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.
— Matt Mullenweg
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.
The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.
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.
Love is great, but not as a password.
The biggest mistake we made at WordPress.com in term of infrastructure was buying servers.
When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.
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?
I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.
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!
No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.
You shouldn't restrict peoples' freedom on what they can and cannot do with code.
Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!
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.
I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.
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.
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.
For me, open source is a moral thing.
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.
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.
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.
Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.
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.
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.
Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.
I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.
If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it.
Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.
You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies.
Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most effective URLs available today.
Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data.
Red notification bubbles on any icon, including mail, drive me crazy.
The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.
Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.
I really enjoy computer networking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
