About Us « Automattic

About Us

Automattic Inc. is a startup from a handful of people passionate about making the web a better place. So far we’re best known for our work on WordPress and other projects but we have a lot of other interesting things in the pipeline as well. We are strong believers in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under licenses like the GPL.

We work from places all around the world.

Automattic first got started around August of 2005, and has since grown to include the fine people you see here.

Barry Abrahamson Systems Wrangler: Blog: Barry on WordPress
Barry was born and raised on the banks of the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas. During the day, he makes sure the servers are zipping along while trying not to get too much BBQ sauce on his keyboard and at night… ok, well, he’s doing the same :) When he’s not on AIM, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, or reading about the latest and greatest in MySQL optimization, Barry enjoys traveling and playing a little lacrosse.
Michael Adams Quantum Bug Creator: Blog: Blogwaffe
After escaping Moscow (Idaho), Mike has been hiding in academia for 20 or so years. We stole him from a PhD in Quantum Information at Caltech to join the real world, or as close as we get to the real world around here. In between carnitas tacos, because apparently there is no good BBQ in Southern California, Mike hacks on bbPress and the javascripty bits of WordPress.
Nikolay Bachiyski Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër: Blogs: Аз, света и сметачите
Younger than even Matt, Nikolay is blogging from small but beautiful Bulgaria. He makes sure the eskimo teens can blog in their native language. When not in front of the computer, Nikolay is either in Sofia University, torturing freshmen, or wandering around Bulgaria. Being like House, M.D. is his secret dream, although quite unattainable, having in mind his lovable nature.
Raanan Bar-Cohen Media Engineer: Blog: Raanan.com
After using Gopher to impress the ladies in the 80s, and starting a web agency specializing in serving publishers and musicians in the 90s, Raanan decided to go to the dark side. Between Time Inc. and Dow Jones, Raanan worked on social media initiatives including RSS, search, podcasts, and the launch of AllThingsD.com. Now that we’ve nabbed him Raanan works on media services, partnerships, and oversees QA for the secret company BBQ sauce. (No Kool‑Aid here.)
Sheri Bigelow Happiness Engineer: Blog: Design Simply
Sheri is a designer, developer, and photographer currently living in Northern New York near Montreal. She earned a Bachelor’s in Business and a Chemistry minor from the University of Utah before spending eight years managing websites for Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. She has always considered herself a WordPress evangelist, and now her endlessly positive nature makes her a perfect fit as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.
Ryan Boren Engineer: Blog: Boren.nu
Ryan writes code, fixes bugs, and wrangles his toddlers.
Anthony Bubel Happiness Engineer: Blog: Today is Fire
Widely known for his support of Microsoft products, Anthony doesn’t fit into many social circles anymore. But what he lacks in popularity, we like to think he makes up for in apparent Halo skills, wiffle ball prowess, and undying love for WordPress. A graduate of Temple University, Anthony currently resides in King of Prussia, PA. He hopes someday to move to San Francisco to be with all the other cool people and never deal with seasons again.
Lloyd Budd Digital Entomologist: Blog: A Fool’s Wisdom
Lloyd is Canadian. We forgive him for this. We’re trying to guilt him into sending in a bio. Let’s see how long it takes him to notice. It’s been a few years so we’re not optimistic.
Stephane Daury Systems Wrangler: Blog: Steph Dau @ Automattic
Stephane currently lives in Montreal, Canada, where he shares his time between a family he adores and a career he is more than ecstatic about. He started working in the digital/web industry in 1994, and admits he is lucky enough to have done it all at some point or another. His favorite quote is Albert Einstein’s “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
Maya Desai Perspective Engineer: Blog: MayaDesai.wordpress.com
Maya lives in Redwood City with her 2 daughters and husband. After teaching English in Tokyo for 3 years, she worked for Bank of America for 7 years in various cities, then joined Automattic in 2006. She still knits scarves for everyone she knows in between changing diapers and making sure everything is running smoothly at Automattic.
