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.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

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.

We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

I don't have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.

I was raised Catholic, and I can get incredibly guilty about mistakes.

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

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

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.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.

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.

For me, it always comes back to the blogger, the author, the designer, the developer. You build software for that core individual person, and then smart organisations adopt it and dumb organisations die.