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Listener Q&A with Taylor Otwell After Accel Investment Announcement · The Laravel Podcast

• Matt Stauffer: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Laravel podcast. I am one of your hosts, Matt Stauffer. Taylor Otwell: and I'm Taylor Otwell. Good to be here. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, it's great to be here, man. I love this. This is part of that is because this is not our normal recording time. But last week you kind of put out a big exciting video where you kind of shared about a 57 million investment in, know, Laravel together with, you know, like the reminder about the announcement of Cloud and everything like that. And you guys did do a Q &A session right afterwards. But some folks kind of felt like there was just they wanted a longer Q &A session. They wanted some more questions answered. So I kind of put out a thing asking everybody, I was like, hey, if you got a few questions that weren't answered in the initial Q &A, know, kind of think about them over the weekend. You know, it's been a couple of days since and a couple more questions have come in. So I want to ask you a few of those. But before we go there, I just kind of want to speak to everybody listening because there was so much consistency between one big chunk of the questions. And there was some questions that were technical details and, you know, like stuff about the VS code extension. We will talk about those in a second. But a huge swath of the questions were around people's fears and anxieties. They said, I hear this news, I hear this update, and I'm afraid that X is going to happen. I'm anxious that that's gonna happen, and it's going to do this to this wonderful thing I love, or it's gonna do this to my career, or to my work potential. And so I asked Taylor for permission for this ahead of time, and he said, yeah, my goal for the first chunk of this is just to work through all the questions that basically revolve around people's anxieties around this announcement. So we can just say, hey, you're anxious about this, let's ask Taylor the question that kind of gives us the clarity there. You're anxious about that? And so we're gonna knock those out and we have a couple other questions. But I do wanna speak to everybody that like learning news like this can trigger, because Laravel has been very stable for 13 years. We were just talking about that, right? And so this is new and new things can bring fears, they can bring unsureness, they can, and like, the upside of Laravel changing everybody's lives also comes with the potential downside of if Laravel goes away, then all of sudden, what change does that make to my life? So it's completely reasonable for us to have concerns and fears, and that's why I wanted to make sure we had space for those questions to kind of be surfaced here too. So I just wanted to kind of just share with everybody ahead of time, a lot of these questions were very clearly, even though these words weren't said, like I am afraid that X is gonna happen. Can you tell me if that's gonna happen or not? And so I wanted to of really kind of throw those to Taylor, you know? So you ready to go? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, I'm ready. Let's do it. Matt Stauffer: All right, so unsurprisingly, nobody's anxiety had anything to do with Laravel Cloud, right? Nobody was like, you know oh my God, Laravel Cloud is gonna destroy my business or something. The anxieties were what either the investment into Laravel Cloud has to do with other things like Forge and Vapor, stuff like that, and self-deployment. Or what the general investment into Laravel, like the organization and, know, Accel means about the future of the framework or the future of the experience of being a developer. And so the first question that kind of like leads into that is what motivated you taking investment, especially if like Laravel was already profitable in the first place, like what, you know, why choose to take investment and you know, the ups and downs of coming with it versus just kind of staying where you were before? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, ultimately it came down to I felt like I had built everything I could build in a bootstrapped fashion for Laravel. Everything I had kind of dreamed of, I had tried to build. Forge being, you know, my early stab at building something like a Laravel Cloud, although I didn't want to take on the risk of building a fully managed platform. I would have loved to build like Laravel Cloud back in 2014 as this fully managed cloud infrastructure, but it was obviously way too much for one person. And so ultimately I reached this fork in the road, like I've mentioned before, where it was like, can either coast on what we've built so far and sort of, this is it. This is about as far as we can take Laravel with, pretty much. Or we could really swing for the fences and try to build some of these more ambitious projects that require a lot more help. They maybe have a bit more risk, but ultimately have much more reward, I think, for the Laravel ecosystem if we deliver on these products, which of course we all hope we do. So yeah, I mean, I've seen some people react to the news online with sort of this take of Taylor could have just built Cloud anyway. And actually, I probably couldn't have. You know Laravel is successful. Laravel is very profitable as I was running it, but building Cloud is a huge undertaking, probably more than what people can imagine. You know, it's a lot more moving parts to run your own infrastructure, to solve data, manage databases, to solve managed file storage, managed cache, managed queues. And then all of the other stuff that comes with running a cloud platform, GDPR, SOC 2, DMCA take down notices, abuse of the platform. It's just a lot. And it is actually more than I could do on my own, in fact. So that's ultimately what led me to choose to work with Accel, to scale up the team to a level where we could build awesome new products like Cloud and more to come and also continue to improve things like Laravel Forge, which we're not done with. I mean, anyway, TLDR is that I wanted to do what I thought this community deserves, which is build an amazing platform for shipping Laravel apps. And I felt like the best way to do that would be to partner with Accel, which has a track record of building great companies that developers like in general. