Matt Mullenweg built a company worth more than a billion dollars on software he started coding when he was a 19-year-old student at the University of Houston, but you’ll never see the WordPress name atop an office building.

That’s because Mullenweg’s Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, has no physical headquarters. Its 850-plus employees are scattered in 69 countries around the globe in what’s known as a distributed business. Mullenweg, who graduated from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, has become an evangelist for this way of working, and is developing a podcast and writing a book on the topic.

This approach has been wildly successful. WordPress is used on more than 33 percent of the sites on the web, according to W3Techs, which tracks technologies used by websites. It requires hustle, though: In 2018, Mullenweg logged 377,000 miles, visiting 126 cities in 20 countries, according to his most recent birthday blog post – a tradition he’s maintained since he was 19.

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Things to know about Matt Mullenweg

Born:

Jan. 11, 1984, in Houston

High school:

High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, studied music

Instrument:

Saxophone

College:

University of Houston (but dropped out)

Favorite keyboard:

Dvorak

Hobby:

Photography

Number of books read in 2018:

39

Name of his WordPress blog:

Unlucky in Cards

At the time of its last funding round in 2014, Automattic had an estimated valuation of $1.16 billion.

Even more remarkable is that the core product is free. WordPress.org, a separate non-profit that manages the development of the open-source software used for standalone WordPress installations, costs nothing. WordPress.com, a hosting service owned by Automattic, also has a free component. Automattic makes money by selling services, support and premium versions to businesses.

After spending WordPress’ early days in San Francisco, Mullenweg now considers Houston his home base again. Texas Inc. recently caught up with him.

Q. You were born and raised in Houston, and moved to San Francisco after creating WordPress. But now you’re back living here. How did you end up returning to Houston?

A. I moved to San Francisco originally when I was about twenty years old to take a job. So I dropped out of the University of Houston, drove out there with my mom, and really loved it. As you know, WordPress and my company Automattic is totally distributed, so there are people all over the world. Before long, I started clicking up 200,000, 300,000 miles a year.

My parents had also started to get a little older, so I really wanted to maximize my time with them. So, I think it was around 2011 or 2012 that I made Houston my home base and started coming around here whenever I could between all my trips, and got to spend a lot more time with my parents.

Q. Do you spend more time here or on the road?

A. I probably spend more time on the road in general because I still do 350,000, 450,000 miles a year.

Q. Houston has made a big push lately – really, yet another push – to become more attractive to start ups and technology businesses. What do you think of that effort?

A. You know I’ve been all over the world I think Houston is a really special city. It’s a great place to live. It’s a great place to raise a family. And I think that is important. If you look at the places that people are starting to flock to now – entrepreneurs are fleeing San Francisco and the Bay Area there – they’re going to places the great quality of life. And I would put Houston above Austin there.

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Houston’s a much more dynamic city. And now I think we have better food, better arts, better music. Austin is great but I think Houston is under-appreciated. And personally, I choose it.

So I think if we continue to focus on making Houston just a great city, particularly as companies become more more distributed – meaning that people can work from anywhere – I think we’ll see more hiring happening in the Houston area. Hopefully, more companies can get started here as well.

Q. But Austin has a lot of gravity, a critical mass that pulls tech talent there. People want to be where the critical mass is. How do you compete with that?

A. I think the critical mass is moving online. Austin is getting expensive just like the Bay Area did, just like Portland did. I don’t think Austin has great infrastructure – traffic.

You can build a great company, honestly, anywhere. Walmart started in Bentonville (Arkansas), IBM up north, Microsoft being in Redmond. Pixar is in Oakland. These are not necessarily in the city centers.

So over and over you see great entrepreneurs find someplace just a little bit off the beaten path to hang their hats. And like I said before, I think that the larger secular trend is that more and more of this work is moving online.

I think you beat Austin by just being a better place to live.

Q. Does Houston’s push to attract more tech startups have any opportunities for your company?

A. Automattic hires all over the world, including Houston. If there were 30 people here that have a great application that was made through our process, we’d hire 30 people. If there were 100, we’d hire 100. We’re hiring as fast as we can.

I would encourage any Houstonians reading this to really explore distributed companies, including Automattic, and many others that are hiring. You can work at one of the best companies in the world that is changing the web, while not having to leave your friends, your family, your home, all the things that you about wherever you live.

Q. WordPress has become the dominant content management system on the web, but you also have a bunch of other products. It’s now kind of an ecosystem. Can you talk a little about these products and how they interact with each other?

A. So think of WordPress as the best way to get online, to have a web page or online store. That’s where everything started and that’s kind of like our foundation. For people who run WordPress and are a bit more technical – maybe they run it at GoDaddy or BlueHost – we create a product called Jetpack. Jetpack allows them essentially to make their site really fast and secure and up to date without worrying about the maintenance. You don’t have to be a techie.

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And then finally we expanded into this system called WooCommerce, which is e-commerce built on top of WordPress. You get the ease of use WordPress with the ability to run some of the largest stores in the world. Actually, a big user of WooCommerce is H-E-B, which I know is a hometown favorite.

So there are many stores doing over a hundred million a year in sales with WooCommerce, as well as lots of small ones.

Q. You recently announced Newspack (a version of WordPress aimed at small and medium publishers), which you’re working on in a partnership with Google. What has been the reaction to that?

A. In addition the ones I talked about, there are over 50,000 extensions to WordPress, plug-ins and themes that can transform what it does. Journalism has been very near and dear to the heart of many people at Automattic, including myself, from the earliest days.

