🔴 Thomas Crary (President at Laravel): $57M Raised, +30K Customers & What’s Next

Yeah. Light. Uh-huh. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. What's What's up beautiful PHP people? Welcome back to my channel. How everyone is feeling today? A lot of lot of help people today here. No surprises there. Peter Silva GTSM, nice to see you. What's up, Dave? David and Paulina, nice to see you all. Native PHP of course in the crew here as well. Frolley Chen, Frley, Charlie French boy already with a tier one sub on Twitch. Thank you, dude. 15 months already. You are an OG supporter of my channel. I really appreciate you being so awesome. Ggoid, how you doing? Nice to see you. Nice to see you. The Matias Grim, what's up, dude? John Sugar, how you doing? Excited for the interview, dude? I'm excited as well. I wanted to do this for a while already, but Tom is super busy, but happy that I'm doing this today. Ashley, how you doing? Miker as well. Shad, I'm excited about today. Okay, today we are going to have on this channel one of the, you know, one of the persons that I wanted to interview for a long, long, long time. So, this will be awesome. Stick around, Chad. It'll be absolutely awesome. Let's warm up this, man. How everyone is feeling already. Hopefully good. I'm feeling excited. Already went to the gym, you know, feeling strong and I'm ready for this today, man. I am ready for this today. British Peter, how you doing? Nice to see you all. John Sugar, what's up? What's up? What's up? Ashley on the chat. Oh yeah, baby. Only celebrities here. Bruno, how you doing? How you doing? Nice to see you. Shet, we are going to start things off today. I'm here everyone giving a welcome a huge huge welcome to Tom Thomas Kra. How you doing Thomas? Nice to see you dude. Welcome to the channel. What's up Nudo? I'm super happy here man. Super super happy to have you here today. Everyone typing W Tom. Okay W Tom cuz he's absolutely awesome and we have him here today. And Chad, let's get started with this. Today I'm talking with Tom K. Thomas Curry. Dude, how do I pronounce your name? I your name is so how do I pronounce it even? I think you said it good. Thomas Craig. Tom Cra. I've been called a lot worse man. Go just go with it. I'm going to call you Tom which I what is exactly what I call you at Lavel. I think that's the correct one. Today I'm talking with Tom President Laravel. And Tom is someone who is playing a key role really shaping Laravel's growth business and future. And I'm super happy to have him here today. really excited because you know Tom today I want to kind of demystify a little bit uh you know some of these complicated words like what means to be president what means 57 million investment you know and where Laravel is heading from here so you know I'm ready for this you ready if you're ready I'm I'm going to just get started here man I'm I did my homework you know I'm excited you know I've been watching your streams for as long as I've known you so it's been it's been fun now I can't believe I'm here it's just surreal I cannot believe you are here but yeah let's get started And for those who don't know you, Tom, um, what are you doing before joining Laravel two years ago? Yeah, I joined Laravel just over two years ago. It was January 1st, 2025 when I joined Laravel officially. So, I'm not quite an OG like you are, Nuno, but I was employee number 11 here at Laravel. That makes you an OG. Actually, Taylor actually called me an OG recently. It really warmed my heart. So, I'm a fringe OG. Not like you are, though. But, no, I joined Laravel two years ago. Before that, I I've run a few companies. I love the technology space. Most recently, I was the CEO of company called Pawn Five, which is a uh digital media e-commerce company. Um, you know, pretty large. I ran it uh let's see, I was the CFO for about five six years, and then I became the CEO for the last three three years of our journey there. And uh it was uh it was a good experience like um you know the a lot of people ask how did I know Laravel? How did I get to get to know about Laravel? And it was partly through um through by time of pawn five which was a PHP and PHP based stack and including using a little Laravel in there as well. So Oh did you do you actually did any Laravel before like actually seeing some code in Laravel and [ __ ] like that before joining Laravel. I mean you know I'm not a coder you know you know that but our team did so for sure we we definitely used it. um you know as early as 2016 we started using some Laravel anytime we built something new uh and we were obviously all built on PHP as a legacy app that went back to we were founded in 2006 so it was all pre Laravel in terms of the original stack uh built on Symphony but you know as we built new apps we were always always looking at Laravel and used Laravel a few times on our on our newer apps you know what's fun is that right now you don't even need to be a coder to use Laravel like recently we just saw Paulina from the Laravel team which is not a coder But she did literally vibe code an entire app and deploy it on cloud. That was so awesome to see honestly. So you know absolutely and uh you know two years ago before you joining Laravel you know Laravel was already a successful company with a small team of course but products like Vapor Forge and more they were successful already. So I want you to walk me through that moment like why did Laravel two years ago