This AI Startup Idea Has 500 Million Customers Waiting For It

**Jason Cohen** (0:00)
How many times has someone proposed something, everyone's like, I don't get it, but then someone else is like, look, what this is really about is blah, blah, blah. Everyone's like, oh, that sounds great.
That I want. Well, you just said, it's not bad information, it's bad presentation.

**Shaan Puri** (0:14)
I made my whole career doing that.

**Jason Cohen** (0:29)
It.

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
Can I give my brag about you intro of what I know about you, and then you can correct anything that I get wrong?

**Jason Cohen** (0:35)
Of course.

**Sam Parr** (0:36)
We have Jason Cohen. Jason Cohen originally started, you had a bunch of smaller businesses, but in the early 2000s, you started, was it called, it's just called Smart Bear or Smarter Bear?

**Jason Cohen** (0:46)
Just Smart Bear. That was 22 years ago, believe it or not.

**Sam Parr** (0:50)
So 22 years ago, you started Smart Bear. You grew it for seven years, bootstrapped it, making millions of dollars in profit, sold it. That company now has a thousand plus employees, has sold recently or traded recently for like two billion. Is that right?

**Jason Cohen** (1:05)
Yeah, it actually doesn't have that many employees. It's more like hundreds, which is part of why it's impressive. Cause it's, yeah, it was sold in 2020 for two billion and it doesn't have a thousand employees. It's super profitable.
Like it was publicly said then what the profits were. It's 50% bottom line profit.

**Sam Parr** (1:22)
God, so just a printing, a cash printing machine. Then you started WP Engine of which I'm a customer of.
WP Engine is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world.
That company you bootstrap for two or three years. Then you, now you've raised I think two or $300 million. It makes many hundreds of millions of dollars. It's worth billions of dollars. And all along the way, you've been blogging at a smartbear.com. I've been reading that for years. You are not the loudest person. And that's the reason why I wanted to have you on is cause you're not the loudest person. But anyone who's like in the thick of it and trying to build great companies, everyone reads your blog. Like the 1%, the 1% read your blog. You've got a really good audience of people actually building it.
And the reason I like you is you and Darmesh are a little bit of the same personality to me. There's like this Venn diagram and it's like, it's like people who are wildly successful, like we're talking billionaire successful, but then also are just do shit just because it's fun.
And at the same time have this weird like logical way of thinking, but then can like disregard that logical way of thinking and just do what's cool and what's exciting, which is really rare to have someone who's both an engineer, but also understands like, ah, fuck it, I'm just gonna do it cause this is cool. And you do that. So like, Shaan, he just DM to me on Twitter. And I was like, dude, I just got this automated DM from you. He's like, oh yeah, I built this script that automatically DMs everyone who follows me on Twitter. So he's that type of guy where like, he's got like a thousand projects that he would never even talk about, but it's like a little thing that he hacked together on the weekend. But you also have WP Engine, which is this massive unicorn. And so that's why we wanted to have you on the podcast.

**Shaan Puri** (2:55)
I mean, WP Engine's like one of the top 10 web platforms in the world. And then you're also tinkering with like these DM, auto DM scripts, because you're like, yeah, this is useful, I like this. And so that's the, that combo we've come to find is a really good fit with us on the pod.
Somebody who has ambition and scale, but also is a tinkerer at heart.

**Sam Parr** (3:12)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. Sales super teams aren't built overnight. They require unicorn level talent, endless training, huge budgets and lots of luck.
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I wanna talk to you about some different ideas. So check this out, Shaan. On your computer, and Jason, if you have a computer, do this too. Go to zeck.app. So it's the word deck, but with a Z. So Z-E-C-K dot app, okay? So it says, Zeck's re-imagined how CEOs collaborate with their board. You scroll down, whose face is that?