Jason Cohen is the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of WP Engine, the world's leading managed WordPress hosting and digital experience platform, serving 200,000 customers and 1,200 employees across eight global offices.

A born-and-raised Austinite, Jason studied at The University of Texas at Austin and went on to bootstrap Smart Bear Software in 2003, selling it to Insight Venture Partners in 2007, and co-founded ITWatchDogs, which was acquired by Geist Manufacturing in 2005.

A prolific thought leader writing about early-stage startups since 2007 at longform.asmartbear.com, Jason was recognized with the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2017 Central Texas Award for Technology and is a sought-after speaker at major SaaS events globally.

Jason has served WP Engine in virtually every executive capacity including CEO, Head of Engineering, Head of Product, and CTO before settling into his current role as Chief Innovation Officer, and has been an active angel investor and founding mentor at Capital Factory since 2009.

Under Jason's founding vision, WP Engine grew from a bootstrapped startup to a unicorn valued at over $1 billion, raising more than $290M in funding led by Silver Lake, and now processes billions of web requests daily as one of the top-ten largest web platforms in the world.