Anne Dorman Finance Engineer: Anne is best known for founding a 225 acre avocado/kiwi/Hereford cattle farm and a mobile auto body frame shop, but at some point in 1976 she fell in with the wrong crowd at Arthur Young & Company. After a short 9-year stint there, Anne began working with start-ups from 9-person operations like Automattic was when she joined to start-ups with hundreds of employees. Anne spends her time undoing the damage Matt did in the few months before she joined.
Zé Fontainhas Outernationalist: Blog: Everywhere Else
Initially convinced that he was applying for a drumming gig with The Dave Matthews Band, Zé landed at Automattic after a long time spent trying to solve people’s WordPress-related problems in five continents and as many languages. Since he grew up in Portugal, Angola and Belgium, went to school and worked in Austria and the U.S., and one of his daughters is American, he gets where most people are coming from. He’s still trying to figure out what any one of his three daughters wants, though.
Jon Fox Title Pending: Blog: Jon Fox
Jon was born and raised in central Illinois amongst a flat sea of corn and soy beans. Somehow he managed to give it all up and move to the scenic, mountainous land of Colorado where he is the co-founder, mastermind, and code monkey of IntenseDebate (a distributed comment system now a part of the Automattic family). Just shy of completing his master’s at Washington University in St. Louis, Jon is thrilled to continue to learn with the great minds of the Automattic staff. His ideal brain food consists of bacon, chicken strips, and steak — with the occasional BBQ on special occasions.
Eoin Gallagher PollDaddy Junior: Blog: thriftycoder
Eoin spent years telling robots what to do, only to realize they are bad listeners and incessant bores. So he abandoned a career in automation to eventually join Automattic. A proud Irish daddy of two girls, as well as a GAA man to the bone, he harbors ambitions of winning something before he reaches 30. Career ambition now is to climb those learning curves and reach the dizzy heights of true nerdiness.
Noel Jackson Stylist: Blog: Jcksn
Noel is an übergeek, designer, and developer. He loves the internet and dreams in HTML quite frequently. A self-proclaimed polymath, Noel was once a secret agent, fashion photographer, and ran a successful post-production studio in NYC. When not pushing pixels and babbling about regexes, he’s probably listening to music (300 LPs and 250 gigs in all) or reading a good book. He lives in Detroit with his beautiful wife, a fish named Hiro, and a chinchilla named Elvis.
Demitrious “Meech” Kelly Code Ninja: Blog: Apokalyptik
Demitrious is a self portrayed jester (certainly not jack) of all trades and master of none. Leaving the heat of central California behind him he set out to make a difference in this new age of instant information. And what better place to make a difference than here with us at Automattic, where instant information isn’t just a goal but a way of life?
Isaac Keyet Design Junkie: Blog: Isaac Keyet
Isaac is the co-founder and master designer of IntenseDebate, a comment plugin that became a part of the Automattic family in October 2008. He left cold Sweden to participate in the TechStars program class ‘07 with his fellow co-founder Jon Fox. Spends large portions of his day drinking tea and hanging out in cafés. Likes intelligent people. Has a very diverse music taste.
Paul Kim Community Whisperer: Blog: PKB
In BBQ we trust. Here to add some Korean-Oaklandish flavor to the WordPress grill, Paul joins Automattic after four years with Mozilla, where he instigated several worldwide happenings on behalf of Firefox. He enjoys words, music, coffee, ponies and rainbows. (His daughters made him add the ponies and the rainbows.) At Automattic, Paul channels his love for the Internet and the world into the growth of the hardest-working community in blogging.
Michael Koenig Schmooze Engineer: Blog: Inside The Debate
Michael has seen “Big Trouble In Little China” more times than anyone ever should. While he wanted to be a kung fu master, he went a less violent route and picked up a bass guitar and set of skis. Originally from Michigan, Michael now lives in Chicago, Illinois by way of Boulder, Colorado where he earned his BA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado. He joined the IntenseDebate crew (a distributed comment system now a part of the Automattic family) in March of 2008, and has since perfected the art of schmoozing kung fu.
