[HN Gopher] Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio
___________________________________________________________________
Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio
Author : ceohockey60
Score : 343 points
Date : 2024-01-08 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| Was not expecting this departure
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| Was this planned? What is behind this move?
| kypro wrote:
| No.
|
| Shareholders have been critical of Twilio's performance, and
| therefore Jeff Lawson over the last year or two though...
| They're in a difficult place. They don't have the margins of a
| SAAS company and they've been losing a lot of money.
|
| This was fine in a low interest rate environment where
| investors are willing to pay up for growth, but when that
| changed investors wanted them to cut costs and show a path to
| profitability. As a result Twilio was forced to do large
| layoffs and refocus the business on products with higher
| margins.
|
| Perhaps Jeff just didn't want to run the type of business
| Twilio needs to become in this new environment. He doesn't
| strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about
| running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising
| profit margins above all else. I he think prefers to get stuck
| in and build things cool things, and for better or worse that's
| not where Twilio is anymore.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets
| passionate about running a mature business that needs to
| focus on optimising profit margins above all else.
|
| There is optimizing profit margins, and there is not losing
| hundreds of millions of dollars per year, year after year.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-
| in...
| kypro wrote:
| Depends on how you look at it I suppose... It's not unusual
| for growth companies to operate at a large GAAP loss.
|
| They were never losing that much cash, and they have
| recently become cash flow positive, https://www.macrotrends
| .net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/price-...
|
| The large GAAP loses comes from dilution - mostly in the
| form of stock based comp. In theory if growth exceeds
| dilution then investors are still owning an appreciating
| asset, and if the stock is richly valued (as TWLO was) then
| it makes sense to fund that growth with capital rather than
| debt.
|
| But yeah, as a shareholder I felt their stock based comp
| was egregiously high and it took management a little too
| long to realise we're in a new world and things needed to
| change... A side point, but that's actually why I invested
| in TWLO because the stock got so beat up and their SBC was
| so excessive that it was kinda obvious that things were
| going to need to change and the market would react to that
| positively.
|
| The markets seem to be reacting favourably to this news and
| again I think that's because there was an assumption that
| Jeff Lawson was largely to blame for the lack of focus on
| profit optimisation.
|
| Personally I think Jeff is a great CEO though and I didn't
| want to see him go. I just wanted him to make some tough
| decisions to stop the burn - which more recently he seemed
| to be doing. While I do think they need to be more finance
| minded in this next stage of the business, I would doubt
| whether a developer focused tech company like Twilio will
| benefit much from a managerial leader like Shipchandler.
| We've seen this mistake made repeatedly by tech companies
| in the past.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| "Jeff Epstein Appointed Chair of the Twilio Board of Directors"
|
| That's an unfortunate name to have. I've always wondered how
| people handle when this happens. If it's as big a deal as I feel
| it would be if it were me.
| 7ewis wrote:
| Bloomberg said:
|
| "Twilio Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson is stepping down
| from leading the software company he co-founded amid slowing
| sales growth and pressure from activist investors."
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ce...
| lagniappe wrote:
| What a shit sandwich. Not everything needs to be a hockey
| stick. There's is an angle of the growth line that should not
| be exceeded because above that level of growth seldom is a good
| situation for the consumer.
| gphil wrote:
| The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't
| need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-
| subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to
| their investors because they have no other fundamental to
| point to.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed, either take the investment and the dragons that
| will come to burn your village or grow slow and own your
| future (Basecamp/37signals), but make peace with that
| you're always going to be small (but it'll at least be
| yours).
| walls wrote:
| Maybe a notification API provider doesn't need to be
| spending a ton of money on "AI".
| dalyons wrote:
| instead of posting a poorly informed take, you should go
| and have a look at their list of product offerings. They
| havent been just a "notification API" for a long time
| now.
| ejb999 wrote:
| I think that is exactly the OP's point - they are
| spreading them selfs so thin in many areas (AI or not),
| they took their eye off the ball.
| mdp wrote:
| Here's another source - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/08/twilio-
| ceo-lawson-steps-down...
|
| "The move is not likely to stave off the activists at Anson
| Funds and Legion Partners. Both are pushing for the company to
| sell itself or completely divest its data & applications
| business, CNBC previously reported."
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! I've changed the URL from
| https://investors.twilio.com/news/news-
| details/2024/Twilio-A... to that article, which gives more
| background (and isn't a press release).
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| [deleted]
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| can you source major shareholder? The doc I found said 3.7%.
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-s...
| gkoberger wrote:
| I don't know much about what happened here, but I did meet the
| early Twilio team (not Jeff, unfortunately) back in 2009 and knew
| they were something special.
|
| Jeff (and team) deserve a ton of credit for two massive things:
|
| First, changing how people think about devtools. I know Stripe
| gets a lot of credit, but Twilio was 3 years earlier and really
| defined how we look at building, marketing and monetizing tools
| meant for devs. They were early (if not first) to the devrel
| space, and Jeff's live coding (paired with a phone literally
| vibrating) was something I had never seen before.
|
| Second, I know a lot of people have lots of opinions about San
| Francisco, but I have a lot of respect to Jeff for always
| standing up and fighting for the city that enabled him to build
| his company. He seems to be a really good person, and is one of
| the few CEOs I find myself eager to emulate.
|
| Good luck to Jeff, Twilio, and everyone else involved. Jeff built
| something really special in the early years. And jeffiel, now
| that you have a bit more time on your hands, hopefully we can
| finally cross paths!
| pylua wrote:
| The stock price has been lackluster unfortunately. I'm not sure
| as to why.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| One issue might be that Microsoft (as ever) launched a
| milquetoast competitor that sounds the same to a purchasing
| department in 2020[0].
|
| [0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/25/microsoft-
| declares...
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _One issue might be that Microsoft (as ever) launched a
| milquetoast competitor that sounds the same to a purchasing
| department in 2020._
|
| AWS (and presumably Google) also provides a suite of
| telephony services with Chime, SNS, Connect, etc. I assume
| the strategy now is to sell to/merge with a smaller CSP to
| provide a competitive portfolio of services.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > The stock price has been lackluster unfortunately. I'm not
| sure as to why.
|
| Stagnant revenue and declining free cash flow means that the
| company doesn't have many tools in the toolbox to be valued
| higher.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| My take: They're too expensive at volume (and they have
| competitors, just not famous ones) and not specialized enough
| / not best in class compared to tools like Klaviyo.
| teitoklien wrote:
| They own a lot of those regional competitors that are less
| well known.
|
| They play in both market categories, they sell it at higher
| margins with twilio brand.
|
| Then sell it again, at lower prices from more regional less
| known brands.
| drchopchop wrote:
| This. They're great for small/mid-sized developers, but
| they price themselves out once you're doing billions of
| messages a month. At that point companies start looking at
| aggregators one level down (i.e. closer to the carriers or
| raw SMTP).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Stock price isn't a great indicator of product quality
| though. Stock price requires endless growth which is
| unsustainable.
| bwilliams18 wrote:
| But it is ultimately what will result in a CEO departure.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| No. Stock price requires higher per share values.
|
| One can continuously grow a stock if they reduce the shares
| outstanding.
|
| That being said iirc buy backs have notoriously all gone to
| executives. Essentially they buy back, and then award
| themselves options to re-dilute, but cannot readily find a
| source for that. So maybe incorrect.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| When a business does a stock buyback, the business
| receives the stock, not any executive(s).
|
| The business might pay the executive with stock per the
| board approved compensation package, but a CEO does not
| wake up and say "I want to give myself 5M shares so let's
| do a 5M share buyback".
