Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform, WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder & CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.
He has been recognized for his leadership and success by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair.
Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. Matt splits time between Houston, New York, and San Francisco.
David Needham
David has a heart for helping beginners to feel empowered and to grow. He uses his own experience to explain topics, ranging from fundamental building blocks to soft skills such as productivity and public speaking, clearly and concisely. David has presented on Drupal and WordPress dozens of times, including at DrupalCons in Chicago, London, Denver, Munich, Portland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Vienna, Nashville, and Drupal Europe 2018; as well lots of WordCamps, including WCEU in Belgrade.
Vladimír Smitka
Vladimír is a network engineer, developer and security researcher, WordPress enthusiast and WordCamp Prague organiser, as well as the founder of marketing agency, Lynt.
Kåre Steffensen
As a WordPress digital strategist working at Peytz & Co, Kåre focuses on putting WordPress to the test in the hands of businesses in Denmark. Kåre teaches and talks content strategy from a WordPress standpoint. After falling in love with WordPress in 2009, he’s been active in the WordPress community as a speaker, organizer, and core-privacy component maintainer.
Andrew Taylor
Andrew currently works for Pantheon as a developer programs engineer, providing consulting to their agency partners around complex workflows and automation. As a former web developer, Andrew spent his time on large-scale projects for clients such as AMC Networks, Frito Lay, National Van Lines and more. With over 10 years of web development experience, he is a seasoned veteran.
Michele Mizejewski
Michele is a User Experience and Interface Designer at the University of California, San Francisco and a contributor to the WordPress design community. A longtime WordPress enthusiast, she believes that websites and the tools used to build them should be well crafted, intuitive, and accessible.
Sabrina Zeidan
A WordPress lover since 2010, Sabrina first installed WordPress for the advertising agency she was working at, and it was love at first sight.
Her career has taken her along a path from design, SEO and marketing to what she is really excited about — building cool things with WordPress Multisite.
Sabrina specializes in helping dev teams implement WordPress Multisite to get the most out of its functionality. She shares her experience at Sabrina’s blog.
Rob Hope
After a decade of freelancing in the WordPress space, Rob has taken the leap to working full time on One Page Love, a leading resource for single page website design and landing pages. Rob also publishes YouTube videos about website design and development.
Jesse van de Hulsbeek
Jesse is the lead at Yoast Academy, Yoast’s online SEO training platform. As a university trained teacher, he is responsible for creating the best possible learning environment for students, and specializes in evidence-based e-learning, effective practice tasks, and fostering deep learning.
Micah Wood
Having been as a professional WordPress developer for over a decade, Micah has worked on sites for Fortune 100 companies, has released over a dozen WordPress plugins, is a frequent speaker at WordCamps, co-organises the WordPress Gwinnett meetup, is a co-host on the WP Square One podcast and shares his knowledge by blogging on WordPress development] topics.
Ronnie Burt
Ronnie is Chief Business Officer at Incsub, the company behind WPMU DEV, CampusPress, and Edublogs. He’s a former educator, a math nerd, and a wannabe musician.
Simon Cooke
Simon is a Design, Digital Marketing and Sales specialist with over 20 years of industry experience, having co-owned a creative agency for 14 years, which merged with Pragmatic in 2016.
Nowadays, Simon heads up the Commercial Department at Pragmatic, the UK’s largest WordPress Agency with big plans for the future. Simon is also a jury member of the Automattic Design Awards and co-creator of PACE, a marketing technology conference held in London.
Jonathan Bossenger
Jonathan is an open source, freelance web developer from Cape Town, South Africa. His time is currently split between being lead developer on Seriously Simple Podcasting/Castos and working with clients from around the world through Codeable. Jonathan enjoys writing and sharing knowledge with others and regularly speaks and blogs about development or related topics, from hosting to freelance business practices.
Michiel Heijmans
Michiel is a partner and COO at Yoast and an Internet veteran. His daily goal is to kick-start site optimisation in the most practical way. With so much to do and so little time, Michiel has a blast at Yoast, all day, every day.
