Startups and Entrepreneurship, Episode 118

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hey everybody! Welcome to officehours.fm Season 3 Episode 118. Today I’ve got a great episode lined up for you with Jason Cohen, entrepreneur and founder of WP Engine. Before we dive into the good stuff there are a couple things I want to make you aware of. Our last Episode 117 actually kicked off Season 3 of the podcast. I’ve got a different format for you this season, live shows in the evening once a month, in addition to freshly published episodes every week starting with this one. My goal is to bring the highest-quality amazing conversations about WordPress and entrepreneurship directly to your RSS feed. I’m able to do that with the help of some generous sponsors, brands I trust, use and respect. I’ll be introducing you to them in upcoming episode. I do still have a handful of sponsorship opportunities left for Season 3. So if you want your company to be a part of what’s going on over here head on over to officehours.fm. Also on officehours.fm you’ll find the complete catalog of podcast episodes and news of what’s coming up on the show. If you’d like to participate in conversation I’d love for you to join in the OfficeHours.fm slack channel. It’s completely free to join and a great way to connect with other listeners just like you. To do that head over to my.officehours.fm and you’ll find the instructions to join there. As always thank you so much for tuning in. This show exists for you. So without further adieu, here’s my conversation with Jason Cohen.

Hey Jason! Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Jason: I’m good. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: Oh my gosh! It’s a total pleasure. Jason? For folks who have not had the opportunity to meet you yet, would you mind just giving a quick rundown about yourself? Later on we’re really going to dig into some of the questions about your startups. Who is Jason Cohen?

Jason: Well I’ve had some normal jobs. But over the last 20 years (which is a frightening thing to say) I’ve been building startups as a founder or cofounder. The reason I’m here now I think is because I’m the founder and CTO at WP Engine. So we started about 6 1/2 years ago and we’re now about 400 employees and in about five offices and so forth. That’s how the WordPress community has gotten to know me. On line my handle is @asmartbear. That’s due to my previous start up SmartBear, which I ran for 7 years. It was bootstrapped. It was sold in 2007 and I left in 2009. That’s really where my blog came from and then Twitter. So I had about 50,000 followers on that blog. I think that’s how most of the Internet space has come to know me as well.

Carrie: Well we’re sure glad that you came on over to the WordPress side of things. You mentioned you have been doing this for 20 years. That’s pretty cool that you got started in junior high.

Jason: Right. (laughs)

Carrie: So you’re actually based in Austin. Then in WordCamp San Antonio I met a lot of the WP Engine crew and learned that there is now an office in San Antonio which is super cool.

Jason: Yes. San Antonio, Austin, San Francisco, London (which we’ve had for over two years now) and then we just opened an office in Limerick, Ireland last month. Of course that was eight months in the making but was opened last month with about a dozen folks. We’re also looking to grow to around 100 folks in the next couple years. So fun stuff and lots of fun travel too, especially over to Europe.

Carrie: Of course now it’s WP Engine but clearly you’ve got a whole heck of a lot of entrepreneurial spirit. What was your driver in your first business that made you think Ok. I can go and do this.

Jason: I think it was ego and difficult to work with others kind of a thing.

Also I had the idea that you make a lot of money doing it, which is often of course not true in startups. But having it yourself and owning it yourself goes a long way to ameliorate various problems of running a company like the incredible stress and doing most of the work and stuff you don’t want to do. Which is true in life. It’s true of people in a band too. Most of the work is stuff like practicing and trying to book gigs and moving stuff around. Very little of it is the one hour that you’re on stage every once in awhile. Startups are kind of the same way. So I think you need (founders in general) to have some kind of fundamental thing of “Yeah, but it’s mine and so it’s worth it.” Maybe an ego and desire to be well known. I definitely have that problem. Again, a lot of folks look at it as a way to make money but of course, few do. So just in a risk/reward profile it’s probably a bad way to make money but again maybe we’re too optimistic about what the good cases can be like. In my case I have been fortunate. It has worked out. I also helped start the local major incubator here in Austin for startups in 2009. So I’ve invested in dozens of companies and mentored maybe about 100 companies. Most of them don’t work right? That’s just the nature of it. The odds and the math and so on are probably against entrepreneurship more or less. I think you need some kind of irrational belief, irrational optimism or some kind of personal issue that makes you want to do it regardless.

Carrie: We’ve got to be just a little bit weird is what I heard.

