Lesson: Building a Unicorn with Matt Mullenweg

Step #1 Mission: The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing and development

So the mission of Automattic and WordPress is to democratize publishing and development. So we want to make it easy for anyone in the world to have a beautiful website or blog and we're also a platform that on Elance over a quarter of a million of developers, this is a skill that they build things on top of. So, that's a huge responsibility and opportunity as well.

How we track our success and our mission to democratize publishing, is how much of the Internet is running through open source software. We're about 21% right now of websites running WordPress, and we're trying to make that higher.

I think publishing in general is the cornerstone of a free society. The ability for free speech and for ideas to be disseminated and for authority to be challenged to speak truth to power is part of every free society that we have seen so far in history. The very small part that WordPress can play in building a tool, a printing press for the digital age that allows people to do that, to get their thoughts and words out there; sometimes in trivial ways, maybe it's cats and sometimes in meaningful ways, maybe it’s the Snowden documents. That makes me excited.