Viola Eva
Viola specialises in SEO testing, correlational SEO, and data-driven content creation. She is co-founder and an SEO consultant for Flow SEO, and is known as a public speaker on SEO and online entrepreneurship. In 2017-18, Viola gave more than 50+ practical workshops and talks, including at Search Marketing Summit Sydney, Tech Open Air Berlin, and UnGagged Las Vegas. She is also co-founder of Digital Marketing Skill Share (DMSS), a yearly international digital marketing conference in Bali.
Rahul Bansal
Rahul is founder and CEO of rtCamp, an enterprise WordPress agency that is also a WordPress.com VIP partner.
Rahul started using WordPress in 2007 as a professional blogger, then shifted to freelance development projects which soon transformed into rtCamp in 2009.
Over a decade, Rahul has contributed to the WordPress community in different ways, including as a WordCamp speaker, organizer, volunteer, polyglot, and theme and plugins developer, and through side projects such as EasyEngine.
Maura Teal
Maura is a software engineer at Pagely and previously developed for WordPress at scale at a large media company. She is an open source and emoji enthusiast, and is a firm believer that speaking about and sharing life experiences — both failures and successes — builds lasting connections.
Valentina Thörner
An opinionated writer, pragmatic minimalist, German expat living in Spain, twin mom, barefoot runner, customer support geek, expert in leading teams across geographies and time zones, and author of the remote leadership bible ‘From a Distance.’
Thousands of customer interactions, hundreds of team 1:1s and raising twins has taught Valentina a thing or two about how to relate to other humans – even if you don’t share an office.
Fernando Tellado
Fernando has written three WordPress books, authors the largest blog about WordPress in Spanish (AyudaWP), and is SiteGround’s WordPress ambassador.
He is also global coordinator of Spanish translations and Spanish forums, administrator of WordPress Spain, and co-organiser of WordCamp Madrid and several WordPress meetups.
Francesca Marano
Francesca is the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround.
She is part of the WordPress community team, organizing meetups and WordCamps, and taking part in other WordPress events worldwide.
She founded C+B, a blog with a staff of more than 80 authors offering advice for Italian female creative entrepreneurs.
Francesca is a passionate speaker, and you can find her in Italy and around the world talking about WordPress, community, open source, women in tech, and small businesses.
Brian Teeman
Brian has never been slow to express an opinion, thanks to his background in community activism. As co-founder of Joomla!, he has seen the power of community and software freedom. and believes that only by working together can we “repair the world’.
Brian has been contributing to, and advocating for, free software for over 20 years and is a regular speaker at tech and non-tech events across the world.
Kevin Stover
Kevin is a developer from a very small, very rural town in the Appalachian Mountains of south east Tennessee in the United States.
He’s best known as co-creator of the Ninja Forms WordPress plugin and co-founder of Saturday Drive, the company behind Ninja Forms and Ninja Shop.
You can hear Kevin talk about business as one-fourth of the ‘Adventures in Businessing’ podcast. And like all good devs, Kevin has a Master’s degree, and nearly a PhD, in Roman History.
Sebastiaan van der Lans
Sebastiaan van der Lans is an open-source fanatic who loves to explain complex technology in plain English. His WordPress agency, Van Ons – founded in 2006, 25 developers, and based in Amsterdam – works on large-scale WordPress websites for publishers, television, and charities. Since 2013, Sebastiaan has been researching the intersection between WordPress and blockchain, aiming for an inclusive, fair, and 100% open-source future! Sebastiaan’s motto is inspired by Walt Disney: Celebrate progress, tomorrow is just a dream away.
Jack Lenox
Jack has previously spoken at WordCamps and a number of other tech conferences including the Future of Web Design and A Day Of REST. He ran in a UK parliamentary by-election, which led him to present and debate at numerous public hustings events and on regional and national TV and radio.
Torsten Landsiedel
Torsten is a WordPress freelancer from Hamburg and is a former GTE, former support forum moderator, and a member of the Pluginkollektiv, a group of people maintaining the plugins from Sergej Müller.
Petya Raykovska
Petya is the Global head of allocations at Human Made and the WordPress Polyglots team communication lead.