|
| A buyback benefits all shareholders equally by reducing
| supply of the stock and therefore increasing its price.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > the business receives the stock
|
| correct. Hence my wording
|
| > and then award themselves options to re-dilute
|
| It's not that executives receive the bought back stock,
| but that their stock based compensation plans result in
| no net decrease in the amount of outstanding shares.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I'm somewhat on top of the stock, here's my not financial
| advice take:
|
| 1. Growth rate slowed such that valuations had to come down
| (went from inevitable overtaking of Salesforce in size, to
| decades of growth required)
|
| 2. Environment -- Cashflow negative meaning another raise was
| required without fiscal controls and in a high interest
| environment that's really tough. A return to office end of
| covid anxiety meant the Covid bubbled stocks are returning to
| mean. (eg compare zoom has done relatively similar over past
| 5 yrs)
|
| 3. IMO a few execs were absurdly over compensated whilst
| investor pressure against dillution was targeted to rank and
| file employees. eg: Eyal Manor earned a reported $42M in
| compensation (and a $2.5M retention bonus that reading
| between the lines sounds like hush money), meanwhile ICs were
| often given below cost of living raises and no refreshers.
|
| 1-2 means outside investors had to lower the valuation and 3
| meant a combination of dilution and morale hits.
| umeshunni wrote:
| https://contracts.justia.com/companies/twilio-
| inc-3579/contr...
|
| Looks like Eyal's compensation was more like 9-10M?
| mikeryan wrote:
| https://www.execpay.org/executive/eyal-
| manor-42374/r-186733
|
| He got 33M in stock grants in 2021
|
| You're both pretty much right it looks like he vested all
| the RSUs in one year so he while he took it all home in
| 2021 it had probably vested over 4 years, the first 3
| when it wasn't reflected as comp.
| gkoberger wrote:
| A few other things that could contribute to a slowing
| growth rate:
|
| 1. People build software differently now. There's not as
| much reliance on text messages (fewer phone apps build
| built, 2fa via phone is considered dangerous, etc)
|
| 2. Gig economy is stabilizing. There was a huge increase in
| new companies for years, but at this point it feels like
| we've stalled on new innovations in that space (while a lot
| of VC-subsidized ones have faded out)
|
| 3. There's way more regulations on spam (good for us, bad
| for Twilio). I think Twilio did as good a job of avoiding
| spam as anyone could reasonably expect, but the barrier to
| entry to using Twilio for even reasonable projects now
| involves the government. Plus with the crackdown on spam
| (good!), a portion of their business has likely been
| affected.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I have no idea the breakdown of their revenue, but my
| understanding is that now they do a lot more than just
| the SMS they were famous for. Especially with all the
| companies they bought.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Semi-related to your third point, I do not trust a text
| message from a company that does not use the shortened
| phone number system that was popularized by Twilio. It's
| the easiest way to detect phishing attempts because
| scammers don't use those.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Wait, you trust shortened numbers _more_ than un-
| shortened ones? That hadn 't occurred to me before.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why wouldn't you? Anyone and their mother could get a
| long code number from Twilio for $1/mo, without any kind
| of verification or KYC process.
|
| Meanwhile, a short code would run you $4500 for three
| months (IIRC, memory is fuzzy, and it's probably
| changed), and you had to go through an approval process
| with all the mobile carriers (that is, Verizon, T-Mobile,
| etc. had to individually approve the short code) where
| you explained your use case and promised not to spam.
|
| (Obviously things are different now with the campaign
| registration and approvals requires even for long code
| numbers. But short codes are still harder to get, and the
| approvals more rigorous.)
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Environment -- Cashflow negative meaning another raise
| was required without fiscal controls_
|
| The company was founded almost 20 years ago, and went
| public in 2016..and they are still needing to raise money?
|
| I mean, this isn't a capital intensive space, right? What's
| the deal?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| They spent a ton of money buying other companies. That's
| always capital intense.
|
| Software isn't capital intensive the way a large
| industrial factory would be, but it still has unfavorable
| financial conditions that require raising. You can't sell
| software until you've built it, so you have to incur a
| large employee/R&D expense for years until the product is
| ready. And of course none of that is IP that you can just
| get a loan against (unlike say, building a factory).
| fshr wrote:
| > You can't sell software until you've built it
|
| It's funny to contrast that with the video game
| publishers. They'll push to sell things that aren't even
| close to finished, make bank, and do it again and again.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| The new CEO will be selling the company now. Hold on.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I truly hope it's not the divide and sell that activists
| have been pushing for. The time to sell to CRM or ADBE
| was during pandemic highs, now both those are probably
| more interested in AI hype. I think AWS or another cloud
| provider would be an interesting pairing though, but with
| Jeff out so does the hopes of an Amazon relationship
| besides 2023's announcement
|
| https://investors.twilio.com/news/news-details/2023/AWS-
| and-...
| pastor_bob wrote:
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/shares.
| ..
| x0x0 wrote:
| I think the common thread with Twilio the sms/sip product and
| Twilio the CDP / nee Segment is this: businesses outgrow
| them. Both of them work well for smb and lower midmarket, but
| as companies grow, become horrendously expensive and
| essentially strongly encourage migration off. A public
| company is not a failure, but when your product has a ceiling
| with your customers, that's painful.
|
| I also had a really annoying experience with Sendgrid post
| acquisition. I'd used Sendgrid for my first company (as in I
| personally made the purchase, implemented the apis, and for a
| long time, was the sole and then admin account). I went to
| use it for my next company pre website launch and they froze
| my new account and their customer service was a pita. To be
| fair, the site wasn't up, but I needed the ability to send
| emails to publish the site (it's a crucial part of new
| account flow.) They wouldn't allow me to use sendgrid even
| though I was happy to share my linkedin, my previous history
| with their company, etc. We're happy sendinblue customers.
| kelnos wrote:
| My take: ignore the pandemic. The stock price was around $90
| before the pandemic hit, which isn't much higher than it is
| right now. Twilio was basically the perfect remote-work-
| enabling pandemic company. And the market piled on and
| thought Twilio was a great place to put money during a global
| pandemic, when so many other places seemed risky or
| disastrous.
|
| After mid-2021, that $400+ stock price started looking a
| little silly. And the broader market downturn in 2022 hit
| Twilio even harder than it hit the broader market.
|
| And, meanwhile, Twilio's growth numbers -- while still being
| an unprofitable company! -- look worse than they did at the
| beginning of 2020. $75 might be _generous_ for how the
| company is actually doing.
|
| (Full disclosure: former employee for ~10 years, and I still
| have a few shares left.)
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| > and knew they were something special
|
| Can you share more insights on how you knew they were special?
| haswell wrote:
| Not OP, but their approach to devrel was by itself a huge
| differentiator early on.
|
| We've become so accustomed to developer-oriented marketing
| and programs that it's easy to forget that Twilio was really
| at the cutting edge of this movement and should be credited
| (or at least acknowledged) for the easy on-ramps most
| developer programs now provide.
|
| Twilio also pushed the envelope in terms of what it means to
| talk to their developer community. Greg Baugues' talk titled
| "Devs and Depression" reached a lot of people who were
| struggling, and was one of the reasons I personally sought
| out therapy, and my life is much better for it.
|
| Early Twilio was a very human-oriented company, and I think
| many developers and developer programs are better for it.
| gregorymichael wrote:
| Hi. Greg here. :heart: Good job taking the steps to get
| help!
| haswell wrote:
| Hey Greg! Thanks again for the work you were doing. It
| made a difference.
| rprospero wrote:
| Congratulations, Greg! You've come a long way from Mr.
| Shadiow's CS class
| neom wrote:
| Developers And Depression | Greg Baugues | Talks at Google:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CausE8Sc8Uc
| gkoberger wrote:
| I was an intern at GigaOM in 2009 (a popular tech blog that
| ran conferences), and my first memory of Twilio was going to
| the sales people and trying to convince them to give Twilio a
| discounted booth because I thought the product was so great.
