OpenAI Raises More Capital, Joby Aviation’s Air Taxi Play & The Power of Community in Tech

0:00Allie:This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear?

0:39Allie:Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. People have Laravel tattoos. I actually was reading the story I wrote about you guys last year, and you told me about signing computers in permanent marker. Yeah, someone has named their daughter Laravel, I think, since our last podcast. What? Hello, hello. Welcome to the Term Sheet Podcast. I'm Allie Garfinkel, senior finance reporter here at Fortune.

1:22Allie:And every week on the Term Sheet Podcast, we're going to go over the latest news and insights in private equity, startups, and venture capital. We're going to talk to some of the most exciting figures in the private markets, and it actually has been a pretty exciting week in the private markets and the public markets. This week, I'm actually still thinking about last week. Figma went public in what's widely considered to be one of the most successful IPOs in recent memory. Stock popped about 250 % in the first day of trading, and the market cap at the end of the day for Figma was$55 billion. Now, a lot of people are saying this means the IPO window for venture-backed tech IPOs is open.

2:06Allie:I'm sort of of the opinion that it's actually been open for a while, but when you're talking about the IPO window, what matters is belief. And a lot of folks, I think, are starting to believe, which means we're going to see some IPOs we maybe wouldn't have seen otherwise in the coming weeks and months. Next up, OpenAI. Hi, OpenAI has reportedly raised another$8.3 billion as part of a larger$40 billion fundraise. Now, I'm going to be completely honest with you. I actually forgot about this particular piece of news when it came out on Friday, because when a company that is already valued at$300 billion raises$8 billion, you sort of blink your eyes twice and go, oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense.

2:46Allie:And then you move on. It's an incredible act of relativism because new company raises$100 million. Huge news. Company that's already raised billions and billions and billions of dollars at a valuation that's hundreds of billions. It's Friday. Moving on to our interview of the week, I am so excited to introduce to you Taylor Otwell. Now, this is sometimes hard to explain to folks outside of tech, But there is a very specific tech subculture and a tech subculture of celebrities. There are certain kinds of developer-focused celebrities in tech whose technology has so improved people's lives, whose technology has become so ingrained in people's lives that it's made them famous.

3:28Allie:And Taylor is certainly that. Now, Taylor runs a company called Laravel. Laravel, in the simplest terms, helps people build websites more easily. Sort of, if you're not from the tech world, Laravel is what's called an open-source PHP framework. Now, the center of that is called PHP. PHP is a scripting language that's from the mid-90s, and Taylor is often the person who's sort of credited as bringing it back from extinction, if you will. Now, Taylor and I last talked a year ago when he raised$57 million from Excel, and I'm really excited to catch up with him and see what he's up to, see what's changed, and see what hasn't.

4:04Allie:Let's welcome Taylor. Taylor, welcome to the Term Sheet Podcast. What's up? Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, a lot of stuff is up. We've had a lot of stuff going on here at Laravel. It's been a busy summer in general, but it's been a lot of fun. Well, we've been trying to figure this out. How long has it been since we've seen each other? That last story I did on you guys published in September of last year. So we've got to be closing in on a year. And part of the reason I'm so excited that you're here is I really want to bring back a bunch of the founders who were some of the most read term sheets of last year.

4:43Allie:And you you were you guys, I think, were number two out of the top five. Lots of people were. Yeah. Does that surprise you? The Laramble community is pretty passionate. So I'm not surprised we got a decent amount of readers. But number two is good. I'll take number two. Especially, you know, given that you're in Arkansas, given that you guys aren't a typical Silicon Valley story. it was kind of a thrill. And for those in our audience who aren't familiar with Laravel, can you tell the Laravel story? Because it actually started as a personal project for you. Yeah, yeah, totally. So I graduated from college in 2008.

5:22And right after college, I worked for a company called Arkansas Best Fray, which is now Arc Best, publicly traded company, large company. There were hundreds of other computer programmers working there. in my free time a couple years after i started i started creating the side projects um called laravel and it was basically a way to create web applications faster and i was mainly building it for myself to be honest i did not have big dreams of building this really popular web development tool i just needed a way to build my own ideas faster and laravel was going to be like my way to do that like my toolkit for making that happen and i worked on laravel for a while and once it was basically let's say like a 1.0 state i thought like this is kind of decent like other people might be interested in using this but i still didn't really think it would be any big thing so i wrote like a user manual some documentation for it and put it out on github released it to the world and i can't say that it was like an overnight sensation you know with just incredible growth in the first you know a few months but slowly but surely a lot of people started adopting it for building web applications and php which is the programming language that it's written in and you know um eventually i got an email you know from a guy in new york that said said hey i saw laravel we want to rewrite some stuff in laravel do you want to come work here and just kind of like work on laravel and also help us do um some rewrites into the framework and so i said sure that sounds great And next thing you know, I'm sort of like working full time for another company using Laravel.

