Laravel's President Explains the $57M Deal | Thomas Crary Interview

This will be our fastest growing month in the history of Laravel. Really? And you built the entire product that way? That's amazing. Why did Laravel 2 years ago decide that it was time for a 57 million investment in more of a structured company with a president to reach the next level? What's up, everyone? It's Nuno here. Would mean the world to me if you could subscribe to this channel. I love PHP. I love you all and enjoy the video. So, yeah. So, I met Taylor in the fall of 2024 and he was still very much considering whether or not the right step was to raise venture capital money and build the company. You know, at the time it was like, I guess, 10 of you guys, nine or 10 of folks on the team, Taylor and and nine developers. And, you know, I think he considered it for a long time. By the time I met him in the fall, he was starting to lean towards doing it, but he really had a lot of a lot of questions to get through, a lot of things he had to get comfortable with. And I started talking to him and, you know, I think he was meeting other people as well at this time, but, you know, he and I hit it off and just had a very shared vision on how we could build a company that, like, would stay true to the to the community it came from. And when I heard about, you know, what the company was, it actually was much further along than I thought. You know, there's a lot of commercial products in there. Obviously, Forge and Vapor are two of the ones, Envoyer, Nova. Lots of commercial products that were in there. So, it was actually a lot larger than I expected for an open source framework. And I was like, well, this is awesome. We have a great running start here. I would also say just meeting Taylor was really awesome. Everybody knows Taylor and how how awesome he is, but he's he's he's been great to work with and it was just really refreshing to find a founder that had such a clear vision, but also just like a real person, you know. 57 million investment. You don't have to turn on the details on this, but maybe explain a little bit what this means in practice. Like, where when you hear something like this, where the money typically comes from and what an investment like this means for Laravel? Yeah, I mean, I think whenever you build like a really ambitious product, like, you know, Laravel Cloud, and of course we also built Vapor during this time as well. It takes a lot of people and it takes a lot of cost investment, right? I mean, we're we're we're investing up front to launch a product. And and Cloud took over a year over a year to build. Obviously, you were part of it, Nuno. And Nightwatch was similar timeline. So, to build those products, it takes a lot of people and a lot of resources. So, what a venture capital investment like like what we did, you know, allows you to do is hire in advance and pay a lot of those costs up front that, frankly, would be really hard to fund fund out of your own pocket. So, Right. while Laravel was a big company and obviously very successful, it would be a lot of risk and a lot of capital for for Taylor to try and fund, you know, finance that himself. So, bringing in a partner like Excel is useful just from a capital point of view, but there's a lot more to it than that. Obviously, it brings a lot of um credibility and experience to what we're doing, you know, so um you know, being able to hire a lot of people that have done this stuff before, um have built platforms before has been has been a big advantage. And also the network that an investor like Excel brings is also really important, right? Um you know, obviously they're they're known as uh the the largest investor in Versel, as example. Uh and so, you know, a lot of the know-how and experience and like, you know, whenever we hit like a tough spot, we were able to call them and they were able to connect us with someone else who was able to help us get through some of those those early challenges. So, Some of the things that I have noticed like on the very early days when you guys joined Laravel was like how fast you guys were with connections. You know, every time we would hit a problem with our providers or whatever, you guys would be already instantly have a Slack channel where you can just communicate in real time with them and just solve the problem. That was so nice to see like the network some of you guys bring to Laravel. What exactly happened at Laravel once you joined the company the very first three to six months? So, towards the end of 2024, Taylor had committed to doing the fundraise with Excel. And so, at that point, I was I was, you know, I was starting to work with Taylor to get through due diligence from the investor point of view. Like, you know, make sure that everything checked out and they were buying and investing in what they they thought they were investing in. So, I was kind of representing Laravel at this point helping get through that early due diligence process. I think this is around the same time you and I met, Nuno, for the first time late late 2024, maybe early 2025. Still before the investment was done, um but at this point there was a pretty good commitment on the table. So, you know, I remember those early days of meeting you and the other the other nine folks at Laravel and I was just like blown away by like the talent that we had on the team. I was like, wow, for nine people, you know, you could see the productivity and the products we had and the open source that we had built, but also meeting you guys as people. Like, it's like there was just a lot of really energetic, obviously, but also just like talented, well-formed, like, you know, potential leaders for the company. I was like, we got this really great running start with this community, the products, and then the people and that we could really build a platform really fast. So, it was really really exciting time, but there was a lot of like, you know, there was a lot of you know, business work that has to happen like those early days. So, like, you know, you're doing things like setting up bank accounts and forming entities and getting insurance in place and payroll providers and contracts and like all this like stuff that you don't even want to hear about. You were not the only one thinking