WP Engine

“That bought our house. Paid cash for our house.”

“When WP Engine first started, we were only for like small business, maybe medium sized. A lot of times it was going through freelancers, sometimes direct. And sure, four or five years in, we saw some more appetite from larger companies, but not for their homep…”

“When we raised money, which wasn't for two years, because originally the idea was to bootstrap it again, it was the fourth bootstrap company. It's just right. But even then we only raised a million dollars. It's not exactly like earth shattering quantities of …”

“The pricing was already pretty good, but we had some revelations talking to customers, and Hearing some stories or some revelations where we reset the prices, not dramatically, just like certain things in 2012. And that's when we really took off. That's like w…”

“Like if growth is really good, the problem is generally operationally scaling to meet the growth. And so you're focused on that. It's when growth slows where you're like, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, right? We have to focus on growth now must as opposed…”

“I'm invested in 224 B to B SaaS companies. Dozens of them are doing seven or eight figures, and, you know, there's WP Engine, which is, what do we think the worth of them is a billion.”

“It has about 700,000 WordPress installs. There's a company called WP Engine.”

“So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So a cool part about WordPress that actually one of my favorite features is every change to every single post or page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So if you make a mistake, you…”

“Last year, they tried to sell the company. So private equity usually holds things for like five to seven years. So they were kind of five years into this. They tried to shop it around and sell it. They weren't able to find a buyer. They said, well, they don't …”

“And also, you know, they're spending millions of dollars a month on both lawyers and PR.”

“They would refer to themselves as WordPress engine and client meetings and other things.”

“98% of all the core developers have stayed and contributed and are working on the next version and are supportive”

“This is controversial and actually the, they actually got a preliminary injection. So the judge said reverse this. So this has all been reversed by the way.”

“WP Engine has not done any podcasts and no press. They don't respond to journalists. They don't talk about this.”

“Given that WordPress has shown that they are going to be aggressive, not making themselves out to be a friendly platform right now.”

“So we got to one million ARR in our first 18 months, which is pretty good.”

“But then in 2012, our growth rate shot up again. We went from one million to five million in one year, and as you can see, it never ended.”

“We got to a hundred million in something like a little less than seven years.”

“What I'm going to argue is that this is not what you should do, that you should instead still have only a couple of things that you do, and focus everybody, all the scale that you have, on just a few things instead of this. And the reason is that if you cut up…”

“I think doing it more often than this is not necessary. It's a lot of overhead. But about every hundred days, this kind of stuff falls out of people's heads. Just like if you're a distributed team, about every hundred days, all the social fabric starts getting…”

“We host millions of websites and have tens of billions of events per day flying around, so we have infrastructure scale problems, too, or challenges, I should say, but it's usually people.”

“Everyone you hire has to be better than you, or else the company is not progressing, and certainly, again, if you're scaling fast, you're gonna outscale how anyone can grow. You have to get that talent. That means that person has to be better than you.”

“What you do is you call and say, what is the perfect scenario where this person is an absolute superstar? That they're so happy and so effective and they just get 10 times more done than you would expect. What does that, if you were to construct that for them,…”

“Anyway, my second best decision, though, was hiring Heather Bruner to be our CEO. She's been here for over 11 years now, and, ah, fantastic.”

“Here's what he says. Here's the thing. You're the founder. You'll always get the credit. That's what I needed to hear. Of course I get to keep the ego part. I get to keep it. Wait a minute. I get to keep that part? Good. Like, what am I doing hiring a VP of sa…”

“When WP Engine had, ah, what I think was considered a private equity kind of growth round in, in 2018 or 19, we got bought out. And that was enough money that we could pay cash for our next house”

“That was the first angel check we ever wrote. In fact, we were not accredited investors.”

“You can either try to save a company money and take a percentage there, or you can just go straight for the value and you'll capture like four to eight times more.”

“So at this point at WP engine, also we've had a few secondary rounds, which by the way, all employees got to participate in as well.”

