PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Joins Group Payments Startup WePay (YC S09)

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-joins-group-payments-startup-wepay/

by trefn • 16 years ago

100 33 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

trefn• 16 years ago

congrats guys, that's huge. i hope you see a large influx of resumes.

breck• 16 years ago

Very cool. Do you guys do most of your backend logic in PHP as well, or just the website?

billclerico• 16 years ago

when we first started, basically the entire application was php. over time we have introduced other various languages in different places

vijayr• 16 years ago

which ones? and at what layers?

jfong• 16 years ago

Nice find!

strlen3• 16 years ago

Congratulations on the hire. Even though I dislike PHP and avoid primarily-PHP projects (which excludes me from something like 75% of all start-ups, but was fine at Yahoo where many teams used Java/C++/Perl for backend/middleware work), I can only say good things about his contributions at Yahoo which went beyond PHP work e.g., educating engineers on web security.

rufugee• 16 years ago

75% of startups? Really? Where'd you get this number?

jeromec• 16 years ago

Browse this list of HN contractors/developers and see how many did not list PHP. I think it's safe to guess around 75% have it. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

Funny thing. When you google your username the first result is the php function.

mahmud• 16 years ago

strlen(3) first appeared in Reaserch Unix v7, circa January 1979:

http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-1...

strlen3• 16 years ago

Try using "man" instead, perhaps?

davidw• 16 years ago

I worked with Rasmus at Linuxcare, and he always came across as a really good person - a problem solver, and generally nice, and pleasant to be around. I don't care for PHP either, but that's another story, and in any case you have to give the guy credit for launching an open source project that ended up that big - he got something right, and it's worth studying to find out what.

whalesalad3• 16 years ago

If anyone's ever used PHP, this sounds like the worst hire ever. I bet he's a smart guy, but you can gain some insight on his attitude towards development here -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart apache every 10 requests."

omouse• 16 years ago

That's not the worst hire, that's the normal hire! A lot of programmers are out there that are like that.

whalesalad3• 16 years ago

I used to work with a developer, about 2-3 years ago. He was originally CTO of a startup bought by Yahoo! back in the day (Hotjobs). He'd develop live on the server, no version control, yap at you over IM or across the room to get out of the file that he was editing, restart Apache every few seconds to get mod_python to reload. It was absolute chaos. He's a great hacker and a brilliant guy, but some people are truly shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of being "old school". It all comes down to a stubborn laziness. There's definitely a balance between sticking to what you know and prematurely ejaculating over the latest and greatest technologies. Some people just refuse to use new things.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

He sounds like one of the most valuable kinds of programmer: humble about his own abilities and more interested in solving problems than being precious about the elegance of his code. PHP itself hews to this same pragmatic philosophy, and it's the reason PHP powers a huge swath of the internet.

Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has allowed countless developers to solve problems quickly without having to learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.

whalesalad3• 16 years ago

I feel the same, but couldn't manage to articulate it. Nicely done. I agree... humility is very important.

jey• 16 years ago

There's a huge difference between actual pragmatism and shooting yourself in the foot in the name of pragmatism.

No, you shouldn't build your program out of some overengineered metahyperpolymorphic Proton and Electron base classes in the name of "elegance". But the problem with PHP is that it goes completely to the other extreme: it has no internal consistency and little foresight. Simplicity is a great desideratum, but it shouldn't come at the expense of sense.

sh1mmer• 16 years ago

Actually, Rasmus is one of the smartest people I know.

douglasputnam• 16 years ago

I've met Rasmus once, when he generously spoke at our humble community college during his tenure at Yahoo. He came across as pragmatic and opinionated. In his writings and presentations he always stresses simplicity and efficiency (two virtues often lost in the quest for novelty and elegance), and he conspicuously disdains excess. Check out his 2008 DrupalCon presentation and you will see that he is a straight shooter who does not curry favor or spare the ignorant.

tszming• 16 years ago

One of my favorite quote from Rasmus:

I have said so many times, PHP is not about purity in CS principles or architecture, it is about solving the ugly web problem with an admittedly ugly, but extremely functional and convenient solution. If you are looking for purity you are in the wrong boat. Get out now before you get hit by a wet cat!

http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.internals&arti...

Pahalial• 16 years ago

While that quote should understandably give anyone pause, I don't think it's nearly as damning as you seem to think, nor single-handedly enough to advocate against hiring him. As you say, he's probably quite intelligent, and his solve-problems-damn-the-consequences approach can actually be a crucial piece of a development team. Some developers will like nothing better than to take one of his quick and dirty "it just works" PHP algorithms and fine-tune it until it is more reliable than the server software hosting it.

Plus, of course, when you desperately need something done or fixed YESTERDAY, memory leaks are indeed the last thing on your mind. In the world of rapid developments and instant news spread that is online commerce, fixing a crucial 0-day issue at the cost of 3-5 minutes of downtime per hour until a better fix is implemented? No-brainer.

JoeU2• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure he was using that to illustrate an extreme. He talks a lot about performance and he will spend hours lowering latency by 5% and restarting Apache every 10 requests would certainly not help performance. I think his point was that sometimes you need to simply solve the problem and move on.

iamelgringo• 16 years ago

I've been hanging out with the WePay guys since shortly after they moved to Silicon Valley. They are really great guys. I also happened to meet Rasmus at WePay's launch party, and he impressed the socks off me with how laid back and unassuming he was. We talked for about half an hour about the history of PHP. I learned a bunch and wanted to hang out with the guy a lot more.

I've been using WePay to manage the payment of sponsorships at the http://HackersandFounders.com meetups, and I'm also using it to transfer money between members of my family.

I have no skin in their game aside from really liking the guys. If you're interested in working for a great startup that has amazing potential, you should really send WePay your resume.

hussong• 16 years ago

Awesome hire, congrats, Bill and Rich! Looking forward to your API.

rythie• 16 years ago

I've seen Rasmus speak twice and talked to him once. He certainly is very interested in APIs. It seems a theme of his to hack a mashup together with an API that exposes information that wasn't previously available.

I would guess that this post is more about his passion for APIs than it is about PHP.

leftnode• 16 years ago

Congrats to both! I think it's important to realize while there are a lot of valid criticisms with PHP (likewise with other popular languages), there are still a great many intelligent developers and programmers in the PHP community. Once you wade through a lot of the cruft (and there's a lot of it), you'll hear from some really intelligent people who use PHP.

PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Joins Group Payments Startup WePay (YC S09)

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