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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Where are we timeline-wise now? Jason Cohen: We’re still in the mid-2000s. Just accelerating through that, I sold Smart Bear in 2007. I left in 2009. I had to stick around for a year. Sramana Mitra: To whom did you sell this company to? Jason Cohen: There was another company called Automated QA.
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Being the author of a book gives you huge credibility. Jason Cohen: Even now when everyone knows you can publish, it does. We were doing enterprise sales where credibility is even more important. I remember being with a potential customer in San Diego. Our champion inside the company threw one of our books
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go down the path of your content marketing. You said you published a book. Tell us more about what was the marketing strategy around your code review product? Jason Cohen: I have to give credit where credit is due. In ITWatchDogs, Gerry had this idea because it had just become possible to
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Did you go to work for them? Jason Cohen: I did for just a little while, but at that time, I had already started another company with Gerry’s encouragement. In fact, when we started ITWatchDogs, I was hesitant to join a startup because I thought, “Maybe I should just increase my savings a little
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: It is very difficult to get any kind of financing for new companies from these community banks. I’m curious about how you managed to get that. Was Gerry offering a personal guarantee of some sort to get that money out? Jason Cohen: Yes. He also had a history with the bank. Of course, you’ll
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Jason has done three bootstrapped startups, sold two of those, and then bootstrapped a fourth one to heavy duty venture financing. This is a great interview with a pro who knows what he is doing at many levels. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning
Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit the $1 million mark? Shane Evans: I think we would have come just under it in 2013. In 2014, we would have been $2 million. Sramana Mitra: In 2013, you were at $1 million revenue. At that point, what was the distribution between professional services
Bootstrapping Using Services from Ireland: Shane Evans, CEO of ScrapingHub (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: I know quite a bit about that kind of work because I did a lead generation software company earlier in my career that required lots of scraping and cleaning. It’s quite complicated and it’s very domain-specific. I am very aware of how very complicated this is. Did you launch this with any financing