Matt Mullenweg and the comment that became a commons

In January 2003, Matt Mullenweg had a problem with his blog. The software underneath it, b2/cafelog, had stopped receiving updates. Its lead developer had disappeared from view. Mullenweg liked what he had built there, and the prospect of abandoning it was unappealing. He was nineteen. His proposed solution was to take the code and carry on.

That was possible because b2 came with a license allowing people to modify and redistribute it. Mullenweg set out his plans in a short blog post, wondering aloud about the features he would like. He was thinking about continuity as much as invention. “The work would never be lost,” he wrote.

The next day, Mike Little, a developer in Stockport, England, left a comment offering to help. There was no recruitment department between them. There was a public page, a shared irritation, and enough permission to begin. Their collaboration became WordPress.

Read that exchange today and the lack of ceremony is rather pleasing. An undertaking that would eventually occupy an appreciable portion of the web began with the digital equivalent of someone leaning over a garden fence. Mullenweg had asked what to do next. Someone answered.

A saxophone before a startup

Houston supplied the early ingredients. Mullenweg studied at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, played saxophone, and made websites and computers for music teachers. One client was his saxophone teacher, David Caceres. Adding a discussion forum to Caceres’s site introduced him to PHP, the programming language that would become central to his work.

Music and computing were already overlapping in practical ways: a musician needed a website; a student could build one. Across the Atlantic, Little had his own history of music and programming. They arrived at the same software from different lives. Mullenweg’s friend Christine Tremoulet supplied the name WordPress.

The first release arrived on May 27, 2003. Later releases acquired the names of jazz musicians, including Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Duke Ellington. A software update could also be a small recommendation from the record collection. There are less enjoyable ways to remember a version number.

The company came later

WordPress was already underway when Mullenweg accepted a job at CNET Networks in 2004 and moved to San Francisco. The arrangement included paid time to develop WordPress. His announcement took care to say that a new employer would not change his principles. Even then, he anticipated the question that follows an open-source developer into a corporate office: whose interests will the work serve?

He left CNET and founded Automattic in 2005. The distinction between the company and the project matters. WordPress is open-source software; Automattic is a business that offers products and services, including WordPress.com. A person can use WordPress through another hosting company. That freedom is part of the proposition.

Automattic built a business around helping people use the web. Its portfolio now includes WooCommerce, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and other services. Publishing extends from a personal post to a publication, a shop, or a conversation. Each creates different demands on software that began with a blogger trying to keep his own site going.

Mullenweg did not immediately settle into the permanent role of chief executive. Toni Schneider joined as CEO in 2006. In January 2014, the two switched roles, with Mullenweg becoming CEO and Schneider turning toward new products. Mullenweg joked about the wisdom of keeping people in their twenties away from running companies. He had turned thirty two days earlier. The timing gave the joke its qualifications.

Four freedoms, one difficult job

In 2014, Mullenweg wrote an essay about software freedom. The central argument was that the programs people depend on shape what they can do. Being able to inspect, change, share, and run that software gives users a measure of control over their own lives.

For him, this was an explanation of how WordPress had been possible. The license on b2 let two users continue a project they had not originated. Their improvements, in turn, would remain available for others to build upon. An abandoned tool became the starting point for another tool.

That inheritance also creates a demanding job for anyone trying to sustain the project. Open software requires maintenance, infrastructure, and people willing to do repetitive work. Successful businesses can grow around it. The recurring argument is how much those businesses should contribute, and who gets to decide whether they have done enough.

In 2024, that argument became a public confrontation with hosting company WP Engine. Mullenweg challenged its contributions and use of the WordPress brand. WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg. A December 2024 preliminary injunction required the defendants to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org. It was an interim order, rather than a final judgment on the case.

The conflict puts pressure on a distinction that is easy to overlook when everything works: having the freedom to use code and depending on services surrounding that code are different circumstances. A license can spell out permissions. The daily relationships among maintainers, companies, and users require continuing negotiation. Mullenweg occupies several positions within those relationships at once.

The office could be anywhere

Automattic also became a test of how people could work together without sharing a daily commute. It has operated as a distributed company since its founding. The practical question was familiar from WordPress’s beginnings: what can people make together when they are somewhere else?

By January 2019, Mullenweg was making the case in a TED video and accompanying post. He suggested that conventional companies try everyone working from home on selected days, then build the documentation and tools needed to support the experiment. Starting with a manageable change made the argument more useful than simply declaring the office obsolete.

The Automattic Creed makes communication an explicit obligation. It also asks employees to keep learning and to value the effect of their work over the hours they spend producing it. Those commitments expose the real work behind geographical freedom. A colleague elsewhere needs enough information to act without waiting for you to wake up.

“I will never stop learning.”

The Automattic Creed

A distributed company still has to make decisions, resolve disagreements, and recognize good work. Moving the desks apart makes those responsibilities harder to ignore. Mullenweg’s experiment is interesting because it makes an organizational promise that can be tested in ordinary working days, far from a conference stage.

Write for two people

For someone associated with publishing at scale, Mullenweg has offered unusually intimate advice about audience. In a January 2014 essay, he described the discouragement of measuring a post through reactions and visitor counts. Effort and attention do not reliably arrive in matching quantities. Anyone who has spent an afternoon on a paragraph has grounds to sympathize.

His remedy was to imagine two readers: yourself, including the future self who might return to the writing, and one particular other person. A post could work like a letter. That gave publishing a purpose that survived a quiet afternoon in the statistics dashboard.

In August 2026, he returned to the needs of that writer, describing a division between bloggers and builders within WordPress. Bloggers wanted a place to write and connect; builders wanted tools to shape sites. He placed himself with the bloggers and argued that their needs deserved more attention.

It is a revealing self-portrait. An enterprise can acquire products and accumulate management problems while its founder still notices whether the writing desk feels welcoming. The original user remains somewhere inside the executive.

A board meeting, then a boat

September 2026 brought a brief board-imposed leave and his return as Automattic CEO. Later that month, the company announced a new board. Those events made the question of authority immediate inside the business as well as around the software.

Meanwhile, Mullenweg had announced an offer to buy Mirene, the houseboat owned by Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan. His account connected it with another secondhand adventure: he had previously owned John Mayer’s EarthRoamer before passing it to artist Dustin Yellin in a trade for art. The vehicles come with their own maintenance requirements. He seemed prepared to learn another set.

The 2016 Heinz Award recognized his contribution to making online publishing accessible. Awards can make a career sound finished. His more recent writing feels occupied with unfinished business: what writers need, how communities learn, and who should help steer a company.

On October 13, 2026, he offered to help authors negotiate board appointments, with a one-percent fee directed to the WordPress Foundation or Locus Magazine. His “Board Agent” post named science-fiction writers he admired. Another post that day announced an Automattic livestream with Neal Stephenson and recalled how Snow Crash had influenced his early web work with Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer.

There is a recognizable thread from a saxophone teacher’s website to that invitation. Someone makes something; someone else finds a use for it; the conversation takes another turn. Mullenweg’s career has made that process available to many people. It has also demonstrated how complicated the responsibilities become once they accept the invitation.

Back in 2003, the important thing was that another person could pick up the work. More than twenty years later, the question still has practical force: what arrangements will let the next person carry on?