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Okay. And one of the follow up questions for each of those in terms of what the motivation are is often asking, okay, well, is Taylor doing this really so that he can take this VC investment and then he can exit, right? You know, or is the VC investment coming because what they're trying to do is really kind of get this whole thing acquired by something else. So is this like a, you know, Taylor sticking around for a little bit so that he can kind of go on his way out, or is this like a Taylor's, you know, stick around to stick around and he wants to keep doing this thing, you know? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, I mean, I have no plans of leaving Laravel. I want to see this thing through. I want to continue to shepherd Laravel, you know, to curate the framework, to get this Cloud project platform launched, and then keep going past that. So yeah, it's not even on like my, I don't have like some calendar in my office where it says like, 2026, exit Laravel, you know, it just doesn't... Matt Stauffer: Got it. Taylor Otwell: not really how it is. It's still very much business as usual here, just with a bigger team, bigger ambitions, bigger goals, but you know, no plans of calling it quits. Laravel is what I love to do. I think, you know, it's been the most rewarding aspect of my like professional career is obviously building Laravel and building this this whole thing together with the community has been super rewarding. So I have no plans to stop doing that. As far as like, you know, what is the goal as far as like, do we want to get acquired? What is the end goal? We really don't think that way. It's not something that even comes up in discussions. Really, the goal has been let's build the most amazing company we can for Laravel and for PHP in general, you might say. And we don't really go beyond that, you know, as far as like some some further goal or some other motive we would have down the line. It's just about right now we're building the best platform we possibly can, the best framework we possibly can, and the best community we possibly can. Matt Stauffer: I love it. Taylor Otwell: And that's really what everyone has been focused on. Myself, Accel, that's what we've been focused on. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. And that lines up really well with the next question I had for you, which was what does Accel get from this? And a lot of people are saying, okay, great Accel put $57 million in and I know probably all of that wasn't Accel, but let's just kind of keep it there. What do they want back? And a lot of folks said, Hey, I know VC and if they put that much money in, they're expecting that money back in blood, you know, a 10 X or whatever. So, you know, can you talk a little bit about what you know of what's Accel's goal here and what are they trying to, you know, what's the value that they get out of putting that money into Laravel? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, it's a great question. mean, I think, you know, obviously, ultimately, all investment hopes for a return on an investment. So I think all venture capital investment would eventually hope for some sort of return. Again, it's not necessarily something that we discuss now, at least, or, you know, probably in the near term. It's really all the focus is all about building, making Laravel the best it can be, you know, and let the chips fall where they do later on. But it's not like part of our, you we don't go into Laravel board meetings and talk about, okay you know, how do we, what return, how do we get the return? Like return, return, return. This is not something that comes up right now. I think we're all just very locked in on making Laravel as awesome as possible. I think we're all very committed to staying true to what we've built so far. And that's something that Accel and I, I think are very aligned on. I would say Accel sometimes is even more cautious about this than I am. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Taylor Otwell: They are very sensitive to respecting the open source community that Laravel has built thus far, because it's one of the main things that drew them to Laravel in the first place was this passionate community of open source developers, where you have people getting Laravel tattoos and everything like that. And I think Laravel has a history in open source working with companies like Sentry, which is an open source, or the code is available on GitHub for the Sentry platform, basically. So, you know, I think they get open source and they understand the value of community and walking that line between building awesome open source stuff, also trying to build a sustainable, profitable business around that and balancing the two, which is something we've been doing for a long time, honestly. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. And I hope you don't mind me jumping in a little bit and we can kind of cut this if you don't want me to, but I... I have been really critical of VC and even Accel because Accel showed up, you know, long before you make this announcement, right? They've been kicking the tires of the Laravel community for over a year and I've been really critical and really just kind of like, who are you and what are you trying to do with our precious community here? And one of the things that I've seen people kind of bring up recently is something I said earlier, which is sort of like, what do you, what do you want from us? Right? Cause it's like you say Accel, you know, sees the value of the open source community. And some folks heard that in the first one, they said, oh yeah, they see that they can kind of squeeze money out of us. And what's interesting to me that has been valuable to kind of like shift my perspective, at least one I've seen so far, is that folks who see business