WP Engine

“Probably.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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,…”

“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…”