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 Barry Abrahamson
Blog: Barry on WordPress
Born and raised on the banks of the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, Barry now hangs his hat in New York. 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 Michael Adams
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 Nikolay Bachiyski
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.)
Sam Bauers Coderoo Sam Bauers
Blog: The Unlettered Gentleman
Rather than using his Commodore 64 to invent the internet, Sam used it to play games. This wasted youth was followed by several more wasted years pretending to be a graphic designer, before he worked out that he was actually a web developer. Seven years after that realization he joined Automattic. Along the way he open-sourced some software and meddled in a little project called bbPress, which he now calls home.
Ryan Boren Head Janitor Ryan Boren
Blogs: Boren.nu, Ryan on WP
Ryan is a Texas boy currently living in Northern California where he likes to hike, ride his bikes, and read. Ryan is a telecom industry veteran who decided to leave the server closet to create things that people would actually see and use directly. If the rest of the company sat on a bench, Ryan could “press it.” He’s the one we send when people are late with payments.
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 Lloyd Budd
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.
Maya Desai Anti-chaos Engineer Maya Desai
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 Dorman
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.
Noel Jackson Title Pending
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 Hound Maya Desai
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?
Marianne Masculino Happiness Engineer Marianne Masculino
Blogs: MarianneMasculino.com
Marianne was born in Germany, yet grew up in exotic locales like Elizabethtown, KY and Houston, TX. She now happily resides in San Francisco. A designer at heart and by trade, she’s joined the team to sprinkle happiness among the WordPress community. Marianne has an affinity for useless celebrity facts and makes a mean white chocolate bread pudding.
Nick Momrik Happiness Engineer
Blogs: MtDewVirus
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.
Matt Mullenweg CBBQTT Matt Mullenweg
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 Donncha O Caoimh
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.)
Andrew Ozz WYSIWYGINEER Andrew Ozz
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 Andy Peatling
Blogs: Andy on WordPress, Andy in Life
Originally from the UK, Andy had no trouble adapting to the rain soaked life of Vancouver, BC where he now resides. 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.
Warwick Poole Systemologist
Blog: Linux Internet
Warwick (Rick) was born and raised in South Africa and has lived on a few continents looking for its equal. He currently hangs his toothbrush in New York with infinitely patient wife, Michelle. A mid 90s tryst with Mosaic, FreeBSD, Usenet, and IRC sparked an interest in Open Source software. If the Internet didn’t exist he would have been a wildlife photographer or a small plane pilot. Preferably both. Somehow his colleagues haven’t yet detected he’s a vegetarian. Don’t tell the CBBQTT…
Heather Rasley The Deputy Heather Rasley
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 San Francisco. 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 Mark
Blog: 69105
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. His wife and 2 daughters put up with him in the UK.
Toni Schneider Band Manager Toni Schneider
Blog: Toni’s Garage
Toni grew up on Lake Zurich in Switzerland and moved to the fabled Silicon Valley to study computer science at Stanford. He started in the tech world in the realm of 3D sound and virtual reality, then came back to the real world and was the CEO of a great little company called Oddpost, which was AJAX before it was cool (or had a name). Oddpost was acquired by Yahoo (it became the new Yahoo Mail) and Toni was a VP at Yahoo where he created their developer network. As CEO of Automattic he hopes to introduce fondue as a light and healthy companion snack to blogging.
Joseph Scott Bug Exorcist Joseph Scott
Blog: Random Networks
Joseph is a California native, moving to 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 Alex Shiels
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 Andy Skelton
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 Noriyko Tate
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 Matt Thomas
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 B.F.A. 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.
Hailin Wu Ping-pong Specialist Hailin Wu
Blog: hailin.wordpress
When he was a child, Hailin helped his parents plant pumpkins and raise chicken, geese and rabbits. In third grade his older brother imparted this wisdom from graduate school: the “software” thing will be big someday. Next thing Hailin knew he had a PhD in computer science from University of Denver and spent three years at Array Networks. In his spare time, Hailin likes to jog, hike, and will soon resume one of his favorite childhood activities—planting pumpkins in the backyard!