that Laravel was like run in informal way because it was, you know. Back in the days we barely speak on Slack. I didn't have a single meeting with Taylor for 2 years. The very first video call we got was like after 1 year and a half already. And it was just to say hi on camera because at some point it was just ridiculous that we never met like on camera before. What is the thing that surprised you the most on those first weeks at Laravel? I mean, actually that was probably the thing that surprised me the most that you guys [laughter] didn't actually get on calls ever. Like, it was kind of shocking how much you could get done in this fully async way. I've never seen a company do that before. You know, and of course we have come a long way from there and we have a lot more meetings now, but we still try and stay true to that original like we don't if we don't need a meeting, we don't need a meeting. We don't need to have a meeting just for the for the sake of it. But but I was shocked how few meetings that were actually happening at the company. Like, you weren't alone. Like, everybody was like, yeah, no, I mean, we just, you know, I just text with with Taylor on Telegram or Slack or whatever. I was like, really? And you built an entire product that way? That's amazing. [laughter] Um but it did lead to that sort of hyper-productivity that, you know, Laravel has become known for. So, um we've tried to I've tried to embrace that and uh change how I've how I've managed really um it's been great. So, you know, we definitely have a lot more meetings now, for sure. I mean, as you know, but um but still I think like compared to even my my past companies where we're we're on the lower side of meetings. I'd say that that was one big surprise. And then, like I said, the people like you guys were all so well-spoken, energetic, obviously great developers, too. And that was really refreshing. I was like, that's when I was really got excited. I was like, wow, we have quite a team here to start. President Laravel. What seats with Taylor? What seats with you? How things work there? It's a title that sounds pretty good. So, I like it. Um but uh you know, frankly, in in the US it's often uh either is the CEO, you know, the CEO and president or they're like work with the CEO. So, that's the case here. So, I'm the president and COO. So, I work with Taylor on basically the business side of of the of Laravel. You know, so, you know, Taylor obviously is nearly 100% focused on open source, community, and like our product vision, right? Right. And um you know, I kind of try and take the other things that, you know, he may not want to spend as much time on. Uh so, particularly the business operations. So, things like sales sales and marketing, finance, HR, um you know, uh legal, you know, all those kind of like back office things that that need to get done to run a company along with a lot of the organizational development stuff. So, definitely work a lot on um you know, how do we build the team? What's the what's the right org structure? Where do the teams fit? And as you know, we've always been we've been growing the company really really fast. So, that's constantly changing over the last 2 years. So, I spent a lot of time on that. A lot of internal communications, external communications. I'd say the early days after I kind of got through that initial like, you know, onboarding phase and we got the business set up, you know, I remember working with you guys like on the Cloud team, for instance, of like, okay, well, what are the right partners we need? What are the right supplier relationships? And then like what do customers want from this platform? So, that also became my role of like, you know, talking a lot externally or talking with potential customers to like figure all that type of stuff out. So, it's really trying to fit in around what, you know, I'll never be Taylor from, you know, understanding Laravel developers or any of that type of stuff. So, you know, I wouldn't even try. I just try and fit fit in around him and say, how can I help make this company better? So, In your perspective, what is that something on Taylor that he's exceptionally good? He's just exceptionally good at taking complex complex problems and complex uh you know, experiences and distilling them into simplified, elegant Right. uh workflows and approaches, you know, and just making it so that anybody can like pick something up and and run with it. Um so, I mean, he I think it's all about like sort of the developer experience you get with with any Laravel product from the framework all the way down to, you know, any package we develop or our commercial products. Like, how do we craft a unique developer experience that just feels natural and simple and like, you know, removes the noise. So, I mean, I'd say I'd say that's that's his special skill and I kind of seeing the future a little bit in terms of where where the where the puck is headed, where the ball is headed, and trying to be be in front of that. So, You said that investment was meant to unlock things like Laravel Cloud and Laravel Nightwatch. I was wondering if you can mention some examples where the investment in people are clearly things that are what needed for something like Laravel Cloud and Laravel Nightwatch. Yeah, I mean, you know, we we we started off right away, as you remember, like it was you and Joe kind of from the earliest days of trying to build the Cloud, right? And we're like, okay, we got pretty far. You guys had done a lot of work with Forge and Vapor. So, you knew how to do like, you know, server deployments and platforms and stuff like that. But we're like, you quickly get into the point of like, okay, now how do we connect this, you know, into like AWS, you know, which is what we wanted to build on top of and Cloudflare. And that's when we were like, okay, we need more we need more people. We need more specialists, people who have done this before. So, I'd say like the first wave of hiring was um you know, bringing in both engineering leaderships and then we started hiring the infrastructure team, right? Where it was like, you know, we knew a lot about infrastructure between you and Joe, but we needed more, right? to ask you, if you are able to share it, you don't have to, but if you are able to share some of the adoption numbers on Laravel Cloud and Laravel Night Watch. