Jason Cohen: About the author
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Thanks for visiting! As a four-time entrepreneur across 25 years, both bootstrapped and VC-funded, resulting in two exits and two unicorns, I’ve also been writing about everything I know for 18 years, distributed to 60,000 folks on this mailing list.
I hope you’ll find it useful and entertaining!
Founder: WP Engine
I founded WP Engine in 2010, initially bootstrapped, then raised a few small rounds, then together with our amazing CEO Heather Brunner a few large rounds totaling over $300M, fueling hyper-growth to a unicorn with 1,200 employees across eight global offices, serving many billions of web requests daily for 200,000 customers as one of the top-ten largest web platforms in the world. Our name is on a downtown building that I remember seeing from my car seat growing up in Austin.
Founder: Smart Bear
Prior to WP Engine I bootstrapped Smart Bear for seven years, built it to millions in profit, and sold it in 2007. It changed hands again in 2017 for $450M and in 2020 for nearly $2B. I can’t take credit for the success it enjoyed after I left in 2009, but it certainly had a good foundation.
Now a conglomerate of beloved software quality products, originally we invented the modern methodology and software for peer code reviews, which is when software developers review each others work, just like authors and editors. I “wrote the book” about code reviews; in the process we conducted the largest in situ study of 2,500 code reviews at Cisco.
Founder: IT Watchdogs
Before that, I was the co-founder of IT Watchdogs, a hardware-with-embedded-software company making server-room climate and power monitors. It was bootstrapped and profitable, sold in 2004 and is still selling its products under parent company Vertive.
Investor
Since 2009 I’ve been an investor and time-permitting mentor at Capital Factory, Austin’s major incubator and startup co-working space. I’ve invested in a few companies including AgentPronto, Alto, Apptronik, Builder Prime, Cart.com, Cratejoy, Osano, Pingboard, Signup.com, SpareFoot, StackOverflow, StormPulse, SureSwift, SwimTopia, and Vitag. (And others that didn’t work out, but I’m no less proud to have been a small part of the journey.)
Speaker
On my new YouTube channel, I have a playlist of 10-20-minute topics, and one for lectures.
Some folks enjoy my talks on bootstrapping and startups over the past decade. These are the favorites:
Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business (Microconf 2012)
Naked Business: How Honesty Makes Money (Business of Software 2011)
Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Lessons in burn-out on the way to $100M ARR (SaaStr 2018)
How data makes you do the wrong thing (Business of Software 2012)
When to break the rules and ignore advice (Business of Software 2010)
Special links
- All articles as a simple ePub (e.g. Kindle), a rich ePub (e.g. iBooks), or as a printable PDF.
- All articles as RSS in published-date order, with full text, newest first, including full text as Markdown, with references to low-res images, suitable for machine-consumption.
- All articles as RSS in “newsletter” order, both new articles and cleaned-up older posts.
Credits
The cartoons are by the prolific Mark Anderson of Andertoons. This is one of my favorites:
- The Smart Bear logo was made by a freelance designer in Austin, TX.
- High-res bio photo.
https://longform.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen/
© 2007-2026 Jason Cohen
@asmartbear