| I remember the salesperson laughing and saying "this booth
| costs more money than they have in their bank account", but
| there was some extra inventory and we got them the booth.
|
| The early people all just had this vibe of technical-but-not-
| complicated. It's common now, but at the time it was such a
| breath of fresh air. They were one of the first companies to
| pitch "easy of use" (compared to "look at how amazingly
| complex we are!"). I know this is super obvious now, but back
| then I had never felt anything like that.
|
| All the people I met (I specifically remember Danielle) were
| friendly and excited... not in a sales-y way, but in a "I
| just love what we're doing and want you to, too" way. And
| again, I know this doesn't feel unique now, but that's
| because Twilio helped shape how we think about all of this.
|
| I loved their attitude, such as this talk from John Sheehan
| (https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/runscope-ceo-and-
| twil...) about how they look at customers. I remember him
| saying they would fly to any little city that would have them
| and buy pizza and just hang out. They caught on early that
| there were so many tech people out there around the country
| who would become lifelong supporters because of little
| gestures like this.
|
| Overall, a lot of what I can say about Twilio is super
| obvious now. But it's kinda like how people watch Friends for
| the first time in 2023 and say "meh it's a pretty generic
| sitcom". It's because they created the whole genre and
| shifted how everything thinks.
| johns wrote:
| <3
| rurp wrote:
| > Overall, a lot of what I can say about Twilio is super
| obvious now. But it's kinda like how people watch Friends
| for the first time in 2023 and say "meh it's a pretty
| generic sitcom". It's because they created the whole genre
| and shifted how everything thinks.
|
| I feel this way about most classic media. Famous movies and
| books almost always feel underwhelming to me because the
| notable ideas have been reused and referenced so many times
| that the original ends up feeling like a retread decades
| later. Interesting connection to tie this phenomenon to
| tech marketing and dev relations.
| carimura wrote:
| When we started Iron.io in 2010, there were basically 3
| companies at every developer event driving the API-first
| message: Heroku, Sendgrid, and Twilio. Back then, most thought
| Heroku (as the Platform) was going to be the one ending up in
| the public markets. Then they got taken out and Twilio bought
| Sendgrid. Congrats to Twilio and team for the years of success!
| mtnGoat wrote:
| I used iron.io for years. Sad story there I think but I don't
| know the details. Seemed like Great service for years then it
| kind of fell off, the service still worked thankfully. But no
| new features, and support would take days.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| They laid off all of those early Dev Relations people, from
| what I understand.
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm personally not a dev, maybe amateur dev, but I am a
| professional I.T. consultant and sysadmin, and I have used and
| thoroughly enjoyed Twilio's tools for years. They are
| accessible enough for even low-skill amateur devs like me to be
| able to spin up test programs and functions that do really cool
| things. I am heartened to hear that my longtime support has
| gone to a company whose culture and leadership have been
| worthy. Hoping for the best to everyone involved.
| Solvency wrote:
| Out of curiosity what cool test programs does a sysadmin make
| with Twilio? Custom system alerts over SMS?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| https://archive.is/8Ffn4
|
| Keep in mind his voting structure changed in May meaning he lost
| some shareholder power.
|
| > Its use of supervoting shares, which gives CEO and co-founder
| Jeff Lawson a voting stake of 21.8% even though he owns only 3.7%
| of the stock, [1]
|
| No derogatory remarks intended to Jeff, Jeff certainly has had
| great moments, but Kho is also a fantastic leader and capital
| allocator, who's made some truly uncanny calls (like raising in
| the market near the top,and share buy back near the bottom). I
| think Kho is the right person for the job in the times that
| Twilio finds themselves. It's something I've hoped for for years,
| as a shareholder. Jeff deserves praise for the humility to step
| down and promote from within a well groomed and talented
| successor.
|
| [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-
| lose-s...
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Any exec who actually tries to sell the stock high, and buy it
| low is a winner in my book.
|
| Most just follow the crowd and do shareholder dilutive buybacks
| at nosebleed valuations.
|
| If you can buy a long duration US treasury yielding more than
| twice what your shares yield, maybe stop to think before doing
| any buybacks.
|
| Though I've written it up to mostly short term-ism towards
| increasing their own compensation through pressuring share
| price in the immediate term. The alternative is that all these
| CFOs and others are financially illiterate or incompetent
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Reminded me of another point on the board for Kho, He was
| smart enough to grab a billion in 10yr bonds at like 3% which
| was genius for the growth rate (if you can grow money at 10%
| then you should take every penny you can get below that).
|
| https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-
| insights...
|
| The only party he missed was putting our cash reserves in
| BTC. (which is an inside joke). It would have made the money
| like $4-5B based on the time of the suggestion. I think
| investors will be happy to hear he flatly outright said no to
| that. It looked like a missed opportunity (at $64k)... until
| it didn't. (back at $16k)
| csharpminor wrote:
| Agree with this. For folks not familiar with Twilio leadership,
| I would liken Kho to Twilio's version of Tim Cook. For the size
| and stage of growth that Twilio's at, he's the best possible
| replacement for Jeff.
| Aeolun wrote:
| They recently cancelled their video offering and recommend we
| move to zoom. Maybe the ship is sinking?
| figers wrote:
| They had such a good video offering, never had an issue, very
| surprised by this, why not try to charge more before dumping
| it?
| kwindla wrote:
| They have not adequately funded the video product for a very
| long time. Other companies built out better infrastructure
| and a much broader range of features. The market also turned
| out to be smaller and differently structured than all of us
| thought. (I am a co-founder of a company that competes with
| -- though also predated -- Twilio Video.)
| kwindla wrote:
| I have a dog in this fight, but strongly recommend that you do
| not move to [the] Zoom [Video SDK].
|
| tldr: architecture that doesn't work for web apps, performance
| issues, missing features
|
| https://www.daily.co/blog/zoom-web-sdk-technical-notes/
| gregorymichael wrote:
| When I joined the Twilio Developer Evangelism team in 2014, we
| spent a lot of our onboarding practicing the "five minute demo"
| where we live-code a Twilio app from scratch. I thought this was
| dumb, mostly because live-coding is so damn hard.
|
| Six weeks into the job I watched Jeff live-code a Twilio app in
| front of 10,000 people at IBM Connect. It was as if he was saying
| to all of us, "Yeah, live-coding is hard. And if I can do this in
| front of 10,000 people, you can do it at your local Ruby meetup."
|
| It was the first of many, many times over my nine years that Jeff
| led by example, set the bar, and pushed us all to reach levels we
| didn't know we were capable of. Working under Jeff's leadership
| was the privilege of a career.
|
| I can't wait to see what he builds next.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Are there any uploads of Jeff live coding?
| gregorymichael wrote:
| Here's the time he built "Hawk or Not" with Tony Hawk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHYyD3upNc&t=6120s
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| This is John Britton, not Jeff Lawson, but an example of the
| live coding. Epic demo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o
| paxys wrote:
| The new CEO:
|
| > Shipchandler has over 25 years of experience growing businesses
| and driving financial performance across global, public
| organizations. Prior to Twilio, Khozema spent over two decades at
| GE where he drove operating excellence in GE's high tech aviation
| division, plus accelerated growth in the Middle East region.
|
| I wouldn't be too enthused about him running a software-focused
| company. His experience yells "generic businessman brought in by
| investors to squeeze more profit".
| raiyu wrote:
| Yeah definitely not a good sign for Twilio - the tried and true
| playbook will now get executed once again.
|
| Fire a bunch of people, especially those that are most tenured
| and have the highest salaries.
|
| Raise prices each quarter to achieve revenue growth with the
| assumption that customers are more inelastic than suspected and
| won't leave.
|
| Doubtful that any smart acquisitions will occur, given that
| requires an actual understanding of product, customers, and
| markets.