And one of the new people new executives joined the company last year was Kinsey Wilson, previously of NPR and most recently the New York Times where he helped transform the digital operations.

One of things we have observed that many of these smaller publications are either shutting down, or if they are staying alive, they are typically spending what you would find to be shocking amounts on really bad technology.

So with Newspack we partnered with Google, the Knight Foundation (and others). It basically creates a system which provides the ease of use of WordPress with the power that you need to run a small publication like a newspaper, essentially. And it is still all the open source and very inexpensive.

We hope that this can allow the small publications to reinvest money they would be spending on bad technology to build a good technology and put that money towards more journalists like yourself.

Q. Let’s talk a little bit more about the distributed nature of Automattic. You’ve become an evangelist for this way of working. How much traction have those efforts gotten, and how can becoming distributed pay off for a traditional company?

A. I should first say that this is a deep topic and I’m actually working on a book about it. And I’m launching a podcast very soon. It’ll be at distributed.blog.

I think that what this new generation of companies is doing – including Automattic, GitHub, Elasticsearch – they’re saying, “Why should we constrain ourselves to only hire people that either live in or can commute within a 70-mile distance of the headquarters. That’s silly. That is a geographic filter which takes out the vast majority of the talent and intelligence in the world. We can do better.

Large companies, I think, do distributed work, just in a poor way.

As soon as you’re large enough to be on more than one floor, you already need to invest in the communication, invest in the processes, invest in the systems to get everyone on the same page when you can’t have them all in the same room.

They would still invest in these huge corporate campuses and buildings and things like that just because that was the way they knew how to work. But companies starting from scratch say, “Why do we need that? Why do we need to invest that money? We can create a great company a great culture, a great set of people without that building with our name on it.”

I get jealous sometimes when I drive down (U.S.) 59 and I imagine some day a building that has WordPress on it or Automattic. That would be pretty cool. But it’s clearly egotistical. There’s no actual practical reason why we would ever need a headquarters like that.

Q. There’s a control-freak factor in in a lot of companies, particularly those that are driven, as you said, by ego, or by stockholders. They want everybody in one place so they can control them. How do you break through that?

A. I honestly think it’s easier to slack off in office than it is working distributed. Because in office if you show up on time you’re dressed in a presentable way, you don’t smell of alcohol, then people assume that you’re productive. You can appear very busy, going to lots of meetings.

In a distributed organization, no one knows what you’re wearing. They might not know what you look like, all they’re seeing is the output of your work. Either the work is good, or it’s not.

Separate from being a control freak if you really care about the results of the organization and you want to build a results-driven workforce. So allow people to work from home, allow them to set their own schedule, allow them to control their inputs and just focus on the output.

Q. It strikes me that one of the benefits to doing this is that you don’t need to hire people to actually maintain the physical facility. That would be a really large cost structure you can forgo.

A. We end up not saving that much money over having an office because we invest a lot in travel. I still believe it’s crucially important for people to get together like you and I are here now because you can develop a rapport, you can get to know each other and you can develop trust.

So we tell everyone who joins Automattic to expect three to four weeks of travel per year. Once a year, we bring the whole company together, and then the other two or three weeks you’ll be meeting just with your team, which is five to ten people, and we allow you to get together wherever you want in the world.

So when you add that up, it probably ends up to be what we would pay for an office, but I think the big advantages are around hiring retention and just quality of life and quality of work.

Q. Early on in the history of the web, there was a lot of optimism about its potential as a democratizing force, as a great equalizer. But in the past five years or so we’ve seen a dystopian side as well. How can we get back to the dream of the web as open and democratic, as opposed to something that seems almost dangerous to some?

A. That’s a very loaded question, sir.

There is no time in history I would rather live in them today, and the only thing I prefer is tomorrow. The world is getting drastically better but progress doesn’t always happen in a straight line.

We can look back. If you’re familiar with the history of technology, email connected us all. It allowed us to exchange messages in minutes that used to take weeks. But then, spam happens.

Every technology – sometimes by virtue of being so radically open, which is the beauty of it – will have bad actors. The technology will need time to develop antibodies to those bad actors.

Yes, terrible things happened around the 2016 election — Russian interference at this, but we figured it out. We are addressing it.

For the larger organizations like Facebook, there’s a particular onus or responsibility to really try to do well by society. But I do truly believe that these technologies are creating opportunities and advancements. They already have had a huge impact on people’s lives and will continue to make everything better.

Again, not always in a straight line. And we must be wary.

Q. Finally, you just turned 35 in January. What would 35-year-old Matt tell the 19-year-old Matt as he was starting development on WordPress?

A. If I could talk to 19-year-old Matt, I would probably give him some life advice around just being a bit more balanced. Who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have created WordPress if I was not in front of a computer all day.

Exercise, meditation: I feel like these things have really transformed my life for the better. If I were telling one thing, I’d say it would be to meditate.

From a business point of view, I would tell the younger Matt to not be scared of of scaling. I think the early days of of Automattic, I kept the company artificially small because I was scared of working at a big company. I hadn’t seen examples of big companies innovating. So, I was scared of it so we stayed really small for many years.

Now I see the beauty in scale. You can bring bring such a more diverse group of voices around the table. You can expand not just the depth of what you do, but really the breadth of what you do. We’re able to have a much better bigger impact on the world because we figured out that company-scaling side of things. Your teams are the best way you have an impact on the world.

There is this myth of the lone genius or the lone artist. But in every case if you scratch below the surface, there’s a team there.

Dwight Silverman is the technology editor for the Houston Chronicle and the grillmaster for the TechBurger tech news site. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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