MATT MULLENWEG

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Living place: San Francisco, California.

Matt Mullenweg, 25 is a Founder of Automattic. As the Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic, Matt travels the world sampling cuisine and comparing it to the gold standard of Texas BBQ.

Mullenweg founded Automattic in 2005 and is seen by some as one of the most influential people on the web due to the work his company has done to produce highly regarded open source blogging applications, many of which are available through licences such as GPL. And it seems there is a lot more in Automattic’s product pipeline that could prove equally useful.

One Agenda Setter panellist said he voted for Mullenweg for “setting the pace with kick-ass authoring platform and tools. Redefining open source, developer eco-system”.

Automattic describes WordPress, which has been around since 2003, as the “largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world” and the platform now has 14 million users worldwide.

January 2008 Automattic in raising an additional US$29.5 million for the company from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and the New York Times Company.

September 2008 brought more press coverage with Mullenweg being named to the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 by Inc. Magazine and one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web by BusinessWeek, again the youngest on BusinessWeek’s list.