value in open source software communities, seldom see it with the open source consumer, like developers as the primary target, but it's actually the companies that use open source software that are the folks who are actually like the place where there's like, there's potential partnership here because there's a whole huge world of developers that are building apps for companies that have budgets that are currently not being super well spent because the things aren't targeting them because the vast majority of these platforms are targeting the .net world or whatever these, you know, I guess .net might be open source now, but you know what I mean? Like this kind of like this traditional enterprisey world. And so it is possible Taylor Otwell: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: to see open source as a place where like lots of new development is happening, lots of great growth is happening and also for that not to be, hey, we see a whole bunch of developers that we're gonna try and squeeze pennies out of. And again, I just gotta be really transparent that like I didn't get that at first. And so was I like, yeah, you want all of our money as open source developers and we're open source, we don't have any money. But like seeing that like they're trying to build something at least based on what I've perceived so far that gives... Taylor Otwell: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: the companies that we're building for this space to be able to say, oh rather than having to DIY this kind of hosting solution, I can now get a first party official thing. And that's where there's kind of like opportunities for them. Taylor Otwell: Yeah, it's interesting. I think the crazy thing is you might actually see, you know, for the indie hacker that may be concerned about this, I think you will actually see it become more affordable to launch Laravel into production for that segment of users. But the thing we hear, you know, when we go to places like Laracon is there's a lot of companies out there that are hand rolling like Kubernetes environments because they're a little bit bigger than what Forge might provide. But there's really not a solution out there tailored for PHP and Laravel specifically of what they want to do and they're very excited about Cloud and actually very willing to like sign up and pay money to have someone else manage this, you know complicated infrastructure for them. So I think it's gonna benefit everyone and that's the goal. I think you know kind of like I said in my Laracon talk I wanted everyone to be able to ship their side projects their indie projects out to Laravel cloud. No-brainer. And ultimately, I think, probably will end up saving money compared to what they've had in the past as far as options go for shipping Laravel applications, which I'm really excited about because I think indie hacking and bootstrapping really goes back to the very beginning of Laravel and is really at the heart of a lot of what Laravel is about, about empowering one person to build a web app and ship it. And I think that story is going to be easier than ever and probably more affordable than ever. Matt Stauffer: Good, I love to hear that. And I do want to take that to transition and talk about Forge and Vapor, but I shouldn't because we're going to stick with the core stuff first. So I want to get through. We got three more and then we're going to kind of get over to that stuff. The next question we had around the Accel investment was, does Accel now own the Laravel framework? Taylor Otwell: Right, the Laravel framework is still open source MIT software that anyone can fork at any time to be honest and change and put out for themselves. So no, I don't think it would be correct to say that, you know, Laravel or Accel owns an MIT licensed open source project, you know. The Laravel framework predates even Laravel as a company, you know what I mean? It's an open source project that I created and Matt Stauffer: I'll see. Yeah. Yeah. Taylor Otwell: put out there on GitHub under the MIT license. So it really predates any business aspect to Laravel. Matt Stauffer: All right. The next one is and the next two about hosting. So how would you avoid and I personally actually don't know the story. So I'm going to have to just repeat other people's words, but basically how do you avoid the mess that a lot of folks feel like Vercell made of Next js when it comes to the deploy story. And then now there's like open next and there's just like, feels like things didn't go the way people wanted there. Do you, are you kind of like on top of what's going on there and what does that story look like for you? And it, and it might line up with the next question, which is just sort of like, is the self =-deployment Taylor Otwell: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: support for the Larvavel world going to diminish over time because of Cloud or is it something that's going to stay supported? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, I wouldn't classify myself as a Vercell expert by any means, but I think what people are getting at, I guess I understand what they're getting at. And I think my answer to that would be that Laravel and PHP is very different than JavaScript. And it's got a much different history than JavaScript in the sense that Next.js, you know, obviously kind of the most popular React framework, you might say, for building front end apps. It is relatively new, I would say, and there's not as many established practices for deploying and managing Next.js apps when Vercell came on the scene. Compared to PHP, which has been around for over 20 years, people have been deploying it in production at scale for just as long, and you cannot really pull the wool over PHP developers' eyes and say, "Oh it's too complicated to deploy outside of our platform," you know, because people have been deploying and scaling PHP apps for, like I said, over 20 years. There's like, you know, whereas I think with Vercell, you know, they were kind of, they were, and in many ways are sort of the only game in town for deploying Next.js apps. And if you want to use all of Next.js' sort of more