7:01And then a couple of years after that, I actually went full time myself, just working on Laravel exclusively as a company.

7:08Allie:Did you ever think you wanted to be an entrepreneur on your own? Because it sounds like you were sort of content working for somebody else for a while. It was a personal problem. You know, I didn't really think about it as being an entrepreneur. I thought about it as like, I wanted more freedom, like in my life. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to live wherever I wanted and work from home. So if that meant being an entrepreneur, I guess, sure. But I didn't really think of it like, I want to be a CEO of a company. I want to start a company and be an entrepreneur in that way. It was more like the things that come with maybe running your own company that I was interested in at the time.

7:51And kind of accidentally became the CEO of a company over time.

7:56Allie:We've talked a lot about sort of the role that being from Arkansas and sort of building Laravel in Arkansas has played. But do you think that all ties together where it's like you wouldn't sort of grow up with this cult of the founder per se, and you really just, you sort of fell into it a little bit or it chose you rather than you choosing it? Yeah, maybe so. So, you know, like one thing I've thought about, you know, as I've kind of reflected on starting Laravel from Arkansas, which is not, you know, it's not really like the Silicon Valley of the South or anything. There's just not a lot of distractions.

8:32You know, there's a nice way of putting it. I was not, you know, distracted by what other founders were doing or maybe what like the current hype cycle is, you know, in tech. I really was just able to really lock in and focus on building Laravel. and I think that was actually really helpful. You can get pulled a lot of different directions when you're trying to start a company and even when you're trying to grow a product in the initial stages, when the product is still very fragile from a vision perspective and you as the founder or the creator of the project are trying to really solidify what the project's about and what its core values are, there can be a lot of voices and a lot of things pulling you in different directions.

9:15And sometimes I think if you're in the midst of that, you can sort of get swayed by others' opinions really early. While before the project has really solidified itself and found its footing. And I was always really careful of that. And I think being outside of Silicon Valley actually helped in that regard quite a bit. That I was able to sort of set Laravel on the path that I believed it needed to be on early without a bunch of distractions.

9:44Allie:What most confuses you? about Silicon Valley even now? You know, I think that when you're in Silicon Valley, it's very easy to think that everyone is building things using the latest, greatest tech that everyone is talking about and everyone's like very bleeding edge. And if you're not, you're just like not gonna make it. And working in the enterprise in Arkansas, you know, when I first started my career and just traveling the world in general and going to Laracon conferences and meeting developers from around the world. There are a lot of developers out there that are just building stuff. And it's not necessarily the flashiest software in the world.

10:24It's not going to be at the top of programmer, social media or whatever. But that's actually what most programming is. And I think that Laravel has really catered a lot to being sort of like the common person's web development framework. in a way that maybe makes people scratch their heads in San Francisco. Sometimes like, why, why would you be using this? This isn't like the latest, greatest language or the latest, greatest tech stack. And, you know, and yet it is, you know, one of the most popular ways to build backend web stuff in the world. And I think it's just easy to lose sight that most programmers are actually not using the flashiest stuff all the time.

11:09They're just trying to get their job done really well, really productively and enjoy doing it. And I think Laravel really fit that need for a lot of people.

11:16Allie:I would describe what Laravel does as helping people build websites faster. Right. Is that how good of a description is that? Because that's what I am going to use when I explain what I was doing today to my mom later. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good description. Okay. It's been a year. I'll take it. It's like a starter kit for building web applications. You know, a lot of web applications do similar things. They log people in, they log people out, they store data about what that user interacts with. And Laravel gives you a lot of the pieces to make that happen out of the box so that you don't have to rewrite all of that code.

11:53Every time you have a new idea or a new product you want to build, you can just use what Laravel gives you out of the box.

11:59Allie:You used the phrase earlier, the common person's web framework, I believe. And this brings me to the first fact I ever learned about you, Taylor, which is that you have fans and Laravel fans. Laravel, people have Laravel tattoos. People have, I think you actually was reading the story I wrote about you guys last year and you told me about signing computers in permanent marker. Yeah. Someone has named their daughter Laravel, I think, since our last podcast. What? It's pretty wild. So what do you attribute the fandom? You know, I think like, it may be kind of deep into like PHP and programming lore.