|
| The beginning of the end until some larger corporation, looking
| to grow their revenue base decides to acquire them.
|
| End of an era for sure.
| akmittal wrote:
| > Fire a bunch of people, especially those that are most
| tenured and have the highest salaries.
|
| That's already done
| fooster wrote:
| Not even close to enough. Look at the growth of revenue and
| headcount. It is clear another huge cut has to be made.
| goopthink wrote:
| But also:
|
| > He has a deep understanding of Twilio's business, operations
| and culture, having most recently served as President of Twilio
| Communications, and previously as Twilio's Chief Operating
| Officer and Chief Financial Officer.
| sswaner wrote:
| I agree that this is not a move I am happy to see. I hope I am
| proven wrong. I have been struggling with my love of Twilio.
| For years they have been one of my favorite tech companies, but
| I have been really struggling with them and their products
| lately. It feels like they have lost their core mission.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > His experience yells "generic businessman brought in by
| investors to squeeze more profit".
|
| In Twilio's case, it is "squeeze some profit". Having revenue
| be greater than expenses seems like a reasonable goal for a
| business's leaders.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-in...
| ipqk wrote:
| As an Indian-American, I'm weirdly elated that Indian-Americans
| can now be thought of as "generic businessmen" (at least in
| tech).
| shadowtree wrote:
| Google/Sundar is seen as the template, not necessarily as a
| positive one. Doing the needful, to the grave.
|
| MSFT/Satya is the outlier, should be what others aspire to.
| kelnos wrote:
| To be fair, Khozema joined Twilio as CFO more than 5 years ago;
| it's not like he was brought in externally and knows nothing
| about the business.
|
| But yeah: Jeff had been working toward GAAP profitability for a
| while now, but was unable to deliver.
|
| I have my own feelings and biases about the company's
| trajectory over the past years (I worked there from 2011 until
| 2022), but ultimately a) Jeff lost his super-voting shares last
| summer, b) he didn't deliver on profitability, c) growth
| numbers have been unimpressive for a while now. Activist
| investors have been saber-rattling for most of the past year.
| Of course Jeff was going to get forced out, sooner or later.
| debacle wrote:
| Twilio is in a weird spot. They are so cheap that it's very easy
| to build a successful company on top of their APIs, and choosing
| their APIs is a no brainer.
|
| They probably need to go vertical and capture some of the value
| their users are generating to have the kind of revenue investors
| want.
| shakes wrote:
| I worked at Twilio for nearly 10 years and it's hard to overstate
| what a gift it was to work there and see Jeff operate as CEO up-
| close.
|
| He created an environment where (at our best) we could have fun
| doing work that had a real impact, and we could it with people we
| enjoyed doing the work with. He pushed us to be creative to
| authentically empower and inspire developers. Wanna build a video
| game that teaches developers how to code and use Twilio? Let's
| try it! Wanna build an AI application with Tony Hawk and have
| Tony Hawk debug the code live on stage? Sure!
|
| And Jeff would always be spending time with developer tools and
| Twilio's products himself, to the point that he could live code
| at the drop of a hat to show off what we'd been working on. This
| meant his own understanding of developers and their problems
| never ceased to amaze me.
|
| But more than all of that, he was a rare CEO that led with
| empathy, humility and care.
|
| Thank you, jeffiel. We can't wait to see what you build next.
| throwaway_108 wrote:
| It's also why George Hu left Twilio.
|
| Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the
| detriment of the company.
|
| All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on
| George's watch.
|
| I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left,
| on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total
| of ~24% of their entire public company being let go.
|
| Note: former senior level Twilio employee, posted anonymous for
| obvious reasons.
| vehementi wrote:
| Did any of those layoffs coincide with the global layoffs?
| Moto7451 wrote:
| September of 2022, Feb 2023, and December 2023. So no,
| kinda, and no.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Sep 2022 and Feb 2023 was the peak layoff season in the
| industry. Mostly guided by interest rate hikes.
| jmacd wrote:
| George Hu cut his teeth under Benioff during the most
| meteoric rise of both Salesforce and Benioff's celebrity. I
| would be very surprised if Jeff's desire to be a public
| facing CEO would even cause George to notice, let alone
| bristle at.
|
| It's more likely that someone as smart as George might have
| just looked at the fundamentals of the business and decided
| it could not keep this up over the long term.
|
| or... it might have just been epic timing too. Probably.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't have any direct knowledge, but the gossip flying
| around internally at the time was that a big part of George
| leaving Twilio was because he wanted the CEO role, but knew
| Jeff wasn't going to leave and give it to him.
|
| That was gossip, of course; sure, George may have decided
| back then that -- even with all the growth he drove --
| Twilio wasn't going anywhere long-term.
| jmacd wrote:
| The fact that George has not taken on a CEO role since
| tells me that it probably wasn't a driving factor for
| him. That's conjecture though. I think that role would be
| available to him at a lot of strong companies if that was
| his goal.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Being a celebrity CEO makes sense when interest rates are low
| and your main job is to keep convincing investors to pump in
| money. Of course when interest rates are high, and your main
| job is business and company fundamentals that's a lot less
| useful. I'm seeing a lot of startups (and public companies)
| with CEOs like that floundering right now.
| gkoberger wrote:
| This is a genuine question... isn't that his job?
|
| For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO.
| Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves
| as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others
| as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it,
| and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you
| can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when
| you were private.
|
| I've never known Jeff to hobnob with celebrities, travel in
| luxury or abandon his company. I'm not sure he's a "celebrity
| CEO" as much as he just became a public one, although I don't
| know him personally.
|
| (FWIW, this is the reason I'd never want to go public. I
| personally don't like the system, but that doesn't mean it's
| not how the system works.)
| wslh wrote:
| > For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity CEO.
|
| No. Look at S&P 500 CEOs.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I've seen celebrity CEOs in non-public companies a lot more
| than in public companies. There is a difference between
| being the public face of the company and being a celebrity
| CEO.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Only if you pretend that the CEOs job is purely for raising
| money.
|
| Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help
| brew the culture that makes that company productive.
|
| We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people
| stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10
| years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to
| raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies
| they built.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Everything you said here is true, but I don't think it
| applies to Twilio or Jeff.
|
| I don't think you can accuse Jeff of not caring about
| company culture. He built one of the defining dev
| cultures out there. Yes, this have changed as they've
| grown, but I've always found the people and offices of
| Twilio to be warm, productive and smart.
|
| And Twilio was forged in the hardest time to raise money
| ever... 2008. If anyone knows how hard it is to build in
| a climate without easy money, it would be Jeff.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| Memories are short, but Twilio was built when doing what
| seemed obvious - add an API to telecom services - was
| really hard. It's what Stripe is (doing, not done) to
| banking & payment, what countless companies have failed
| to do with Healthcare... I met Jeff in the early days and
| the fact that he (a) managed to stay the CEO through this
| growth & timeline, and (b) gave few enough sh!ts to
| maintain a hacker dev mentality makes him a notable
| standout. I'm not surprised that lots of people with
| legitimate viewpoints and perspectives DO/DID NOT like
| him or his approach. To me, that's a feature; we need
| less CEOs and senior executives who try to be all things
| to all people.
| lokar wrote:
| It depends on the company and what it needs.
|
| At google Eric had very little to do with product and
| engineering. He was still a very effective CEO.
| callalex wrote:
| I was tasked with taking over some of jeffiel's code
| bases around the time period we are discussing here. He
| perfectly skirted the line of telling me what he was
| thinking while writing stuff and simultaneously staying
| out of it and letting the people he hired take the reins.
| He spent most of his time interacting with Cxx and
| Director level people to set the tone and direction of
| the company, while still taking the time to know what ICs
| were doing so that he could usefully answer questions and
| use our products.