advanced features, you know, it's really easiest if you use Vercell and, you know, like people can see that as a good thing or a bad thing, whatever. But it's a very different technology and it's just a very different context than PHP. So as we've been building Cloud, I can tell you with confidence that it has not come to mind to like, how can we make it so that you can only deploy Laravel on Cloud? It's just one, I don't think it's like technically achievable. And two, it's just not something that has come up as a huge priority for us. We're just very, very focused on genuinely making Laravel Cloud as awesome as possible for Laravel apps and the idea of trying to like lock people into using Cloud, it just hasn't come up and I don't think it's doable. One, because we have Laravel Forge that we're still supporting and that we still have plans for actually. I mean it all kind of ties together. There's a lot of things we would like to do on Laravel Forge leading into early next year. Really exciting stuff and so we continue to be committed to that as well. And I think that's another difference between us and other companies is we don't feel like fully managed and self -managed needs to be sort of mutually exclusive. We'll be in the unique position, I think, among all sort of framework companies, you might say, of offering both a self-managed, bring your own cloud account deployment platform and a fully managed cloud platform. I'm not sure if that's ever really been offered by one single company out of the gate. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Taylor Otwell: So, you know, I mean, it's just different, different context, different technologies. And I think it's a little bit, it's just different. It's harder to make Laravel feature gated and locked in, in that way. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, if I could tell you all right now, because one of the questions that was asked is like, what if you guys stopped supporting Forge? I'm like, the number of competitors that would spring up and try to do exactly what Forge did if Forge ever came to like people have tried to do that when Forge already exists, let alone if Forge ever kind of lost support. One thing about having an ecosystem of people who are always trying to make products that target that ecosystem is there's always going to be somebody ready to snap up that market share if Laravel officially lets it go. Taylor Otwell: Yeah, I mean, we're super excited about Forge, actually. The team is fired up. We have a whole team dedicated to Forge. And that's where most of our revenue comes from. So we're very committed to preserving that product and continuing to evolve the product. Because we use Forge every day. We see the pain points, too. We see what we would like to improve. And so we have been at work on that behind the scenes, I can tell you already. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, I love that. And that's a great transition to the next question, which is a lot of folks were saying, like, hey, you know, we heard a lot about Forge. We didn't hear so much about Vapor when it kind of came to the future. Is Forge getting ongoing support and maybe Vapor kind of like we should start planning as Vapor users to move over to Cloud? Or is Vapor still getting support and development as well? Taylor Otwell: It's definitely still getting support. I think most of our focus is definitely on Forge, Cloud, and the other products we've been working on to be revealed at Laracon Australia. We think Vapor is a great product. I really like Vapor a lot, actually. I think that in many ways we have explored Vapor to the extent we would like to. That's not to say that people should migrate necessarily or feel like there's an emergency, but I think that just most of our efforts are going into Forge and Cloud because it's where we feel like we have the most exciting ideas. But again, we run stuff on production in Vapor. We have no plans to discontinue vapor, to turn off vapor, to force people to migrate off of vapor. That's just not something that's on our roadmap. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. No, and it's great hearing whenever you all are running something in production on any of these services, that's really kind of like a confidence boost in the future of the tool, right? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, and if you go to cloud.laravel.com, know, right now you're hitting a Vapor powered application. it's a yeah, it's all inception all the way down. Yeah. Matt Stauffer: It's just turtles on turtles, right? They're all just running on each other. I Love it Okay, a couple more questions and I'm gonna let you go for today. How easy will it be to migrate projects from Forge to Cloud? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, this is something we've thought about a lot. I think for larger customers, you might say our enterprise customers, I think we're very interested in kind of a hand-holding approach for some of those companies. For smaller installations, I think we would like to try to build as many automated systems as we can, either for linking your Forge account to Cloud and sucking in all the info we can about your project so that we can try to make that as easy as possible. One kicker will be the database, right? Moving databases is never fun or easy, typically. Of course, you could always back up and restore to a Cloud database. You could even connect to your Forge database from your Cloud application, potentially, if you wanted to leave it running where it is. So I think that's definitely going to be something for our documentation team and customer success team to provide best-in-class materials on how to migrate your application if that's what you want to do, right? You're just like you're gonna be forced to move on day one or anything or even in the the long term but You know, well it'll just be something for us to document and kind of develop best practices around and and help people out where we can. Matt Stauffer: There will probably be about 17 different YouTube videos within the first week of how to move over as well. Taylor Otwell: Oh yeah, I'm sure. Matt