1) Matthew Charles, also known as Matt Mullenweg was born in January 11, 1984 and lives in San Francisco, California. He is considered one of the youngest, talented and most successful entrepreneurs. He is one of the America’s social media entrepreneur, web programmer and a musician who plays saxophone.
2) He studied visual and performing arts in his high school. In his school days, he excelled at playing saxophone. Matt did his majors in Political Science from the University of Houston. In 2004, he left his university to take up a job at CNET Networks and moved from Houston to San Francisco.
3) In the end of 2005, he ceased his job at CNET Networks. Although he has done majors in Political Sciences but he did remarkable work in the field of computer sciences. After leaving CNET, he launched Automattic. Automattic is the company that founded WordPress.com, Akismet, VaultPress, Gravatar, IntenseDebate etc.
4) In January 2003, the progress of B2 came to a halt so he declared on his blog that he would soon launch a new branch of software, which will be up to date with web standards. From the B2 code base, he along with Mike Little commenced WordPress. Soon Michel Valdrighi, the originator of B2 joined Matt.
5) WordPress was amongst the 30 most active sites in the world with thousands of bloggers and people commenting and making additional posts. In 2007, Matt launched Gravatar service.
6) He made Akismet with the consensus of everyone and its basic purpose was to stop comment and trackback spam. Automattic launched WordPress.com with employing people of high caliber such as lead developer Ryan Boren and Donncha O Caoimh, the MU creator of WordPress.
7) He is well recognized and acknowledged for the development of web software ‘WordPress’, which is free of cost and open source web-based software. The WordPress Foundation now handles this software. WordPress is the web software, which leads the web by 16%. He provided free access to blogs and other service on WordPress.com.
8) This American entrepreneur has been an active speaker at many conferences and events including Global Word Camp events, Canada’s Northern Voice, Greek Blogger Camp, Blog World Expo Web, Yahoo Tech Dev Talk and many more. He has shown his eloquent and effective speaking skills at all these events.
9) Mullenweg participated in National Fed Challenge and from that time, he started designing codes. After participating in National Fed Challenge, he started using the B2 Cafelog to accompany the photos he took on his trip to Washington D.C. He made valuable contributions including clearer permalinks and Typographic entities.
10) In March 2004, he became the co-founder of Global Multimedia Protocols Group along with Tantek Celik and Eric Meyer. Matt was also among the first person to write micro formats in collaboration with Global Multimedia Protocols Group. Matt’s association with Global Multimedia Protocols Group and creation of Micro formats is very vital part of his career.
11) Matt Launched Ping-O-Matic with his colleague from WordPress, Dougal Campbell in April 2004. Ping-O-Matic is an apprising blog search engine like the blog updates Technorati. It covers more than a million pings per day.
12) In May 2004, the competitor of WordPress changed its prices, this radical change in the competitor’s pricing resulted in the loss of thousands of users of WordPress. At this leaning moment of WordPress, Matt looked for other solutions.
13) In February 2005, Matt and the WordPress team issued WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhom’. WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhom’ was a complete success and was downloaded for more than 900,000 times. New feature, different theme styles, new and innovative face, end and back were also added to this release of WordPress.
14) Matt Mullenweg received many awards and achievements. In 2007, PC World listed his name on the 50 most influential people over the internet. PC World ranked him number 16 on this list of people. He was also appointed as an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society in the realization of his contributions in Information Technology.
15) Matt totally evolved the style of the internet and for this, he was included in the top ten most influential people online for transforming the online world. He was also part of a list of Most Influential Angel Investors, which was generated by Forbes.
16) He received the biggest news of his career in January 2009. San Francisco Business Times reported that WordPress viewership is accelerating faster than Google’s blogger. This became important news in the community of internet. Mullenweg was also ranked in the Vanity Fair’s Next Establishment honorary list of upcoming talents in the fields of policy, tech, business and media in October 2011. Matt’s WordPress grew by 14.7% on the ranking of the top million websites in the world in the year 2011.
17) WordPress was awarded the Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, amongst 12,000 other nominations. This changed people’s perspective of WordPress, they started taking WordPress as more than just blog software. WordPress was now recognized as a full featured CMS. . WordPress took part in the SOPA Internet Black out day, in January 2012.
18) Matt is an enthusiastic supporter of various philanthropic organizations. He supports causes like Long Now, Archive.Org and Innocence Project. He is the founder and director of the WordPress Foundation.
19) He supports many causes such as promoting safe and clean drinking water in developing nations. He is a part of a charity raiser organization and in the year 2012, he travelled to Ethiopia with the other member of The Well organization.
20) In the mid of 2008, Matt was on the cover page of Linux Journal. He was spotted in a Fight Club T-shirt in this picture. In September, Inc. magazine included his name in the list of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs under the age of 30. Business Week included him in the list of 25 most influential people; he was youngest in the list.