How Laravel’s Taylor Otwell Builds Products and Community that Drive Organic Growth

Taylor(00:00):

I started to wonder if I was viewing it in totally the wrong way and that to not swing for the fences that is actually sort of selling out the community that had been on this 13 year journey. 

Sara (00:13):

Welcome to Spotlight on a podcast about how companies are built from the people doing the building. One messy, exhilarating decision at a time. 

 (00:21):

Welcome to Spotlight on, I'm Miles Clements and I'm here with Laravel ass founder and CEO Taylor Otwell Taylor. I think everybody knows, but for those who don't, what is Laravel? 

Taylor(00:32):

Yeah, so Laravel is an open source PHP framework that I created way back in late 2010. I started working on it, I released it in 2011. It's basically a starting point for building any kind of web application. Could be booking system, invoicing system. People use it for all sorts of crazy things. Even cool, people like Milwaukee Bucks, Harvard Art Museum are using RAB able to build all sorts of applications. 

Miles(00:53):

So take us back to the beginning. You mentioned you got started on this in 2010. What were you doing at the time? What were the earliest days of Laravel? 

Taylor(01:02):

Yeah, so I was only a couple years out of college actually, and I was working at a large trucking company in Arkansas. I was writing enterprise. 

Miles(01:09):

This how every huge opportunity 

Taylor(01:11):

Got started. So this is where it all starts for everyone. I was writing a lot of enterprise code, a lot of T net, a lot of cobol, which goes back into the 1960s. I routinely worked on programs that were written before I was born. It was not rare at all to see that, but I really just, I always wanted to build my own business. I had just random startup ideas a lot of founders have in the beginning, and I needed a quick way to prototype those ideas. And so 

Miles(01:37):

What was a bad startup idea? What was, oh 

Taylor(01:40):

Gosh, I wanted to write a billing system for lawn care companies. We would not have funded that, but I needed a quick way to build these ideas and at least see if there was anything to them. And so I built Laravel as a way to build web applications really quickly in PHP. 

Miles(01:58):

And then when did you realize that you were onto something? You'd cycled through a couple of ideas that you didn't pursue. When did you know you had something? 

Taylor(02:05):

Yeah, so like I said, I worked on Laravel for probably eight months to a year before I released it publicly. The first day I released it publicly, I think I got four stars on GitHub. So it was definitely not an overnight sensation, but a lot of people did latch onto it relatively quickly and became just incredibly passionate about the framework almost to a fanatical since to where now you have people with Laravel tattoos and 

Miles(02:31):

We'll get to 

Taylor(02:32):

That, but I think people were just ready for a breath of fresh air in PHP and Laravel arrived kind of in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that. 

Miles(02:42):

Do you remember what some of the early use cases were that you observed in the wild? 

Taylor(02:46):

Yeah, so this is kind of a small world story, but one of the first companies I ever heard Laravel was actually also in Arkansas and they were another trucking company in Arkansas up in northwest Arkansas near Bentonville. Pam Transportation is the company and they were on Laravel 1.0 commercially in the business. 

Miles(03:06):

So you've brought up, okay, we're like two minutes in and you've brought up Arkansas twice, so I'm just going to go straight there. So you started this company in Little Rock, 

Taylor(03:16):

Basically? Yeah. 

Miles(03:17):

You basically have bootstrapped the entire thing from Little Rock. I think for a lot of founders out there, the activation energy to go start a company just seems really intimidating and people think I've got to go get this really high quality series A and I probably need to move to Silicon Valley and there's all these other things that I have to do yet you kind of built this empire from your home in Little Rock. Why'd you bootstrap and why'd you make us come find you after all these years? 

Taylor(03:49):

Back when I first started Laravel, a lot of it was just that's where I was and I think if I would've been out here, I almost fear I would've been intimidated to some extent by so many people are doing awesome things in San Francisco and in Arkansas. I didn't know anyone else building a business and I didn't really get distracted or intimidated by what other people were doing because I wasn't out here, I didn't know them. So I just really focused, laser focused on Laravel and really never let anything distract me from that once I got started. 

