394: Taylor Otwell — The (Quite Entrepreneurial) Creator of Laravel

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder podcast. Today, I'm talking to Taylor Otwell, the creator of the Laravel framework for PHP and an outstanding entrepreneur who figured out how to turn open source software into Lamborghinis. Seriously, Taylor's approach to building not just a framework but a whole ecosystem of businesses on top of that framework is one of the most impressive open source monetization stories I've ever seen. It's quite fitting that Laravel has, therefore, also embraced the sponsor of this episode, paddle.com. Paddle is a merchant of record payment provider and they are deeply integrated into both the open source library Cashier, which is free, and the for pay payment portal Laravel Spark, one of the many ways that Taylor is monetizing his work. So it's open source and for pay. It's a very interesting story. So if you want to monetize your own software work without having to deal with stuff like sales tax and expired credit cards, give Paddle a shot at paddle.com. They're supremely good at making your founder life easier so you can build your business on solid foundations. So let's talk foundational frameworks. Here's Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. Congrats, Taylor, on half a million deployments on Laravel Cloud. That is amazing. How how does it feel to see people building on your own platform at that scale already a couple months after you released the thing? Yeah. Wow. It's pretty surreal, and it's especially surreal thinking back to, like, how it all started, which is basically like a casual conversation in Amsterdam by a few of us at Laravel. There was not many of us at Laravel at the time. There was probably only nine or 10 of us, and now there's, like, 70. So just thinking back to that conversation where Laravel Cloud was just an idea, and we hoped we could build it. You know, we hoped we could figure it out and crack it to now where it's live and, you know, thousands of people are using it, and there's, you know, so many people deploying on it. It's really it's pretty mind blowing. But I'm super happy with where we're at. And, honestly, I think we're just kind of getting started with it. So I'm even more excited about where we're heading with it. Yeah. I bet. That is such an accomplishment. I think, like, just seeing you develop both the idea and then teasing it a little bit at the Laracon and all of that, it felt like a it was a concerted effort, but it also felt very natural in in the way that it was built. That was really cool. And looking at the Laravel ecosystem in particular, like the products that existed prior to cloud, I can't help but feel like you worked your way, you iterated your way to the cloud, to forge and and Voya way, the the, like, hosting and deployment. Did did this make it easier …