Stauffer: All right, one last Cloud question. Will Cloud support non-Laravel applications? Taylor Otwell: That's something that's definitely on our radar. I mean, of course we would, the easiest thing to support after Laravel would be other PHP applications, things like Symphony, potentially things like WordPress, dare I say. But other popular PHP frameworks or CMSs or whatever, we would obviously be very interested in supporting. Statemic, of course, which is Laravel based, we're very interested in supporting. We do have sort of bigger ambitions with Laravel Cloud. I don't want to put the cart before the horse, but I think deeper into next year, I'm sure we'll start exploring what else can we run on Cloud. If people have a JavaScript microservice, they have a Go microservice, they have an Elixir app they would like to run on Cloud. We would love to, I think, offer affordances so that you could run those things alongside your other Laravel apps. So if you have a Nuxt .js frontend and a Laravel backend. I think we're very interested in figuring out how you can deploy both of those things to Laravel Cloud. Again, I don't want to get ahead of myself. That's not going to be there on day one. When Laravel Cloud comes out, we're very focused on the core Laravel deployment story. Then I think you would see us move on to generic PHP and other tools and platforms and things. And then past that, I think you would see us start to explore, OK, how do we let people run other languages on Laravel Cloud, which is already something people do on Laravel Forge, right? People already sort of hack in or install Node apps on Laravel Forge. It happens all the time. So I think we'll explore that on Laravel Cloud as well. Matt Stauffer: Okay, I have one more for you, which is you talked about a VS Code extension that's gonna make Laravel a lot easier and some folks were asking, well, what about having an official one for PHP Storm and then someone mentioned Sublime Text and then I just started, I'm like, what about Coda, Vim and Neo Vim, VIEmax? So like, what's the story? Like what led to VS Code being the primary one and are there plans to do any more after that? Kind of what do you think in there? Taylor Otwell: I think just our gut read of the pulse of the web dev community was that VS Code is very popular in other ecosystems, JavaScript in particular. We feel like it's very popular for new developers because it's free and it kind has a lot of mind share behind it in terms of extensions and all of that. So our thinking was start with VS Code, building a really great experience in that editor. I think we would love to explore other things. It's probably going to be through like an LSP, like a language server provider, that basically if you have something like that, you can bring this kind of functionality to basically all editors in one go. It's just a little bit bigger of a technical lift than we could tackle right now. So we're very interested in that. We hear that. You know, and it's on our radar, I can say that much. But we're starting with VS Code simply because we think that's where probably the biggest audience is for new developers. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. And I put out a tweet about this, but I wanted to kind of point out to folks that one of the stated goals long-term and especially lately for Laravel is to make it as easy as possible for, I think you said for PHP to be folks first programming language again in a way it didn't used to be. And that kind of really kind of puts a lot of your goals and priorities and movements over the last year really kind of in perspective of like what, if you take a brand new person who's coming out of bootcamp or even going to bootcamp or coming to college or whatever and say, I want to get started programming, what is the story to make development as easy for them as possible if they start in Laravel and start in PHP. And so I kind of am of hearing that that VS Code decision is one part of that whole puzzle for you, is that right? Taylor Otwell: Yeah, everything we're doing is part of one unified theory of everything, which is to make Laravel and PHP the go-to choice for building web apps. And everything sort of revolves around that, even from Laravel Cloud all the way back to the VS Code extension. It's all about, man, Laravel and PHP is an awesome way to be productive and ship apps. And we just got to... If we can move a few pieces around the chessboard, we feel like we can kind of get back to where we want to be, which is being kind of the go-to choice that everyone from indie hackers to companies that want to build, you know, a startup or their next big idea to choose from. So that's what we're working towards. We're just trying to get all the pieces in the right place. Even though it may seem disconnected like the VS Code extension, the Laravel Cloud, but it's all really part of one story, which is that. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. it lines up with the changes you made to the file structure and the fact that SQLite is the first database out of the box. And it's just like less steps to get started, more ease to get started. Herd is easier to install than Valet was, right? So like, Valet is. So less steps to get started. So, love it. Taylor Otwell: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Okay, is there anything else? That's the end of my questions I lined up for you. Having kind of spent the weekend after all your big announcements, is there anything else you wanted to kind of chat about or announce? Are you feeling good for today? Taylor Otwell: You know, not really. We'll be shipping out some of the features I demoed at Laracon this week. The defer function, the concurrency stuff, the local temporary URLs. All of that stuff will probably ship out Wednesday. I documented it all over the weekend. So yeah, be on the lookout for that. Go test out that stuff and let us know what you think. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Matt Stauffer: Well, I'm excited to try it out and for the rest of you all thanks for hanging out with us and yeah, we'll see you all next time Taylor Otwell: See ya.