What Does It Take To Succeed As A Young Entrepreneur?

Learning From Matt Mullenweg

Ep 4. Question Everything, CITR Radio 101.9 FM, Vancouver, BC

Matt Mullenweg was only nineteen years old when he became a founding developer of the open-source web software WordPress, which currently powers between 23–26% of the web. Matt is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress and a number of other open source projects that employs hundreds of people around the world.

In this episode of Question Everything on CITR Radio 101.9 FM, we talk about the lessons that Matt learned in Boy Scouts and as a musician, and how they prepared him for the challenges he’s faced throughout his career. We also discuss the importance of curiosity, failure, and how he made the difficult decision to drop out of college. Finally, we have the opportunity to ask Matt what he looks for in prospective employees and talk about what it takes to stand out and succeed in the hiring process.

Here are the top 10 insights Matt shares for young leaders who are interested in pursuing a career the tech industry.

WordPress is an open source project that you started working on when you were only nineteen. Could you tell us about the journey leading up to that point in your life?

My youth–I won’t say misspent, but I focused a lot more on the arts. I played the saxophone and I went to a school that was dedicated to performing arts in Huston, Texas. That’s what I thought I would do, but along the way I started making websites for local musicians (usually in exchange for music lessons) and I just kind of caught the bug of the web, programming, and helping other people publish, which has become my life’s mission.

How did you first become interested in coding and get into that industry?

My father was a computer engineer his whole life. Even from before I was born he was programming computers, so it was always around the house. That sort of background (and also you kind of want to be like your dad when you’re a little kid) combined with the explosion of the web…I mean…we had the web at home, first in dial up, DSL, and broadband. You could learn anything. You didn’t need to go to the library to get a book and learn something. It’s all right there, so you are really only limited by your curiosity. I was very very curious so I learned a lot just by Googling around and reading lots of tutorials.

Did you always have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur or making a big impact on the world?

I don’t know why, but I always had little businesses. I went into a cleaning business, a gardening business–I thought all that you needed to have a business was a business card. You could buy these sheets that were perforated and you could print on them and then tear the perforation and have these little business cards. So I probably had a dozen “businesses” when I was young.

Do you think that coding and web development is something that anyone can excel at if they are curious enough or interested in it, or do you need to have a specific mind set and level of expertise?

Without a doubt anyone can do it. I see this over and over again. There is a lot to learn, I won’t downplay that. You know, just like any other skill, whether you were going to learn a new sport or instrument. There are sites like Codecademy that have really never been better for teaching you how to script and code and program.

Could you walk us through the process of how you first got started working on WordPress and how it developed into what we know it as today?

I was blogging at the time and blogs weren’t new, they were probably five or six years old, if not more. But, it was still a relatively small community and the software for making the blogs was pretty hard to use and not really advanced yet. I was just using the software and thought, this could be better. The big thing that was different with WordPress was that it was open source, meaning that the code belonged to everyone. You weren’t at the mercy of one company or one person. Much like the Wikipedia, it was completely open to the world. Anyone could see how it worked, anyone could modify it, anyone could contribute changes, anyone could use it how they liked. There was no cost or license restrictions.

You were so young when you started. What was it like for you to start managing so much responsibility and success at that age?

I think a lot of things prepared me for it. Being a musician, you rehearse and you practice. Sometimes you lead the band and sometimes you follow. All sides of that are very very important. Being in Boy Scouts–that was a great program for getting me out of the city. They also teach you a lot about leadership and volunteering–all of these sorts of things. You learn the common sense basics of people working together, which is really what an open source project is. It’s not anyone telling anyone else what to do, it’s people volunteering and working together. But I would say I’m still learning many aspects of that. I just became the CEO of Automattic about two and a half years ago now, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t learn something new about how to better manage people, or about how people might interact, or something new about people’s backgrounds or where they’re from. So it’s really an ongoing process. I hope I never stop learning.

You dropped out of college to pursue a career working at CNET Networks. Was that a difficult decision for you to make?

It was a difficult decision. I had kind of a non-traditional college experience because I decided last minute to stay in Huston, so the place I got into was the University of Huston, which at the time (I think it’s different now) was a commuter college, so no one really lived on campus. I got an apartment but I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the campus. I was in class with people but I didn’t really make any connections with my classmates. So really, my strong connections were to the people I had either gone to school with in high school, some musicians and friends, and of course the people I had met online. So those were really my core communities. But my parents still saved up and education was incredibly important to them. My father, when he went to U of H 30 or 40 years before, he had gone to night school. He had already had my older sister, was already married, and had a day job and would go at night to get his degree. So I felt in dropping out–I had a scholarship, I was going during the day, I had all of these opportunities–I felt like I was squandering an opportunity. But at this point, WordPress had started to take off a bit and when I got the job from this company in San Fransisco, they offered to move me out and the salary was more than I could have.. it was like a dream job. In fact, at that time it was more than my dad made. So I was like, “Wow, I could stay in school for two more years and hope to get an opportunity like this, or I could go for it now.” And so I moved out to San Fransisco. I looked back–I missed my family a ton, but there were definitely opportunities there. At the time, it was kind of a quiet or dark period because of the dot-com crash. So really the only people left in San Fransisco were the ones who were really passionate about the web. All of the people who had just been there to make money had already left, so it was a really rich time. I learned so much about entrepreneurship, about investing, about creating companies while in that environment. There’s a reason it’s typically seen as one of the best places in the world for that.

