Don't even come in here saying that I have been living under a rock. I am the owner of my company, on the board with three more technology companies and also a director for a non-profit.
Edit: Still kudos to you, for running a business at that age, respect for that!
Edit: In the end i feel like i have to justify my post more then i want to. It's not that i hate that guy or that i think he is a bad programmer or a bad person or whatever. I was just surprised to read that someone who has been coding PHP for 7 years never used an ORM. I imagine that most people that want to learn "web programming" start with a framework that includes an ORM. He surely has a big benefit over "competitors" who only know ORMs and never cared about the underlying SQL. That's surely not good as well.