I was offered $200M at 24 and I turned it down

My First Million

Hubspot

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Get our Business Monetization Playbook: https://clickhubspot.com/monetization Episode 672: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Matt Mullenweg ( https://x.com/photomatt ), the founder of WordPress and Automattic. — Show Notes: (0:00) Turning down $200M at 24 (6:04) WordPress's 1000 days of irrelevance (9:24) Turning a small South African company into $3B (13:40) The battle of giants - WooCommerce vs Shopify (18:37) Matt's Villain Arc (30:07) Auditions > Interviews (36:04) Putting every employee on the front line (42:56) Matt on Deepseek — Links: • Automattic - https://automattic.com/ • WordPress - https://wordpress.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, today's episode is special. We've got Matt Mollewig. Matt founded a company called
0:04.2	WordPress, which is used by something like 45% of all websites on the internet. So it's just
0:09.5	huge thing. And we talked to Matt about a bunch of interesting things. Sean, what do we talk
0:13.1	to him about? He had an offer to sell his company for $200 million when he was 24 years old. He
0:17.6	turned it down. We asked him what that was like. We talked to him about some of
0:21.0	the recent drama that they've had. We talked about how they've been acquiring companies. They bought
0:24.9	a small company in South Africa and how it turned out to be a huge thing for their business,
0:29.4	like a billion dollar plus win. And he's just a student of the game. He's been doing it for like 20
0:33.8	years. This guy started this company when he was 19 years old and is still doing it
0:37.8	and it's become this absolute juggernaut. So enjoy this episode with Matt Molloy.
0:41.5	Let's travel never looking back.
0:43.7	Tell me if this is right because this sounded like almost too good to be true, but I'd
0:47.3	read that in 2008 you had an acquisition offer. I think you were only 24 years old for $200
0:51.5	million. At that point, I think you'd only raised a million dollars. And I think you raised a million dollars at $3 million valuation, something like
0:57.1	relatively, you're 24, you're going to be worth nine figures, something crazy like that. You turn it
1:01.8	down. But then you talk about how you didn't have control of the company because you were young
1:07.1	and maybe just like made some mistakes with funding, something like that. What's the conversation
1:11.4	like with yourself when you're like, I'm turning down something that might make me worth over
1:16.2	$100 million at the age of 24? You talked about and your name the first million. It's kind of
1:21.4	funny. Like I guess technically on paper my first million was that first funding round, right? In theory,
1:27.1	I own like half the company that was now worth $4 million. But first funding round, right? In theory, I owned like half the
1:28.0	company that was now worth $4 million. But as you know, like that's paper money. I was still,
	...

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