What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch … Continue reading Boom & Deepseek →

It’s another year, I have ordered all the things and tested all the cables, there’s a little bit about tech and a little bit about life. Here’s what made the cut, now I’m going to be factoring in weight of everything as well. The flat-lay this year was taken at my sister Charleen’s house, where … Continue reading What’s in My Bag, 2025 →

Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco. My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing … Continue reading Matt 4.1 →

I wrote over on WordPress.org about breaking the status quo with a Joost/Karim fork. It’s a perfect time as Automattic is re-focusing its work while the legal stuff is going on.

WordPress.com launched a new update to Studio this week, and we’re already seeing some buzz. Studio is our free and open source app for local WordPress development, enabling you to spin up unlimited WordPress sites on your personal computer. Through its newest feature, Studio Sync, you have complete freedom to: Studio is an excellent tool to have in your … Continue reading Studio Sync →

When Inc Magazine reached out to have David H. Freedman (website powered by WordPress) write a feature piece I was excited because though Inc wasn’t a magazine I have read much since I was a teenager, David seemed like a legit journalist who usually writes for better publications like The Atlantic. I opened up to … Continue reading Inc Hit Piece →

The talented Felix Arntz has given an incredible Christmas gift to the WordPress community with his fast, light, and accessible Snow Fall plugin, which is live on this site and you can install on yours. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays! Search for “snow fall” in your plugin dashboard and install his version, … Continue reading Falling Snow →

It’s a dream come true being here in Tokyo for State of the Word 2024. We’re going to be in an amazing venue that looks over the city. Most of WordPress and Automattic’s senior leadership is here, and we’ll also have several hundred folks from the local community and press. We’ve gotten so much inspiration … Continue reading State of the Word Tokyo →

My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Franisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University of Houston student to co-founding WordPress and leading … Continue reading UH Magazine, Revisting My Alma Mater →

This week, DrupalCon Singapore is bringing together an incredible community of Drupal platform creators, developers, and supporters.  Last year, I had the chance to share the stage with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and the conversation stuck with me. It highlighted the profound impact we can have when communities like ours come together to … Continue reading DrupalCon Singapore →

Very excited to share that we’ve acquired WPAI and the team is joining Automattic. They have some very cool products including CodeWP, AgentWP, and WP.chat.

It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew Ross Sorkin, but this one with Jeff Bezos was particularly good.

I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer. See also: Australia’s Senate bans social media for kids under 16. But there are … Continue reading Age-gating →

I guess something has changed with the Joe Rogan / Spotify deal and now all the old episodes are on YouTube again, which means the gems from the archives can now pop up. I was alerted to this conversation between Joe Rogan and John Carmack, and it’s pure gold. I know I’m five years late … Continue reading Carmack & Rogan →

As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammerly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then … Continue reading Welcoming Harper →

Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writes for the Observer, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg Is ‘More Energized’ Than Ever Amid WP Engine Battle.

Quincy Jones had such an impact on the culture that it’s impossible to summarize. His discography is amazing. I feel so lucky to have met him in 2012 when I was much earlier in my career, and he didn’t have any reason to give me time, but he treated everyone as if they were important. … Continue reading RIP Quincy Jones →

It was a huge pain in the butt, because my mail-in ballot didn’t register properly, but I found a last-minute flight to Houston and this morning walked over to Congregation Emanu El and voted. It is our most sacred duty as a citizen. I encourage every American to vote.

I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing cover on YouTube, and one of my favorite genres of videos is genius musicians breaking down the incredible musical stuff Jacob is doing. (He even has his own instrument now.) This reaction and breakdown from Michael Palmisano, who … Continue reading Michael Palmisano on Collier →

On Wednesday I had a great chat with Connie Loizos, the editor in chief of TechCrunch, you can view the video here: Then yesterday Automattic filed its legal responses to the spurious lawfare from WP Engine, Silver Lake, and Quinn Emanuel. It’s a bit long, but if you have time give it a read, it’s … Continue reading Disrupt Interview →

A quick followup on my prior conversation with Theo. During that chat, I talked briefly about a trademark infringer that was also distributing nulled plugins. I said “Not illegal. Legal under the GPL. But they weren’t changing the names. They were selling their customers Pro Plugins with the licensing stuff nulled out.” I want to … Continue reading GPL Clarification →

Back in June I recorded an episode with Jaclyn Lindsey on the Why Kindness podcast, for their awesome non-profit kindness.org. You can listen to it through Pocket Casts here: This is kind of funny because I’m obviously in the midst of the big battle with Silver Lake and WP Engine. I am a huge proponent … Continue reading Kindness and Techcrunch Disrupt →

WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this about community or some nonsense, but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights. The First Amendment is the basis of our democracy. … Continue reading My Freedom of Speech →

There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend. The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged about … Continue reading Cloudflare Stories →

It’s a heavy day, and I’m sad to write this. Not sure where to start. In 2022, a lawyer recruited two people who took care of my Mom—an assistant and one of her dozen nurses—to resign and demand a million dollars each, or they would publish horrible things about her in a lawsuit. I refused. … Continue reading Those Other Lawsuits →

I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling. However, “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is an abomination of a headline, and David’s second post Open source royalty and mad kings, is just sloppy. … Continue reading Response to DHH →

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard. On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company … Continue reading Everyone’s An Owner →

Yesterday in the African bush was great, I saw giraffes, zebras, warthogs, leopard turtles, elephants. Today wasn’t great: I witnessed a rhino shot with a tranquilizer from a helicopter, then it was held down, had its horns cut off, and then shaved down. I have some photos and videos from the event but I’m not … Continue reading Rhino Dehorning →

Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process. Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, … Continue reading Automattic Alignment →