Heroes

Matt Mullenweg is probably someone you may never have heard of.  If you use WordPress you’ve seen his name every time you go in and delete the Hello Dolly plugin.  In 2003 there were various blogging platforms out there but none of them quite met the user friendly standards that Matt was looking for. What resulted was a blogging platform that would eventually evolve into a content management system that currently powers over 22% of all websites on the Internet.

He gave it away free. He’s worth about $40,000,000.

What I took away from this was that you can’t give up on your dreams and it does take work and dedication to get to where you want to go.

I like how he mentions MySpace. When they got bought out by News Corporation $580 million in 2005, they really wasted a good opportunity. Interesting Fact. MySpace was created in 2003 as well because some people that worked together thought they could replicate Friendster and make it better. They built MySpace with ColdFusion (Ugh! Why?) in 10 days.

I was working at a company called Xeal from 2006-2008. I was working on computers that many people had used before me and the same name kept popping up on the computers. Noah Everett. I only met Noah once. It was two weeks before he quit everything and went to work on his brainchild full-time. I had no idea who this guy was but I had known of him.

He took a script that the owner of Xeal claims he tooled around with while at Xeal. The only problem is that at the time he started the script he didn’t really have an application for it. Then Twitter became popular and he had the answer to a problem. TwitPic. This guy created one of the most popular ways to add photos to your Twitter feed from your mobile devices.

But then, it started to become famous. Historical pictures were being taken and given to the world instantaneously.

What really impressed me is that when offered much higher than 10 Million dollars for his idea he turned it down.