decided that it was worth and it was time for a 57 million investment in more structured company with a president to reach the next level. Yeah. Yeah. I'll think back even a little further than that. I actually met Taylor about two and a half years ago. Um so call it like September October 2024. And I think Taylor was still at that time still considering whether or not to do what he what has become Laravel cloud and the investment round that we'll we'll talk about more. And I was introduced to Taylor and like I said I knew Laravel as the framework. I was like that's not a company though. That's just an open source framework. And they're like no no no it's a real company. You got to go meet Taylor and hear more about it and hear more about where he wants to take it. So so I met Taylor in the fall of 2024 and he started talking about his vision for what Laraveville is going to become. and he had this longtime dream that I think everyone's kind of heard about about what has become Laravel cloud and building building out the ecosystem further with a deployment platform that you know could take it to the next level. So um 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 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 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, you know, would stay true to the to the community it came from, you know, and and the and the and the Laravel Laravel based way of building a company and building a community. So, um, so that that that's how I got introduced to him other than, you know, knowing about Laravel as the open source framework. 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 Ford, Vapor were 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 and it's amazing community and we learned how big it was and I was like wow this is this is an awesome opportunity. I would also say just meeting Taylor was really awesome. Everybody knows Taylor and how how awesome he is. 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 right we are going to jump into um you know in a second what is working with Taylor and how he's working with Taylor but uh yeah I just want to acknowledge the same as you that uh at some point we were more commercial products than actual people which is just hilarious because we're making good money but uh you know we were not a lot uh so and now things are much different and we are going to equally speak about that Tom can you dismiss ify a little bit like uh for developers who hear this thing or 57 million investment. You don't have to enter into details on this but maybe explain a little bit uh 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. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think whenever you build like a really ambitious product like you know Laravel cloud and of course we also built nightw watch during this time as well. Um it takes a lot of people and it takes a lot of cost investment right I mean we're we're we're investing upfront to launch a product and and cloud took over a over a year to build and obviously you were part of it Nuno and Nightwatch was similar timeline so to build those products 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 upfront that frankly would be really hard to fund fund out of your own pocket. So while Laravel is 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 Verscell as example. Uh and so you know a lot of the knowhow 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 there's a lot of advantages to it but um but yeah no I think it's been a pretty positive experience so far and we can we can talk about that more. Yeah, we you know some of the things that I have noticed like on the very early days when you guys joined Blavl was like how fast you guys were with connections. You know every time we would hit the 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. It was something unreal to me. uh when I was you know I was I'm I'm a coder you know I'm a developer so that the only thing I know how to do is like literally code and now AI can do that for me too so it was nice to see network so you know and I want to ask you like um what how were your very first three to six months at Laravel what exactly happened at Laravel once you joined the company the very first three to six months yeah so towards the end of 2024 Taylor had committed to doing the fund raise 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 Laraveville at this point helping get through that early due diligence process. I think this is around the same time you and I met uh Nuno for the first time late late 2024 maybe early 2025 still before the investment was done u 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, well, we got this really great running start with this community, the products and then the people 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's a lot of u 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. Um, and like frankly I wasn't really all that prepared to do like you know having been a CFO long ago and then being a CEO for the last six seven years it was a real strange time for me to go back and actually have to do real work again you know mostly and I guess I'm back to this again mostly talking to people these days but those early days of like just trying to figure stuff out uh was was actually really refreshing for me but it was hard um so I was very happy to to to help build out the team and you know I remember Paulina who you mentioned