| hitekker wrote:
| IMO, you and the GP are onto something with the term
| "celebrity CEO". In Jeff's case, he seems like a
| celebrity CEO for his employees/developers, who we
| identify with, though not for his customers, who we are
| largely not.
|
| His customers probably expected better products, whereas
| his developers expected another round of amazing perks
| and fun work.
| pmontra wrote:
| I don't know the right answer here, but there are thousands
| of public companies. If every CEO has to be a celebrity,
| meaning that everybody knows them and which company they
| are the CEO of, it's going to end up like for actors: tier
| one world superstars, tier two stars, then people you don't
| hear much about, then people you read their names sometimes
| in the closing credits, otherwise they are only random
| faces on screen.
|
| If that's the case, the top layers of the system have space
| for so many CEOs. Some won't even care to be there, they'll
| just do their job and take the salary plus bonuses.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Sure. I'd say 99% of people in tech couldn't name the
| Twilio CEO. I don't think he's really a celebrity CEO, at
| least not in the way that's being implied about him (as
| in, I think "public" and "celebrity" are being conflated
| here).
|
| Jobs certainly was a celebrity CEO, and despite all the
| criticism of him, I've never once heard anyone imply he
| was bad for Apple (or its shareholders). Musk is a
| celebrity CEO, much to the detriment (and potentially
| benefit? who knows) of his companies.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity
| CEO._
|
| Is it?
|
| From the DJIA: can you even name the CEO of 3M? Cisco?
| Amex? Visa?
|
| I don't think celebrity is a pre-req for being a CEO. And
| as OP suggests, it _could_ even be a detriment.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's also a double edged sword where greater visibility
| leads to greater scrutiny. Galen Weston Jr stepped into
| the public eye much more during the pandemic as the face
| of Loblaws (Canadian grocery chain), and although it
| originally was welcome, he ended up outing himself as
| just another entitled, out of touch zillionaire, and at
| least in my social circles becoming kind of as punchline.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Why he thought to cast himself in commercials is beyond
| me.
| randomdata wrote:
| Why's that? He has been doing the commercials for around
| a couple of decades, staring long before he was the one
| doing the casting. Even after taking that role in 2016,
| the previous commenter points out that the commercials
| continued to be well received until well into the 2020s.
| It was a successful formula for a long time.
|
| Indeed, positive audience sentiment has an expiration
| date. He rode the wave too long, perhaps, but it is hard
| to know when to stop. All ongoing media productions (e.g.
| TV shows) suffer from the same problem and question of
| when to keep going and when to move on.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I didn't actually know that he'd been doing it for a
| while, but I've not ever been a regular TV viewer. The
| change from my perspective was the commercials showing up
| in my Facebook feed and my family group chat joking
| around about the latest dispatches from old Gal Pal and
| how we could pick up a shrimp ring for 20% off.
|
| So even if it was a longstanding thing, pushing the
| content toward a more millenial/gen-z audience is still a
| new direction and risk.
|
| In the end, the biggest factor was the dissonance between
| his warm, cozy "all in this together" messaging combined
| with grocery price hikes and news like this coming on the
| other side of it all:
| https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/11/loblaw-report-profit-
| foo...
| randomdata wrote:
| Funny thing is that restaurant patronage has declined
| considerably in Canada in the past year or so. Even with
| many restaurants now operating at a loss (i.e. paying you
| to eat) to try and win back customers, they are failing
| to capture hearts and minds.
|
| If people aren't eating at restaurants, it is almost
| certain they are getting their food at the grocery store
| instead. For all the mockery of Galen, it seems the
| marketing strategy has been unbelievably successful.
|
| That's probably why he continued to cast himself even as
| the audience focus shifted to millennials and gen-z.
| Letting someone laughing at you for a few minutes is no
| big deal. Watching them love you when they show up at
| your store over and over makes it all worthwhile, I'm
| sure.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| >> just another entitled, out of touch zillionaire,
|
| You can level a lot of criticism at Jeff but I don't
| think this one applies.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I can't. But could most people name Jeff, even in tech? I
| bet people in finance certainly know (and closely watch)
| the CEOs of these companies.
|
| I did reword my comment though, because I don't agree
| Jeff is a "celebrity" as much as a "public" CEO.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I work in tech and had never heard of Jeff or George. I
| could name every CEO of Twitter or Google, or the
| founding CEOs of companies like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber,
| Coinbase, etc. Companies like Twilio and Unity don't
| really register.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Twilio is more of a "how the sausage gets made" type of
| company, I do t really think its the type that benefits
| from a celebrity CEO
| roflulz wrote:
| everyone knows the Stripe founders tho...
| swozey wrote:
| I've worked on some of the foss tech (infra and ptsn)
| that twilio has used for almost a decade. Know all about
| what the company does. Have applied there (to which they
| never replied). Known plenty that work there.
|
| Ironically my previous partner works there and she didn't
| know anything about the company prior to taking the job
| so me not even getting a reply to my application was a
| jab. I've always seen twilio in a positive light they do
| some really interesting work.
|
| I live in the city of their HQ. I have no clue who the
| people mentioned in this thread are either but it makes
| sense that they'd see the CEOs in a positive light with
| how much positive I hear(d) about the place.
| bearcobra wrote:
| Being able to keep track of the craziness that is the
| leadership history at X/Twitter is kind of impressive.
| nostrademons wrote:
| There actually haven't been that many, and double-
| checking against Wikipedia I forgot Parag Agrawal but
| Wikipedia forgot Linda Yaccarino. I divide them up into
| eras and power struggles:
|
| 1. Jack Dorsey. Founding era, founding engineer, forced
| out when Twitter was ~30 employees because he had no
| management experience.
|
| 2. Evan Williams. Growth era. Another founder, but one
| who had past experience dealing with hypergrowth, getting
| companies acquired, and working inside a big company.
|
| 3. Dick Costolo. Maturation era. Adult supervision, he's
| the professional CEO hired to manage Twitter because both
| of its previous CEOs were really startup people.
|
| 4. Jack Dorsey (2). Came back after gaining some
| political savvy and learning how to launch a boardroom
| coup. Founded Square in the meantime and got a bunch of
| experience being CEO of another company. Also famously
| the guy who shut down the Jan 6th insurrection by
| blocking the sitting U.S. president from Twitter.
|
| 5. Parag Agrawal. Caretaker; Twitter was in trouble by
| then and Jack Dorsey was either forced out or decided it
| was better to die a hero than be remembered as a villain.
|
| 6. Elon Musk. Bought Twitter in a fit of insanity.
|
| 7. Linda Yaccarino. Glass cliff. Installed as CEO so that
| X's eventual demise is not Elon Musk's problem.
| michaelt wrote:
| There's celebrity CEOs and there's celebrity CEOs.
|
| Without googling, can you tell me the name of the CEO of
| Target? Sony? Texas Instruments? BMW? FedEx? Mitsubishi?
| Exxon? Home Depot? Siemens? Procter & Gamble? 3M? Nestle?
| Broadcom?
|
| I certainly can't.
|
| But I bet you can tell me who the CEOs of Tesla and Amazon
| are.
|
| Just because whoever-is-in-charge-of-siemens hasn't run a
| vanity PR campaign to raise their personal profile, doesn't
| mean it would help the company if they did.
| hnfong wrote:
| There's big company and there's BIG company.
|
| # Market caps:
|
| Target 64.99B
|
| Sony ~116B (I think)
|
| TI 152B
|
| BMW ~70B
|
| Fedex 62B
|
| Mitsubishi ~70B
|
| Exxon 396B
|
| Home Depot 343B
|
| Siemens 141B
|
| P&G 349B
|
| 3M 60B
|
| Nestle ~290B
|
| Broadcom 501B
|
| ...
|
| Amazon 1520B
|
| Tesla 750B
|
| The sum of the market cap of the first group of companies
| is ~2.068T USD, while the sum of the second group is
| ~2.270T.
|
| And of course the CEO of Tesla is(?) allegedly the
| richest man in the world, which is one of the reasons why
| people know him. And I honestly don't remember the name
| of the CEO of Amazon since Jeff Bezos stepped down.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _There 's big company and there's BIG company._
|
| Which is Twilio?