She fell in love with the WordPress community in Leiden during WordCamp Europe 2013, and since then helped organise WordCamp Europe 2014 in Sofia, WordCamp Europe 2015 in Seville, and lead the team of WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna
Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke is a partner and CEO at Yoast. She founded Yoast Academy and manages marketing, research, and the Yoast project teams. Her favourite SEO topics are SEO copywriting and site structure. Marieke has a PhD in social science and, together with her husband Joost de Valk, has four children.
Mark Uraine
As an interdisciplinary designer, Mark is dedicated to making the web more accessible, and human-friendly by facilitating the transfer of information. As a designer at Automattic, Mark strives to be an impactful contributor to open source. Mark designs, communicates and gets things done.
Tom Nowell
Tom works his days as a VIP launch engineer at WordPress.com VIP for Automattic. He reviews and deploys millions of lines of code each year for large sites at scale. Tom is also a community moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange, lead developer for VVV, and a conference speaker.
Ines van Essen
Ines has been active in the world of WordPress since 2011, first as a developer and later as a support engineer. She has given talks at WordCamps around the world, helping developers to understand the importance of support and documentation.
Ines is also the lead volunteer at DonateWC, an initiative that helps diversify WordCamp speaker pools by providing financial aid to speakers who are unable to afford travel.
John Jacoby
John is a software developer and project lead for BuddyPress and bbPress, as well as a WordPress core contributor, component maintainer, and security team member.
Omar Reiss
Omar joined Yoast in September 2014 as a software architect and quickly became responsible for professionalising development processes. As a partner and CTO, he focuses on the bigger picture of software development at Yoast, working together with a great team of skilled software engineers. Omar spends a lot of time contributing back to WordPress and was a release lead for 5.0, integrating JavaScript packages into WordPress core.
Dee Teal
Dee has been using WordPress as a blogger since 2008, as a web developer since 2009, and has transitioned to being a Project Manager (PM) for large-scale WordPress projects as a ‘Human’ with Human Made where she leads their team of PMs.
Dee is a huge fan of the WordPress community, organises WordPress events in Australia, and speaks at them whenever she gets the opportunity, both at home and around the world.
Felix Arntz
Felix is a developer programs engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer from Germany, currently residing in Switzerland. He has been contributing to WordPress and the open web for several years and is a maintainer of the Core Multisite, Capabilities and REST API components. Felix has published numerous open source plugins and libraries. Aside from WordPress, he spends his time producing music, playing the piano and playing soccer. He also drinks a lot of Mountain Dew.
Jenny Beaumont
Jenny Beaumont is a multicultural, multidisciplinary maker and writer of things.
She has worked in and around the web industry since the late 90s, has been working closely with WordPress since version 3.0, and with the WordPress community since 2013 when she attended her first WordCamp.
Jenny works at Human Made as a Senior Project Manager and certified Scrum Master, and is based in rural Normandy.
Sami Keijonen
As a front-end engineer at 10up, Sami focuses on building the web with accessibility in mind.
Joe McGill
Joe McGill is a WordPress core developer, focusing primarily on maintaining the Media component. He also works as a senior WordPress engineer at Human Made, providing technical leadership on projects for enterprise clients.
Juliette Reinders Folmer
Juliette Reinders Folmer is an opinionated, passionate busy-body with a prolific portfolio of contributions to various high profile open source projects over the years. She is co-author of PHPCompatibility, initiator of PHPModernizer and created the PHP Cheatsheets. Juliette regularly speaks at conferences and is always happy to discuss how we can all contribute to changing both the dev-culture as well as our code, to be better. Juliette is self-employed and based in the Netherlands.
Pascal Birchler
Pascal is a software engineer and WordPress core developer based in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s been working with WordPress for half of his life and is an avid member of the community. Most recently, Pascal joined Google as a developer programs engineer to help advance WordPress even more. Living in a multilingual country, he is passionate about internationalisation and improving this area in WordPress to make software for accessible for everyone.
Charles Johnston
Charles is a self-proclaimed digital ninja. After spending the last few decades in the IT industry, Charles started a boutique web design agency called HeartWired Technical Solutions, which focuses on putting compassion back into technology. Charles has a heart for nonprofits and small businesses that are doing good in their local or global communities.
