WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg #SXSWWP

Wooohooo! We’ve made it to Austin for the Interactive portion of SXSW. In the celebratory spirit of Houston, we chose Matt Mullenweg’s panel as our first to attend!

Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress, the open source platform that powers at least 12% of the internet. (That’s significant considering the platform is open source — free.)

Takeaways from Mullenweg’s panel:

• “The more we give it away (WordPress software), the more we get.”
• The future of WP is to use it as a CMS, not just as a blog, but to power websites.
• 40,000 people a day sign up for WordPress
• The jetpack plug-in is a great tool that contains the most popular WordPress plug-ins all in one package. (Available for WordPress.org sites)
• The thing that makes young tech executives more successful than any other web executives, is that they’re willing to outwork everyone else.
• The goal of WordPress is to make it fun for authors to use – hence the full-screen mode. (It’s a hidden feature many people don’t know about along with  “The Kitchen Sink” mode.)

Facts about Mullenweg

• He’s from Houston
• He went to HSPVA
• First went to SXSW when he was 19
• Played the saxophone
• Thinks everyone should learn some code because, “It’s like literacy.”

Panel attendees were able to live tweet questions using the hashtag #sxswWP. The moderator, John Battelle of Federated Media, led the conversation and  fielded questions from the audience, which largely centered around wondering the future of the CMS.

Mullenweg said that for now, he and his team are just coming off of the release of 3.1 and have not begun plans for the next version. Mullenweg said that eventually they’d like to make upgrading WordPress invisible to users to make the process of transitioning much simpler than having users manually upgrade to the latest version.

Stay tuned for more SXSWi updates from the Schipul team, and be sure to give us a shout if you see us around!