I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat - all that matters is their work.

Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.

Particularly if you're a good engineer, there's a lot of ways you can make money, but to actually have an impact on the world is rare, and when you find an opportunity for that, it's very special.

Love is great, but not as a password.

In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it's just nice to wake up without one.

Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.

A lot of the early adoption of WordPress was actually from thousands and millions of individually hosted instances, so a lot of the people who ran WordPress were on their own.

If I were to wish for two things, they would be as much bandwidth as possible and ridiculously fast browser engines.

Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors - a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.

The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr's own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there's healthy import and export traffic both ways.

130 of Automattic's 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

Simperium seems like a genuine utility for our own apps, and for other people as a service. And Simplenote, as a product, I love, and it's just darn handy.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.

From the first time I held an iPhone, the space has evolved quickly, and people have shifted from reading content on their desktops to smartphones and iPads, even long-form stuff.

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.

The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

The rise of broadband and growing ubiquity of Internet access excites me the most. The world changes a lot when, no matter where you are - in the middle of a deserted highway or in a bustling city - you can get high speed broadband access.

Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.

WordPress, it's a complex tool; it's like the back of a digital SLR... but that doesn't work on a phone.

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary.

With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.

Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.

The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it, all I wanted to do was hack around on the Web. Now the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the Web.

People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they'll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users.

When there's no one you can point to, or when something goes wrong, it's your fault - that level of responsibility and accountability is pretty interesting.

Basically, if you believe in Moore's Law, and you believe that hosting is going to become more and more commoditized over time, not being a host is a good idea.

The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition.

I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.

I really enjoy computer networking.

With Akismet, there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective?

Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.

You don't need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are.

I'm pretty cheap, to be honest.

The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.

The Google Voice service is a lifesaver for me. My actual phone number changes a lot, so having a canonical Google Voice number that doesn't change - it's actually my same number from high school - is indispensable.

When I travel, which is most of the year, I live in TripIt.

Red notification bubbles on any icon, including mail, drive me crazy.

I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.

The biggest mistake we made at WordPress.com in term of infrastructure was buying servers.

Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that's where we're heading.

Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most effective URLs available today.

Ultimately, Captchas are useless for spam because they're designed to tell you if someone is 'human' or not, but not whether something is spam or not.

You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies.

You shouldn't restrict peoples' freedom on what they can and cannot do with code.

The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.

Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.

I don't think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks... but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use.