Nevena Tomovic
Nevena is a trained simultaneous interpreter, but swapped her microphone for a laptop in 2015 and started working in WordPress. She has spent the past four years working in content, editorial, events and, more recently, business development at Human Made.
In her spare time, you can find her hanging upside down on an aerial hoop, skiing, reading, and traveling like a true remote employee.
Mel Choyce
Mel Choyce is a wicked awesome product designer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Not only is Mel a WordPress core committer and former release lead, she is a regular core contributor and speaks frequently at WordCamps on design, typography, and user experience. When Mel isn’t designing products at Automattic, she enjoys cold brew coffee, craft beer, and rocking out in her band.
Marcel Bootsman
Marcel is the owner of Nostromo, a specialised WordPress company that offers maintenance, development, and consulting. He is active in the WordPress community as a WordCamp organiser, forum moderator, and translation editor.
When he’s not looking at a screen, he enjoys walking (go figure!), riding a mountain bike, and playing tennis.
Ana Cirujano
Ana is a web designer with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and is a Marketing graduate with 10+ years of experience in graphic design, editorial design and employer branding. In 2016, Ana took a master’s degree in web design and development, became self-employed and devoted herself to developing web projects with WordPress. Ana is leading the Design Team in her local WordPress community, is a co-organiser of the Collado Villalba Meetup and attends every WordCamp throughout Spain.
Maja Benke
Maja studied landscape architecture but soon discovered her love for WordPress and travelling the world. Now she works as a web designer with a passion for UX and accessibility and has a blog for WordPress newbies.
Karin Christen
Karin is cCo-founder and interaction designer at required.com, a WordPress agency based in Germany and Switzerland, focusing on user experience design and custom WordPress development.
Yvette Sonneveld
Yvette helps owners of small and medium-sized businesses across the globe use inbound marketing strategies to land more clients. Not just any clients, but those who will love you and your team for both your expertise and your personality.
Vassilena Valchanova
Vassilena is a marketing consultant, trainer, and speaker. She has more than 10 years of experience in digital communications. Her expertise covers marketing strategy, content marketing, growth, and measurement. She has worked with companies in different industries, mainly in the consumer electronics, e-commerce, and SaaS fields.
In her spare time, she organizes popular science events, teaches content marketing and growth at SoftUni, and authors a blog on digital strategy and growth.
Mary Job
Mary is a writer and the founder at How Do You Tech, which documents correct answers to ‘how do you’ questions in tech. Sheteaches ICT and mentors at Uwani Hub, a foundation for teaching women and girls to use computer technologies to empower themselves, and believes that anyone can blog and everyone should. Mary volunteers for the Lagos & Ijebu WordPress Community in Nigeria, and is the lead organiser for WordCamp Lagos 2019.
George Gkouvousis
George is co-founder of 8web Interactive, has been a full stack developer for more than eight years, and is an official WPML contractor and rtCamp’s EasyEngine project expert. Handling some serious projects in Greece and London, he helps serve the world wide web tons of megabytes every day through awesome websites and scalable solutions.
Judith Schröer
Judith is a digital business administrator, she consults with freelancers and small companies on all aspects of online marketing and digitization.
She has a soft spot for niches and small businesses because she likes people who follow their passion, having gained 20 years of professional experience in small service businesses, mostly in the tourism industry.
Judith started her own business in 2015, and became a passionate WordPress fan and has been involved in the WordPress Community since 2017.
Dennis Hodges
Dennis teaches executives, educators, and entrepreneurs how to unlock creativity and drive innovation in their organizations and personal lives.
Serving as a creative catalyst, he shares valuable strategies for reclaiming innate gifts and turning ideas into action. He believes: It’s about challenging the status quo and getting outside your comfort zone in order to move forward.
He is the author of ‘11 ½ Ways to Ignite Your Creativity’ and creator of the video series ‘Creative Nibble’.
Elio Rivero
Elio is a developer, designer, and a WordPress core contributor who has recently contributed to Gutenberg core and the TwentyNineteen theme. As a code wrangler at Automattic, Elio works on the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, mainly in the UI built with React and Redux that leverages the REST API. Whenever he’s not coding or tinkering with Gutenberg block possibilities, he’s taking photos, enjoying the rain, eating chocolates, and hiking in the hills and woods that surround his city.