earlier is one of our early hires she actually worked with me at the at the last company last two companies. Um, and when she came in, I was like, Paulina, I am so happy to give you all this work. Um, you know, I was I remember I think I even sent this probably happened to you, Nuno. I think I sent out wires to like the wrong people. So, I lost money by like trying to send like a wire out to some of our employees and like it went to like the completely wrong bank account because I don't know what I'm doing. And I was like I was just so happy once Paulina joined. Paulina runs finance for us. So yeah, besides the network in terms of like providers, we also had a great network of actual people as well. So you know, I was just so happy to see like this those early hires, all of them were just good from the get-go, which is um felt really good in refreshing and uh you know, I feel like um you were not the only one thinking that Laval was like ran in informal way because it was you know we barely speak on at like back in the days we barely speak on Slack. I didn't had a single meeting with Taylor for two years. Uh it was super informal, you know, like a video call. I remember like the very first video call we got was like after one 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 in camera before. We would met on Latins but not not via video, you know. So um what surprised you the most though? Like what is the thing that surprised you the most on those first weeks at Laravel? The you know anything? Actually, that was probably the thing that surprised me most that you guys 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've come a long way from there and we have a lot more meetings now. Oh, yeah. 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 at how little how few meetings that actually happened to 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. But it did lead to that sort of hyperproductivity 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 and 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, we're 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 shad today we have 120 people watching right now the live stream. You're absolutely awesome. Please don't forget go all the way down click on the like button subscribe my channel. We are streaming right now to Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and more. I really appreciate many of you being there today watching Tom the president of Laravel speaking about president Laravel for those who really don't know what this means because the word president of Laravel I don't think people can really understand what that means you know I want to kind of you know dismystify that a little bit uh what that sits with Taylor like what what Taylor what sits with Taylor what sits with you uh how things work there yeah yeah it's I guess president is a term that isn't used a lot in other parts of the world in in the US it's a little more common I used president to get viral, you know, because I knew if I because because you are SOO or something like that and uh COO, I'm also the CO. Ex. Exactly. And I don't think people would understand that, but if I have president, people would be like, whoa, you know, what is that? You know, that that so Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, it's definitely a com 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 I'd say nearly 100% focused on open source community and like our product vision, 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 two 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 beat 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 right and you probably one of the very very early things you have detected is that we need a sales team because we didn't have any. So you know so we had commercial offering but we had literally didn't have any sales team which must have been hilarious for you to see but uh you know I want to ask you like in your perspective uh what is that something on Taylor that is exceptionally good that people even people outside Laravel maybe don't fully see? I mean I think you probably all see it. I mean he's he's just exceptionally good at taking complex complex problems and complex uh you know experiences and distilling them into simplified elegant 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 a a a unique developer experience that just feels natural and simple and like you know removes the noise. So I mean I' I'd say that's that's a special skill and like 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 I would just add one thing on top of that. I really like the way Taylor says stop to things. You know like as a software engineer it's super easy to get into this mindset of I need to solve this problem and I won't stop solving it until it's solved. And Taylor is very good to understand even in the middle of it like does does this problem needs to be solved to begin with. You know what I mean? Uh and just saying so maybe we don't need we don't need focus to solve on that problem because that's not really a problem. So let's not focus on that. So you know in terms of software engineer I really appreciate that but also like I think I feel like he is very good also like in terms of understanding what people want which I think today it's called it ed of product too I guess I don't even know but he's very good also understanding a little bit uh you know what the community needs basically and um you know I think