John O'Nolan
John O'Nolan

Founder/CEO @ Ghost.org — Geographically restless. Publishing, open source, and independent business around the world.

About me

I'm a thinker, entrepreneur, designer and developer. I love open source technology, socially responsible business models and independent journalism. I work and play at the intersection where all of these things meet.

I was born in Scotland to English and Irish parents, grew up in The Philippines and my first language is Dutch. In the past few years I've lived in Austria, Egypt, The British Virgin Islands and Thailand.

Confused? Me too.

Career

I studied contemporary music at university, which I thoroughly enjoyed right up until the point that I realised I was a bad musician. From that point onwards, I started making websites to promote my more-talented friends instead.

Over the course of a few years I went from building websites for friends, to local businesses, to national businesses. Eventually I had carved out a niche designing and building blogs for major organisations like Microsoft, Nokia, Ubisoft, Virgin Atlantic, KLM, EasyJet, MTV, Visit Australia, Tourism Spain and many others.

As I was growing my design portfolio, I became very involved in core WordPress community. Eventually becoming the Deputy Head of the UI Group, helping to design and build the world's most popular content management system.

Ghost

After a few years of watching WordPress evolve from a small blogging platform into a full-blown CMS, I wondered what it might look like if it were redesigned from the ground up; purely for publishing. I wrote a blog post with my ideas for what that might look like.

The reception was incredible and, over the course of the next year, I raised $300,000 on Kickstarter with my best friend Hannah and to turn it into a real product.

Today, Ghost is one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world. We're a proud non-profit organisation, with a business model that complements everything we believe in.

Now

I'm on the move, as usual! These days I can generally be found somewhere between PST and EST.

Want to chat? Get in touch.

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