Latest / Talk Commerce / Live from Ecomm Forum Ben Marks on PHP Foundation Fundraising and the Future of Open Source Commerce
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:00.93) Welcome back to Talk Commerce live from the e-commerce forum in Minneapolis. Today I have Ben Marks. The man, the myth, sometime legend. always legend. Ben, tell us what are you doing now? Well, since I left my previous employer back in May, I've jumped into just basically doing what I've always done anyway, which is consulting. Now I'm just trying to get people to pay me to do that. It's also given me a chance to go down some new avenues. I was just really happy to announce just last week, maybe earlier this week, that I'm going to be handling all the fundraising for the PHP Foundation, which if you don't know, is actually how PHP language continues to be maintained and secured and developed. It's just an amazing opportunity for me personally because PHP really has given me my entire career. It's great to be able to help out and help make sure that it's around into the future. And then also I've jumped onto a founding team at Nomicore, N-O-M-I-C-O-R-E, which just takes Speaker 1 (01:15.088) takes the search bar and actually makes it really operational. It basically lets your data speak for itself, right? So instead of people shaping their product search queries, like sort of having to understand what your product is all about anyway, you just say like, hey, I need to go do this thing, and the system will actually go and it'll sort of dynamically compose all of the filters and layer navigation for you and just basically let users interact in a more natural natural way with your project catalog. That's all I'm doing man. And you know I get to take the dog for a walk every once in while. Wow, that's all you're doing? Speaker 2 (01:52.568) So the first thing I have to ask is, so PHP is just that dying language, just like Magento. Well, know, one of the board members, Nils, also part of the co-founding team behind Packages, which is the big package manager that really helps stitch up applications all over the world, he would wrap you on the knuckles for saying, for even making that joke, because it turns out that we've been hearing this, this is an old story, PHP is dying, but like, the reality is, it really, really is not. The language keeps getting better and better. because you have a foundation pays for developers to work on it, but also you still have all the contributions that come like any good open source project. And that continues to make PHP just continually relevant and powerful. And the team just released an official MCP package with the help of Symfony, one of the frameworks. So yeah, it's far from dead. Yeah, and not to get into too much into the weeds and the PHP, but I know Ivan Chernobyl, he has a new... Did you say Ivan Chernobyl? Yeah, Ciprna. I always get... I butcher everybody's name. But he had a great example of running 200 Magento stores in a very small instance. And a lot of people attribute it to the newer versions of PHP. That Magento can perform so well. Chaperone? Speaker 1 (03:21.678) Well, I mean, look, when I was at Magento, mean, we did claim the performance benefits that came with the PHP 7 at the time. PHP's major version is 8. We're well into that major version. But yeah, it's become incredibly performant. Several years ago, had really, PHP 7 was a total reimagining of how everything worked under the hood. It just made it behave more like like some of the other runtime environments out there. So tell us a little bit about your role so you know you're back, you're traveling all over the world. It doesn't seem like your life has changed. Well, you know, not a... Well, I mean, it's a lot less travel. Definitely won't be global services next year, much to my dismay. But, you know, I did get to visit with Meet Magento that happened in Rome a couple weeks ago. just had some miles to burn up and... it was interesting to be back, kind of back in that context. got Mathias Schreiber, the executive director of the Magento Association, which I founded many, many years ago. You I consulted on that whole process, right? And, you know, it's an interesting moment for Adobe and Magento, and of course, and also I think, kind of have to name Hoover as well in there, kind of in the mix, as well as, you Speaker 1 (04:54.608) and all the other kind of projects. got this kind of swirling constellation of, I don't want to say necessarily competing interests, but very, probably different interests. And it was nice to just kind be back in that world and kind of hear some of these discussions firsthand. And they actually had an amazing panel at the end of the event that really addressed some of the challenges that are happening right now. The fact of the matter is Magento, really has been a, a product standpoint, has been dead in the eyes of Adobe for several years, right? And what I mean is like Adobe still supports Magento, still supports the Magento Association. Still has a lot of customers out there running Magento, but they are... The product itself has not received any feature updates. It's only performance and security patches. But Adobe Commerce itself continues to develop. And I think at some point there needs to be, I won't say it's a schism, but there really does need to be a line drawn that says, okay, we're all in on Adobe Commerce. I would personally love to see Magento turned over to the ecosystem, but I don't know of any executive who has the power to say, hey, this thing that we pay, $1.7 billion for it, just gonna give it away. Anyway, really, really, you know, most of the most interesting thing for me though is that there's so many people who still care and who are still there and still doing the work and it's still an incredible piece of technology powering billions in transactions. I think that, I mean you're a testament to how you've left, I mean you haven't left the Magento community, but you left Magento Adobe and you went to do your own thing, you went to a competitor even, but you're still involved and I think that's a testament to the community in itself that people have come and gone but people are still volunteering their time and they're still being involved and they're still doing their thing