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

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.

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.<p>I've been using WePay to manage the payment of sponsorships at the <a href="http://HackersandFounders.com" rel="nofollow">http://HackersandFounders.com</a> meetups, and I'm also using it to transfer money between members of my family.<p>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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Nice find!