Daniel Kanchev
Daniel leads the enterprise hosting team at SiteGround. He is responsible for complex cloud solutions provided to WordPress users with very big sites or custom needs, and has taken part in system administration, support, project management, and speaking at conferences in his 10 years.
Daniel’s free time is dedicated to the things he loves most — being on a board (skate, snow or wake) and being with loved ones.
Annelieke van den Berg
Annelieke is the lead of the research department at Yoast. She focuses on data, especially data from Google Analytics that provides insight on understanding an audience, and she writes about it regularly on the Yoast blog. When not at work, Annelieke enjoys spending time with her 4-year-old daughter, singing, and riding her bike.
Aleyda Solís
Aleyda is an experienced SEO consultant and the founder of Orainti, a boutique SEO consultancy. She is also a blogger at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal, has been a speaker at over 100 conferences in 20 countries, and is the author of publications such as SEO, Las Claves Esenciales.
Aleyda has been named the European Search Personality of the Year for 2018, and featured in Forbes Top 10 Online Marketing Experts to Follow and in Hubspot as one of 59 Female Marketing and Growth Experts You Should be Following.
Josepha Haden
Josepha is currently Executive Director of the WordPress project, helping to coordinate and guide volunteer efforts across the ecosystem.
Since 2015 Josepha has worked behind the scenes as lead of the open source division at Automattic. Her work includes financial planning, sponsorship relations, volunteer training programs, and several diversity initiatives on a global scale.
She is well-versed in conflict mediation tactics and has a knack for explaining complex topics clearly and respectfully.
Izabela Mrochen
Izabela Mrochen is a professor assistant at the University of Silesia, Poland. She integrates CAT tools in software localization and cloud computing and promotes accessibility, social and digital inclusion. The issues of preparing good websites according to the WCAG rules have influenced her interests. In 2016 she was awarded with Professional Certificate in Web Accessibility by the University of South Australia and Media Access Australia.
Radost Dacheva
Radost is the Key Partnership Manager at SiteGround. She enjoys working on establishing long-lasting relations among businesses and is a firm believer that people are the key to success in any venture.
Before working in the web industry, Radost pursued a career in business consultancy and finance as part of the largest program for Entrepreneurial Excellence in Bulgaria, providing startups with an early-stage funding.
Miriam Schwab
Twelve years ago Miriam stumbled across WordPress and it was love at first sight. Since then, she has gone on to found one of Israel’s leading WordPress development agencies, illuminea.
More recently Miriam founded Strattic, the “unhosting” platform that publishes Open Source CMSs as static and serverless, making them virtually unhackable, and exponentially faster. Five-time organizer of WordCamp Israel, regular speaker at WordPress meetups and events including WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US and WordCamp London. Advocate for women in tech. In her spare time, Miriam likes to…haha spare time as if.
Hannah Smith
Hannah is a freelance developer and project manager based in Bristol, UK. She’s also an instructor, teaching others how to code with WordPress and PHP on a developer’s bootcamp. She is active in the WordPress community and she co-organises the Bristol WordPress meet-up, was co-lead for WordCamp Bristol 2019 and is a strong advocate for women in tech.
In her downtime, she’ll probably be outside doing something. When feeling active she’ll be cycling, walking or perhaps snowboarding if she’s managed to find some snow! Otherwise she’ll be enjoying nature and in her garden probably accompanied by her four legged best friend, Lili the golden retriever.
Shane Pearlman
Shane is the CEO at Modern Tribe Inc. As a digital agency they get to work with the worlds top companies (SAP, MTV, Bon Appetit, eBay, Microsoft) and universities (MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia). As a products company they manage freemium open-source and SaaS offerings in the events space catering to millions of users.
Shane have spoken at SXSW, HOW, The Future of Work, Project Management Institute, directly for companies like eBay and numerous BarCamps & WordCamps.
Monique Dubbelman
Monique works as an independent UX designer and content strategist for her own company BOE!media since 2011.
In 2016, she graduated from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as a bachelor in information management. Building user-friendly websites with WordPress is an important part of her work.
When she’s not glued to her phone or computer, she likes to whisper to earthworms in her vegetable garden.