Building Laravel's Future. The Artisan of the Day Is Tom Crary.
When Laravel needed a leader who understood both massive scale and vibrant communities, they found their answer in an unlikely place: accounting.
Tom Crary is Laravel's President and COO, but his journey to Laravel started with numbers, not code. A formally trained accountant who transitioned into technology leadership, Tom brings a unique perspective to developer tooling. His background spans more than 20 years leading companies at incredible scale.
Tom understands community-driven companies. As CEO of Pond5, he learned the critical balance of growing their community and customer base of creators. This was amplified after Shutterstock acquired Pond5 and Tom managed huge web properties, seeing over 100 million sessions monthly, all powered by PHP at a massive scale.
Tom now serves as President & COO at Laravel, with a mission to ensure the business can continue growing and supporting its Community and customers. While he doesn’t contribute code, he’s critical in ensuring solid technical teams and partnerships are in place for the constant releases at Laravel.
Unlike other Laracon speakers, Tom took the stage for his very first conference talk, sharing the behind-the-scenes story of Laravel's acceleration over the last year and a half.
The $57 Million Decision
Tom's story begins in San Francisco, November 2023, sitting across from Taylor Otwell as Taylor wrestled with the biggest decision of his career: whether to raise venture capital and pursue his ambitious vision for Laravel.
Taylor had a roadmap in mind:
- Laravel Cloud: a fully managed deployment solution that could get you from signup to deployment in under one minute
- Reimagined Forge: a next-generation version of the beloved server management tool
- Laravel Nightwatch: world-class monitoring for Laravel applications
- An ecosystem transformation: a complete rethink of how Laravel developers build, deploy, and monitor applications
Tom initially wasn’t sure Laravel was the right fit for him. But after two days with Taylor, “he couldn't imagine working anywhere else”. On the flight home to Arkansas, Taylor drafted what Tom called Taylor’s "manifesto": a transformative vision for Laravel.
Tom signed his offer letter to join Larvel on Christmas Eve 2023 and six weeks later Laravel closed a $57 million funding round.
Building Laravel’s Global Team
With funding secured, the real challenge was building the right team. Starting with Laravel's original 10-person core team which already spanned eight countries, Tom and Taylor set out to scale to 35 people over the next 90 days, while further solidifying Laravel's culture.
Key early hires that shaped Laravel's future:
- André Valentin: The Director of Engineering who organized the original developers into focused teams.
- Chris Fidao: An infrastructure expert with a decade of Laravel experience who could build Laravel Cloud from a blank GitHub repo.
- Calvin Schemanski: A Product Manager who left Ford Motor Company after his Laravel SaaS experience convinced him to join the team.
The hiring philosophy was to attract senior level, autonomous developers who were great communicators and would add to Laravel's culture of "positive vibes."
The Technical and Business Challenges
Behind Laravel Cloud's 30 second average deployment time (crushing their one-minute goal) were countless technical and business decisions. Tom's role during this phase was to establish Laravel as a serious enterprise partner with cloud giants including AWS and Cloudflare, a not-so-easy goal when the company was spending less than $1,000 monthly on AWS.
The decision framework prioritized technical complexity and risk assessment first, with economics intentionally last. Tom was confident they could figure out the right economics with any partner; the product had to be right first.
Laravel Today
Twelve months later, Laravel has grown to 80 employees across 21 countries. Laravel Cloud already serves over 15,000 active customers, just 5 months after launch, and Nightwatch has attracted over 10,000 new users. Tom and Taylor continue to focus on building a global team that matches the spirit of the Laravel community the company serves. As Tom put it: "With our company workday spanning all 24 hours of the day, someone at Laravel is always shipping!"
Your Story Belongs Here
You don't need to have a course, a talk, or a big launch. If Laravel has been part of your journey (a pivot, a side project, a moment of growth), we'd love to hear about it!
Answer Taylor's questions at laravel.com/stories.
We're always looking to feature developers from every corner of the community. Beginners, builders, behind-the-scenes folks. If Laravel helped you do something you're proud of, that's a story worth telling.