Jason: Weird in a particular way. Just oddball doesn’t make a good business. Even being different doesn’t necessarily make a good business. You often hear that especially out of the Silicon Valley world, that you should be different. That’s fine to be different. A lot of successful businesses are not fundamentally very different. Even in the space we’re in with WordPress hosting, I would say you could look at a lot of folks and say that they’re approximately the same…that they’re all growing and so forth. That’s fine. In the shared hosting world, EIG has bought something like 40 different shared hosting companies. None of them are very different. I think different is good but it’s actually not required. People sometimes get hung up on that. It’s not different enough so I can’t do it. I don’t think you have to be so hung up on that.

Carrie: Over time are there patterns that you’ve noticed that differentiate those startups that go on to be successful and have some longevity versus those that don’t last very long?

Jason: No. I think if there were venture capitalists and angel investors and folks like who are were putting their money in would have solved that. I’m not saying that it’s impossible that there’s a pattern. But if there’s not an obvious pattern now, or else that’s would they would seek and they would do a lot better than they do. Almost no angel investor in the long run makes money. Almost always you lose money in total. With VCs the same is true. Only a quarter of the VC firms last 10 years and return there fund or return the money that they raise. They’re actually quite bad at predicting with a few exceptions. That just shows there’s probably not a lot of a pattern. In retrospect you can go say things I suppose about companies but probably not. I think it actually makes sense that there’s not a consistent pattern because in a sense having a really successful company is an outlier. In other words, most fail and the ones that don’t are outliers and are notoriously difficult to predict. Like in any form of statistics and prediction outliers are hard, especially with companies that are creating new markets. Then you are having to predict whether the market itself can be created. Those kinds of things are just very hard to predict. If really smart people whose jobs that depend on predictions are quite bad at it then that indicates to me that it’s hard to predict.  Also at the early stage of a start up, it always kind of looks like a mess. Most things are unknown. A lot of things are experimental. There’s a lot of luck as opposed to later on (like we are now at WP Engine) we have to be predictable. It’s not OK for luck to play a big part of things. Of course, it did early. In a remit stage you have to mitigate luck through process, excellence and execution. But early on of course that’s not true. There’s a lot of  luck and other things going on. So it’s hard to say what does a big mess with a lot of luck look like with a successful versus an unsuccessful company? I’ve written about this before and shown data on the growth curves of successful and unsuccessful companies. They look the same early on. It just goes to show how difficult it is.

It’s easy to say things like well you know founder’s who have vision or founders who have purpose outside of metrics, people that are really good at marketing…there’s all kinds of things (people that are persistent) there are all these things you can say in retrospect. The trouble with that is you can usually say the same thing about people who are unsuccessful. So you can be persistent and unsuccessful. You can be passionate and unsuccessful. Often that is the case. So I think it is OK to say look if you don’t care that much and you’re not that persistence you’ll probably fail. That’s probably true. But on the plus side when you say OK you know I have all these characteristics, I’m not sure that still increases the chance of success all that much. Here’s another interesting example that’s relevant really to anybody that’s starting a company. It’s a question whether you should do it with cofounder or alone.

Carrie: Yes.

