I Started WordPress at 19... Now It Powers 40% Of The Internet

TL;DR

Matt Mullenweg turned down a $200M acquisition offer at age 24, instead using it as a secondary sale valuation to fund growth and buy his first liquid million. WordPress now powers ~43% of websites, yet Automattic captures only about 5% of the total ecosystem revenue (over $500M annual revenue).

Key insights

• The “overnight success” of WordPress actually required about a thousand days of irrelevance; early days involved manually setting up blogs for high school friends and hosting upgrade parties at his ap
• Automattic’s most successful acquisition was WooCommerce, a 40-person South African company with only four engineers, which now powers over $30B in goods and services annually.
• Mullenweg views open source as a moral decision: the four freedoms (use, study, modify, redistribute) give users permanent ownership of the code, unlike proprietary licenses where customers are stuck