Taylor Otwell

I love his excitement for everything.

And yes, I'm going to be at Resend Forward this week talking to Taylor Otwell in the Builder Room live on stage.

If you're going to be there, come say hello.

If you haven't heard, Resend launched inboxes.

Yeah.

And for those who don't know, Taylor Otwell founded Laravel.

It was a really kind of small team of under like eight-ish people.

And then there was a really big inflection moment where he decided to partner together with Excel, a PE firm, and grow the company significantly and build new products.

We discuss why restrictive open source licenses are pointless in a world where agents can rewrite any codebase in 12 languages overnight, how he sat down with a Claude code that didn't even know OpenClaw existed and built Nanoclaw from a blank slate, the moment Carpathia tweeted and shut down a marketing agency doing hundreds of thousands in ARR, and Gavriel's vision for a human-centered future where every knowledge worker becomes a manager of hundreds of agents.

Heads up, I'm doing a live show with Taylor Otwell at Resend Forward.

Check it out at resend.com/forward, and I hope to see you there.

A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com.

Aaron Francis had a day one closing talk.

And then you had a fireside chat between David, sorry, Taylor Otwell and David Hennemeyer Hansen, which is one to not be missed.

So some really good stuff there.

Check that one out.

maybe put grok bot in that category too i think that's the other like really interesting uh well done execution of a product yeah i mean like we can get into that stuff too but i don't know if you want to keep going down the uh what you

brought yeah justin last week we talked about Taylor Otwell's post about like being clearly the best in the market as like the primary point of your strategy in general is to be the absolute best in your category.

We had some conversation around what that means.

So what you're talking about now sounds adjacent to that.

So thankfully he gave me a call and it was just the right timing.

I did a lot of research actually, thankfully, Taylor Otwell and even Tom Crary.

I did some research online about both of them and they both seem like excellent human beings and people I wanted to work for so I joined yeah

okay so yeah so so right now your job is the field mark senior field marketing manager which we will talk about in a second but you know like the first thing I want to dive into is the origin story of like who were you before and what actually brought you here in the first place so let's not even focus on what you do right now because that's I feel like that's the whole second half the podcast so Who were you? What were you doing? What kind of work and what led you to be in the type of work? And I would say that you're doing today, but I think what you're doing today is different than when you did the first time around at Laravel.

So I work for Laravel, the company, which I think is Laravel Holdings Incorporated.

And it's basically the company that has formed around the open source framework because Taylor Otwell created Laravel, the framework.

And then eventually it became the company around it because we have products like Laravel Forge and Laravel Cloud, Nightwatch and all of these that are owned by the company.

But it's all around the framework itself, similar to how Vercel is around the Next.js framework.

And I was like, this is just a really cool community.

I want to like keep building with this and I want to like be a part of it.

So, I started then... like going full send with Laravel and like I changed my Java side projects I was like oh no we're full in Laravel now so I started rebuilding them in Laravel and talking about Laravel online and streaming with it and I got followed by a lot of people who work at Laravel including our CEO Taylor Otwell and I was like you know what this is making programming fun for me again like I'm feeling like like I want to keep building side projects outside of work is like reinvigorating me um so eventually like a month later I messaged Taylor and was like hey I would love to work here eventually I was like a dev rel is there any steps you like I should take to make that possible and he connected me with head of marketing at the time and think five to six months later, I was there.

Oh,