Jason: One of the interesting pieces of data there is almost all of the large successful companies you see cofounders instead of single founders. Even with Apple, Google, and those kinds of things. You see that. Of course you’ll see Amazon or Facebook where there’s a single founder…although Facebook gets complicated, right? The data shows that usually successful companies do have cofounders. That kind of makes sense. You share the load early on in terms of the emotional load as well as workload, maybe even with specialization where so and so is good outward and so and so is good at writing code (which was certainly the case at Apple for example). It was somewhat the case at Google even today. But, also the data shows that the number one reason that young companies fail is that cofounders break up. The company doesn’t survive the breakup. That’s data out of the Why Commenator but also the things that are not funded. In other words, having a cofounder is high beta as they say in the financial world. It may increase the chance of success and failure. That’s not a contradiction. It is sort of increases things that happen. In an environment like startups where the most likely outcome is failure, high beta is probably a good thing because you are trying to seek the optimistic case. If it doesn’t then you want to start over quickly to have another “at bat”. So that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve done both. I’ve been cofounder and founder of startups that have been successful.  I was a cofounder at ITWatchDogs. That was successful and we sold it in 2004. I was a single founder at ASmartBear. That was obviously successful. At WP Engine I was also a single founder. I’ve done both and I think there’s good and bad in all that stuff. You can read articles ad nauseam about the good and bad. It fundamentally shows that this is probably not predictive of success. The good news is when you hear you can’t predict anything and there’s no pattern, this is actually good news. It may sound like bad news because you don’t know what advice or do on for success. It sounds bad, but is actually this can be a really optimistic view. If success can happen in all sorts of different paths (even a failure can too) that means you should consider the things that make the most sense for you personally. In other words, what sales techniques or marketing techniques do you feel are compatible with how you normally are? Not what you think other people think a good sales process is or language that you think other people think is good language for sales. You can say, what do I think would be good at sales? Is that’s something more formal or informal? Is that something where I say something more strongly that pisses off some people but also makes some other people more thrilled? Do I want something a little more mundane and saying something less strong but impacting more people? Both of those works, so what do you feel and what you’ll be most proud of where that is most compatible with your personality and your approach to the world? If all those paths are acceptable then that means you picking is fine. You don’t have to go look outside of yourself for validation. That’s actually a liberating concept. It’s not a bad concept. That means you take all his advice, ideas and stuff from online as options rather than advice. They’re options. These are possible ways to go. You think about which of these ways feel right to me since so many of them are valid. Assemble the set of things that make sense for you. Use it as a way of generating optionality instead of something you have to follow to the letter. That’s actually quite liberating.

Carrie: That’s a great perspective. Wow! I don’t even know the question I asked but I loved the entire answer that you just gave. There are a lot of nuggets there. So as an investor, I guess in light of the fact that you go into it knowing that there’s a slim chance you’re actually going to get your money back in some cases. I don’t know if that means there’s a little bit of altruism involved or you’re just cheerleading for these folks that you are investing in…but what are some of the key characteristics of either the individuals involved or the business ideas that are attractive to you?

Jason: Yeah.  You’re exactly right. Unless you’re really going to be a professional angel investor and develop really good deal flow (that’s a critical thing and one of the reasons why angle investor fails because they get into a few good deals a year) When I say good deals, I mean the kind that make the financial returns that are needed for the portfolio math to work.  For the VCs there are only a few that work there. That by the way, is not how I think about startups. That is mathematically true about financial returns. That’s why I don’t invest with that in mind. Just as you say, I’m not actually looking to make tons of money investing. That’s not my goal because I think not only is that goal not best for startups. It also requires absolute devotion and the development of these things like relationships upwards in the fund-raising structure so you can help your company raise money for their A and B rounds for example. It requires credit…all these things if you’re going to be successful. Look. Of course I’d rather make money than not. I don’t want to invest in companies that I think will fail out of hand. Obviously that would be really bad. I don’t measure success just financially. I’d be very happy to just get the money back so I can to give it another start up. That’s how I look at it. What’s interesting to me is just that company exists. If I can help in some way some company exist that I think is good in the sense of doing social good and doing something interesting in product and genuinely better for the world and all that kind of stuff, then obviously I just want to see that happen. And it’s fun to be involved in a company existing and if I can help that happen, it’s personally gratifying. Again, it goes back to ego. It’s easy to ignore that. But I think ego drives a whole lot of the things that happen in investing too. It’s cool to be the person that someone else looks to for advice. That’s an ego-stoking thing.

Carrie: It feels good. Yeah.

Jason: It feels good. I’d better have actually good advice to give. That’s not only ego. It should be ego and actual help. Then maybe it’s ok.

Carrie: Good point.

