Matt Mullenweg on WordPress at 43%: Key Takeaways from the Kleiner Perkins Interview
Matt Mullenweg sat down with Joubin Mirzadegan of Kleiner Perkins for 70 minutes about WordPress, Automattic, open source, and the WP Engine lawsuit. The interview is the most candid Mullenweg has been about the past year’s controversies, and the WordPress community has strong opinions about it.
Who this is for: WordPress site owners, developers, and freelancers who want to understand where the platform is headed and what Automattic’s CEO is actually thinking in 2026.
Watch the Full Interview
“How WordPress Became a Web Giant” · Kleiner Perkins, 276K+ views, published September 2025
The 8 Things That Matter
1. WordPress at 43% Is 10x the Competition
Mullenweg drops the clearest framing of WordPress’s dominance early: “Over 40% of websites, I think it’s 43 right now, are powered by WordPress, which is 10 times the number two in the market.” That gap is wider than most people realize. The number two platform has roughly 4% market share.
For anyone wondering whether WordPress is “dying”: the market data says the opposite. But market share and community trust are two different things.
2. WooCommerce Does $30 Billion+ in GMV
This number got almost no attention but it should. Mullenweg confirms WooCommerce processes over $30 billion in gross merchandise value, calling it “an open source Shopify.” He frames the next decade of WordPress growth as commerce-driven: small businesses selling online through WordPress rather than paying Shopify’s transaction fees.
For WPSchool’s audience: if you’re building client sites and not offering WooCommerce, you’re leaving revenue on the table. The commerce side of WordPress is where the money is shifting.
3. The WP Engine Dispute: “It Put Me in a Dark Place”
This is the most raw part of the interview. Mullenweg is unusually candid about the emotional toll. When asked how dark it got, he says: “Made me want to walk away from everything. When you devote your whole life to building open source things… and then to essentially be dragged through the mud, attacked, pilloried… it does make you question, is this worth it?”
He reveals specific operational details: both sides are “probably spending millions of dollars a month” on legal fees. The court date isn’t until 2027. In November 2024, the dispute consumed “120%” of his brain. Today it’s down to 5%.
His framing of the dispute itself: WP Engine was “misusing the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks,” they tried to resolve it privately for 10 months, and when that failed, he went public. WP Engine then sued Automattic, Matt personally, and WordPress.org for “a bajillion dollars” with 21 counts.
Whether you side with Matt or WP Engine, the takeaway for the WordPress ecosystem is clear: this fight is far from over, both parties are hemorrhaging money, and the court date is two years away.
4. “I’ve Probably Been Cancelled Seven Times”
When asked about online criticism, Mullenweg responds with the perspective of someone who’s survived two decades of internet controversy. His first crisis, the “Hot Nacho” incident, happened in 2005, before Automattic was even founded. He accidentally hosted spam links on WordPress.org, Google banned the entire domain, and it blew up across CNBC, CNN, and Slate while he was on vacation in Venice with no Wi-Fi.
He took the first 5 AM water taxi to the Venice airport to get online.
His framework for surviving controversy: “This too shall pass is probably some of the most valuable words I’ve ever heard. Everyone you admire has also been through some really tough times when they also felt like a failure.”
The lesson for WordPress professionals riding out the current ecosystem turbulence: this is not the first time and won’t be the last.
5. Open Source Swings in 7-10 Year Cycles
One of the more interesting claims: technology oscillates between proprietary and open phases on a roughly 7-10 year cycle. Mullenweg says we hit “the most closed down” point around 2019-2020, and it’s been swinging toward open ever since.
He connects this directly to AI: “We’re actually seeing it play out in AI now with proprietary models versus the amazing open source models coming out of China and France.” He argues that when things get too proprietary, companies exert control in ways that are “user hostile,” and open source competitors emerge to reverse it.
For WPSchool’s audience: this matches what we’re seeing with DeepSeek, Mistral, and Llama challenging OpenAI and Anthropic. WordPress itself was born from this cycle. It forked from a proprietary blogging tool, b2/cafelog, in 2003.
6. Automattic’s Sabbatical Policy Eliminates Single Points of Failure
Every 5 years, Automattic employees get a 2-3 month fully paid sabbatical. If you don’t take it, the clock doesn’t reset. Wait until year 7 and the next one comes at year 12.