12:45Allie:Let's go. I want to go into PHP programming. At the time in 2011, when I first wrote Laravel, PHP did not have a lot of the cool stuff that, you know, at the time Ruby on Rails was the big popular web development framework and had all the cool bells and whistles and all the neat features that everyone wanted. And PHP didn't have that. It was a little bit of an older programming language. It may be the developers felt like they were maybe being left behind a little bit by where tech was heading at the time. And I feel like Laravel came out at a really opportune time in PHP's history where people were like, oh, this is kind of cool again.

13:25We actually enjoy using this. A lot of people felt like their career was sort of revitalized. Like when I first came into PHP and wrote Laravel, many people were considering switching technologies entirely, like learning a new programming language, maybe even needing to like change where they're working or change their career trajectory because they felt like they were getting left behind. And that was scary to them. And I think when Laravel came out, it was really a breath of fresh air for those people. And because of that, and because of feeling like they had a chance to revitalize their tech career and also had this really great tool to maybe even build their own ideas like I wanted to, people just really latched on to that and became passionate about it and almost felt like this indebtedness to it and develop this fandom around it.

14:14And I think I also tried to build a very welcoming and fun community around Laravel from the beginning. Like when I first released Laravel, I was in the chat rooms. I was in the forums answering questions, like gathering feedback, talking with people. And it was just generally really accessible to the community. And, you know, I don't know, just like people just really latched on to that whole concept of like belonging to something, being able to contribute to something that they're excited about. which I think, you know, even outside of tech, that's a lot of what people want, right? To like belong to this community that they feel like they're a part of and they can have a positive impact on.

14:51And people derive a lot of personal satisfaction from that. And I think a lot of people found it in Laravel and thus became passionate fans of it.

15:00Allie:The other thing too, is being a fan of something is a piece of identification. It says something about us. Like it says something about me that I'm a big Olivia Rodrigo fan, probably. Right. What does it say about somebody who's a big Laravel fan? You know, I think some of the core like values of Laravel and what it might say about someone is we value beautiful code, shipping products, getting stuff done, you know, positively impacting the world with what we build. And I think that's really what reflects most through the Laravel community is it's a group of people that love to build things, love to build software and ship it to the world so that other people can use it and enjoy it.

15:47And they like to have fun doing it. So anytime I go to a Laracon, whether it's in the US or Europe or India or Australia, everyone's just super excited. There's a lot of really great vibes. People want to share what they're working on to see what other people are working on, to hear the talks, to meet people they've maybe interacted with online or maybe look up to respect in the community as as mentors and sort of like programming heroes and it's just a lot of great energy around shipping software that

16:14Allie:impacts the world now uh you've done something slightly slightly dangerous here i expect because we we spoke about a year ago give or take uh you just raised your first outside funding from excel about 57 million dollars and you had all of these plans about what you were going to do with that money. Right here now, I know one of those plans, for example, was expanding and spending more time with that Laravel community. Have you done it? What has that looked like? Yeah, gosh, we have done so much stuff since we last talked. So we released a couple of new products. We released Laravel Cloud, which is our managed deployment platform.

16:54Allie:That was another thing. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That was one of the big things. Yeah, thanks. We released that back in March. um so that's our managed hosting platform for laravel apps so basically when someone builds an app on their local laptop or computer we help them ship it out into production live onto the web and manage it for them we also released laravel night watch just a few weeks ago actually which monitors the applications make sure they're running really well and fast and all of that good stuff um and we're we've even increased the uh size and scope of lara con this year which is actually just next week i'm flying out to denver to get ready for that um and we're going to have over 1100 people in denver for our laricon us edition this year where we'll be showing a lot of even more new stuff we've been building the team has gotten much bigger you know just internally here at laravel yeah so when we raised money we were just like a team of 10 um and now we're I want to say like 72 or 73 people, which was just like, it's so much growth.

17:56And especially for me, you know, I had been used to working with such a small team for so long and now to have over 70 people. We've actually built a game internally where it will show you the picture of someone that works at Laravel and you have to type in their name so that we can make sure we actually know all of our employees. It's like a fun little game we all play now because we're growing so quickly. But it's been a blast, honestly. And I've loved working with everyone that's joined the team. And we've just hired so many amazing, talented people. And it's really been a lot of fun.

