do i understand you correctly - you found it harder to learn PHP because its so unorganized and inconsistent ,

and found Python easier to understand and learn than PHP ...

anyone else here with similar experience ?

Absolutely. I feel like I wasted some of my most able years fiddling with code that was complete garbage (my fault) and not learning much of anything because I was constantly looking for explanations of, well, everything. Granted, I was young, foolish, and accepted what everyone was saying ("All you need for webdev is PHP... shhhh shhhh"). I didn't really 'get' programming due to all that. But Python was a breath of fresh air, and while I'm no expert I feel much better for it even while going through snippets of PHP.

Basically, I saw PHP as the pragmatic solution to programming for the web. Problem was I didn't really understand programming until Python showed me the light, and while I'm much happier now using and [still] learning C I found it to be an immense help.

is there a major new startup that has been built with php in the last couple of years ? can you name one ?

http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/rh3u2/any_new_major_sta...

As pointed out in the comments there, 2 years is not really a big enough window to identify a "major" startup.