Matt Mullenweg – The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.20]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:21)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:46)
My guest today is Matt Mullenweg, co-founder and CEO of Automattic, the company on top of the open-source project WordPress that Matt helped start. Today, WordPress powers 40% of all websites in the world.
Our wide-ranging conversation covers the state of the internet when Matt first started WordPress, the symbiotic relationship between open-source and proprietary projects, and how the most successful companies are really master world builders.
I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Matt Mullenweg. So Matt, I always try to name these episodes in my head before having the conversation as a sort of frame for what ground we can cover. One of the ones that me and my team toyed with for this one is the past, present and future of the internet.
Given what a integral role you and WordPress and Automattic have played in the development of the internet, I thought it would be fun to start by asking you what the internet felt like in early 2000s when you first started building WordPress and ultimately Automattic. What did it feel like to be a participant back then?

**Matt Mullenweg** (3:50)
It felt like I missed the wave because everything that happened in the 90s around Netscape, the internet boom. I was in high school. the.com crash was just something I observed as a teenager.
When I got to San Francisco in 2003 or 2004, it was a little bit of a ghost town, but it was like people were trying to reinvent things. I think the catchphrase at the time was Web 2.0. And Web 2 was trying to correct the excesses of Web 1.0. So everything was open. It was connected. There were open standards.
Services would integrate with each other. Flickr would integrate with Delicious, would integrate with Technorally, would integrate with all the blogging systems.