Miles(04:22):

If you had to start something else again tomorrow, would you bootstrap and do it the same way? 

Taylor(04:28):

Not necessarily, I think, and I think part of that is because of the good relationship we've had between Laravel and Excel and seeing how beneficial that can be. I think some people, it's probably up to personal preference, but I think a lot of ideas, there's this great value in what venture capital can provide especially great firms like Excel and who they can network you with and the advice they can give you and help you build a business together. 

Miles(04:55):

What were the advantages of bootstrapping? I mean one of the things that always struck me about you is just the level of original thought. You don't have a lot of the preconceived notions that there is a lot of great that comes from Silicon Valley obviously, but there's also just a lot of templates and things that are perceived as best practices, and I just always saw this authenticity in you in the way that you were building the company. Do you think there are any advantages from doing this kind of off the grid a little bit? 

Taylor(05:24):

Yeah, I think it does go back to what I said about just distractions. When you're building a business, there's so many rabbit holes you can go down and get distracted by rather than just making the product really great. And that's what I did for so many years at Laravel. That's what I still am most passionately obsessed with at Laravel is making sure that Laravel Forge, Laravel Cloud Nightwatch are just amazing products. 

Taylor(05:47):

And I think if you build amazing products, things tend to work out. If you build amazing products for customers and they love to use them, things usually go well. And with the bootstrap thing, I think bootstrapping is great and it gives you a lot of maybe personal freedom or lifestyle freedom and how you run the business and how you want to structure things. I think looking back, if there's anything bootstrapping held me back from it was sometimes you are more personally incentivized to benefit yourself rather than the company, if that makes sense. Taking ambitious risks are not really in the bootstrapper DNA, it's a little bit more of a conservative playbook of building a sustainable business and not really swinging 

Speaker 4 (06:32):

For 

Taylor(06:32):

The fences in many cases at least. And I think that's one, if I had to look back, that's one thing that held me back in the bootstrapped era of Laravel is not building the products that I think our customers deserved because they were so ambitious 

Speaker 4 (06:46):

And 

Taylor(06:47):

There's a little bit of risk involved when you build ambitious products, but I'm happy that we're finally tackling those now. 

Miles(06:53):

Yeah. When you think about not just the evolution of Laravel, but the evolution of Taylor the founder, you feel like you needed a couple of years of just getting your confidence and seeing the community take off and seeing the product adoption that gave you the sort of the faith that you could go build a business around it? 

Taylor(07:15):

I think so, yeah. In many ways I was always just solving my own problems to some extent. I built Laravel because I needed a way to build web applications quickly. I built Laravel Forge our first commercial product. I needed to create service quickly and I thought other people probably had this problem too. I've always been a little bit pessimistic when I build products. I remember when I first built Forge talking to my wife about how I hope it just kind of covers our house payment or something, and within a month of launching I was making more on Forge and I was making it my day job and now I'm working on Laravel and life changes quickly. So yeah, it's been an interesting journey. 

Miles(07:52):

What was the first time that you realized there was commercial interest in you started building and then the community grew very quickly and there's this huge vibrant open source community around it. What was the first time you thought maybe I should charge for a commercial version? 

Taylor(08:08):

Yeah, some of those early Ric Cons, people would come up to me and say, Hey, thanks for building Laravel. Our company's making 50 million a year using your framework. And I'm like, if you're making that, maybe there's some money to be made for me in this story back when Laravel was purely open source and I really wasn't making any money on it at all. Those kinds of stories got my wheels turning a little bit. 

Miles(08:30):

So you knew that you had this incredibly popular framework and there was this very vibrant community forming around it. You made the decision to commercialize. Was that controversial at the time and how did you view the trade off between open source and commercial? 