cloud is one example but even nightw watch um and you just mentioned that um you know um you said u that investment was meant to unlock things like laval cloud in laval nightw touch um you mentioned and yeah I was wondering if you can mention some examples where the investment in people are clearly things that are were needed for something like Laravel cloud in Laval 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 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 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 want to build on top of in Cloudflare and that's when we 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 leadership. So we hired Andre Valentine early days 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 and so we hired some early developers like Chris Vidow for instance was our first infrastructure hire and like think back now we have like 15 16 infrastructure and DevOps you know uh engineers on the team um and that's a special skill it's like it's it's different it's different than just being you know a Laravel developer so like you know to get ahead of that we like really hired um you know heavily on that side of the of the of the wall a lot um very early days. Um so I mean again we we in order to build the product we built it even to get to launch right we launched cloud in February 2025 so a year after we started just just about a year and at that point we had I think around 60 employees at Laravel. So we had 6x the team in just about a year. Um and a lot of that was like a lot of the special skills that needed to complement you know the the Laravel development skill you know that building Laravel Club is the one of I think is undeniably probably the happiest I have ever been building something if I'm honest you know um those very first 12 months you know where I felt like I was like peak of productivity almost for me uh cuz we were you know so focused on building this thing that nobody body knew and you were so focused on getting that thing ready for Laron US and then like being you know actually seeing that on stage and people being happy with it. It was like one of the most happiest memories for me. I was wondering if you have one of those memories that you can just share yourself uh things you can remember from those moments. Uh maybe the release day I don't know but uh yeah I mean all of the above. I think the Laracon US moment was definitely definitely big. You know we all knew it was coming. Um and to prepare for that was was incredible. Um you know and the you know the hackathon that we ran out in um you know in advance of that. Actually the real big hackathon I guess was was the Laranu a year later right before the big the big launch right in February 2024. So that's where we had the whole team there and you guys were all pulling allnighters which was incredible and we added so many cool features during that. So I don't know there were so many good so many good memories that came out of that that year. Um, but you're right, like it's like that feeling of like peak productivity where everybody's just locked in and like vibing together, you know, there's definitely no replacing that. Like especially when it's a small team, you know, I don't I nothing against where we've gotten to now where we have 110 people at Laravel. Um, because and we're still, you know, doing really well and working well together. But like those early days when it's just a small team just vibing together and just like shipping stuff so fast like every day you'd get like a Nuno uh video that come out like a video demo and those were just like so fun to see the features come together. Um and so yeah it was just a really fun fun experience building a new product for sure. 100%. Chad we have 130 people watching the live stream. Thank you so much for being on that side. Don't forget to go all the way down subscribe to the channel click on the like button. Instantly important just below me to support my work. Also, Charlie French Boy, thank you so much for the tier one subscription. 15 months already. Josh, thank you so much for the prime subscription. Eight months already. Appreciate your support since day one. Thank you so much for the new followers on Twitch. Moving forward, you know, um it's been a few months indeed since the the release of Laravel Cloud and Nightw Watch. And I want 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 Nightwatch. Yeah, for sure. I mean they both got off to amazing starts right so so cloud launched February 2024 2025 so just over a year ago and then nightw watch in June of 2025 June or July I think it was the end of June yeah and uh 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 um 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 get to launch and it's going to be like, "Oh, this is perfect. There's nothing more we need to build." Well, I'm sure there's a couple things here or there we got to clean up and do all that type of stuff, but like, you know, the the naivity 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 because 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 on 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 fix that or whatever. So, it changed our 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, right? And uh that that took us, you know, I'd say a month or two to really get our our bearings and our and our and our feet under us so we could continue to work work at the speed we were we were at