with Magento. Speaker 1 (06:58.734) I mean, know, whether it's, know, it's Magento or PHP, you're really, really open source in general. mean, the secret sauce there has always been that you get people to, to, you know, invest and think and work, you know, sort of outside of the nine to five, right? So people just come together and do things intentionally, whether that's, you know, hosting a hackathon or organizing, you know, an online meetup or conference or you know, people just, when they start to pool their effort together, real magic happens. Definitely like a two plus two equals eight. kind of moment. Yeah, some of the other communities that we won't mention that sound a lot like Spotify, they claim to have that magic, but maybe they don't. still have an experience. or... I said sounded like Spotify. Or maybe the music company that sounds like Shopify. I was trying to be clever, but my cleverness never worked. Speaker 1 (07:51.63) Especially now with you. It's that dry sort of Midwestern thing. Anyways. I'm from the coast, man. We put shrimp in our grits. I'm supposed to smile, yeah. Speaker 2 (08:00.62) So tell us, what are you getting off the e-commerce forum? this year? Well, know, this is the 11th edition. You know, I've been hearing about this event, especially, you know, with the shop or team having several team members here in Minneapolis. 11th edition. I wish I'd been here for the first time, right? In part because, you know, Darren and the whole Irish team, you know, again, like talk about people and businesses that put in way, way, way more than just the nine to five effort. You know, they just they bring, they create the space and curate the content to really bring great ideas together. In fact, there was just a panel with Sharon Gee from Commerce, Jason Nias from Shopware, and Scott Siegel from Klaviyo, and it was fascinating to see these fairly senior folk really go through how AI is impacting, not just the market. in the marketplace for commerce, but also how it's shaping things internally. And the big takeaway, the big takeaway really is you've got to... Scott from Klaviyo said it really was. It's an osmotic process, If you're worried about getting started, if you're scared, you don't know what to do, just start. Just start to do stuff and be intentional about it. Klaviyo was saying they take 10 minutes every week doing it all hands and show someone in the front line, just to show off something that they've done to materially improve their efficiency, their process, or whatever. That kind of intentionality, I think, is going to be what Speaker 1 (09:44.528) really separates the vendors who are still going to be here in a few years versus those who are not. Because I think Jason Chopper said it was a forcing function of sorts that we're basically, are, it's not all roses and there will be companies that, you he said exist now because of zero interest and they will probably go away, right, because of inertia, because of, you know, they just kind of rest on their laurels and they don't take that next step. And Sharon, Sharon. from Commerce is a huge, huge proponent of this idea that data is the new storefront. So she's, especially with the Fedonomics purchase that is powering, I think a lot of Commerce's reach. It's weird to talk about Commerce, like big C Commerce, But just because there's been all this historical investment in things like search engine optimization and all of a sudden search engines, like their traffic is plummeting, well that doesn't mean you throw up your hands or you throw more money after that. You basically just need to understand where your customers are going to be. customers tend to go where they are most enabled. And I just went through an agentic, well not really agentic, I mean. like quasi like I asked I asked Chachi BT we were going to a wedding my cousin's wedding in the family farm in New Hampshire flying into Boston and my wife Tracy had found locally found a pair of recurve really good German boots but it's rare that she finds shoes that fit her but like they they were brown and I don't know if you know anything about about fashion but like brown like all of her clothes like all of her outfits were kind of built around black shoes so I said well hey maybe we can find a like a black pair of these boots. So I just, I threw this chat to BT, I said, hey, I'm, you know, we're gonna be leaving tomorrow from our home. We're gonna be going to this tiny little town of Cornish, New Hampshire, and, but we're landing in Boston, and, you know. Speaker 1 (11:59.438) How can I get, can you find me this model of this manufacturer food, either to be delivered in time or for me to pick up on the way? And I kid you not, we ended up just outside, what was it? Lexington, like Lexington, Massachusetts, like right outside of Boston. So we just had to take a slight little dog leg because basically said, you could, you could try and go to, what's the big, Zap, Zapos, right? You can go to Zapos. They have a VIP program and might be able to do shipping, but like, I'm really concerned that it's not going to get there in time. And it found a, a, just a, a shoe shop in Lexington, Mass. night, great, great place. Michael said to me, ever need shoes anywhere near Boston. That's the place to go. those guys are wonderful. And they happen to have, they just deployed a Magento 2 store not that long ago, and amazingly enough, the system detected that they seem to have up-to-date stock. So, ChaptGPT actually had the context that, okay, I see that this store is on the way, I see that they have stock that looks like it is actually updated dynamically. And here's a script. you can use if you call them. I mean, didn't need the script. That's awesome. The next step, of course, would have been if it had called me. But at the end of the day, that was a new experience. And it really shaped how I'm going to be buying things in the future. It's incredible. I mean, it's like we've taken this industry that seemed fairly inertial for so long. And then all of sudden, boom, everything's changed. That's wow. That's incredible. Speaker 2 (13:39.634) Right, Ben, it's been a great conversation. Thanks for stopping by and it's so good to see you again. Ben Marks, thank you. All right. Always good to see you, brother.