The Balance of Hard Work and Luck in Building a Tech Empire

Matt Mullenweg turned his early passion for blogging into a flourishing business and an unshakeable idea: that users should be able to share and tweak the code that powers their websites, and that most of those tools should be free to use. As far back as college, Matt was collaborating with far-flung fellow-coders to make blogging less clunky and more elegant and intuitive. Around 2005, he pitched the idea for WordPress.com to his bosses at CNET, but they turned him down, so he launched the idea on his own, eventually tucking the service into a nascent umbrella company called Automattic. Today—after many twists and turns—the company has nearly 2000 employees and a valuation of $7 billion; and WordPress powers more than 40% of the websites on the internet. 

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