pre-launch. Um so that's I guess the burden of bringing on 10,000 customers your first week. Um but after we got through that phase and you know um we we really we've grown really consistently since then. Um so so today cloud has about 30,000 customers on the platform. Um Nightw Watch has 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 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 uh last four or five months. Um but but cloud is growing even faster. So customers are coming onto cloud it 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. So, what is funny is that uh I don't know if I'm allowed to disclose this, but when you guys do prediction and you guys are like, "Oh [ __ ] it went above the prediction again." And it's that's so funny to see. Uh but uh that is a rare pleasure. I've been budgeting for 25 years of my career and it's most the time if I'm being honest, I miss my budget. So, it is it is nice when we exceed plan, which we've which we've done every month this this year at least. uh Tom a lot of developers uh you know I don't think it's a early anymore but I would still want to bring this topic to the table because it might still be to some a few people a lot of developers early that once a company raises money it starts losing its its identity and to be honest like in the very early beginning even myself I thought about that too you know uh which is obviously not the case over time we just you know start noticing that things are literally the same and even more even better honestly because now we have much more resources and much more talented people to make a lot even better. But I want to make sure you as a president, how you make sure Laval keeps growing without losing things that made people love Laval 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, right? Is trying to stay true to who we were 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 to your point. I really feel like, you know, 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 two years time. Um, you know, it really I I I'd say one one of the biggest things we do just to 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, I would say, challenge, but I think we've handled it really well. Um, you know, there's not there's not a lot of big divides in the company. We really are all working really well together. Um, I I give a lot of the ta the credit to Taylor, right? I mean, I think that original crew and like, you know, you've all become key leaders for us as well. Um, you know, I mean, you've worked on several projects even since cloud. Um, and they're always they're always really cool. And then like Joe is obviously leading our cloud team. Joe Dixon that is. And so, you know, Jess is leading Nightw Watch. James was leading Forge. Um, is now actually on the cloud team and leading our our enterprise efforts there. So, a lot of the the original uh original crew has really become key leaders for us. Um and and it goes beyond that. I mean, I could keep going, you know, whether it's trees leading our all of our billing efforts or Desmond and support um is one of our key people there. Um Mior, you know, as well. So, like Muhammad has been, you know, critical to uh the Forge relaunch, you know. So, that original team has been so so powerful for us. Um but then as we bring in new new folks to be tied into the to the community has been really really key. Right. Right. Um by the way chat everyone typing w Tom that awesome that that answer was great. Tom I want to just take a quick uh some quick questions from the chat real quick before making with the last question. Um Joe Piccolo is asking uh if there is any plans to have a Brazil region on Laravel cloud. If you don't have an answer for this, maybe you can share where where is the where is the best channel to actually make requests like this. Yeah, you can definitely uh send in requests to our to our support team cloudaravel.com and we definitely keep track of those and we add regions constantly. I think we're up to nine regions right now and we're about to launch our 10th region. I don't think we've announced it yet, so I'll I'll I'll refrain from announcing it, but um it's not Brazil, but Brazil does get requested quite a bit. So, if we get enough requests, we could add we could add Brazil. That's definitely been on the list for for a while. And, you know, like I said, we have 10 right now. So, we're getting pretty good at launching these regions. We just need enough of a customer, you know, demand for it. So, by all means, send in send in your requests to cloudl.com and we keep track of those and then uh we add regions constantly. So, um and especially as I often say, if you have a larger workload, so you know, sometimes we talk about Laravel private cloud, which is our enterprise workload. Sometimes a single one or two requests alone are enough to add a to add a region. So um so by all means get in touch with us. Yep. Uh by the way talking about Brazil, you may guys may have a surprise on Brazil early May this year. Something will happen and I cannot tell you what it is but something will happen. Also another question from the chat Tom real quick from peak and flow. There is any plans to add an AI inference service uh on Laval Cloud. Hm. That's that's that's a good idea. Um I can't necessarily comment about that, but I think it's definitely a good idea and something we've we've we've batted around. It's definitely becoming more popular right now