Jason Cohen is the successful founder of several startups, including ITWatchDogs, Smart Bear, and his current company, WP Engine, a growing 200+ employee enterprise based out of Austin, TX. Within their first year of business, he led the WP Engine team to over $1 million in sales, which is no small feat for a startup.

Jason’s areas of expertise include technical design, customer acquisition, sales, funding, and metrics & finance. He writes about marketing and small business on his personal blog A Smart Bear and is frequently sought after for his business advice. We’re very excited to welcome him to Prestige Conference Minneapolis to discuss mistakes companies make in their A/B testing, how data can unwittingly lie to you, and what specific changes you can make to avoid these errors.

Please share what you do for a living.

I’m the founder and current CTO of WP Engine, in which I oversee Product, Engineering, and Infrastructure, and help set the strategy and execution for our 300-person organization. Prior, I founded or co-founded three other bootstrapped companies, two of which were sold and are still going strong today (ITWatchDogs, Smart Bear). I helped found Capital Factory, Austin’s version of TechStars, and continue to love helping startups succeed.

You’ve got quite a track record of founding (and selling) profitable companies and you’re also a book author. Tell us a little bit about how you got started as an entrepreneur.

It’s always been in my DNA to chart my own path when it came to career. Early on I was driven mostly by ego and the selfish insistence that I knew better than everyone else about most things. Today it’s the positive impact I can have on the lives of our employees and our customers. Both are results that entrepreneurship can provide.

Why this and not something else?

As Peter Thiel says, a company (or life) is not an experiment that can be run more than once. Had I made other choices or had my companies had different outcomes, the same question could be asked but it’s unclear that the answer would be different.

Founding companies is quite a bit different than the traditional “career path”. Can you speak to some of those differences?

I’ve never planned a career like that — setting goals, deciding where it should go, and then planning how to achieve that. Perhaps that’s a failing, because without planning it’s unclear where you’ll end up. But in my case, I made things happen by just doing them, and seeing where that led. Surely luck has played a part in those things turning out to be good enough to withstand challenges.

What’s one lesson you learned the hard way about letting go of a company you built from the ground up?

Founders tie their personal identity to their companies. Not just their financial success, not just their reputation, but actually themselves. A common result of selling is to realize you don’t actually know what you like to do, or what you think about anything outside of the sphere of expertise that related to your startup. This isn’t healthy, not just because of some potential exit, but because along the way you don’t have perspective, and probably will have a hard time being happy and healthy during the long years between inception and termination, especially if the termination is not in success.

What relationships (ie mentors) have contributed towards your success? How did you form those connections?

My mentors have been people I’ve worked for or with. Neither one would think of themselves as “a mentor,” but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn everything from them; sometimes mentorship is what you take out rather than what someone else puts in. Nowadays there are systems and organizations for getting mentorship, and so long as that’s not just a passing relationship, that’s a great new way to get that result as well.

Any industry predictions for 2016?

There will be more tools and categories for digital marketers to have to deal with, not fewer. There will be more wearables and other modes of reaching customers, not fewer. Mobile will not just be caught up with desktop but dominate its usage especially as non-Western countries accelerate their online presence.

WordPress will increasingly become the content hub in a complex ecosystem of marketing activities as opposed to the website where just a few other things are connected to. Consumers will expect more interactivity and personalization, not one-size-fits-all experiences. The marketing and web site universe will be more noisy and complex. In short, it’s going to get harder for marketers, and therefore for those building websites for them!

What’s coming up next for you?

With a growing team, our output is accelerating. We have everything from new infrastructure offerings to new features supporting advanced development workflows to tools for marketers to better manage their sites and keep up with the cacophony of “digital marketing” stuff that’s swirling around us.

Name one thing you’re looking forward to for Prestige Conference Minneapolis

Connecting with people who are building real businesses and creating success for their customers and clients. It’s always energizing to be in a roomful of folks who are living the dream and helping others do the same.