“Everything's screwed up. Okay. Different ways, different levels of screwed up. Sure. But everything's screwed up. And if there's those one or two things that are just so compelling, whether it's delighting people are so useful or it's built into their workflow…”

“And the things that got you to product markets that are the wrong actions to take when you scale, you're like, all I'm doing is experimenting. Not when you scale, you know what to do. Now you need to do more of it. You need specialists in it.”

“Saving money, saving time. It's not a bad proposition, but often the same product can be shown to generate value instead of saving time. And all of a sudden it's literally an order of magnitude more valuable.”

“When I scraped together, you know, a couple, 20 grand, I think, which was an enormous amount of money for me at the time. To write Jason Cohen a check, and I was honored to be part of it, and it paid out a tremendous, tremendous payout for me, and it's probabl…”

“I had modeled my approach after Steve Blank's original customer development, but realistically, more so after Jason Cohen's validation or pre-validation of WP Engine. And he talked to a lot of people, and he got 40 yeses.”

“I know that Jason Cohen, when he was vetting WP Engine, he would actually pay consultants or agencies, or he would offer to pay. He's like, I know your rate is a hundred dollars an hour, And I'll pay you know, for a half hour or for a full hour of your consult…”

“With Drip, I got 11 yeses. With WP Engine, Jason Cohen got 40 yeses before he started coding.”

“The life-changing income that I've received has been from selling my own companies and from angel investing in companies like WP Engine and a few others that had these massive returns on my investment or on my time, and the tax advantages were there as well.”

“Activity logging feature at WP Engine, it'd take six to 12 months for them to even figure out what they want to build, whereas we're built in a modern environment, all modern frameworks, end-to-end test suites, API first, things that just don't exist in our in…”

“It's either angel investing, because I was an early investor in WP Engine and several others that have done reasonably well, or crypto currency.”

“It was about a decade ago, I believe, I was able to write my first check, which was to WP Engine, and, you know, it was a small check, and a lot of them until I saw drip were small”

“We now have about 90,000 customers in a 140 different countries.”

“We're backed by Silverlake. Last year they made an investment of two hundred and fifty million into our business, and now we are doing about a hundred and thirty two million in revenue.”

“But for my SDRs, my commitment to them is if they come in and overachieve, exceed expectations, I will promote them in nine months.”

“Part of that is invest in work permits. Invest in expat packages. Take one or two of your top people and send them over to that international office. If you don't do that, it's going to cost you so much more money in the long run because it's going to take so …”

“The other way to go and build trust across time zones is when you hire that first managing director or country manager, whoever that is, have them write the business plan. Don't write the business plan for themselves. Have them write it. Have them do the study…”

“The definition that I utilize is the difference between showing up for work and volunteering your best.”

“What if they get violent, and you have to take out a restraining order? I've had to do that. What if they get depressed afterwards and kill themselves, and you have to explain it to everybody? That has happened to me.”

“Delaying only hurts everybody, everybody, you, the team, the person. Be decisive. Our CEO, Heather Bruner, has a terrific phrase about this, which is, General Patton on the decision, Mother Teresa on the exit. Be decisive, and then be kind.”

“The idea that you can become an expert in something important, something that's an entire career for someone else in a few months and then hire an A player. That's, of course, not true. So you're actually a C player at best.”

“I founded WP Engine in 2010, and like I said, we now, ah, we're, we've passed a hundred million annual revenue, we just got a two hundred and fifty million dollar investment from Silver Lake, and, ah, we're worth more than SmartBear, right?”

“Our executive team is majority female, for example. We have diversity in many areas in the business. Half of our engineering management are women, for example.”

“You don't have to hold onto these things like CEO or C whatever or blah, blah, blah for ego because you'll still get the credit. Your ego is going to be fine. You're going to get the ego stuff anyway, which is cool.”

“And now I have zero direct reports, just like Dharmesh at HubSpot.”

“WP Engine at this point is 450 people. You know, that's, Automatic's only six 50. So just serving their customer base, which is much smaller than ours takes almost the same number of people.”

“Probably.”