Jason: Yeah. So that’s important of course. What I look for is I want to work with people that I like working with. Which is a tautology I suppose. Do I want to spend time with this person? Do I want to spend time with this company? Am I excited about what the product is? Are there lots of avenues for the company to be successful? So that means for example, sometimes you have a company that says we’re making a medical device. The only way to sell is we have to go direct to hospitals. That’s fine. But if that way doesn’t work there’s not another way. It’s not like they can have ad words for a medical device. There is not another way to be successful. Another example of limiting factors is where you have companies that can’t charge very much for their products. They can charge a dollar amount like five dollars a month and the only route is huge mass adoption with no marketing budget. Again it’s possible. You can point to examples but it’s really hard and very unlikely. As a counter example where that looks good is with a company that can charge $50 to $5000 a month. That’s a big range but something in the $50 to $100 a month plus. So you don’t need a lot of customers before making interesting money. In a market that’s large (so there’s plenty of people to sell to achieve that) where there’s potentially a dozen marketing channels. Now they won’t all work, right? But there are a lot of possibilities. Maybe a couple will work. So these are things where there’s a lot of ways for it to work. If you assume that things are unknowable at first and you are going to have to find them out, then you want lots and lots of possible paths. Even as some doors seem to close there’s plenty of other doors to try. That’s a good thing in terms of the risk. That’s what I mean by are lots of ways for a company to potentially be successful? So recapping. Is it a team I want to work? Do I want to work with this person and do I think they have the grit to succeed? Do I like the product? Do I think it’s an interesting thing anyway and the kind of thing that people talk about. Are there lots of ways to success? Finally, is there sort of a purpose other than the success of the company? In other words, greater good is a little strong word, but that’s nice if there is one. Let’s take the case of WP Engine. We do actually do a lot of giveback to the communities that we live in. WordPress is one of them. But there’s local communities (like Austin and the other areas we’re in). That is a higher purpose as well. Marketers generally are victims of technology and need the people to help them with technology. It’s like you and I trying to hire a Pancreatic Surgeon. We don’t know what questions to ask to see if it’s a good one. Marketers are generally in that position in terms of selecting technology or selecting let’s says a freelancer to work with. So they’re victims in that sense. If we can make them not-victims (at least on the tech side) and of course introduce them to freelancers and agencies that we know to be good and help them on that side, then we’re genuinely helping them turn from a victim into someone who has no control over their site. That’s a big deal. That’s what I mean by higher purpose. It doesn’t have to be completely philanthropic. There has to be something other than just eyeballs and an app or even growing revenue. There has to be some other good that’s happening there, at least for me. Some of that is just because that’s what I want to spend my time on. But I think you can even make a cold Vulcan argument for that in companies. The one I like to give is actually from Peter Thiel. It’s easy to hire actually the first few people in a startup because it’s fun to work in a startup. It’s interesting. You have a lot of influence. You get stock. There’s a lot of reasons why you can hire people at a startup. It’s a third higher. It’s a lot harder to higher the hundredth person. You can no longer use any of those techniques you used before. You’re not little anymore. Your impact is smaller, the equity that you’re going to get is small.  The role is more specialized. It’s less generic. You just can’t use any of those carrots. So why would the hundredth person join? So a startup has to be able to answer that question. They may not be able to answer on day one, but they need to know what will the answer be on a day in the 5th year or 2nd year, whenever you might reach that depending on how fast you grow. You have to be able to answer that. One of the best answers in my mind is having this higher purpose or this better purpose so that are joining it to achieve that purpose and not just to do the specific job at hand. That’s all advice for people that want to grow and be large. When you’re talking about investments and such that you asked about, then you’re talking about companies that want to get larger and more valuable. That’s the whole point of investing. However, I do not think that’s the only important company, even though Silicon Valley does think that. I love companies where it’s just two people. They want to keep it to two people forever. I love that. I like helping companies like that. It’s just not an investment because you won’t get any of your money back out of that probably. It’s probably not investable but I love it. I love to see more companies actually that are small and just want to stay small and thrive. I think that’s fantastic. So for example, I try to support MicroConf. I have been a speaker there many times because that’s the environment that they promote. I am a big promoter of that too, just not an investor.

Carrie: So Jason? Let’s talk about WP Engine. So you said you are the soul founder of WP Engine. I’m pretty sure that almost everybody here in his podcast knows who you guys are. But just in case they don’t, you guys are a managed WordPress host. Fantastic job! You mentioned your earlier your involvement in the community off-line, but certainly in the WordPress community you guys have had tremendous presence and impact. Just kind of share some of the story around (as an outsider I’m guessing to the WordPress world) looking in, seeing a need and an opportunity with managed hosting. How did all of that unfold?