Taylor(08:44):

Yeah, it's a good question. I worried it would be controversial. I was really paranoid about that honestly, and it ended up not being as controversial as I expected. I think if you build an open source library and it becomes popular, you will have to cross this bridge of how do I actually keep working on this thing in a sustainable way? Because if you don't find a way to commercialize it in some way, presumably you're having to work on it in your free time and then you're staying up until 2:00 AM working on your open source project after working your day job and it's just not sustainable. So I think every big open source maintainer eventually faces this crisis and either they find a way to commercialize or at least put commercial products around the core open source products in a way that compliments it or they just burn out or have to move to a committee based open source maintenance model, which is never as good, but everyone has to cross this bridge. And I was worried it would be controversial, but it really wasn't as much as I expected, thankfully. 

Miles(09:49):

Yeah, I mean I remember when we met the first time, one of our many slides was We thought you were going to be this non-commercial dude from Little Rock who we were going to have to explain this to. And we had this slide, it was like the commercialization flywheel and the best open source projects actually had this monetization flywheel where the project earns money from customers and you pour that into r and d and you were like, have you heard him making money before? You were like, I understand. You're like, okay, next slide. And then the conversation went better places from there and then talk through the act as I perceived it. It sort of seemed like at a certain point you said, well, let's throw up a paywall and these companies that are managing 50 servers per month, maybe they should pay us $500 and we'll see what happens. When did you sort of experiment with the pricing model for the first time? 

Taylor(10:39):

Yeah. Well, to be fair, I feel like I've always been a little bit historically bad at pricing, but the first time, so from 2011 to 2014, Laravel was only an open source framework. There was no other commercial offerings built around that framework. And 2014 is the first time we launched Laravel Forge and our pricing plans were something like $10 a month and $20 a month with $20 a month being the absolute maximum you could pay us. 

Taylor(11:05):

And a lot of it was me not knowing what I was doing, just launching my first product and experimenting, and I was always scared to scare off the community. I think open source and commercial products always has a bit of a tension when you're a company that has an open source product that you're building commercial services around, people are always nervous that you're going to neglect what they came to you for, which is usually the open source stuff that funneled them into your commercial products. So that's something I'm always conscientious about as far as making sure that Laravel is an open source framework, is always totally topnotch and that we're giving it the attention it deserves and then building great commercial experiences around that. 

Miles(11:45):

So maybe let's talk for a second about when we met and when Xcel came into the picture. And obviously, I mean Laravel was this incredible thing, this vibrant community long before Excel was around and we had just been for years fascinated in what you were building. So you start receiving this flurry of emails and inbound phone calls and things in the mail and random outreaches from a venture firm. I've never asked you this. What were you thinking when you started hearing from us? 

Taylor(12:14):

Yeah, so I mean I would get emails like that probably weekly, and I usually didn't know which ones were legit, which ones were sort of shady, and so I would usually just hit the old delete button keyboard. But when we actually got in touch was when I think Excel started attending Racons and kind of getting face-to-face, introducing ourselves. So there was a little bit more personal connection there. 

Speaker 4 (12:40):

And 

Taylor(12:41):

Actually Excel was I think the only firm that actually did that and put in the legwork to do that. So I appreciated that and that's when I think we actually got a real conversation 

Miles(12:50):

Going. Yeah. What caused the change? Was it like a conversation with Abigail? Was it looking at the business plan? I doubt it. Was that what caused you to want to do it? 

Taylor(13:01):

I think it was just a deep reflection on the entire journey that I've been on so far. And the original reason I had hesitance to raise money or do anything like that was I feared that the community would see it as sort of selling out in a way. And the more I thought about it deeply, I started to wonder if I was viewing it in totally the wrong way. And that to not swing for the fences is really the selling out position to continue on the trajectory I was on. I had basically built most things I wanted to build and had the ability to build with the team I had and the company was making good money and I was making good money. And to me to coast on that trajectory that is actually sort of selling out the community that had been on this 13 year journey, rather than build awesome new ambitious products like Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch that are going to take more resources and they're going to be harder than anything we ever built before, but they're what the community that's been on this journey with us so far and honestly been on this journey with me personally so far, what they deserve and what I think we need to give them. 

