Jesse Friedman a long time innovator and currently the Director of Innovation of Jetpack Business for Automattic, formally the Director of Innovation at BruteProtect.

Jesse Friedman – Innovator

I have the privilege of being the Director of Innovation for Jetpack Business at Automattic. Automattic is by far the best company I’ve worked for and that counts BruteProtect which I co-founded.

I could regale you with personal stories about the Automattic culture, the trips I’ve taken all over the world, the generous benefits package, or the honor of working closely with Matt Mullenweg, CEO. However, what really hits home for me are the company values and the goal of democratizing publishing. I truly feel like my work makes a difference, globally.

Jesse Friedman, Innovator at Jetpack

I’m also quite lucky to be able to work in multiple capacities. As the Director of Innovation for Jetpack Business I’m able to flex several muscles at once – while working from home on an async, autonomous schedule – I handle business development, strategic partnerships, marketing, and product development.

Jesse Friedman, formally the Director of Innovation at BruteProtect.

In 2014 I had, had enough of Astonish and it was time for me to leave. It provided me great relief to leave but it was a stressful time, not knowing what was next for me. Soon after leaving Astonish Sam Hotchkiss reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in cofounding a company around BruteProtect.

Sam, myself and 3 others had our fist team meeting in the last week of January 2014. I was the Director of Innovation which was a catchall role as I was the voice of BruteProtect to our customers and potential partners, business analyst, customer experience advocate, javascript coder, and more.

By March of 2014 we had a product to be proud of, albeit a first iteration, which I promoted at SXSW 2014 when I spoke on Real-time Personalization to thousands of people.

“BruteProtect is a cloud-powered brute force protection WordPress plugin that tracks and thwarts attack vectors across the WordPress ecosystem. Built atop a security and management dashboard that gives you the ability to monitor your site health and manage your site security all in one place.”
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Jesse Friedman, Director of Innovation

Jesse Friedman, Innovator at BruteProtect

By August 2014 I was building pitch decks and meeting with Venture Capitalists eyeing our next round of funding. Instead of another round of funding, we found ourselves happily getting acquired by Automattic. In just 7 months we formed a team, built a product, stopped billions of attacks, and helped hundreds of thousands of customers, it was an amazing run.