How Matt Mullenweg built WordPress into a giant platform powering 1/4 of the Web (podcast)

We’re investigating the nature of these Innovation Engines in a series of What To Think podcasts, sponsored by Pivotal Tracker, and columns by VentureBeat editor at large Dylan Tweney. Tune in here to learn the secrets behind the tech world’s most successful platforms.

In this week’s podcast, I talk with Matt Mullenweg, who created WordPress as an open-source blogging platform twelve years ago and turned it into a parallel, for-profit company called Automattic ten years ago.

Since then, WordPress has grown into one of the most successful platforms on the Web. According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 24.2 percent of all known websites — and 60.4 percent of websites for which W3Techs is able to determine the content management system. I can’t think of any other content system that owns such a dominant share of the Web.

But WordPress is more than just a blogging tool; it’s an extensible platform and a massive open-source community. In this podcast, Mullenweg explains how he created the blog, nurtured the community, and how he balances the needs of an open-source project with those of a for-profit company. And that company, Automattic, is worth over a billion dollars, according to its most recent investors.

Mullenweg is a sincere, low-key, and remarkably effective CEO who does things very differently than most tech execs. I think you’ll enjoy this conversation with him.

Also in this episode, Jordan Novet and I tell you what to think about:

• The launch of Windows 10 (and Microsoft’s newfound humility)
• GitHub’s massive new funding round
• Uber’s surprisingly high quarterly losses

You can listen to the podcast in the player above.

Or, click here to get the MP3 of this episode of What to Think.

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