WordPress founder Mullenweg takes over as Automattic CEO
Matt Mullenweg swaps roles with current Automattic CEO Toni Schneider. It may be because Mullenweg's now 30, and he thinks twenty-somethings shouldn't run companies.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, having hit 30, is taking over as CEO of the company behind the blogging platform, Automattic.
In a blog post Monday, Mullenweg wrote that he and current CEO Toni Schneider are swapping roles at Automattic.
Mullenweg wrote that Schneider is "going to focus on some of Automattic's new products, and I'm going to take on the role of CEO." He added that, "internally this isn't a big change as our roles have always been quite fluid, and I've had some recent practice filling in for him for a few months last year when he was on sabbatical."
The timing of the move is interesting. Mullenweg said he believes people in their twenties shouldn't run a company because "they think they know everything, a fact I can now say with complete confidence now that I'm 30 and two days old."
WordPress, of course, is a leading publishing platform that some believe could be an attractive target for an Internet giant like Yahoo, which spent $1.1 billion on Tumblr last year.
Writing in the Guardian, Dan Gillmor expounded on Automattic's value last year, given that "the WordPress community is enormous in part because, like other major open-source projects, it has become the center of an ecosystem."