Jason: Sure. I wasn’t quite an outsider in the sense that I was a user of WordPress. But I was an outsider in a business sense.  I wasn’t making money in WordPress but I was a user. User is such a funny word. There are only two industries that call their customers users. One is the illicit drug industry and us. I actually hate user. Anyway, what happened with SmartBear, my previous company, is that I created a blog with the intent to be just like 37Signals. Everyone would blog. Everyone would write on it and it would become the voice of our company. Then no one ever wrote on it but me. It kind of defacto became my blog. In 2007 I sold SmartBear and I left in 2009 because my wife was pregnant. That seemed like the only good time to be at home and all that. Again, having sold the company, I didn’t have to work for money, which is an incredible opportunity to have. I’m lucky to have it. I’m lucky enough to have that privilege and I mean all the uses of the word privileged. I am happy to expand on that by the way. Anyone who’s had kids knows that (especially in that first 18 months) your brain is mush. You barely are sleeping and it’s very taxing. So continuing to write on the blog was a way to have something that kept me intellectually connected with the world but had no deadlines, or project, or money or anything attached to it. It was actually a really great thing. Of course where there’s focus there’s progress, so it started taking off in popularity. What would happen is that I would get on the front page of Hacker News every Monday because my content (not purposefully but it happens to be perfect for that audience) about marketing and business but for geeks. So then the site would crash. Even though I was on a dedicated but small enough sort of a VPS type of thing, I wasn’t an idiot about setting up WordPress but it wasn’t special. It would crash under the traffic of Hacker News, which is about 10 or 15 hits per second at peak when you’re on the front page it turns out. Nowadays we do something like a 10,000 hits per second across the farm. It doesn’t seem like a lot nowadays but it is before you build out a structure for it. So I called up blogger friends and said hey! Do you anything where WordPress companies keep WordPress up and running in this environment? I don’t care if it costs like $50 or $100 bucks a month? It can’t be a $1,000 a month but it can’t be 10 times more than shared hosting. The answer was always no but if you find it tell me because I need that. So then it turned into customer development. I interviewed 50 people to figure out what was needed. It turned out that there were four things. 1) Make WordPress fast (so speed) 2) Scale under traffic loads 3) Handle security 4) Have good service about WordPress, not just service that says the server is up and the network is up. But about WordPress and the application layer. So to this day, we call those the 4 s’s – Speed, skill, security and service. To this day that a big reason why people buy managed WordPress hosting from us or any of our competitors. It’s for those reasons. Of course there’s more reasons but those are the pillars to me at least of what Managed WordPress hosting is. That is how it got started. I was a customer and it turned out to be a really great business as well. Today we are far and away the largest Managed WordPress host. Some of that is due to us just starting early. Pagely and ZippyKid (now called Pressable) all started within about a six month period. Pagely of course was first but we all started within six months of each other. Looking back now about seven years, that’s pretty much at the same time. But through execution and also other things like a price change in January 2012 and other major events, we have grown by far the fastest of our peers. That’s why we’re here today.

Carrie: That’s awesome! I love that. So many times you hear about products that are built out of the developer’s need.

Jason: Right.

Carrie: That sounds exactly what that was. So I do want to circle back around. Because when you touched on the word privilege it clearly sounds like you’ve got some things there or some thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

