Matt Mullenweg quotes:

Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.

The rise of broadband and growing ubiquity of Internet access excites me the most. The world changes a lot when, no matter where you are - in the middle of a deserted highway or in a bustling city - you can get high speed broadband access.

The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr's own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there's healthy import and export traffic both ways.

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society - rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they're painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors - a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

Occasionally, if I'm in a rut, I find changing location helps.

The Google Voice service is a lifesaver for me. My actual phone number changes a lot, so having a canonical Google Voice number that doesn't change - it's actually my same number from high school - is indispensable.

If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.

I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad.

I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office - just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight.

We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.

You don't need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are.

Before the widespread rise of the Internet and easy publishing tools, influence was largely in the hands of those who could reach the widest audience, the people with printing presses or access to a wide audience on television or radio, all one-way mediums that concentrated power in the hands of the few.

I don't care what hours you work. I don't care if you sleep late or if you pick a child up from school in the afternoon. It's all about your output.

It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.

Jeffrey Zeldman had an astonishing ability to craft a seductive coolness using educated references, dry humor, and retro/organic imagery.

Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data.

For me, it always comes back to the blogger, the author, the designer, the developer. You build software for that core individual person, and then smart organisations adopt it and dumb organisations die.

I don't think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks... but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use.

There is no moderator or ombudsman online, and while the transparency of the web usually means that information is self-correcting, we still have to keep in mind the responsibility each of us carries when the power of the press is at our fingertips and in our pockets.

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.

WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.

In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it's just nice to wake up without one.

One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible. If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the Internet, live on the Internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you.

From the first time I held an iPhone, the space has evolved quickly, and people have shifted from reading content on their desktops to smartphones and iPads, even long-form stuff.

I think it's good to have different locations for different modes you want to be in throughout the day, and to keep them separate.

If you're going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it's the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.

When there's no one you can point to, or when something goes wrong, it's your fault - that level of responsibility and accountability is pretty interesting.

Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most effective URLs available today.

Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we're thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there's a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they're making.

We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.

I hope that people have more to say than 140 characters will allow them in their life.

Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.

Ultimately, Captchas are useless for spam because they're designed to tell you if someone is 'human' or not, but not whether something is spam or not.

The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

Environment plays a huge role in my ability to creatively focus and my mood - for better and worse.

I'm pretty cheap, to be honest.

With Akismet, there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective?

With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.

Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

If you were building a real-time game like one of Zynga's games, the WordPress model wouldn't work well for that.

I really enjoy computer networking.

I don't have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

Particularly if you're a good engineer, there's a lot of ways you can make money, but to actually have an impact on the world is rare, and when you find an opportunity for that, it's very special.

It's good to be in a role when you can learn something new.

Simperium seems like a genuine utility for our own apps, and for other people as a service. And Simplenote, as a product, I love, and it's just darn handy.

Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.

Just because someone uses Twitter doesn't mean they shouldn't use WordPress, and vice versa.

The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.

Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

130 of Automattic's 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

For WordPress to be world class, it needs to have a sustainable model.

Don't think about work in your bedroom or relaxation area.

Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age. Its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.

I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad. So, on the whole, I think the power that online distribution confers is a positive thing for society. Online we can act as a fifth estate.

I drive a Prius and drink $10k bottles of wine. The wine isnt on Instagram. The Prius is.

You can learn practically anything you want in the world online.

I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat - all that matters is their work.

The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition.

Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you've created until it's out there.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas.

If you're building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.

People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they'll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users.

WordPress, it's a complex tool; it's like the back of a digital SLR... but that doesn't work on a phone.

Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, were thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think theres a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things theyre making.

I am the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, I think it sucks.

For me, open source is a moral thing.

Whenever there's a new form of media, we always think it's going to replace the old thing, and it never does. We still have radio, however long after TV was introduced.

Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that's where we're heading.

Automattic's mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.

I think that all services will have downtime. No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you've experienced before. It even happens to Google!

If I were to wish for two things, they would be as much bandwidth as possible and ridiculously fast browser engines.

Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!

The biggest mistake we made at WordPress.com in term of infrastructure was buying servers.

There are 100 million blogs in the world, and it's part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help many more people start blogging.

The power of the web is not in centralization; it's not in closed systems or anything like that. It's in its open nature, and that's what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years.

I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary.

Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.

Money and salary is not a particularly good motivator in the long term.

My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.

Red notification bubbles on any icon, including mail, drive me crazy.

Simplicity can have a negative impact when it's the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience.

If you have a fantastic idea you're really passionate about and are making $100,000 in your job, if you can set aside some of that to invest in servers or contractors or other folks, that's actually the best way to start a business in my opinion.

Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.

I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.

When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?

The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it, all I wanted to do was hack around on the Web. Now the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the Web.

It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.

I think it's really important for the independent web to have a platform, and to the extent that WordPress can serve that role, I think it's a great privilege and responsibility.

Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.

There's something very real about helping someone one-on-one.

A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers.

As an entrepreneur making decisions for your company, always go back to your first principles of what's important to you and why you started in the first place.

Do what you love and don't focus on money - life's too short.

Get the 1.0 out as soon as possible...even if it sucks.

I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.

I don't have a Wikiquotes page.

I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.

If I'm on the titanic I want to be steering.

If you make the Internet, live on the internet.

If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I'm trying to reduce that.

One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,

Simplicity not simplistic.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

Technology is closing the gap between what one can imagine and what one can do and as a result the equality of opportunity is unmatched in human history.

The biggest motivation is not the money but the impact.