The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
WP Engine takes 6-12 months to scope features Rocket.net ships quickly
“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…”
Cohen: Founders should not fear hiring CEOs because founders always retain credit
“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…”
Cohen: Fast-scaling companies must hire executives who are better than the founders
“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.”
Cohen: Distributed Teams and Strategic Alignment Degrade Every 100 Days
“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…”
Cohen: Ask references to describe scenarios where candidates excel as superstars
“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,…”
Cohen: Diluting headcount across multiple initiatives destroys a scaling company's competitive advantage
“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…”
WP Engine needs 450 employees for a vastly smaller customer base
“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.”
WP Engine Reached $100M ARR in Under Seven Years
“We got to a hundred million in something like a little less than seven years.”
Cohen: Hiring Heather Brunner as WP Engine CEO was second-best decision ever
“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.”
WP Engine Hosts Millions of Websites and Tens of Billions Daily Events
“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.”