I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur.

"I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur. Growing up I wasn't that kid selling lemonade on the corner for 10¢ a cup or starting businesses out of his college dorm. None of that stuff. I was very much raised in this mentality that you go to school, you get good grades, you get a good job after school, and that's kind of the path of life. My parents paid a lot for my education. Private school in DC. Private college. Then I got a high-paying consulting job for the DOD. I think I had a security clearance but it wasn't whatever the crazy top ones are. I'd go in and do some search jobs and user experience work for their public websites. I'd create this report—this 25-page report with all the next steps we should take. Then someone would give that to my boss and say, 'Thanks!' And no one would ever look at it again. The DOD is a very big organization. There were all these people doing a ton of work, trying to make the best decisions possible. Yet maybe a dozen 60-year-old white guys made all the decisions: SEO, UX, things they had no idea about. They wouldn't even read the reports. I felt like I could work there forever and have no impact. I just got so tired of it. Like what's the point of this? Am I going to do this for another 20 years and then retire? I could see my retirement party. 'Good job, Joe! You retired!' Good job for fucking what? I did literally nothing for 20 years. So I started feeling resentment towards the people at the top. I didn't want to be connected to it anymore. I wanted to own my own thing. I'd built websites as a freelancer but I could never really get that model to scale. But around that time I became aware of the WordPress community, and I saw these people running these subscription services. A lot of them weren't doing a very good job at it and I felt like I could do better. That's when I left the DOD and started WP Buffs. With the recent political landscape I'm happy to be doing my own thing. I feel like I'm very disconnected from all that, and I'm lucky because I've got friends in DC whose whole lives are a struggle. And I'm like, 'I kind of love my life right now.'"