What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you are listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions at their companies? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful business. Today, I am excited to be talking to the one, the only, Jason Cohen. Jason is one of the most successful, knowledgeable, analytical, and

honest founders that I know of. He's the author behind a smart bear, one of the most

informative blogs for founders to learn from online. He has bootstrapped four different software

businesses from $0 to over $1 million in revenue. And with the latest of those companies, WP Engine, he eventually decided to switch gears,

take a different tack, and he's raised almost $300 million from investors, and is now at over

600 employees, over 90,000 customers, and recently reported that they are on our annual

revenue run rate of $133 million.

So Jason really knows his stuff.

He's been around the block. He's seen things from every angle. And he's literally succeeded over and over and over again. Jason, welcome to the show. It is an honor to have you on here. Well, that was an awesome intro. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm really glad to have you on here. people tell me all the time, Cortland, you should do more failure stories.

And I disagree. I think you learn a lot more from success stories like yours. I think there are a million ways to fail at being a founder and only a smaller handful of ways to succeed. So I like to bring on people like you've succeeded a ton of times. I wonder what your thoughts are on that. Do you think you learn more from success or failure?

And also looking back on your career so far,

what are some of the experiences that you've learned the most from?

It's actually hard to learn from either one

because either way, you made a whole bunch of decisions,

and there's a lot of factors that were not in your control.

And it's not even clear sometimes what factors are or are not in your control in the first place.

And then there's an outcome.

And then the question is, what did I learn?

But to ask what I learned, like, sometimes there's obvious things, but you don't know.

Maybe if you knew that and made different decisions, maybe it wouldn't have been a different

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