BTD: Speaker Profile: Matt Mullenweg

Posted by Jason Markow on Oct 29, 2009 in Events | 0 comments

Continuing coverage of the stand out speakers at BizTechDay last week brings us to Matt Mullenweg.  Matt is the founder of WordPress, Akismet, bbpress and a handful of other highly successful web based products and services.

Several things made Matt stand out from the rest of the panel, namely: his general mentality of business.  Matt understands and runs his current ventures according to what I will refer to on The think (here) Blog as “bottom line blindness” or “BLB”.  I will further expand the definition of BLB next week, but a brief summary is in order to fully understand the (not-so-common) common sense that Matt applies to problems.

BLB is how I approach business.  It shifts focus away from “we should do this because it will yield a higher profit” to “we should do this because it is (in the words of Matt Mullenweg) intrinsically good”.

Matt sat in a panel with the CEO of Elance, the creator of Odesk, and the CEO of Evernote.  He stood out because his focus, his mindset, and his values all seemed to reside at the opposite end of the spectrum from the rest of the panel.  When the topic turned to metrics, Matt was verbally envious of the other panelists.  He admitted that he could see the value, but that wordpress was not as heavily metric driven in its current state.  I argue the reason his focus is not on metrics is because it is not the most important part of the puzzle.  If it were, they would have been established from the beginning.

His focus, from the beginning was giving the customer what they want.  He stated that if they were ever faced with deciding to offer a new feature for free, or charging, the majority of the time they go with free.  He offers products, features, and tools that competitors (like squarespace) charge for simply because they are pieces he gives customers (for free) because it is what he thinks they should do.

I am not saying we need every business in the world doing everything based on personal thoughts, feelings, etc., but I do think that Matt’s head is in the right place.  We could stand to have a few more entrepreneurs show symptoms of BLB, but I think that is a part of what makes Matt so special.  To close I have embedded a short video of Matt from his blog.  He is as calm, cool, and collected on stage or surrounded by fans, as he is in the video.