Beau Lebens Code Wrangler: Blog: Dented Reality
After growing up in a tiny town in rural Western Australia, Beau decided that he needed to be somewhere with a little more excitement so he could be a part of this “Internet” thing that no one was talking about at the time. After 10 years of illustrious (and sometimes not-so-illustrious) development work in a variety of companies (and freelancing), he landed his position with Automattic, beating code into shape with his mad Krav Maga skillz.
David “Lenny” Lenehan Mr. PollDaddy: Blog: PollDaddy
Lenny is the PollDaddy. His skills involve keeping the PollDaddy empire together day to day. Since PollDaddy joined the Automattic team he has been sweating over their love of LAMP and is going through a messy divorce with Microsoft as a result. He plans to quit smoking any day now. In his spare time he recently completed the construction of a cat house and is now advising on the restoration of a very old arcade machine (circa 2002).
Nick Momrik Happiness Engineer: Blogs: Nick Momrik
Nick grew up in northern lower Michigan and currently lives in Saginaw, population 57,523. He was undercover at the Help Desk and Microlabs at Saginaw Valley State University for 8 years before joining Automattic. Nick has been using WordPress since version 0.72 and vaguely remembers life before plugins and themes. When there isn’t snow on the ground, he can usually be found on a golf course trying to get his first hole-in-one.
Raphael Mudge NLP h4×0r: Blogs: After the Deadline blog
Born in hip and exciting Royal Oak, MI–Raphael now wanders the streets of Washington, DC trying to get strangers to return his friendly hellos. Raphael is the only one at Automattic who knows illegal ninja moves from the government. He programs jIRCii and Sleep in Java, but we forgive him for that because he keeps our spell cheker going.
Matt Mullenweg CBBQTT: Blogs: Photo Matt, Matt on WordPress
As the Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic, Matt travels the world sampling cuisine and comparing it to the gold standard of Texas BBQ. Although he originally aspired to be a jazz saxophonist, Matt somehow wound up studying economics which took him to Washington D.C. where he began taking pictures and blogging. The rest, as they say, is mystery. He lives in San Francisco and has a crush on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Donncha O Caoimh Murphy’s Quality Control: Blogs: Holy Shmoly!, In Photos, Donncha’s Blog
Donncha hails from Cork City, Ireland and is currently living in the picturesque Blarney village with his wife Jacinta. He’s a slightly obsessive photographer, dragging around a camera everywhere and posting photos every day to Inphotos.org. He loves getting out and about whenever he can and enjoys relaxing walks by the sea. (Murphy’s is the stout prefered by the fine people in the real capital of Ireland, the People’s Republic of Cork.)
Thorsten Ott Bug Zapper: Blog: WebZappr
Thorsten has been in the IT business for 10 years, including work as the head of the development department at one of Europe’s biggest dedicated server hosts. Most recently, he ran his own web development agency. He’s an internet maniac who is proud to say he has a geeky family: He met his wife via ICQ and bought his son his first notebook when he was seven months old (broken, of course). The three of them live together in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Andrew Ozz WYSIWYGINEER: Blogs: Andrew on WordPress, Laptop Tips
In the mid-eighties Andrew graduated in Electronics from Sofia Polytechnics and started working in the only computer company at the time in Bulgaria — Software Products and Systems. After trips through London, DEC, freelancing he finally ended up in Vancouver, where he now resides. In 2007 something possessed him to start contributing to WordPress’ TinyMCE integration, and somehow we convinced him to continue taming that beast and other WPness full-time.
Andy Peatling Social Engineer: Blogs: Andy on WordPress
Originally from the UK, Andy had no trouble adapting to the rain soaked life of Vancouver, BC where he now lives. Andy likes to hop between coding and designing, sometimes mixing the two together and making his code look “pretty.” He has been tinkering with WordPress for a number of years both in theme design and plugin development. When away from his screen, Andy loves to watch and play all kinds of sports. Being in Canada, hockey holds a special place in his heart.