Jason: Well I did not set out to create a company that measured things like how many women did we have as a percentage of what titles they held or any of that kind of stuff. On the other hand we were really clear on what we do care about. So there’s things like transparency and honesty, what it means to empower people, which means accountability for what happened but also the power to do things. It includes the ability to make mistakes. There were all these things that were important to us. None of them were things like gender or something like sexual persuasion or whatever, religion, etc. So we ended up with an amazingly eclectic company perhaps as a result of intentionally allowing those variables to run free. More than half for example of our executive team (by which I mean SVP or C blank o people) more than half are women. Half of our engineering leadership for example is women. This traditionally is an area of course that is under represented. More than a third of our employees do not have a college education, which is rare in tech. There’s just all these things which again weren’t planned. They just unfolded. It’s turned out to be something that we have become well known for. Sadly it’s an anomaly. We also found out something else interesting, which is once you have the reputation of course earned, then you just attract more great people. So in other words if you’re a fantastic women in tech you want to go to a place where you know that your ability to operate, to communicate, advancement, and even getting negative feedback is based on you and not anything else. At a company where it’s already been demonstrated by this behavior, then you know that’s the case. So if you’re talented and you want that environment, you seek it and we end up getting great talent. Again, that wasn’t the plan. It was an outcome, which is interesting. When we onboard new people we go through this whole multi-day series of talks and activities to orient folks to the company. When I kick that off on the first day, one of the things I talk about is…we are all (probably almost everyone listening to this podcast) is in some kind of privileged position just because here we are. In our case, here’s a bunch of folks where just being in America is kind of amazing. Not to mention me. Look I up won the genetic lottery as Warren Buffett says right? I’m a sys gender white male who was born in Texas. Jeeze you can’t explain it. The only thing I’ve got as a slight ding on that is being Jewish. So that’s one micron down from maximum privilege. I know that. So Ok. What do you do? There’s no need to apologize. That’s not useful…or what does that mean? The question is what are you going to do? What are you going to do with it? What are you going to build? What kind of environment do you want to build? What kind of opportunities are you going to create for others? What kind of way do you want to give back? You know another way to see that is (again stealing from Warren Buffet on this) he says the purpose of capitalism is to accumulate capital. That’s fine. There’s no ethical problem with that. Of course we want to do that at WP Engine. There’s no doubt about it. We have lots of metrics around that. That’s what we want to do. So that’s OK. But the question is what do you do about it? So now you’ve accumulated capital and you’re in a position to do things. So what do you do? How is it that you raise up the folks around you, the communities around you and so on? So that also means WordPress the community. So we have full-time engineers that contribute to core. What I mean is that all they do is contribute to core. We sponsor a lot of WordCamps. There’s a lot of things that we do in the WordPress community, but it also means Austin and London and all places we’re in. What does that mean? We’re one of the largest corporate donors to the capital area food bank for example in Austin, which gives food to people who need it (which means a lot of things) just as a random example. What does it mean to take the things that we have and not apologize for it? In fact, try to do well for ourselves with it? That’s good, but then what else? You need to be thinking about what is the higher purpose? What is the reason for it? You know that’s a very good reason and that is a reason to get out of bed and say I’m glad we created more jobs and we’re growing things like revenue and customers. Why? Because of what we’re doing for customers and what we’re doing as a result of that kind of success… what we do with it…if we are proud with what we do with it. That actually answers the question of why. Why would you care? Why do that? Why not just work at some other company especially if you’re talented and have lots of options. People do have options. There needs to be a reason to want to stay and really put yourself into it. I think these kinds of answers are the right kinds answers (at least for us). It’s good if people have different answers to that question after all, because you want a variety so that people can find things that match themselves. You want a lot of variety actually to the answers of those questions. Those are the kind of answers we have that we literally put on the wall and go live by doing it. We have self nominated committees inside the company in order to go do those things. To set aside what is it that we’re doing, then organize it and then go do it, so it actually happens. It takes intention to make sure that is in fact what we are living and doing but we do that. I think it’s a good balance of saying why do we care about these things and doing them. I’m proud of all those things. I think that’s the best. I am proud of our financial success and that kind of thing, of course. Again I don’t think it’s bad to be proud of that but if that’s all there is maybe that’s not enough to be fulfilling. So what I’m really proud of is the job opportunities we’ve created for folks at WP Engine, the ways that we’ve helped our customers gain control over their own media. Those are the things I’m really proud of.

Carrie: I love it. You know of course we want make money and it’s great make money but what’s truly rewarding and I don’t know whether it’s ego rewarding or soul rewarding, but like you said being able to create jobs for others and being able to contribute positively back in someone’s life that’s an excellent thing to be able to do.

Jason: I think it’s both actually. In other words when someone says to me… actually when I see someone else telling someone else this is the best place I have ever worked… it’s ego, right? You hear that and go ha ha. See what we built? It’s still we. It’s not me. But it’s still ego anyway. We spend most of our waking hours at work or commuting to work. You’re sub consciously thinking about work nowadays even if we don’t like that fact. It’s really important that someone finds personal value in it to say this is the best place I worked. I really care about this. It’s what you’re going to spend most of your life on and so how important is that then for someone to feel that way about what they are spending their time on. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that just on a human level. You can’t love everything you do every second. It’s not that, but that it’s fundamentally fulfilling. You fundamentally believe in it and you believe that when you spend say five years of your life on it, that it was worth it. That was time well spent. You’re better for it coming out of that and you did some good while you were there. It’s hard to overstate how important that is. It is ego and I think also it is that fulfilling aspect. It’s both really.

Carrie: Awesome. Jason? I so appreciate your time today and coming on and chatting with me my listeners. You mentioned earlier that you are on twitter at @asmartbear. Your blog is A SmartBear.com. Are those the best places to find you and stalk you online?

Jason: Yeah that’s it. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.