WP Engine

The 6th-largest public website platform used by the largest ten million websites, as the leading managed WordPress platform and WordPress developer tools company, serving billions of requests per day for 170,000 customers.  Our 1200 employees are devoted to world-class customer service (NPS 74) and the most sophisticated infrastructure for scalable, secure, performant WordPress-powered websites.

Founder, Chief Innovation Officer

Capital Factory

Capital Factory is a seed-stage mentoring program for startups that provides a small amount of seed capital and weekly mentoring sessions by entrepreneurs who have founded successful companies. Startup companies apply to participate in our 10 week summer program intended to get a startup pointed in the right direction with a clear path to profitability and growth.

Mentor

Capital Thought

Managing incubated companies and works for hire.

Balancing big ideas with changing the pellets in the urinals.  Nimitz-class cat herding.

Partner

Smart Bear Inc

Developer, salesman, manager, advertiser, visionary, evangelist, and chief executive changer of the toilet paper.

Smart Bear makes Code Collaborator (http://codecollab.com) -- the only professional-grade peer code review tool on the market and winner of the Jolt Award.  I also wrote the only book on lightweight peer code review technique (http://codereviewbook.com).

Customers include: Adobe, AOL, Autodesk, Cisco, Cognos, EA Sports, Intuit, Ixia, Pfizer, RIM (Blackberry), Northrup Grumman, Seagate, Siemens, SONIC, and Qualcomm.

Smart Bear was acquired by AutomatedQA in December of 2007; the parent company was later renamed to Smart Bear.

Founder, CEO

Geist Manufacturing

After ITWatchdogs (below) was sold to Geist, I stayed on as a part-part-time project consultant for the product line I helped create.

Project Consultant

ITWatchDogs

Designed and developed firmware for ARM7 devices for multiple product lines.  Grew to 3-man team.

ITWatchdogs was sold to Geist Manufacturing in July 2005 but still operates under its own name.

Devices measure server room environments (temp, humidity, air flow, light, sound, power, water, door position) with both internal and external sensors, showing current and historical data through HTTP, SNMP and alarming through SMTP and SNMP.

http://itwatchdogs.com

Co-Founder, CTO

DataCert

Lead 2-man team to implement a web-based reporting system for DataCert's AIMS software in record time.  Managed remote development.

http://datacert.com

Consultant

Sheer Genius Software

Grew consulting shop to six employees with seven-figure contracts with public companies.  Lead team to design and implement tools now installed on tens of thousands of desktops.  Managed remote development.

CTO, co-founder

GlobeSet

Refactored development techniques for the eWallet division

Photodex

Ported 750,000 lines of Windows GUI code to Macintosh, Linux, *BSD, and Solaris by creating a Windows API emulation layer so future changes to the Windows base were reflected automatically in the other versions.  Implemented several new features in the core product line.  Optimized graphics routines in C and x86 assembly.

http://photodex.com

Developer

Built four technology startups, both bootstrapped and funded, both alone and with co-founders, all to more than $1M in annual revenue, sold two, currently at the fourth, http://WPEngine.com, with 200,000 customers and 1200 global employees.

Since 2009 I've also been an angel investor and was a founding member of Capital Factory, an Austin incubator and co-working space. 

I've been writing since 2007 about early-stage startups, blogging at https://blog.asmartbear.com and articles at https://longform.asmartbear.com.

You hate the idea of outbound sales, because “it’s spam” and “I wouldn’t want it.”

Those are good reasons. However:

For whom would this not in fact be spam, but exactly what they need, right now?

A: Your ICP.

For them, it’s not spam, it’s a godsend, right when they needed it.

How can you target them?

(Of course, you can't be 100% accurate, so some of it will be spam. But you can try.)

Jason Cohen

When we launched WP Engine, we thought we were selling to SMBs.

Then Google started buying.

Not because we were suddenly “Enterprise” but because individual teams at large companies have the same needs as small businesses.

Open article: Your target market isn’t demographic by longform.asmartbear.com

“The customer is always right.”

No they’re not, but you have to decide what to do on a case-by-case basis:

1. Act like they are; treat them like they are.
2. Be polite, but ignore.
3. Ask them to no longer be a customer.
4. Realize they actually are right.

You think you need to start worrying about scaling right now.

You don’t. 90% chance you won’t get to that point at all. That’s the challenge you need to spend 100% of your time solving.

“But then I’ll have to refactor etc!”

But you don’t know what that looks like yet.

Great observations, with data, from Mike Judge, on whether “AI makes you faster at coding” is largely hype.

Especially when it’s not demo-ware, or the occasional moment when it really does save hours.

Open article: Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up by mikelovesrobots.substack.com

Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up

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