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they both got off to amazing starts, like so so Cloud launched February 2024 2025, so just over a year ago, and then Night Watch in June of 2025, June or July, I think it was the end of June, yeah. And they both obviously were like there was a lot of pent-up demand, so I think in the first week or so we had about 10,000 users on each platform, which is kind of crazy. Now, what I what I what I learned in retrospect was probably both of them weren't 100% ready for prime time, right? You always think you're going to get to launch and it's going to be like oh, this is perfect, there's nothing more we need to build. I will I'm sure there's a couple things here or there we got to clean up and you know, that sort of stuff, but like Right. you know, the the naivety of like, okay, we have a lot left to build to really make this the the amazing platform that we want it to become. Um and so getting through each of those launches, seeing people come online, seeing people start to really use it was obviously really exciting, but then trying to like lock back in and be like, okay, what's our road map ahead? How do we keep pushing this forward? Not lose momentum. That those were challenges for us cuz you're also like moving from like a pure development flow where it's like you're just building features, no one's giving you feedback to now you're live and you've got 10,000 customers in the platform who are sending in CS tickets saying, "Hey, but what about this? How do I do that? I don't understand that." And it's like that was a that was a tough time and it was tough obviously from like a CS point of view, a customer support like flow point of view, but it was also different for you guys because you guys were being pulled into support being like, "Okay, let me explain." Or let me fix that or whatever, so it changed the workflow from pure like feature development to like, okay, we need to like find a way to support our customers in the moment, but also keep building the platform. Um but after we got through that phase and you know, um we we really we we've grown really consistently since then. Um so so today Cloud has about 30,000 customers on the platform. Um Night Watch has a just over 20,000 as well, so they're growing really well. And to put that in perspective, like Forge, which has been out there for what, 11 or 12 years now, a little over 11 years, has about 27,000, so Cloud has actually surpassed the scale of Forge in in under 12 months time. Um which is which is crazy to say. And uh well, I'll say this, Forge is actually growing really well um since the the relaunch in October as well, so that's gotten a really nice uplift in the last last four or five months. Um but but Cloud is growing even faster, so customers are coming onto Cloud at Frankly, this will be our fastest growing month in the history of Laravel um across the board and for Cloud specifically, yeah. And last month was our fastest growing month before that, so it's still really accelerating uh quite quickly um kind of across the board. How you make sure Laravel keeps growing without losing things that made people love Laravel in the first place? Wow, I mean, that's that's that's been like one of the like probably my biggest focus areas for my entire time here is trying to stay true to who we were and but still evolve, right? Um I could probably talk for hours about all the different things that we've had to think about and how we've tried to, you know, manage that, you know, and and uh it's it's it's been a challenge. I think we've done a really good job. To your to your point, I really feel like, you know, and maybe I'm biased, of course, but like I do feel like we've managed to like grow the company, what's now 110 people from 10 in 2 years time. Um you know, and really what I I I I'd say one of the one of the biggest things we do, just to like cut to the chase is we hired a lot of folks from the Laravel community, right? So we hired a lot of known folks, people that Taylor knew or you knew or other others of the OG community knew, like personally, they were prolific open source developers or had worked at other companies that we knew and had interacted with and just came in and like hit the ground running from a productivity point of view, but also like from like a personal point of view. I think like getting those those bonds between people that are, you know, new joining an old team, I think is really critical. Like, you know, I've seen this problem a bunch of times where it becomes like an old guard versus new guard thing, like, "Oh, the the old people like this and the new people want that and they're not talking." And that's been the biggest, would say, challenge, but I think we've handled it really well. What does Laravel will look like in 5 to 10 years from now? That that is that is hard to predict. I don't think that far ahead. I'm not I'm thinking a couple weeks to maybe a few months. Um but listen, I think we just want to keep growing as a company and as a community, right? I think we're all about trying to, you know, empower, you know, Laravel developers to have successful careers and lives, you know, being able to ship ship apps. Obviously AI is upon us, so we want to bring all of those tools into the Laravel ecosystem to make developers, you know, extremely productive. Um you know, in terms of the company, I think we'll continue to grow, but I think, you know, I don't think I never thought we needed to be a massive company to to succeed. Like I really like our size now and I think we'll continue to grow from here, but I think it'll be more modest growth from the whatever it is, 12x growth we've had in the last last 2 years. Um but yeah, I think we're just going to keep doing what we're doing. I think our focus is is on the commercial products we have now and growing at the open source level, so bringing more developers and agents to Laravel to uh to to use to use the framework. That's fantastic. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget go all the way down, click on the like, subscribe, all those beautiful buttons, and drop a comment on your thoughts about Laravel future. Love you all and catch you guys next time.