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| Not this big, but very large with a market cap of 13B.
|
| In tech circles, a very well known story though.
| swozey wrote:
| lmao Teslas market cap is such a joke. 750bn, 10x higher
| than BMW while I see tens of millions more BMWs on the
| road and the BMW brand has astronomically more staying
| power as brand recognition. Wild. Nobody would be
| surprised if Tesla flopped but we know BMW, a company
| over 100 years old won't flop.
|
| I can't imagine being offered a choice between owning
| (the company) Tesla or BMW and picking Tesla.
|
| edit: Tesla did 4.2% of total market in 2023, outpacing
| VW, Subaru and BMW. They did 25% more sales in 2023 than
| 2022. They sell 500-700k/yr right now with 2023 being
| 660k. BMW delivered 550k cars worldwide.
|
| https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-2023-u-s-market-share-
| volksw...
| Solvency wrote:
| Shhh you must not rain on techbro's fanatical obsession
| with fantasy market caps. It's the only aspiration
| validating their particular niche of career.
| rubyfan wrote:
| _> isn't that his job?_
|
| The CEO's job is to create value. The answer to your
| question is "it depends".
|
| If buyers of their services are impressed with his ability
| to live code _and that moves the needle on results_ , then
| yes. If the same can be accomplished by having a non-CEO
| developer evangelist, then probably no.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| This is not specifically about Jeff in any way, but no,
| it's not a CEO's job to be a celebrity. It's their job to
| allocate capital in a superior way (relative to the
| investors desires ie how much beta, and to marginal
| opportunities elsewhere in the market). If they cannot
| produce a better Risk Adjusted Return then they simply
| should be returning the capital, not being a rockstar and
| growing.
| swyx wrote:
| is that you, George Hu?
| antiraza wrote:
| I don't know the specifics of these two CEOs, but those were
| two very different eras financially in the tech sector. To
| nail all of it on just a CEO's door feels reductive, at best.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Why would that be why George Hu left Twilio?
|
| A CEO has to be the face of the company and needs a good
| reputation. It seems like he was a good leader.
|
| From an outsider it looks wrong.
| pinkfairy10 wrote:
| ...George left right as ZIRP ended. Maybe coincidence but
| that played a big part in TWLO's growth and subsequent
| stalling as well
| anildash wrote:
| Please. George joined the company when it was damn near a
| decade old, and already a publicly-traded company. It's
| embarrassing to ascribe anywhere near the agency to someone
| like that than to a founder.
| acchow wrote:
| > Wanna build a video game that teaches developers how to code
| and use Twilio? Let's try it! Wanna build an AI application
| with Tony Hawk and have Tony Hawk debug the code live on stage?
| Sure!
|
| These are the strange effects of ZIRP and infinite QE. Many
| companies never had to care at all about profit and could just
| do things "for fun", and still see valuations skyrocket as long
| as they hired more people. What a time.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies
| always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic
| climate. It's when you ceded leadership to the accountants
| and shifted gears to maintenance mode that companies stopped
| growing. You never did these things for fun, you did these
| things because they had some knock on effect that made it
| potentially worth it, and in a portfolio of many small bets
| some would blow up into your next big product. Even the ones
| that seem far left field they created an environment where
| people felt allowed to dream at all, and their knock on
| effect was in creation of a risk taking culture.
|
| Blaming low interest rates on taking risk and doing highly
| speculative things, and investing in a culture that values
| that by funding off the wall stuff puts too much emphasis on
| the capital markets. If the company was a steel producer,
| fine. If it's a company that essentially captures the stuff
| of dreams and produces a service that executes thought stuff
| in machines, you have to decouple your R&D from capital
| management to the extent your free cash flow can accept it.
|
| Note of course low interest rates and other capital market
| looseness will create _more_ opportunity for this behavior,
| and not every company doing these things is doing some is a
| well managed way. But they don't have to - that's the magic
| of capitalism. Through a Darwinian process only those who
| strike magic win and survive and the others recycle and try
| again. This feels like a feature not a flaw of zero interest
| rates - it creates enormous value by virtue of incentivizing
| taking risk at a time of high innovation. There are times in
| history where innovation rates were very low, and zero
| interest rates would just incentivize broken behavior. But at
| a time when almost all growth is coming from innovation,
| maybe loose credit is smart. ml
| ctvo wrote:
| > In my 32 years in the industry the best performing
| companies always did these things regardless of the
| macroeconomic climate.
|
| Agreed. Creative, high performing people don't do well in a
| work environment that's structured like a regional bank.
|
| Valve Software -- incredibly profitable, high performing
| and private company, did fun things like hire economists
| (and then later Greek prime minister) to study and simulate
| virtual, in-game economies [0].
|
| Blizzard Entertainment had giant statues of orcs made and
| fan conventions before their downfall, ya know, in the ZIRP
| macro economic environment.
|
| Google allowed their engineers 20% time. Before ZIRP.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis#Academic
| _care...
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Just a small correction, Yanis was the minister of
| finance, under the PM, who at the time was Alexis
| Tsipras.
| balls187 wrote:
| > Valve Software ... high performing
|
| Depends on how you measure performance. ARPU? Very high.
| Shipping software? Super low.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| _> Google allowed their engineers 20% time._
|
| I once heard that this was more like 120% time? Meaning,
| 'extracurricular activities' on company infra was allowed
| and encouraged, but not at the expense of regular
| productivity/output.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > In my 32 years in the industry the best performing
| companies always did these things regardless of the
| macroeconomic climate.
|
| My anecdote, FWIW, is that some of the worst performing
| startups do these tricks too.
|
| There's something about flashy events and boondoggles that
| sound good on LinkedIn that draws bad founders into
| spending waaay too much on parties and fun activities.
|
| Stripe obviously isn't in that category, but never assume
| that because a company spends a lot on parties and events
| that they're doing well.
| Solvency wrote:
| Seriously. Half of the Silicon Valley show was lampooning
| this corporate excess of frivolous indulgence.
| sokoloff wrote:
| My wife is not in tech (and so enjoyed Silicon Valley
| quite a bit less than I did when we watched it together).
|
| Every so often, she'd express frustration about the "over
| the top writing" in Silicon Valley. _Way over half_ the
| time, I could tie whatever it was she was complaining
| about to some concrete story from our industry.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _My anecdote, FWIW, is that some of the worst
| performing startups do these tricks too._
|
| I absolutely agree with this. Monkey see, monkey do.
|
| I think the big winners who make it "fun" are the
| exceptions that prove the rule. Whatever they _really_
| have that leads to success (be it simply luck, timing,
| connections, market fit, whathaveyou) is a _lot_ less
| visible and harder to replicate than the lazy, obvious
| stuff like "make the workplace fun for developers" which
| any wannabe can emulate.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > In my 32 years in the industry the best performing
| companies always did these things regardless of the
| macroeconomic climate.
|
| I think the question is more about whether doing these
| things caused the company financial success, or whether the
| company's financial success caused them to do these things.
| It strikes me as plausible that it's almost always the
| latter, even if the company's financial success isn't
| attributable solely to the macroeconomic climate.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Usually the issue is you can't encourage creative risk
| taking with structured austerity. Structured austerity is
| about improving operational efficiency and there's a
| place for that. But at companies that survive and thrive
| on creative risk taking, giving the reigns to the CPAs
| kills the culture.