Would you encourage other young people who have similar opportunities or ideas for start-ups to drop out of college too, or do you feel like you were in a very unique situation?

It’s funny, because now I’ll give lectures at different colleges, and when I visit the Stanford campus or places like that, I think, “Man, if I would have gone here I definitely wouldn’t have dropped out!” You know? It was just a combination of… I wasn’t super engaged in the classes I was in at the time (particularly the technology classes were a bit behind the time), my strongest relationships were more outside of school, and an incredible job opportunity–those things all combined to be pretty unique. I don’t encourage people to drop out at all, but don’t rely just on school for your education. The luxury of being in school is that you don’t have a nine to five job, necessarily. You can devote yourself purely to edification. I would say, if you’re in school, make sure that you savour every moment of it. Read as much as possible, learn as much as possible, really devote yourself to your studies, because it’s an opportunity that you probably won’t get for the rest of your lifetime. The things you learn there are what’s going to carry you through a lot of the rest of your adult life.

What were some of the things that you learned when you started working in San Fransisco that other people might learn through college?

Well, there are some things that I learned through college that I think actually helped me a ton. Particularly the study of the classics. I had a few fantastic professors at U of H who really influenced how I thought about things, like philosophy of language.

At CNET, what I learned was how to be in a professional environment, which I had never really gotten any training for. I had a manager, I had an office, I went into work everyday. I wore my khaki pants and my button down shirt. People relied on me for things, I did status updates, and they put me in a management training course, which was really nice. That normal company environment was really really valuable. There were certainly some things that I saw — bureaucracy around (for example) getting resources to be a developer. That took a couple of steps when I was at CNET and so when starting Automattic, I thought, let’s make it so that developers can self-serve and have all of the resources and things they need without having to go through someone else. So any number of those things I think were extremely valuable.

You are still very involved in the hiring process and you have a unique way of hiring people which has led to a really low turnover rate. Could you tell us more about the hiring process and how you focus on fostering team work?

First and foremost, we hire people from all over the world. We don’t say that you need to live in or move to San Fransisco or New York or anyplace like that. We want people to live and work wherever they are happiest. So that’s the first thing, and honestly I think it’s one of the most important. Second, in our process is that (everyone has experienced this), where, say you’re starting a new job and you need another Widget maker. You’re going to think to Widget makers you’ve had in the past, because you know what they’re good at and what they’re bad at. So, as we were starting as just a couple of people, we didn’t know that many people, so hiring purely through referrals would be fairly limited.

We made the mistakes in our early days, where people would apply and have a really impressive resume or they’d have a really great interview. We would ask them to write code on a white board–we made all of those mistakes, and we found that there was almost no correlation between how well someone did in the interview and how they did once they joined Automattic. So we started looking at how we could recreate that element of working together. Because folks who would come into the open source project and say people who were volunteers with WordPress, when we hired them we knew exactly how they worked because we had already been working together for months. So we created what’s called trial process. It’s kind of a two way thing; it allows a prospective employee to see how Automattic works on the inside. Because again, you can listen to all of our press and this interview and everything, but sometimes how a company work on the inside is different from how it is portrayed or perceived on the outside. So someone will actually come in and work alongside real Automatticians in a real environment, so that they can see exactly what they are getting into. It’s a small amount of work, it’s not a long term thing, but it looks just like the work that they will do in the job. How they communicate and everything becomes the number one indicator that we’ve seen for how they will perform at Automattic.

This also allows us to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds, meaning not just living someplace else, but maybe never finishing high school. We have a lot of people who left the workforce 10 or 20 years ago because they became a parent or they pursued something different and now they are looking to get back into it. Most companies will look at their resume and say “What were you doing for these 10 years.” And the truth is, maybe you were being a mom, or a parent, or maybe you were taking care of one of your parents. But we don’t care about that. We look at, was your application a good one? Did it have attention to the detail? Did you write a good cover letter? How do you actually do the work that is going to be the job? As a result of that, we’re at about 470 people at Automattic now, and we’ll hire another 100–150 over the next year, so we’re growing very quickly and we’re able to bring in really interesting folks. People who just did some totally different stuff before they joined. One guy was a traveling tour salesman. We’ve had someone who was a full-time musician, someone who was essentially a sheep herder. A guy who was a full time tea master. In addition to folks who’ve worked at Google and Facebook and all of the traditional places, so it creates a really fun mix of people.

To learn more from Matt and listen to the full replay of the episode, visit Soundcloud or citr.ca

To learn more about Matt and his work, check out his blog at ma.tt.

To stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of Question Everything, follow host Carly Sotas on Twitter + Instagram, or visit carlysotas.com (powered by WordPress :)

This interview has been condensed and edited.