.
Matt Mullenweg
#38. 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
#39. Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we're thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there's a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they're making.
Matt Mullenweg
#40. Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data.
Matt Mullenweg
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Don't think about work in your bedroom or relaxation area.
Matt Mullenweg
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg
#48. 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
#49. It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.
Matt Mullenweg
#50. Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.
Matt Mullenweg
#51. Particularly if you're a good engineer, there's a lot of ways you can make money, but to actually have an impact on the world is rare, and when you find an opportunity for that, it's very special.
Matt Mullenweg
#53. I drive a Prius and drink $10k bottles of wine. The wine isnt on Instagram. The Prius is.
Matt Mullenweg
#54. The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.
Matt Mullenweg
#55. 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
#56. You shouldn't restrict peoples' freedom on what they can and cannot do with code.
Matt Mullenweg
#57. I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.
Matt Mullenweg
#58. If I were to wish for two things, they would be as much bandwidth as possible and ridiculously fast browser engines.
Matt Mullenweg
#59. Money and salary is not a particularly good motivator in the long term.
Matt Mullenweg
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#62. I hope that people have more to say than 140 characters will allow them in their life.
Matt Mullenweg
#63. Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium.
Matt Mullenweg
#64. 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
#65. The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition.
Matt Mullenweg
#67. The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact.
Matt Mullenweg
#68. When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.
Matt Mullenweg
#69. 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
#70. You don't need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are.
Matt Mullenweg
#71. For WordPress to be world class, it needs to have a sustainable model.
Matt Mullenweg
#73. You can learn practically anything you want in the world online.
Matt Mullenweg
#74. Automattic's mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.
Matt Mullenweg
#75. Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.
Matt Mullenweg
#77. No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.
Matt Mullenweg
#78. 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
#79. I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.
Matt Mullenweg
#80. Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.
Matt Mullenweg
#81. We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.
Matt Mullenweg
#82. It's good to be in a role when you can learn something new.
Matt Mullenweg
#83. 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.
Matt Mullenweg
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. There is no moderator or ombudsman online, and while the transparency of the web usually means that information is self-correcting, we still have to keep in mind the responsibility each of us carries when the power of the press is at our fingertips and in our pockets.
Matt Mullenweg
#87. Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.
Matt Mullenweg
#88. 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
#89. The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it, all I wanted to do was hack around on the Web. Now the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the Web.
Matt Mullenweg
#90. Has anyone ever said, 'I wish I could go to more meetings today'?
Matt Mullenweg
#91. I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.
Matt Mullenweg
#92. Do what you love and don't focus on money - life's too short.
Matt Mullenweg
#93. 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
#94. I am the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, I think it sucks.
Matt Mullenweg
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,
Matt Mullenweg
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Occasionally, if I'm in a rut, I find changing location helps.
Matt Mullenweg
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