|
| I think it's usually a sign of success that to protect
| the golden goose you stop taking creative risks and focus
| on operational efficiency.
|
| Macroeconomic conditions really matter a lot more for
| capital intensive enterprises like manufacturing,
| refining, real estate, etc. Most creative / R&D based
| companies are much less cost of capital sensitive and
| frankly low interest rates matter a heck of a lot less
| for their planning and operations.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I see a third causality option.
|
| Both << being successful >> and << doing these things >>
| could be caused by a single root cause: a leadership team
| playing the long game.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| > In my 32 years in the industry the best performing
| companies always did these things regardless of the
| macroeconomic climate.
|
| What companies?
|
| Some of the best performing public tech companies of the
| past 30 years include Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Nvidia, and
| Microsoft.You can get some variety in this list by varying
| the exact start and end dates, but certainly the first 4
| are going to make most lists. Others like Google and
| Facebook handily beat the total market.
|
| Certainly a lot of companies that never went public
| (Instagram, WhatsApp, Credit Karma, etc...) performed very
| well for their investors when they got acquired. And some
| companies that since going public haven't been blockbuster
| successes, like Snowflake, still were probably very
| lucrative for their VCs and other early investors.
|
| Anyway, I don't feel like most of the really great
| performing companies that come to my mind are particularly
| "fun," but maybe I maybe I'm not paying attention and/or
| don't know because I don't work at them.
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Great comment. ZIRP is endless stock buybacks and
| $boomer_rock_band or $expensive_celebrity speaking at your
| conference. Those are capital owner and executive benefits
| and don't drive the product or curate new customers.
|
| Tony Hawk at this event is just a marketing stunt and his
| celebrity can be beneficial to drive engagement, impress
| potential customers, keep existing customers happy, help
| with recruiting, etc. Those stunts can get incredible
| attention. Look at how common celebrities in advertising
| and endorsements are.
|
| Stock buybacks, having the Moody Blues play your annual
| meeting or the Rich-dad-poor-dad guy give a speech to execs
| and play down to their biases doesn't drive marketing or
| the product. Its what execs enjoy personally and burn
| through money for these entitlements. Instead this money
| should be used to give raises to the working class.
|
| Also I'd substitute accountants for MBA's in your comment.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Share buybacks are a capital return to investors. This is
| a sensible and desirable thing to do in a lot of macro
| environments. ZIRP may increase the instances of
| borrowing money to do share buybacks, just like it would
| increase the propensity to borrow money to do any other
| valid corporate activity. There were share buybacks in
| the 80s and 90s when interest rates were quite a bit
| higher than today.
|
| Adjusted for inflation, there were more buybacks in 2000
| than in 2015 and interest rates were quite a bit higher
| in 2000 than in 2015.
| dools wrote:
| QE and ZIRP are deflationary policies because they reduce the
| amount of interest payments (which are no different from any
| other transfer payment) paid by the government.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| * QE = Quantitative Easing
|
| * ZIRP = Zero Interest Rate Policy
| 1tao wrote:
| as a first order effect, sure. but do you agree they have
| resulted in the inflation which causes our debt-burden/GDP
| to rise?
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think this is a bit reductive. Sure ZIRP created an
| environment where people could get away with trying crazy
| things, but there was still an expectation of growth in
| pursuit of some longer time-horizon market dominance. These
| kind of things may be more risky, but they still can be
| justified in the pursuit of market awareness and growth.
| Also, when you're building software products, there's real
| value to engaging the creativity of the team.
|
| The fact that the music continued so long and led to
| incredible valuation inflation over the last 15 years made
| the excesses look a lot worse, but even in a more sane
| financial environment I'd argue you'd still want to do these
| things to be competitive in an attention-economy, just maybe
| not to the extremes we saw.
| lulznews wrote:
| Don't forget massive PMF in the case of twilio
| mise_en_place wrote:
| These are multibillion dollar companies, not your scammy SV
| dogshit startups. Fun is a rounding error for them.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Were companies in other sectors besides so-called "tech" able
| to disregard profit and just keep hiring as a result of ZIRP
| and QE. If yes, what are some examples.
| toddmorey wrote:
| My question is what these activist investors think the fix is.
|
| In my experience they'll bring someone in to try to apply
| aggressive sales strategies to a dev tools company & it never
| goes well.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Twilio already uses aggressive sales strategies. They make
| you deposit $20 to test out their API AND THEN they tell you
| to get approved by talking to customer support.
|
| I was unable to get approved so I guess I'm out $20 for no
| reason. They have the worst dev experience I've ever seen.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think they've already made that clear: sell off the
| underperforming data & applications units.
|
| But my feeling is they really just want to strip the company
| for parts and/or sell it to private equity.
| tootie wrote:
| I'm having trouble parsing this against what Twilio does.
| Are they talking primarily about the Segment acquisition? I
| primarily know Twilio as an SMS gateway.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Interesting. I tried to create a Twilio account 2 weeks ago and
| it was the _worse_ developer experience I 've ever had _by
| far_.
|
| Like seriously.
|
| They first make you deposit $20 to get started. THEN, they tell
| you to talk to customer support to activate your account
| (customer support took forever to reply).
|
| Oh and then I had to fill out like 3 applications and my text
| messages are still randomly getting blocked - I have no idea
| why.
|
| To be clear, this is literally just me using Twilio to text
| myself to test out the API. I'm not some spammer or something.
| It was impossible to get started.
| Phurist wrote:
| You have to thanks the abusers and scammers for that. All
| nice things have to be locked down :(
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| They had really nice APIs but they had not enough protection
| from spammers. But APIs were really sweet...
| anildash wrote:
| Strongly seconding this (especially as someone who was
| backstage with Jeff and Tony right before that demo). What's
| less visible is the impact and influence Jeff has had in
| enabling leaders and founders to do the right thing. So much of
| the pressure and industry influence on CEOs is to be short-term
| thinkers, to ruin their user experience, or to be harmful to
| workers.
|
| I've seen, both personally and through others who've relied on
| his example or mentorship, Jeff be a force for good for those
| who were trying to do right while leading companies. And to
| even be someone to call in (or call out) a mistake when you
| make it -- which a lot of bigger-name people are way too
| cowardly to do. He's also spoken up for his city, and for
| vulnerable communities, when it would have been so easy for
| someone of his stature to just stay silent.
|
| It's obvious that Jeff is a brilliant technical innovator, but
| he is just as much of a pioneer of thoughtful and conscientious
| leadership in an industry that's become woefully bereft of it.
| crabasa wrote:
| People who weren't there don't understand, but the world before
| "Ask Your Developer" was completely different than the world we
| live in today where developers are at the heart of how
| decisions are made, products are built and how the world itself
| is changing.
|
| I joined Twilio in 2012 and I saw first hand how pivotal Jeff
| was in supporting the idea that in order for a platform to be
| successful it needed to treat developers like first class
| citizens, and not simply the recipient of a "directive to
| integrate" from the CTO.
|
| This idea wasn't simply a fist bump to devs for cool points, it
| was a recognition that developers themselves held the key to
| innovation and creating radically new things. This culture led
| to entirely new ways of building API docs, designing developer
| dashboards, creating developer events, and so on.
|
| So many of these things have become mainstream and the new
| baseline for platform companies that people forget how unlikely
| it was in the beginning and how hard Jeff had to fight to keep
| the company from treating developers as a means, and not as an
| end. And I think all developers who are happily hacking away on
| a free tier of a cool API with excellent docs and a vibrant
| developer community should tip their hat to a person who helped
| make this normal and influenced a generation of leaders to do
| the same.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Reading this and related stories, seems to be related to activist
| investor pressure. Reading into that, seems that activist
| investors are pushing Twilio to divest from their Data &
| Applications business. How I understand it Twilio has moved into
| "customer engagement" from their initial core business and
| investors aren't happy with the direction or returns from that
| business unit.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Ooof at the Segment acquisition :-/
| taf2 wrote:
| Wish it was a T-Mobile purchase instead :/
| jijji wrote:
| I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started
| blocking all my text messages, then they wanted you to describe
| what you're using it for and you had to pay money to fill out a
| form to tell them what you're using the text messages for....
