September 25th: Matt Mullenweg & Toni Schneider on Open Source Communities & Business Models

Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider - Automattic / Wordpress

Our speakers for September are Matt Mullenweg & Toni Schneider. They are respectively President and CEO of Automattic, which runs blogging software platform and web service Wordpress.com (used to publish this blog), as well as several other  cool products & solutions. Matt & Toni will talk about open source communities and business models.

For more on open source, try these on for size:

• The Cathedral & The Bazaar (Eric Raymond)
• What Business Can Learn from Open Source & Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
• Open Sources (DiBona / Ockman / Stone)

Matt Mullenweg blogs at http://ma.tt. He is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005 he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet.com, and Gravatar. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.

Toni Schneider is the CEO of Automattic, makers of the highly popular WordPress blogging software. Prior jobs include a VP position at Yahoo where he started the Yahoo Developer Network, and CEO of Oddpost, an AJAX/webmail pioneer that was acquired by Yahoo in 2004. Toni began his career developing 3D audio software for NASA. He blogs at toni.org, is a venture partner at True Ventures, grew up in Switzerland, studied computer science at Stanford University, and was named startup CEO of the year 2007 by TechCrunch.

Here’s a short video with Matt and Toni talking about their recent acquisition of IntenseDebate, using WordPress as a social networking platform (via BuddyPress), and wearing hats as both an entrepreneur and a VC (at True Ventures) at the same time: