Tonight I attended an event for the only club I’m active in, St@b (Startup at Berkeley). They have mixers every so often for the purpose of socializing entrepreneurially-minded - therefore often antisocial - students and others connected to the Berkeley startup culture. I found it nearly by accident, since it’s rather underground (literally - the mixers are held in the basement of Blake’s, which on other nights of the week is a somewhat irreputable East Bay nightclub). I’m so very glad I did. It has connected me with incredible resources and opportunities, like volunteer entry to TechCrunch50, even with my previously limited involvement. Moreover, it’s connected me with a great network of people who share my eagerness to forge our way on the web. Most of these brilliant and amazing gentlemen rarely ever encounter ladies, which is quite a shame. What a wonderful untapped source of guys gone to waste! But I digress.
The speaker at tonight’s event was Matt Mullenweg, founder and Chief Barbecue Taster of Automattic (better known through Wordpress). He’s a 24 year old open-source-loving hippie. He’s also the first entrepreneur I’ve ever heard of that seems perfectly content with exactly where he is at the moment. The way he runs his business (or at least the way he talks about it), there is no push for mo’ money, expansion, Harder Better Faster Stronger. This is not to be confused with any kind of aversion to venture capital or growth - Wordpress and Akismet are both well-funded, profitable and growing brands, and Automattic is midway through a string of acquisitions. There’s just a lack of greed. The Wordpress community comes first, and since all 30 (yes, just 30) employees seem well-fed, Matt seems to have no further pecuniary purposes.
Automattic holds no IP and there are no ads to be found on any sites. They make money simply by charging people for the product, a strange and unheard-of concept on the web these days. “We keep raising the price and they keep paying it,” he said, shaking his head at the silly people who provide his income.
In the interest of holding your interest, I’ll cut this short and touch upon two other items of note.
First, a catchy and true sound bite that I felt the need to disrespectfully Twitter about in the middle of his talk: “That’s the thing with entrepreneurs; they don’t mind being on the Titanic, but they have to be steering it.” Entrepreneurs are control freaks, as they very well should be at the outset of a venture. But I’ve seen problems when they can’t or won’t deal with changes in the game plan, and this can be a fatal mistake.
Second, the question I asked about the decentralized nature of the Wordpress team and working virtually. They meet twice a year, have lots of drunken family-reunion-meets-hackathon fun, and then go back to their respective cities and schedules. He says that maximum productivity is captured this way, because employees choose their best hours to work and don’t have the stress of managing their lives around that. This creates happy, calm, Zen-like people, which of course is what a proper hippie entrepreneur is all about 
On a side note, MAJOR props to the Wordpress iPhone app. I liveblogged two full days of TC50 on it. If I haven’t mentioned this before, it’s my favorite app in the whole store right now. Go Wordpress!
