I'm a dev (ceo these days) and I wrote the first version of Wordfence. Also worked at many big and small companies in South Africa, London and USA. We're US based now. And so we're both engineering focused, and our process is to only ship rock solid code via excellent QA.
Funny thing. Finding vulnerabilities is actually just QA. And a vuln is just a celebrity bug. So this culture really helps foster great security research too.
Another big area we invest in is customer service. Our CS team does a great job and we also focus substantial energy on community support in free forums, which really helps foster goodwill from the community and build a relationship with folks who use our free product, many of whom become paying customers.
I started my career in ops in the 90s before moving to dev and am passionate about high performance (as you can tell from fastorslow) - and so we spend a lot of energy and budget on solid operations to support our products.
Kerry is kind of a math guru and is our COO and CFO these days. So we run a tight ship in terms of financials, which is pretty much why we're still around. Cashflow plan updated daily. Awesome projections. Awesome granularity. Sorry if I'm over-sharing, but I love entrepreneurship and perhaps this will give other folks starting out some insight.
We have around 3 to 5 million free customers. Can't share how many paying, but it's a lot.
I haven't coded for some time now. In 2015 I completely handed off coding on Wordfence to a brilliant developer named Matt who is still with us. I've moved my focus 100% to leadership, strategy and somewhat of a CTO role, but I share that with the strong tech leads in our engineering team.
Hope that helps. We're a private company, so I couldn't just dump our internal data, but I hope that gives you some flavor of who we are, our focus, team distribution and culture.
Regards,
Mark.