Michael Pick Lightbulb Engineer: Blogs: Experiments, Michael on WordPress, Jolt++, Smashcut TV
Michael obsesses equally over making videos and tracking down lightbulb moments – those brief epiphanies when everything falls into place and it all makes sense. In efforts to grapple with this dual-pronged fixation he’s been a freelance screencaster and animator, pro-blogger, film & media lecturer and a training type person for a big old bookstore chain. That’s taken him from the UK to Berlin, the tiny island of Malta, Tokyo, and now frosty Sapporo in the far north of Japan. Along the way he picked up masters degrees in film and education, and uses the certificates to swat flies and rest coffee mugs on. When he isn’t hardwired into the interwebs, you’ll find him poring over obscure czech animation, gnawing on high-caffiene gum and hand grinding coffee into the small hours.
Heather Rasley The Deputy: Blog: The H Line
Heather was once a grammar geek. Now she’s just a geek. She was also once a grad student at NYU, but proudly dropped out in favor of joining Automattic and exploring the world. Her M.O. is facilitating communication and making people smile. Want to make her smile back? Send her a picture of a kitty. Or better yet, an animated gif of a kitty.
Mark Riley Support Maven: Blog: Romantic Robot
Mark has been living and breathing WordPress support since January 2004 and really has answered more questions than anyone has had hot BBQ. He can’t code, he doesn’t know much about the command line and his chosen OS would be Windows XP. But in his favour if your blog is broken he can probably fix it. One ambition is to complete all Final Fantasy games.
Hanni Ross Happiness Engineer: Blog: A Hanni, Me.
Tinkering with WordPress since before it was WordPress, Hanni hails from both Warwick, UK and Bordeaux, France. When not engineering happiness, she spends her time studying law. The hilarity of trying to fit everything in means she often feels the need to, in the words of Monty Python, run away.
Toni Schneider Band Manager: Blog: toni.org
Toni books gigs for the Automattic band and makes sure everyone gets paid at the end of the night. Since the “band” is over 40 people strong these days, it’s really more like an orchestra. Toni’s bio can be found here.
Joseph Scott Bug Exorcist: Blog: Joseph Scott
Joseph is a California native, living in Utah with his wife and two daughters. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything.
Alex Shiels Code Bloke: Blogs: Threshold State, Flight Path
A former Textpattern developer, ultra-low-speed communications engineer, corporate code monkey, and Python programmer, Alex has been writing software since before he even had a computer. He enjoys taking photographs and finding old risque music. Briefly a Sydneysider, he recently moved back to Melbourne with his wife and son. He doesn’t eat shrimp or own a BBQ.
Andy Skelton Code Wrangler: Blogs: Skeltoac, Andy on WordPress
Originally a Vermont maple syrup gargler, Andy was called by high adventure to build the Automattic Ranch in Austin where he is kept warm by the socks someone knitted him for helping her move from Blogger to WordPress. It is rumored that he has an Internet Explorer voodoo doll that he sticks pins in while muttering “box model this.” His publicist was not available for comment.
Noriyko Tate Human Engineer: Blog: What did she just say?
A born and raised New Yorker, Noriyko found a new love in California. After moving out West, she was bitten by the startup bug and left the Dean’s office at Stanford University. Without the coding gene, she found her groove in Operations. Anything to be a part of the action! When Noriyko is not fighting chaos at Automattic, you will find her writing comedy bits, plays, and her perpetual novel. She is destined to be among the stars, both tech and silver screen.
Matt Thomas The Detailer: Blog: I am Matt Thomas.
Matt has been a designer since before he knew what that meant. As a child, his parents would frequently return home to find their furniture re-arranged, art re-hung, and tables re-set. Ever since, Matt’s been interested in making things simpler, more beautiful, and more fun to use. Despite a four-year love affair with print design while obtaining his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Matt’s loving the life of a web designer. He lives on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with his trusty sidekick, Maggie. And most importantly, he doesn’t mind being the “other Matt” at Automattic.
Jane Wells Libation Engineer: Blog: Jane For Short
Her fellow Automatticians call her the UI Goddess. Prior to joining Automattic, Jane ran a media research/usability lab in New York and served as director of user experience strategy at Schematic. She’s lived everywhere, had jobs ranging from massage therapist to dude ranch cook (before her ten years in the web industry), and puts herself in the shoes of our users whenever possible. Literally… she’s always losing her sandals.