Miles(14:16):

I'm going to ask for feedback, which is a dangerous thing to do on a podcast, but I mean, look, I think the gist of our pitch was you keep doing exactly what you're doing. You control the company, you're the CEO of the company. All we want is to invest in your product vision. So not much is going to change. We're just going to give you a lot more resources to go do it. Does it feel like that's been roughly how it's played 

Taylor(14:38):

Out? Yeah, I think so. I think that's fair to say how it's played out and I think the connections that we've been able to make through Excel have been really helpful in building Laravel Cloud. Even just introductions to that can help us on this journey has been extremely helpful, but really we've just been building the roadmap we talked about in Litter Rock from that first meeting is basically the playbook we've played and the products we've built. And so yeah, it's been a great partnership so far. 

Miles(15:05):

What has been the biggest trade off? I mean, I won't have my feelings hurt, but we just had a board meeting this morning. You didn't historically have board meetings. You don't have six people to manage. You have dozens of people to manage. I'm sure some bad comes with the good. What's the warning that you would give a current thinking about raising money? And you might say, Hey, overall this is worth doing, but this is something you should be aware of. That's tough. What's been the hardest part of it? 

Taylor(15:35):

I think it's just a little bit of a mentality shift going from waking up every morning and sort of doing what you want to do, but maybe not pushing it too hard and just keeping the business going versus let's make Laravel one of the best companies in the world. That's just a much more ambitious goal. And so that comes with things that are different than bootstrapping. It comes with a more people to manage. It comes a few more meetings, although I only really am up to maybe four meetings a week usually, which is 

Miles(16:08):

I really try to pick my battles. I really stay off your 

Taylor(16:11):

Calendar, but I feel like I needed that to some extent. I needed a new challenge. I needed to grow in new areas and maybe push my comfort zones a little bit just to grow myself professionally, personally, and as a business or as a product builder, as a CEO, I needed that fresh challenge. 

Miles(16:35):

I mean, for us it was completely mutual because we were fascinated outside in, but I don't think you really, really understand what's special about Laravel until you do go meet the community and you go to recon. And so yeah, it was cool. I mean, we did it in Nashville, we were in India, we were in Portugal, and you really feel like the metrics speak for themselves, but then when you understand the substance around it, that got us really excited about it too. Yeah, 

Taylor(17:02):

I think the different, when I go to other conferences, I think one of the stark differences is that at Con most people are actually watching what's happening on stage, whereas you go to a lot of tech events and most people are in the hallway or on their laptop or just socializing. But with Laravel, I feel like everyone's just locked in to what's happening on stage. 

Miles(17:23):

So to go into that process a little bit, I think it took us a little while, but we convinced you to come out here and we're like, get to know us, get to know some of the folks around the Excel family. We introduced you to David Kramer from Century well-known to the pod, to the Laravel community, and I remember sort of putting you guys in a room together and then I just walked away and hoped for the best. He's a very candid dude. What did you guys talk about? 

Taylor(17:50):

I think we talked a lot about our shared background as founders that started just as programmers. And I think David and I relate to each other on that way, in that way that we both started as just developers that had product ideas and wanted to build them. And so there's always among developers that I think found companies, there's always a little bit of comradery there. We have similar backstories and we just talked a little bit about that journey from going from a developer to being the CEO of a company and what that means and what mentality you need to bring to it. When we embark on this journey, we really are embarking on a journey to make Laravel the biggest best it could possibly be. And if that's not your goal, then this isn't the journey for you. You know what I mean? And that was really helpful for me when he told me, if you want to do this, that needs to be your 

Speaker 4 (18:42):

Mindset. 

Taylor(18:43):

And that's in contrast to the bootstrapped mindset in many ways. And that's kind of the core nugget I took away from that meeting to really chew on and think about. 

Miles(18:52):

Yeah, I think you sort of talked a little bit about the journey from being a developer to being a founder to now being a CEO and manager of dozens of people. What has that been like? 

