ENTREPRENEUR VOICES SPOTLIGHT: INTERVIEW WITH JASON COHEN
Founder of WP Engine
Culture—By Choice or by Chance?
If there is such a thing, Jason Cohen is the archetype of an entrepreneur. He successfully built four tech startups from scratch. They run the gamut from bootstrapped to VC-funded and from solo ventures to partnerships. All of them broke at least a million in sales. Currently, he’s the founder and CTO of WP Engine with over 500 employees and 5 percent of the digital world visiting a WP Engine site every day.
Unlike many entrepreneurs still in the trenches, Jason’s had the luxury of being able to step away from not one, not two, but three of his businesses, plus being able to hand the CEO reins of his current business over to someone else. He’s had the time to reflect back over his experience and put some deep thought into small business culture.
We get to reap the benefit.
Entrepreneur: Jason, talk to us about culture.
Cohen: Every company has a culture. The question is: did you decide what it was, or did it just emerge? Regardless, every organization has a personality and a value system. The way you observe that is through the behavior of the people in the organization.
When a business decision is difficult or unclear, how the organization handles it tells you what they value and how they think. The problem in a lot of companies is that those values emerge as a reaction to a situation instead of being something codified beforehand that they use as a guide when making those tough choices.
Entrepreneur: Was this your line of thinking in all your businesses?
Cohen: In my first three companies, I didn’t care about any of this. I had the usual attitude of an entrepreneur—or at least a typical engineering-oriented entrepreneur—that all this culture stuff was just crap. “Who cares about all that? Even if there is such a thing as a company having a ‘personality’ of its own, I already know what it’s going to be: as the founder, it’s going to be mine.”
In the beginning, that’s roughly true. But the challenge is how that changes as things evolve. As you bring in more and more people, their personalities get infused into the company. If you hire people like you, then that reinforces the company looking like the founder. But if you hire people who aren’t like you, then the company is going to look less like you.
And maybe that’s a good thing, but whatever the case, you don’t want your company to develop by accident. You want to be intentional about what it evolves into.
Entrepreneur: What changed your mind about culture?
Cohen: A talk by Michael Trafton at the Business of Software conference. It made me think that there might be other attributes that contribute to the success of a company besides how many lines of code you could write in a day.
It made me realize that, no matter what your position on this culture stuff was, you still had a culture at your company. If you’re like I was, a skeptical, engineering-type founder, and say, “I don’t care about all this touchy-feel stuff. It’s all horseshit. All I care about are results and performance,” even that is a statement of culture.
You’re saying that you value one thing above another. You want results-driven people. So why wouldn’t you hire accordingly? Why wouldn’t you hire ambitious rock stars willing to work insane hours? Why would you hire someone who hates that kind of workplace? Why hire people who don’t share your worldview?
There are certain things you can derive about the company’s culture from someone who says they don’t value “the culture stuff.” You know it’s probably a meritocracy. You know the sales force is probably quota-driven. You know the workplace is probably competitive and metric-driven. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just need to be clear that that’s the kind of company you have so that you can find people who’ll succeed in that kind of environment.
I know of a very successful, family-owned company that is 50 years old and does about $200 million in revenue a year. They’re growing slowly but profitably. They don’t have sales quotas because their culture is more around family, loyalty, and longevity. They’ve been successful following their model.
The laid-back, service-oriented salesperson at that family company won’t succeed in the high-growth startup. The hard charging sales star at that startup will get frustrated by the slow pace and lack of opportunity to take down huge deals and make tons of money at the family company. Neither is right or wrong, but one person isn’t going to be successful in a company culture that runs counter to their own values.
In retrospect, I can look back over my other three companies and see those problems now. I used to ask myself, “Why did this person not work out? And why did it take us a year-and-a-half to figure that out?” or, “Why was this so difficult? We just kept going around and around.” The fundamental problem in those situations was that we didn’t have common ground. We valued different things which means that we had different priorities and made different decisions. Looking back, it’s clear now why we kept having problems: their worldview didn’t work in a company that ran counter to it.
Entrepreneur: You’ve obviously put a lot of thought into this. What about the dangers of hiring people who think like you? At what point is too much of a good thing not a good thing?
Cohen: You want diversity in some things. At WP Engine, for example, we’re one of the most diverse tech companies I know of. Over half of our executive team are women, for example. That kind of diversity is important.
But something that you should not be diverse in are your values. At WP Engine, we have a certain way we think about accountability, trust, and empowerment; we don’t want variation in those things. We want shared beliefs. If someone fundamentally disagrees with the things we value, then they’re not a fit.
Entrepreneur: Last words of advice to entrepreneurs?
Cohen: At no time in this conversation did I mention a plan. I didn’t talk about the future. I didn’t mention milestones. I never used the word “goals.”
Some entrepreneurs say you need a plan; some say the future’s so uncertain that you can’t plan for it. I don’t care either way. What you do have to do is decide what’s important. Be explicit about those things so that when you have to make a hard decision in a complex situation that doesn’t have a clear answer, you’re deciding around what’s important to you.
If you want to make as much money as possible, then if that’s true, own it! Align yourself around that and optimize your company for that so that it’s more likely to come true than if you try to get there by accident. If you’re not honest with yourself about what’s important to you, then you’ll only reach it by random chance--if it all. That’s stupid.
Whatever you are, be intentional about it.