Jason Cohen

We got to 100 million in a little less than seven years, and we hired a CEO, and it was the second best decision I've ever made.

All right.

My name is Jason.

I started WP Engine 14 years ago.

We have hundreds of millions in ARR.

I'm going to share with you some lessons that I learned along the way in doing that.

You probably know me online, though, as the smart bear, so hence that.

So we got to 1 million ARR in our first 18 months, which is pretty good.

I thought maybe already the company could just grow like that.

But then in 2012, our growth rate shot up again.

We went from 1 million to 5 million in one year.

And as you can see, it never ended.

We got to 100 million in something like a little less than seven years.

This little flat part at the beginning, that was that previous chart, right?

Just to give you a sense of scale of what happens.

And so i want to take 20 minutes and talk about stuff that i Learned from this part where the company is growing faster than People can grow.

So the first thing is that

You know it's going to be different, but it's dramatically more different, I think, than you would expect if you had never done this before.

Because before product market fit, you're exploring.

You're trying to figure out, yeah, everyone here knows this.