Editor’s Note: After nearly 12 years running Zao as the sole management, I cannot begin to express how excited and humbled I am to be inviting another team member to our Zao family as a managing partner.

Justin Sternberg is a man whose reputation precedes him in the WordPress community, but I’ve gotten to know him as something of a clone. We both happen to be “Justin S.”, we both have 3+ kids (each of us with two girls first, then a boy), we both play musical instruments, similar development backgrounds, core values – basically, it’s unlikely you’ve ever seen us in the same room.

His brilliant work on the CMB2 platform, excellent engineering leadership at WebDevStudios (who we adore), and general contribution to the WordPress community make us feel incredibly lucky that he’s joining our team. No doubt, you’ll be seeing much more of him in time to come. Welcome, Justin!

Hey! I’m Justin Sternberg (yes, another Justin, whaaaaat?!), and maybe you’ve seen me around the interwebs. I am the lead developer for CMB2, previously worked at WebDevStudios as a developer lead/director of engineering, and have been around the WordPress community for many years. For almost as many years, Justin and I have known each other, hanging out at various WordPress events, and we established a friendship based on our shared interests, shared names, and shared love of WordPress.

A couple months ago, I approached Justin about the opportunity to partner up. The way I saw it, with two Justins at the helm, there’s was no way we could fail! Well, not exactly, but I saw what Justin was doing here at Zao, and it closely aligned with the business principles and concepts I was looking to pursue and adopt. While the opportunity to start my own little freelance business was certainly a viable option, the idea of partnering up with another like-minded individual was definitely the next opportunity I was looking to pursue, whether now, or in the future.