189 Zack Rosen, CEO of Pantheon

This week, our guest is Zack Rosen, CEO of Pantheon. As CEO & Co-Founder, Zack leads the charge to define what developers need now, & what they and their clients will need 5 years from now—and beyond. Zack pioneered the first large-scale Drupal website for the Howard Dean campaign in 2003, co-founded the world’s first Drupal development shop, CivicSpace, co-founded a successful Drupal development shop, Chapter Three, and also co-founded Mission Bicycle. What started as a professional website development epiphany—We’re doing it wrong!—evolved into an all-in-one platform after he and a few trusted colleagues got together and started solving problems. What Salesforce did for sales & Gmail did for email communications, Zack envisions Pantheon will do for websites. How do you build a solution so important it can’t be ignored? Ask not, “How many gigs of storage can we get?” Ask, “How much more scalable can our website become? How much faster can we reach our people?” Zack discusses the future of hosting, Pantheon's goals, Multidev, WordPress at scale. He also talks about the difference between Drupal and WordPress, education, outreach, and mentorship. During our talk, Zack defines the three different levels of websites, and the level where he thinks WordPress is still early in it's adoption. If you use the web to make a living at all, this is an episode you'll want to listen to.   ==================   Table of Contents for Episode 188   0:00 Podcast intros. 0:19 How Pantheon got started. 3:50 Where Zack sees hosting going in the next decade. 8:11 Pantheon's lofty goal for hosting, and how they came up with that goal.   13:08 What most clients don't know about performant WordPress hosting at scale. 20:59 The effect that education outreach with developers has on the awareness and growth of Pantheon. Discussions about workflow with larger sites with multiple people working on it at the same time. 26:03 What is Multidev? How this feature is unique in WordPress hosting, and the practical use cases for agency team workflow. 29:10 Differences in community and culture between Drupal and WordPress. 32:25 What Pantheon learned about communication from WordPress US. 36:26 Dividing lines between different classes of websites. The expectations for each level. The level where Zack thinks WordPress is still early in it's adoption curve. 43:34 What Zack has done to prepare Pantheon for growth as it moves from one level to the next. Why he believes that the majority of entrepreneurial growth and learning comes down to mentorship. 47:01 Podcast outros.   ==================   Links mentioned during the show:   Chapter Three Mission Bicycle ScaleWP.io   ==================   Find bonus content for this episode on the WP-Tonic website:   https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/189-zack-rosen-pantheon/   ===================   Subscribe to WP-Tonic on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wp-tonic-a-wordpress-podcast-for-web-professionals/id893083124?mt=2   ===================   WP-Tonic is both a WordPress maintenance and support service, and the publisher of one of the top WordPress podcasts in the space.