Matthew Charles “Matt” Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas) is an American online social media entrepreneur, web developer and musician living in San Francisco, California.
He is best known for developing the free and open source CMS named WordPress. Mullenweg was just nineteen years old when he started WordPress from the b2 codebase with his partner Mike Little in January 2003: in 14 years, WordPress conquered the 28% of the web, and it is still growing.
Mullenweg attended the University of Houston and majored in Political Science before he dropped in 2004 to pursue a job at CNET Networks. Since November 2014 he is CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, VaultPress, Akismet, Gravatar, Polldaddy, Cloudup, and more. In the announcement, Mullenweg joked:
“It’s obvious that no one in their twenties should run a company.”
A few months later, he raised $160M in additional funding for Automattic.
Mullenweg meets WordLift
It dates back in 2013, at the SXSW conference in Austin – Texas, when @ziodave, @cyberandy and @matteoc for the very first time introduced the semantic editor WordLift to Matt Mullenweg ?
@cyberandy @ziodave @matteoc showing @wordliftit to @photomatt #sxsw #wordpress pic.twitter.com/3gH89f9Z89
— Livia Patta (@livinka) March 11, 2013