Taylor(19:04):

It's been a stretch for me personally, it stretched my comfort zone. I am really kind of a quiet person. I'm not a super big yapper. I don't do a lot of talking. I prefer to sit and think about a problem, and I love to write a good manifesto about the problem I love and just sort of align everyone around it. But as you grow the company, you have to stretch a little bit. Like I said, I've gone from zero meetings over a three year period or more to now having four or five meetings a week with our cloud team, our core services team, our Nightwatch team, and then kind of one-on-ones with various people. And so that's added a few more meetings to my calendar, but honestly, it's been totally doable and manageable, and like I said, I needed to push myself out of my comfort zone a little bit. So it's been helpful in doing that. 

Miles(19:54):

Coming out of Lyon, you've announced cloud, you've announced. Does it feel like this has all been worthwhile so far? 

Taylor(20:03):

Yeah, I think it's been totally worthwhile. I mean, Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch are the best products we've ever built, and I'm super excited to get them out there because it really feels like I always wanted Laravel to be the greatest developer experience from local development when you first start your project on your own laptop to shipping that out into production and being live on the web. And I think cloud really completes that. Going live on the web story for Laravel in a way that is what I always wanted way back in 2011, when if I had the grandest vision of Laravel Cloud is in many ways the culmination of that, making it so easy to ship and scale your Laravel products is what I always wanted. So getting to finally ship that to our community makes it worthwhile. Right. 

Miles(20:49):

Let's dive into that a little bit. How have you made the company more scalable? It's pretty amazing that you can still basically only have, what, four meetings a week. It's intimidating a lot of founders to go from small to big really quickly and have a big team. What have been your secrets to scaling and how has it helped to have a team around you? 

Taylor(21:08):

So some of the things I've tried to do and the kinds of people we've tried to hire and really the kinds of people I like to work with the best are people that I can trust to have a high sense of agency on their own, for me to be able to give them a few paragraphs about a problem maybe in one of our products, and for them to run with that and deliver a really great solution with a lot of taste and thought behind it and bring it back to me and be like, and it's like, yes, this is totally what I would've done. 

Taylor(21:41):

And it's just sort of cultivating and getting the right people in the right positions to where you can run the company that way and have just a high level of trust in your leadership and sort of your best performers and your dev team leads to be able to really deliver thoughtful solutions with relatively minimal structure or boundaries. Here's a problem, go solve it in the way you think is best. And hopefully I've distilled my personal product, tastes into the leaders of the company to where they sort of intuitively know, oh, wouldn't it be great if it worked this way? And we just kind of collaborate in this very delightful way at the end of the day. And to me, that's the perfect way to work because that's how you keep out of 50 meetings a week or whatever 

Taylor(22:32):

Where you have to micromanage every detail of the product. I don't really want to work that way. And I think actually other people don't want to work that way either. They would prefer to have a sense of creativity around the product. And I think about that with Cloud and Nightwatch and maybe even Nightwatch in particular where most of that team is in Australia and some in Japan. And so we just are forced to be pretty async in how we build that product, and that team has to have a lot of their own sense of direction, their sense of style, their sense of taste that they're bringing to the product on top of the feedback I'm giving them or it just won't work because we're so far apart geographically. And I think that's how the best devs and the best product people want to work. They want to be able to express their own creative freedom in the product and put their stamp on it as well. Right. Very cool. 

Miles(23:24):

So just to give some context on the growth of the company, give us the snapshot. What did Laravel look like 12 months ago versus what does the company look like today? 

Taylor(23:33):

So a year ago, which is roughly right before we partnered with Excel, we were about 10 people. It was myself, something like eight engineers and a customer support tech. And that was the entire company. We had no marketing, we had no sales, we had no design even full-time. That was just on a contractor basis. And now we're at about 50 people, multiple designers, more engineers, dedicated infrastructure staff. We've actually got a marketing team. Our marketing department is not just me tweeting anymore. We've got real people thinking about marketing, which is awesome, and it's people that compliment me. And this goes all the way up to our COO President, Tom Prairie who came over from Pond five, who I think is a great compliment to my skillset. I do a lot of technical product thinking. He brings a really great business mind to the company that in many ways compliments my more technical product skillset. So I think that's been a great mesh and just honestly, everyone we brought into the company almost has been totally awesome to work with. And that's been something that Tom and I have been super aligned on is maintaining Laravel great culture of people that just want to come in and make an impact and build awesome products for a great community. 

