Mediaboss Marketing

Dries Buytaert is programming wunderkind. He learned to program when he was six years old -- even before he could read.

Today he is internationally famous as the creator of Drupal, one of the world's most successful open source projects.

And it all happened by accident.

Drupal is a free, open source content management system that powers a million websites including some of the biggest or most important like the White House, NASA and Twitter. Nearly 790,000 people in 228 countries contribute to it.

"This was never intentional. I'm an accidental leader. I love what I'm doing but never envisioned this to happen," he told Business Insider.

Although he's been working on Drupal for over 12 years, for most of that time, he never made a dime on it. This changed about four years ago when he founded Acquia in Boston.

Acquia is already wildly successful. It provides technical support for Drupal, has a Software-as-a-Service program similar to WordPress.com and does web hosting via a service called Drupal Gardens. The company has nearly 2,000 customers, with Drupal Gardens hosting over 100,000 websites including huge sites like Arabic news network Al Jazeera.

Acquia has raised $38.5 million in venture funding, backed by North Bridge, Sigma Partners, Tenaya Capital and Tim O'Reilly's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

"We've grown from two people in 2008 to over 200 people today. We're looking to add another 100 to 120 people," he says. That makes Acquia one of the fastest-growing startups in Boston and named to Forbes most-promising list.

Because Drupal and Acquia isn't enough, Buytaert also has a second startup, Mollom, a comment spam blocking service for use with Drupal sites.

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Dries Buytaert's Software Powers A Million Important Websites — And He Built It From His Couch