The operational insight is sharper than it sounds: “If your company can’t keep running when one person is out for three months, there’s something wrong.” He notes that at any given time, 10-20% of the company may be on leave when you add sabbaticals plus parental leave. This forces the organization to eliminate single points of failure.
For WordPress agencies struggling with key-person dependency: Matt is describing a system that forces resilience by design. You don’t need a 2,000-person company to apply this principle.
7. “15-20 Hours of My Work Define the Entire Year”
When the conversation turns to Silicon Valley’s hard-work renaissance, Mullenweg pushes back on the hours-as-metric framing: “In a year there are probably 15 or 20 hours of my work that define the entire year. The crucial times, the key meeting, key partnership, the key decision.”
His position: “Measure output, not input. If you’re running at 120% 100% of the time, that’s a recipe for disaster.” He quotes Jerry Colona: “How am I complicit in creating the conditions that I say I don’t want?”
He also draws a distinction between grueling hours that are joyful (flow state with colleagues, building product) versus the same hours on legal matters: “That same number of hours on legal stuff would completely burn me out.”
8. Automattic’s In-Person AI Team in NYC: A First
After 20 years of being fully distributed, Automattic is spinning up its first in-person team: an AI team in NOHO, New York City office inherited from the Tumblr acquisition. Engineers across the company will rotate through once or twice a year for hack weeks.
Mullenweg frames it as an experiment, not a reversal of remote work philosophy. AI is “changing so quickly” that “high bandwidth synchronous communication” is more efficient for keeping up than async.
For WordPress developers: if Automattic is investing in in-person AI collaboration after 20 years of remote-only, pay attention to what they ship from that NYC office. It signals where WordPress + AI is heading.
What the Community Is Saying
The interview sparked reactions across YouTube and X that capture the WordPress community’s split personality perfectly.
The Supporters
YouTube commenter @DionJensen called it “an exceptional dialogue and a lesson in humanity.” The Korean WordPress community showed up with direct support. Several X replies echoed: “great interview,” “enlightening,” “worth seeing.”
@joshuaberry3283 on YouTube captured a common reaction: “After reading articles about Matt over the past year, I’m shocked he’s this chill.” The gap between the internet’s version of Mullenweg and the person in this interview is striking.
The Skeptics
Not everyone is convinced. @Gearyco on YouTube: “The only thing Matt is good at is ruining the ecosystem that agencies and freelancers and third-party developers made awesome.” One X user called Mullenweg “the scourge of the internet.” Another YouTube commenter pointed out the tension between WordPress’s GPL license requiring derivative works to be open source while the plugin economy runs behind paywalls.
The most substantive criticism is about power concentration: WordPress’s 43% market share was built by agencies, freelancers, and third-party developers, not just by Automattic. When the steward of that platform takes actions that destabilize trust, the whole ecosystem feels it.
The Data Point Nobody Noticed
@DavidChandraP on YouTube: “250K+ views but only 11 comments? Weird.” He’s right. 276K views with 12 comments is an unusual ratio. Either the audience is passive (it’s a VC podcast, not a tech controversy channel) or something else is going on with engagement.
WPSchool’s Take
Three things are clear from this interview:
First, Mullenweg is not going anywhere. He explicitly says open source is his “reason for being” and he plans to do this “as long as I’m able to type at a keyboard.” The WP Engine dispute will resolve through courts (2027) or settlement. Either way, Matt will still be running Automattic.
Second, the commerce + AI combination is where WordPress invests next. WooCommerce at $30B GMV plus an in-person NYC AI team signals that Automattic sees the future in AI-powered ecommerce, not just content publishing.
Third, the community’s trust problem is real but cyclical. Mullenweg himself acknowledges the hero-villain cycle and has been through seven versions of it. The question is whether this time is structurally different because of the legal precedents being set.
Watch the interview for the founder wisdom and the business strategy. Read the comments for the community reality check. The truth about where WordPress is headed is somewhere between Matt’s optimism and the community’s frustration.
Last verified: April 2026. Transcript sourced from YouTube auto-captions + Kleiner Perkins published video.
What’s your take? Is the WP Engine dispute affecting your WordPress business? We’d love to hear from agencies and freelancers navigating this.