Taylor(24:53):

And that's what we've been focused on with every hire basically. So it's been an awesome journey building up to this amount of people, and I'm sure we'll hire more in the coming year. I just love working with these great people so 

Miles(25:08):

Far. Yeah. Well, the other thing that's been cool about the people that have come into the company is that you've really hired a lot from within the community. These are people with whom you've had years of experience, some you've known personally, but you've known their work product for a long time. And so again, everything that you've done is just very authentic to the Laravel community. I want to talk about Tom a little bit in a way that's going to make Tom blush. So Tom, as you mentioned, joined the company as kind of your business partner. He was one of the first outside business hire and outside in it seems like the combination has been awesome, and you two work together really well. How important is that first hire, that first executive hire when you're going from being a small project to an aspirational company? 

Taylor(25:56):

I think it's actually way more important than I realized even when we brought Tom on. It's something I've only seen in hindsight as we've worked well together and have found alignment in how we would like to run the company and what we believe in, what we think is important. And I think looking back, you could definitely go really wrong with that, and I could see how it'd be extremely painful. So I'm glad it's worked out for us, but I think in hindsight, I actually did not realize actually how important that was going to be. And it's been great because Tom is very complimentary to me in terms of what I bring to the table, what he brings to the table. For example, if we wanted to use a piece of software at Laravel to build cloud a vendor or something, and they gave me a price, I would be like, oh, great, that sounds great. Yeah, sure. Where do I sign? Tom would be like, no way is that the price. So we're just different in that way, but it's in a very complimentary way that I think is great for Avvo, 

Miles(26:55):

Right? Yeah, I mean, you guys only hire humble people and Tom is the embodiment of that. But I've also just observed that you do excel when you can sit in a quiet place and think, write a manifesto, and then Tom sort of has this way of amplifying that to the rest of the company. He in some ways makes you scalable, 

Taylor(27:14):

And 

Miles(27:15):

It's just been an awesome partnership to watch. Yeah, 

Taylor(27:17):

It's been great. 

Miles(27:18):

Let's talk about the future for a second. So you did this awesome Aaron Francis conversation where you were going sort of step by step on outlining the vision for cloud. I'm not going to ask you those questions because I won't do it as well as Aaron did. But fast forward five years, what are the possibilities for Laravel? 

Taylor(27:39):

Yeah, so if I think five years in the future, we want cloud to obviously be the obvious choice for shipping and scaling Laravel apps for shipping and scaling just PHP apps in general, let's say. I think there's worlds where we make it just the best place to ship any backend web application. I think that's something we can explore, but we're definitely going to nail that Laravel story first. I think Laravel is the best way to build web apps. So I think if people are starting a new web app today, I want it to be on Laravel and Cloud's going to be the best place to ship that, and we'll explore what else might be great to ship there in the future. We want Nightwatch to be providing amazing insights in those Laravel apps, but not only providing the insights, but also potentially fixing things in your app. 

Taylor(28:28):

So one of the benefits we have at Laravel is we build the framework, we build the platform for shipping it, but we can also build tools for monitoring it, and we can use a lot of the data and intelligence we have there to really make intelligent suggestions on how you should build your app, best practices, security fixes, performance improvements, and we can just PR those straight to your repository on GitHub and ship them out to cloud for you. So I think we have lots of really interesting ideas for how all of this could tie together to just be an awesome experience for building web applications. And in five years it's going to be fun to look back and see what all is in there, but I think it's going to be really exciting. 

Miles(29:08):

The thing that's been really cool for me to watch, it's just the center of gravity that the company still has. Again, we just had a board meeting and the first slide of every board meeting is first thing that we talk about. The number one North star for the company is the community serving the community, providing the products that customers want, community vibrancy. And if we lose sight of that, nothing else matters. I do think that this first principle thinking is kind of a function of having bootstrapped for a long time, and I really appreciate that everything you guys do is really grounded in those fundamentals. You can't talk about Laravel without talking about the community. In the early days, what were the first signs that this community was as active and engaged as it always has been? 

