I was offered $200M at 24 and I turned it down

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, today's episode is special. We've got Matt Mullenweg. Matt founded a company called WordPress, which is used by something like 45% of all websites on the internet. So it's just a huge thing. And we talked to Matt about a bunch of interesting things. Sean, what did we talk to him about?

**Shaan Puri** (0:13)
He had an offer to sell his company for $200 million when he was 24 years old. He turned it down. We asked him what that was like. We talked to him about some of the recent drama that they've had. We talked about how they've been acquiring companies. They bought the small company in South Africa and how it turned out to be a huge thing for their business, like a billion dollar plus win. He's just a student of the game. He's been doing it for 20 years. This guy started this company when he was 19 years old. He's still doing it and it's become this absolute juggernaut. Enjoy this episode with Matt Mullenweg.

**Sam Parr** (0:44)
Tell me if this is right, because this sounded like almost too good to be true, but I'd read that in 2008, you had an acquisition offer. I think you were only 24 years old for $200 million at that point. I think you had only raised a million dollars, and I think you raised a million dollars at 3 million in valuation, something like relatively, you're 24, you're going to be worth nine figures, something crazy like that. You turn it down, but then you talk about how you didn't have control of the company because you were young and maybe just made some mistakes with funding, something like that. What's the conversation with yourself when you're like, I'm turning down something that might make me worth over $100 million at the age of 24?

**Matt Mullenweg** (1:18)
You talked about your name, The First Million. It's kind of funny, I guess technically on paper, my first million was that first funding round, right? In theory, I owned half the company that was now worth $4 million. But as you know, that's paper money. I was still eating ramen and Mountain Dew and pizza, like living a very broke San Francisco college kid life. But it was in 2008 that we had this acquisition offer. You're right, it was about two and a half years in this company.
Someone tried to buy us for $200 million. And the investors at the time did something which now is a quick comment, but at the time was pretty forward looking, which is a secondary. So they said, wow, we're 20 people, we've been doing this for two and a half years, a $200 million exit would be pretty amazing. Like I said, I would walk away personally with a lot of money. But we think this could be actually way bigger. So let's build that. And so we took that acquisition, made an evaluation, turn that into a funding round where we put a lot more capital into the company so we could really build things out. And I sold some stock myself. So that was my first million liquid was kind of in 2008 I think I was 24 And that was a step change. I was able to like pay off my credit cards and buy mom on my house. Like, you know, all that sort of stuff that you want to do that you dream up and it sort of remove some of those sort of early economic things. And I was really able to focus on just the business and swinging for the fences, which is what they wanted me to do.

**Sam Parr** (2:53)
All right. So when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers and we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the Hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we laid it all out along with our research. And we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode, and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it. Back to the episode.