A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Remember that it might take two engineers a week to implement something, but a few debates and some research might itself involve an entire engineering and product for a week as well. At WP Engine we’re extremely collaborative across teams. Huge effort. Some things take less time to implement than to estimate or to debate.

Engineer 264
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How do I figure out who my next important hire should be?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Examples: You hire the VP of Engineering for Facebook. Now you can scale anything — both computers and people — inside your engineering department. You could keep going with other roles — design, content-marketing, finance, data analysis, social media, biz dev, etc. Typically, one of these is a clear winner.

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Not disruptive, and proud of it

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

When they hear about a new social media craze they cringe in agony, desperately hoping it's a passing fad and not another new goddamn thing they'll be aimlessly paddling around in for the next decade. Google was the 11th major search engine, not the first. But most people are creatures of habit.

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Refutation: An acquisition is always a failure

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Oh how the media loves superlatives (but only because that’s what we click on and share). WP Engine is one of those, and we laugh about how drastic the changes are, in the rare spaces between tackling the latest challenge. Jake Lodwick wrote an article on PandoDaily entitled “An acquisition is always a failure.”

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Imbalanced People

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

A great writer (content marketing, social media) versus 100 average bloggers. Even in sales, which is tempting for Vulcan engineers to think of as revenue-acquisition-robots with zombie-like drive to make phone calls, in which a slew of barely productive “closers” may not be financially efficient but will still get the job done.

Engineer 257
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Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

For example, I'm an engineer, so my first answer to "Why don't you have more customers?" More than that, knowing your "padding" as I used to call it is helpful in making decisions like "Can I afford to try this Risky Expensive Thing," such as making your first hire or trying a $20,000 media blitz. Cartoon by Andertoons.

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Austin in San Francisco

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

” I vividly recall the moment when I connected on this level with Austin Gunter — our social media keymaster (are you the gatekeeper?), the most online-visible person at WP Engine. I was about to give a night-time talk about making websites fast at a local Austin PHP users group; did anyone at the office want to come?