SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Automattic, the company behind the popular Web publishing platform WordPress.com, today announced that Stuart West will serve as the company's first full-time Chief Financial Officer. In this newly created role, West will be responsible for leading Automattic's global financial strategy, and will provide operational and strategic leadership as Automattic continues to scale WordPress.com, expand product offerings and build the global community of publishers and bloggers. As the company focuses on growth of the business, it has also appointed its first General Counsel, Paul Sieminski.

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"WordPress has been doubling in scale every twelve months and we are positioned for further growth and development. Stuart and Paul's experience will help manage the coming critical stages of intense expansion," said Automattic CEO Toni Schneider. "Both understand the vision of Automattic and our commitment to grow the company in a way that supports our users and the open source community at large."

West is a veteran technology executive with deep experience guiding companies through periods of rapid growth. Most recently, West served as executive in residence at Andreessen Horowitz, where he advised the firm and its portfolio investments. For the past four years, West has also served as Vice-Chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind Wikipedia. West has previously served as the CFO for Kno, Inc. and Tivo, Inc. and has served as Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Corporate Development for InfoSpace, Inc.

Sieminski has been practicing law as a corporate and securities associate at Gunderson Dettmer. His specialty has been representing emerging growth and technology companies throughout their lifecycles, as well as venture capital and buyout funds in both formation and transactional matters. He has represented consumer internet and software companies, as well as a number of leading venture capital firms.

The appointments of West and Sieminski come in the midst of impressive growth for the WordPress platform. In the past year, the number of WordPress sites has increased from 35 million to 70 million (including websites on both WordPress.com and those hosted elsewhere via the WordPress.org open source community). They will be part of a larger executive team focused on managing the growth of Automattic and WordPress.com.

About Automattic

Automattic offers a network of web services for online publishers including WordPress.com, VIP hosting and support, VaultPress, Akismet, VideoPress, Polldaddy, IntenseDebate, Gravatar, and more. The Automattic network attracts over half a billion worldwide unique visitors every month.

For more information, visit http://automattic.com.

SOURCE Automattic Inc.