18:25Allie:So raising venture funding, good decision, bad decision? I think it was a good decision for Laravel. I honestly did not understand the full value or purpose of venture funding when I was in the bootstrapper world. but it has honestly been such a net benefit for us, I think, and such a positive thing for Laravel and allowed us to do things that we just simply would not have been able to do before that I think the Laravel community deserved. The products we're building are much more ambitious. They require much more people to build, much more technical expertise than we previously needed. But at the same time, the Laravel community deserved these things.

19:07And I felt like if we didn't try to build these things that I was, you know, it would be a disservice to the Laravel community that stuck with the framework for 10 plus years now.

19:18Allie:Are you happy you waited? That's a really good question. One I haven't actually thought about too much, but, you know, I think that in Laravel's history, I maybe put off a few things too long. One was hiring the first employee, which I put off way too long, years too long because I was scared, of someone coming in and messing up what I had started. I guess you could make similar comparisons maybe to raising money or raising VC money in particular is probably a founder is scared that the whole thing is going to get messed up and then everyone's going to be mad at you, right? Like you're going to be the person that raised money and sort of like the product got bad and everyone just kind of leaves with bad vibes.

20:04and it was like, that just kind of leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth. So I think I was scared a little bit in that regard. But I think maybe I did wait a little too long, you know, in retrospect. I think we could have built these products a little bit earlier, but, you know, at least they're here now. And I'm super happy that we're finally realizing some of these ambitious visions that I always had for Laravel.

20:27Allie:In the last year also, one of the things that's kind of become a buzzword, a movement, all of the above, vibe coding. Do you have a take on vibe coding? Where does vibe coding intersect with Laravel if it does at all? I'm actually a fan of vibe coding. Your team vibe coding? Yeah. And basically just out of principle that I think being able to create software, which is one of the closest things I know of to just, it sort of feels like creating something out of nothing, you know, where you can sit down on your computer with an idea and build something that other people can use on the web around the world.

21:12To me, it's just like this very magical thing. And it's like a very powerful thing to be able to empower people to do. So if you can empower someone to get their ideas out of their head and onto the web so that other people can benefit from them, easier, I think that's a huge win. And I think a lot of the examples we see now of Vibe coding are obviously fairly trivial, like web applications, I would say. It's still like we have to start somewhere, right? And I think if I look back to my history in programming, I started building websites when I was 12 or 13 years old. And being able to use AI and Vibe coding and all of the AI powered development tools that we have now back then i would have like loved that you know like i think that would actually been a huge benefit to my learning to my you know my growth as a programmer because i could use these ai tools to generate code and then i could always go back and read the code and learn what the ai did and sort of like poke around at it it's not that dissimilar to what we used to do building web applications just by like googling and copying and pasting code that we actually didn't understand maybe at the time but we could just like read it and try to learn it.

22:23So I'm a fan of vibe coding. And as far as vibe coding at Laravel, you know, we're working on a lot of AI related stuff as most people are these days. Some of it will start to show at Laracon. So, I mean, some of the things we're exploring is LLMs and AI is already actually really good at writing Laravel and PHP because PHP has been around a long time and Laravel has been around a long time in programming terms. So it's already really great at writing that kind of code, but we'd like to make it even better. So we're building basically a local AI assistant tools that hook into whether it's your existing editor, like VS code, or if you're using cloud code by anthropic, you can hook up our basically MCP server that keeps it always up to date with like the latest Laravel features, the latest packages and add-ons throughout the ecosystem so that the AI and the LLM is really good at writing Laravel code, even better than it would be out of the box.

23:22And I think Laravel is really uniquely positioned to be almost the ultimate Vibe coding platform because it is such a full featured framework. And what I mean by that is like the database features, the authentication features, the encryption features, and authorization and all of these other things you need when building a web app are actually baked right into Laravel. and that's in contrast to a lot of other web development frameworks where you sort of have to piece together and duct tape it all together with a lot of you know separate packages that you have to build into a cohesive platform and laravel is very integrated and batteries included and full stack and because of that i think llms and vibe coding is really perfectly suited to laravel else.

24:07We're very interested to explore that. And I think later this year, we may even tinker with a full Laravel vibe coding platform. I think that's very possible and something I'm super interested in.

24:18Allie:Last question. Any advice for founders, particularly who aren't in Silicon Valley? I think looking back on my career, I think a lot of the things or a lot of what helped to me with Laravel was sticking to what I thought was best for Laravel. And that sounds like really, I don't know, the way when it comes out of my mouth, it sounds very like selfish or conceited, but I think it goes back to what I said earlier about distractions. There are so many like voices in the room telling you what you should do with your product or what you should do with your open source project or your company. And as a founder, I've always been most miserable when And I didn't just stick to my gut of what I knew needed to happen.