Taylor(29:56):

Some of the early signs were, when I first launched Laravel, we had sort of discussion forums that users could go out and participate in, ask questions, give feedback, and there were people in those forums 24 hours a day. It seemed like they just lived and breathed. And I think there are certain open source projects, typically frameworks like Laravel or React or Js, where your tool has such an impact on someone's daily work because they're using it eight hours a day at their job to where if you're making their work life better by this tool you've created and it's actually a joy for them to use every day, that's a huge impact to have on someone's personal life, I think. And I think when a tool has that kind of impact, it's natural to feel, you just feel very attached to that tool. And that's where you see these kind of fandoms developed around open source tools where it's like, especially for PHP, when I think back to 20 10, 20 11, a lot of PHP developers were contemplating jumping ship like, Hey, JavaScript or Node or Ruby or Python has all these cool tools and people are doing interesting things. They're building new frameworks, new open source libraries, and it feels like PHP is kind of stagnant. And I think Laravel just came on the scene at the perfect time to where, I remember when I was participating in PHP chats and stuff online, people were like, maybe I should go learn this or go learn that. And when Laravel came out, it was like the whole discourse shifted to, oh, we have something cool now that 

Taylor(31:37):

We can actually build web applications with. And I think a lot of people, it was such a breath of fresh air for them that they just developed a strong attachment to this tool that had brought them so much more productivity and so much more enjoyment to their daily job. 

Miles(31:53):

The Laravel community is known for being very kind and supportive, also ambitious as hell, but very positive. And there's just so many negative communities out there these days. How have you made, how did it get started? How have you made it so positive? You're not going to like this description, but is it fair to say that when you were quietly bootstrapping this company, the community was sort of built in your image? It's very supportive and humble. 

Taylor(32:19):

Yeah, it was actually intentional from the very beginning. And I remember when I first released Lael actually having an intentional sense of direction of what I wanted the community to look like. And a lot of it was driven by, I felt like everyone at some level wants to be a part of something. It could be a sports team or a community service project or an open source project. And an open source project is a really interesting concept because anyone in the world can come together and participate and contribute to this project regardless of where they live in the world, what their background is, what their even socioeconomic status is, they're all contributing to the same goal and it builds this deep sense of community. And I felt like if I could foster that and give a place for people to belong and contribute and have fun together, building a cool project, that people would just latch onto it because people want that somewhere. And Laravel has been a place where thousands of developers now have found a place to hang out and contribute and be a part of something much bigger than they might otherwise be a part of. 

Miles(33:34):

Yeah. I remember you said something early on which was, and I'm going to botch the quote, but it was like, look, when I go on Twitter, I read about all the cool kid projects and it seems like the world is migrating to these really cutting edge open source frameworks. But when I go out into the real world, the world runs on PHP. 

Taylor(33:53):

I mean, it goes back to the very beginning. The company I was working at runs on cobol, so which is much older than PHP, and there's just a broad swath of software out there. The majority of software probably runs on tech that maybe in Silicon Valley would be considered not glamorous, but it's just the reality is that's what a bunch of the world runs on. And so I'm here to serve those people 

Miles(34:22):

Well, and the other funny anecdote is you remember my partner Casey put together with Dan Levine, our open source conference last year, and we had this fun dinner with a bunch of open source founders, and I think it's some of the most thoughtful, forward-looking open source founders in the world. And Kramer stood up and he was like, go around the table, everyone say, if you had to start a new company today, what is the language of choice? And you can't pick your own and people out, all these ideas. And it was like, oh, well, not great for mobile, not fast enough. The talent pool's not deep enough. And then at the end, the room was kind of like, well, shit, I guess we'd use Laravel and PHP. And that's such an encapsulation of why you guys have been right to stick to your knitting. 

Taylor(35:08):

Yeah, well, I agree with them. It would definitely be the fastest way for them to get started. Right, 

Miles(35:13):

Dude, this was a lot of fun. It's always fun chatting with you. Thanks so much for doing it. 

Taylor(35:16):

Yeah, thanks for having me.