Top 143 Quotes & Sayings by Matt Mullenweg

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What's best for advertisers on Twitter's platform isn't for there to be 20 different clients.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

For me, open source is a moral thing.

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

Has anyone ever said, 'I wish I could go to more meetings today'?

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.

When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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'm pretty cheap, to be honest.

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

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.

Basically, if you believe in Moore's Law, and you believe that hosting is going to become more and more commoditized over time, not being a host is a good idea.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

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

I really enjoy computer networking.

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.

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.