Mullenweg A WordPress Rockstar?

Dave Peralty, Splashpress marketing director and head blogger at Blogging Pro, wrote about meeting 24-year-old Matt Mullenweg at the recent Northern Voice conference for Canadian bloggers. It was like Peralty was meeting Miley Cyrus or the Dalai Lama.

“I did a double take, and of course acted a bit like an idiot around him. It was almost like how people act when they meet a celebrity for the first time,” Peralty wrote.

That awe-struck reaction is the sort of response that let’s Mullenweg skip the hard questions and speak about code and the free-market, rather than the details of a $29.5 million funding from the New York Times Company and other investors. He avoids talking about reports he was offered $200 million for his Automattic empire - or that his WordPress.com hosted service is now second to only Google’s Blogger.

What do we know about Mullenweg, other than he was named one of the 50th most important people online, according to PC World and that he used to work for CNet before launching Automattic? His hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, added some interesting pieces to the puzzle:

• He graduated from Houston’s Independent School District’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where he studied jazz saxophone. Mullenweg attended, but didn’t graduate from the Univ. of Houston.
• Automattic was run from his apartment, making it a ‘virtual company.’
• Automattic has 15 employees.
• The WordPress name came from Houston blogger Christine Tremoulet (bigpinkcookie.com).