Matt Mullenweg is the founder of the open-source blogging software Wordpress. In 2005, he founded Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com and Akismet. Visit his blog here.

What is your personal and educational background? How did you become interested in blogging and software development?

I dropped out of University of Houston 3 years ago, where I was studying Political Science and Philosophy. I've been fascinated by the web as long as I can remember, and when I discovered blogging it felt very natural. I began hacking on web scripts mostly because of my slightly anal attention to detail and frustration with the status quo.

What are your specific skills and how did you develop them? What technologies and programming languages have you found to be the most valuable?

I'm a bit of a generalist, early on I developed a strong understanding of standards-based CSS and HTML which has been really invaluable over the years. (PHP didn't come until much later.) Lately I've been focusing a lot more on the architecture of large-scale and highly available systems, which has me getting my hands dirty at a much lower layer in the LAMP stack.

What are some significant challenges you've faced so far?

Growth is always a challenge -- scaling hardware, scaling community, scaling people. It's easy to get caught up in the day to day activities of running something and forget to think of the bigger picture. It's like driving in the dark without your brights on, you will probably stay out of the ditches, but you won't see any fundamental shifts in the landscape until it's too late to react. Personally a big challenge is managing all of the things trying to take my time and attention, something which I feel I have a left to learn about still.

How has blogging changed in the past few years? Where do you see it going?

It has become broadband, multi-modal. With rare exception the most compelling blogs are those that combine the written word with richer interaction, and I hope that trend continues. Hopefully the tools (like WordPress) can evolve to keep barriers to entry low for high quality sites.

In your opinion, what are the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs are making?

1. Not sharing their ideas, and being afraid of competitors.
2. Trying to perfect version 1.0, instead of shipping and iterating.
3. Being overly focused on money or exits.
4. Not building something they'd use (if they hadn't built it).
5. Trying to do everything themselves.

How effective is Akismet? What are its current weaknesses?

For most blogs Akismet can achieve four nines (99.99%) or better
accuracy. That's a static number though, what I'm most proud of is that
it has remained effective over a year of rapidly changing attacks
against it, and has scaled elegantly on the systems side. Its weakness
is that for some blogs that are on the "edge" of the network its
effectiveness will be lower and those people will have to train it more
than the average user.

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs and software developers?

To avoid the mistakes I mentioned earlier. :)