Over the last 8 months or so I’ve started growing into the role of CEO. And during that time one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that hiring in a startup is really, really hard!

Now it’s not that I hadn’t done hiring before. But I’d done it in larger companies. Companies where “good enough” was often just that. If people had the energy we could train them, and if they had the skills we could mould them. But in a startup, you need people who are exceptionally skilled, totally passionate, completely bought into the company and who really, really fit the team.

For us, Mark Jaquith was all of that and more. Read Aaron’s post for some of the backstory (and the b5 blog for the official announcement, short though it may be, heh).

Truth be told, we were actually only looking to hire one WordPress developer. We decided to fly both Brian and Mark up, as we felt they were both great candidates – and after meeting both of them, we realized that they were both absolutely fabulous.

It wasn’t the original gameplan, but it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Brian’s been rocking the team’s socks off, and we know Mark will as well (no pressure, eh?).

Anyways, welcome aboard to Mark. I did want to note a few things for the WP community, since Mark’s senior on the WP team and he’s one of the few who has commit access to the core.

  1. b5media has no intention of influencing WP (more than we already do via regular chats with Automattic and the WP community). A healthy, happy WP community is good for us.
  2. b5media has no intention of stopping Mark’s involvement in the WP community. In fact, quite the opposite. We want Mark to be more involved than ever in the development of WP.
  3. b5media has no intention of forcing our desires on the WP community. We recognize we have a fairly unique position in the market, and while we’ll always advocate for what we want, we won’t use Mark (or any other influence) to push WP in a direction that isn’t good for the community.

Ultimately, we want WP to keep making leaps and bounds forward, and allowing Mark to do so as part of his job, to us, is absolutely freaking amazing. We want Mark to stay involved and get more involved, we want Mark to continue to be a leader and to inspire other developers and we want to help (any way we can) to make WP a better and stronger community and product.