Taylor Otwell has done some risky demos in his life.
In a world where nearly every onstage demo is very controlled, Otwell, CEO of open-source framework Laravel, has at various times trusted himself and his technology so much that he’s gone all-in, in real time. Once, Otwell unboxed a new MacBook for a demo—as the audience watched.
"I brought the laptop on stage, and it didn’t have [scripting language] PHP installed," said Otwell. "It didn’t have anything to do with Laravel, it was really a brand new MacBook from the Apple Store…The only way we could make that kind of impact was to actually take the risk of going onstage without PHP or Laravel ready to go at all, because I did the rest of the talk with that laptop, coding."
Recently, Laravel has raised a $57 million Series A from Accel, Fortune can exclusively report. And in some sense, Laravel is exactly the kind of company you’d expect VCs to be chasing—it's been demonstrably growing. For example, the company’s open-source installs in July grew 25% year over year and Laravel right now has 35 employees, up from eight at the beginning of this year. Apple, OpenAI, Square, Zillow, OpenTable, Motorola, and Pfizer all use Laravel.
But there are ways in which Laravel isn’t what you’d expect. For one, in an industry where the focus tends to be on San Francisco, Otwell’s company is based in Little Rock, Ark. and despite being founded in 2011, this is the company’s first full-fledged round of VC funding.
"We have this unique and somewhat peculiar strategy of looking for these difficult-to-find, bootstrapped companies that are profitable and tend to be located well outside of Silicon Valley," said Miles Clements, Accel partner. Clements told Fortune that he and his colleagues pursued Otwell for more than a year before he ever took the call. And, when Otwell finally did take the call, it was only because Clements talked Accel into sponsoring one of Laravel's conferences, called Laracons.
Clements's conviction comes in part from pattern recognition, as he compares Laravel to a number of big names, from Atlassian to MongoDB to Vercel. Clements likens Laravel to Atlassian, in terms of product mechanics and positioning, and to Vercel and Mongo, in terms of the potential to become a major player in the open-source ecosystem.
"There's no reason this can't be one of the largest open-source commercial companies out there," said Clements. "You look at Mongo, you look at other open-source companies. I think it has the product mechanics to reach the kind of scale of Atlassian…The combination of the size and breadth, with the virality of the community, was really, really appealing to us. Anytime you can start with that kind of a kernel, there's a lot of interesting things that can evolve from there."
The Laravel community comes up a lot in these conversations. The community, like many developer communities, revolves around message boards and, in Laravel’s case, Laracons, where Otwell’s demos have become the stuff of lore, as has Otwell himself.
"He’s 6’3', he drives a Lambo, and there’s this vibe of, 'man, Taylor’s so freaking cool,'" said Aaron Francis, a developer and educator who’s been involved with Laravel’s community for several years.
Otwell is originally from Arkansas and early in his career worked at a trucking company as a programmer, where he was first exposed to open source. He still lives in Arkansas and, rather than a rip-roaring growth story, Otwell started Laravel as a personal project more than a decade ago, as he sought to build something he wanted. Otwell in that sense is an unlikely developer hero and, though it took me almost 45 minutes to wheedle it out of him, he's aware of the fandom.
"I've seen people with Laravel tattoos, tattoos of me," said Otwell. "I've signed laptops in permanent marker. The community is insane."
That’s not to say everyone is all-in on Laravel on developer message boards. In fact, Laravel’s community has ultimately bonded over the extent to which PHP is, well, uncool.
"PHP has this baggage, this history of being not super serious," Francis explained. "If you’re a quote-unquote real developer, you use something else…Think in terms of high school. The not-cool kids in high school, all of those people banded together to form an alliance. The cliche is the band kids, the theater kids, the math team—that’s us."
Anyone who's been out of high school long enough knows that once-uncool kids can grow up to be pretty cool. And Laravel does seem to make PHP, well, cooler—with ambitions to do even more. The goal of this funding round is clear for both Otwell and Accel: to drive the development of Laravel Cloud.
"We want people to be able to sign up and ship a Laravel app in 60 seconds, period," said Otwell.
Otwell knows he may have to eventually do his onstage Laracon demos with more of a safety net. He doesn’t seem thrilled about it, but appears to be approaching this next chapter with a sense that some things will have to evolve. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t still in love with the thrill of a high-wire demo.
"I love hearing the crowd’s reaction when those moments happen," said Otwell. "Last year, we had 800, 900 people [at Laracon] in Nashville. And to hear those reactions for these live demos, because we keep everything very secret beforehand—those moments make it all worth it."
Elsewhere…OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s new company, Safe Superintelligence, has raised $1 billion from a group of investors that includes a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, SV Angel, and NFDG (Nat Friedman and SSI CEO Daniel Gross's investment group). Sutskever left OpenAI earlier this year. It’s still not entirely clear what Safe Superintelligence is building, beyond the clue offered in the company’s name. But for anyone wondering if the AI gold rush had run its course, the mega-funding in this three-month-old startup is a pretty good sign that it hasn’t.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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