Entrepreneurship Isn’t About Money, It’s About Changing the World

Entrepreneur Matt Mullenweg recently said that his motivation isn’t to make money, it’s to change the world. Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic and Audrey Capital, as well as a founding developer behind popular blogging platform WordPress. He says he believes that everyone who has changed the world is a type of entrepreneur. “It’s about drive and ambition, not owning a business or being a boss,” he said in an interview.

Mullenweg didn’t start a company as a kid, but he did have an obsession with business cards. “I thought all you needed to start a business was a business card, and I loved printing things and those perforated card sheets you could buy,” he said. “I’d make business cards for everything.” He may not be obsessed with business cards anymore, but he has an impressive startup resume. His first claim to fame was being a founding developer behind WordPress, the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. The inspiration for starting to blog came from reading blogs by Jeffrey Zeldman and Anil Dash. “I ended up using open source software called b2 on my own site, and when that project stopped development it became the base of WordPress,” he said. “In the beginning there were never any grand ambitions, I just wanted better software for my own blog and liked the idea of sharing the improvements I was making.” WordPress now powers over 60 million blogs, 16 percent of all websites.

WordPress is an open-source project, not a for-profit business. Mullenweg decided to start his own company, Automattic, as a for-profit entity whose commercial interests would benefit the larger non-profit community. “I wanted to create a company that I wanted to work at,” he said. “I knew that the more people we could get working on WordPress full-time the faster the software would grow, but in creating a company I didn’t want to make the mistakes that I perceived many open source project founders made when they started a commercial entity.”

Automattic offers over 12 tools for WordPress including spam filter Akismet and survey tool Polldaddy. He says the company’s product releases have been driven by products the team wanted to use themselves. “Almost everyone in Automattic is a blogger, so we experience the software every day just like our users,” he said.

Mullenweg launched Audrey Capital in 2005, and has invested in over 28 early-stage companies, including now-acquired startups Typekit, About.me and Sphere. “I’ve been fortunate in my career so far and wanted a way to give back and support, both financially and from experience, new entrepreneurs in that crazy stage of starting something new,” he said about his motivation for starting the angel investment and research company.

Now that he’s at the helm of Automattic and Audrey Capital, Mullenweg speaks about difference between being a visionary and being a leader. He says that the elements of management aren’t intuitive and must be learned by everybody. “Like anything, the best way to start is to read and consume all the resources available, practice, seek feedback, and iterate,” he said. When it comes to the companies he invests in, Mullenweg says the qualities of the entrepreneurs behind them vary a lot. “There are few surface similarities, but each has made me believe that they’re the most passionate person about their category in the world and will do their very best to make their vision a reality.”

Mullenweg’s top piece of entrepreneurs is reminiscent of other successful founders. “The hardest part is starting, so get that out of the way as soon as possible.” Now that he’s gotten through the hard part and actually started several companies, Mullenweg says he’s devoting more time than ever to Automattic and WordPress. “Both have grown tremendously over the past few years, with Automattic now employing over a hundred people across 23 countries and WordPress now powering 16 percent of all websites,” he said. “Working with that fine group of folks to create services that change the way the web is used is what I plan on doing the rest of my life.”

photo credit: Eva Blue via photopin cc