Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?
He’s turning Automattic into a different kind of tech giant. But can he take on the trillion-dollar walled gardens and give the internet back to the people?
In the early days of the pandemic, Matt Mullenweg didn’t move to a compound in Hawaii, bug out to a bunker in New Zealand or head to Miami and start shilling for crypto. No, in the early days of the pandemic, Mullenweg bought an RV. He drove it all over the country, bouncing between Houston and San Francisco and Jackson Hole with plenty of stops in national parks. In between, he started doing some tinkering.
The tinkering is a part-time gig: Most of Mullenweg’s time is spent as CEO of Automattic, one of the web’s largest platforms. It’s best known as the company that runs WordPress.com, the hosted version of the blogging platform that powers about 43% of the websites on the internet. Since WordPress is open-source software, no company technically owns it, but Automattic provides tools and services and oversees most of the WordPress-powered internet.
It’s also the owner of the booming ecommerce platform WooCommerce, Day One, the analytics tool Parse.ly and the podcast app Pocket Casts. Oh, and Tumblr. And Simplenote. And many others. That makes Mullenweg one of the most powerful CEOs in tech, and one of the most important voices in the debate over the future of the internet.
But before we get to that, you have to hear about this RV. «I really love networking equipment,» he said, in an effort to explain the story he’s about to tell. He’s always been the guy who goes over to friends’ houses and upgrades their router or just rewires the whole system: «So when I get this RV, what I ended up doing was I set up a multiple-cell phone modem router.» It connects to all three major U.S. carriers and combines them into a single Wi-Fi network.
