You are listening to conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.

If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, cac, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to gitlatka.com and use our filtering tool.

It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at gitlatka.com.

We got to 100 million in a little less than seven years. Check it out right now at GitLatka.com.

We got to 100 million in a little less than seven years, and we hired a CEO, and

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 a 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 one million to five million in one year.

As you can see, it never ended. We got to 100 million in something like a little less than seven

years. And 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 expect if you've never done this before.

Because before product market fit, you're exploring, you're trying to figure out everyone

here knows this.

Who's the customer and how do we get there and what's our unique thing and blah, blah, blah.

So this is all experimentation and unknown stuff.

...