to to be able to do that. So we want to do a lot with you know the cloud platform and you know moving more and more towards uh you know AI based services. Um so we've got we got some things cooking I guess I'll say. One more question from the chat from Domino Stars is saying the following. Thomas uh exclusively for this live stream and for the PHP family. Can you spill the tea? What is the back what is the next big thing that um Laravel will announce for the Laval users? Um we have some really exciting stuff coming. You know, I think, you know, one thing that we can we can talk about at least at a high level and and Taylor mentioned this in a on a recent recent stream as well is we have uh you know, some really fast um a fast hibernation and a fast wake up service coming for Larva Cloud. So, right now, obviously, if you use hibernation, and we recommend you do, you know, it wakes up in about a 10 or 12 second time, and that's time is going to be cut down significantly. So that's a feature that we're that we'll be announcing soon and and becoming and coming uh you know later this spring and early summer. So I'd say that's going to be a big game changer. It really changes the game both in terms of like being able to run um you know run your production apps you know in in a hibernating mode and to be able to control cost. So I think that's going to be that's going to be the next big wave of of features. Um, but there's a long list to be honest. Like we're always working on probably 15, you know, new new projects at a time, you know, and uh, every month I'm I'm just impressed by how much the team puts out. Uhhuh. Um, I find it funny because hibernation is something that, you know, if we manage to do it in the way that we are seeing right now, hibernation might be a thing that we just enable by default. So you can actually use iberation production and just leverage all the cost reduction, which is awesome. Um, Charlie French Boy is asking the following. This one is very interesting by the way, especially because I'm making this question to Thomas. He's asking the following. There is any Windows users among Laravel employees. There's a few of us. I guess I'll put myself in that in that mix. You know, I you know, as as the actually the oldest person here on the Laravel team, of course, I'm a Windows user. So, yeah, there's a few of us and mostly on the business side, you know, finance people that use like Excel and things like that. we tend to go towards uh and and we're also pretty thrifty, too. It's amazing how much, you know, horsepower you can get in a machine when it's not a Mac for $800. And to be fair, Windows now have also WSL, which is Linux um emulation directly on Windows, which you can get pretty much a good developer experience even on Windows. So, you know, I've been using Mac forever, so I cannot really speak by uh by people. Uh a lot of there's not many of us, let's be honest. I think it's there's like maybe five of us at all of Laravel. So underrepresented community. Tom, I want to make you one last question to close off things here. Um, what does Laravel will look like in 5 to 10 years from now? Oh man, that that is that is hard to predict. I I don't think that far ahead. I'm 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 that 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 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 pretty more modest growth from the whatever it is 12x growth we've had in the last uh last two 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 uh to use the framework. That's fantastic. Thomas, thank you so much for joining me today. chat. 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. That was it, Tom. We're still live, by the way. We're still live. We're still live. But, uh, see you later, buddy. That's it for the for the la for the video itself. So, Shad, that was awesome. I hope you guys had a fantastic time. For me, it was beautiful. It's also a good time. It's always a good time to be able to speak with Tom, you know, president of Laravel, of course, a big a big figure within Laravel. And, you know, the guy is just, you know, it's just awesome to have him here, honestly. So, it was an awesome stream indeed. Was every W Tom everyone, everyone typing W for Tom. Um, I u, you know, he is actually a very, he's like a visionary. You know, there is people on the LL team like Taylor who are visionaries, but Tom is like definitely one of them, too. W Tom. Exactly. What is this number? This number is the number of subscribers of my channel. So if you want to see the number going up, just subscribe to the channel. W Tommy indeed everyone. Shad, that was awesome. It's Friday, chat. It's Friday. A beautiful weekend ahead of us. I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend with family, with your friends, you know, do some sports, go to the gym. Good, good, good time chat. I'm going to rate someone on Twitch as usual. Let's send all our beautiful viewership to a different channel. But that was that was awesome, Chad. So, as a reminder, this video will now be post edited by my brother and will be published on my YouTube channel. And you guys are going to have a beautiful um video out of this. Okay. All right. Sh. I'm going to raid someone here on Twitch. Catch you guys next Monday. Okay. Catch you guys next Monday here on the channel. Thank you so much for coming today. See you all next time. Peace out. Boo. Ooh. Know I fight it.