Matt Mullenweg: Wordpress Founder

Last night, through the SF Entrepreneurs meetup group, I was able to see Matt speak about his company, Automattic, and his Wordpress software. Matt was an extremely nice (and young) guy who was extremely motivating for all of the entrepreneurs in the room. He discussed how he was able to scale his personal software project into a useful tool for hundreds of thousands of users. Some of the key messages were:

Hiring / Employees:

• “Hire people more talented than you”
• “Hire based on things you can’t teach”

Matt had some great thoughts on who and when to hire. The most insightful comments were how he continued to hire people that were better than him at what they did, and to also not hire on current skills (change in 6 months anyway) but to hire on taste and creativity.

Software Development:

• “It takes 10 years to build great software”

Servers:

• “Don’t sign a lease for servers! Use month to month”

VCs / Funding:

• Spend the time to build a prototype and get traction with a user base. You should not approach a VC without a working product.
• “VCs have a herd mentality”

Matt did mention what he thought about Venture Capitalists. Once you screw up with one, you screw up with all J so make sure you are prepared!