Adam Wathan

Adam Wathan is the creator of Tailwind CSS, the utility-first CSS framework that grew from a stylesheet he copied between side projects into one of the most widely used tools on the web, now installed more than 110 million times a week. He open-sourced it in 2017 after viewers of his live-streamed SaaS work kept asking what CSS framework he was using; the SaaS was abandoned, but the framework became the business.

Before Tailwind, Wathan was a well-known figure in the Laravel community, selling self-published books and courses such as Refactoring to Collections and Test-Driven Laravel and hosting the Full Stack Radio podcast. With designer Steve Schoger he wrote Refactoring UI in 2018, a design book for developers that became a perennial seller, then launched Tailwind UI in February 2020 — it made about $400K on day one and approached $2M within five months. The company, renamed Tailwind Labs, also created Headless UI, Heroicons, Tailwind Play and later Tailwind Plus.

In January 2026 Wathan disclosed that, despite Tailwind usage growing, AI-driven drops in documentation traffic had cut revenue by close to 80% and forced the team to lay off most of its engineers. In September 2026 he announced that Tailwind Labs was joining Shopify to give the framework a stable long-term home, keeping all open source MIT-licensed and closing new sign-ups for its commercial products.