| then they would deny that and then you basically can't use
| twilio, or pay them to fill out the form again so they can deny
| you again.... This is for outbound SMS (payment notifications to
| customers) so I wound up writing an Android application that runs
| on a phone that just sends out SMS messages using an API talking
| to a server..... I'm paying $8 a month to Tello now which is
| about 1/5 the amount of money that I was paying to twilio so I'm
| glad that I switched..... but I think they really screwed up
| recently.
| echelon wrote:
| They serve big businesses now. They don't want small players
| coming in with potentially abusive behavior. Twilio worked hard
| to build its relationships with carriers and doesn't want to be
| dragged down by spam.
| oogali wrote:
| This is likely because of industry regulations around A2P
| (application-to-person ) messaging that had a due date of
| August 31, 2023.
|
| It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with
| nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I
| work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me
| to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected.
|
| https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/6650461-changes-to...
|
| https://www.telgorithm.com/news/10dlc-registration-required/
|
| https://support.referrizer.com/support/solutions/articles/10...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with
| nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I
| work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising
| me to come into compliance or risk my messages being
| rejected.
|
| From what I can tell, the telcos aren't performing any
| enforcement, even tho the deadlines and extensions are long
| past. Not to say they won't but the endeavor seems to have a
| stall vibe going on.
|
| Some of that might be related to having major mass-campaign
| requirements placed on small biz who occasionally send a
| handful of texts (often non-sales) from their workstation
| phone apps.
|
| At least I hope this is why it has stalled. Sending a few
| texts during a customer service session shouldn't be
| regulated as if it were a blast of 1M SMS ads.
| taf2 wrote:
| The blocking was 100% not Twilio's fault it was 100% bad actors
| and pressure from congress. Also we have three major carriers
| now in the US they needed to act fast in August since congress
| was going to go back I session in September to force this. So
| the carriers wanted to be able to say to congress see we are
| already taking care of the spam issue ... see
| https://www.campaignregistry.com/. The single monopoly in
| charge of the regulations
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started
| blocking all my text messages,
|
| New telco industry texting requirements came into play. In
| short, US biz are required to register with _The Campaign
| Registry_ and pay regular fees if they want to do _any_ (as in
| 1+) software text comms.
|
| It can be onerous for not-large biz. Twillo took point early-on
| (inserting themselves into the administration, IIRC) and Twillo
| then got a lot of heat from their users - even tho the
| requirements originated from the telcos.
| danenania wrote:
| Somewhat surprising/disappointing to me was that now you
| can't even send SMS to a number that initiates the
| conversation--this would seem to be a pretty clear opt-in
| indicator. Because of that, I couldn't find a way (through
| Twilio) to get around the registration requirements just to
| send SMS to my own number for development purposes to try
| some things out. The registration workflow and UX is also
| comically terrible and confusing.
|
| It's a shame as I think there are some legit non-spam use
| cases for SMS as a messaging platform, but considering you
| now seemingly need to pay, fill out a bunch of annoying/buggy
| forms, and wait for days to who-knows-how-long before sending
| a single message in development, I'd say it's been pretty
| well destroyed as anything a dev would ever play around with.
| Who's going to do all that before writing a line of code?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I think your frustration is reasonable. The telcos are
| favoring major marketing companies by unreasonably imposing
| big biz requirements on small biz and indy devs (through
| platforms like Twillo)
|
| That bad UX is being supplied by The Campaign Registry org.
|
| I do recall Twillo performing TCR's tasks in the beginning
| (applications, registration, etc) but only until TCR was
| spun up. It's all on TCR now.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Is the typeface/font being used here glitch for others, too? It
| looks kinda like a dyslexic optimized font where certain
| characters have different weights.
| timoteostewart wrote:
| Yes, for me too.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Same (Chrome, FF and Edge)
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah, w, z, r, d, and some other chars look heavier than the
| others.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| On my end as well, Mac + safari
| makaimc wrote:
| I worked at Twilio from 2014-2023 and had an incredible
| experience during those 9 years, including all of my interactions
| with Jeff.
|
| One of my favorite moments was running into Jeff in the hallway
| at our Beale Street office just before he had to do a quarterly
| earnings call after we went public. I said "good luck on the
| earnings call" and Jeff said thanks then asked what happened to a
| link to a specific Stack Overflow question/answer from one of our
| docs pages that got removed. He had just been building an
| application and felt like that answer was particularly helpful
| for context in a certain programming language, and was surprised
| it was removed.
|
| Jeff's always been software developer at heart even though he had
| a ton of non-dev responsibilities. There are definitely
| advantages and disadvantages in that mindset! But he created a
| tremendous company along the way and I wouldn't change working
| there for anywhere else during those years.
| annthurium wrote:
| I worked at Twilio for 4 years and it was one of the highlights
| of my career. End of an era, for sure. Thanks Jeff for trying to
| build an anti-racist company even when it upset some of our
| investors.
| westhanover wrote:
| Its still crazy to me all of the people who are out there
| starting racist companies. If you aren't anti-racist you are...
| silenced_trope wrote:
| > Thanks Jeff for trying to build an anti-racist company even
| when it upset some of our investors.
|
| Yikes.
|
| I guess when the company has no profit or potential you have to
| try to build something else?
| zer0zzz wrote:
| Yeah sure, then he proceeded to layoff most of the black staff
| from an acquisition the company made around the same time he
| made that statement.
| anovikov wrote:
| All of the media clouds that did not include telephony, were
| always bad business cases, sometimes got repeatedly sold and
| resold like a proverbial hot potato, see TokBox.
|
| Twilio did include telephony and was originally built as
| telephony-only provider, so it really stood out and was a lot
| more sustainable as a business than anybody else.
|
| But, importance of telephony is falling. When was the last time
| you dialed-in to a Zoom conference? Without that, what's left of
| telephony? Just the 2FA SMSes.
|
| I believe long term, providers like Twilio will become very thin
| layers of indirection to aggregate together underlying phone
| operator services, and will be mostly owner by those phone
| operators themselves, like Vonage now owns Nexmo, Twilio's direct
| competitor. Nexmo's API makes a lot more sense than Twilio's by
| the way, and is a true pleasure to use.
| nunez wrote:
| people dial in all of the time in the meetings i have. zoom is
| still awful in low-bandwidth situations.
| jmacd wrote:
| The decline of Twilio's position has been as pretty clear for the
| last 18 months now, and has been a topic of conversation longer
| than that. Twilio never had the margins or control of their
| environment to nearly the degree you need to have in order to
| maintain software monopoly levels of growth over time.
|
| Most of Twilio's business has been built on reselling network
| access purchased via SMS consolidators. These are companies who,
| decades ago, got their hardware installed inside the networks of
| the major phone carriers. This allows them direct access to
| send/receive SMSs. Twilio never really tried to own the network
| layer and these companies continued to demand higher and higher
| tolls for access. Short codes are a very good example of this.
| Twilio spent a lot of time and money trying to sew up access to
| those short codes.
|
| On top of all that, high volume customers would move directly to
| these consolidators. Sometimes Twilio would keep some portion of
| the business if the sender used a round robin model to distribute
| sends, but often they didn't. OpenMarket and a handful of others
| were the goto providers at scale.
|
| Add on to this the overall decline of the utility of SMS. Even as
| SMS volumes increased, they have not increased at the same rate
| as messaging overall. ie: other channels like iMessage and
| WhatsApp continue to pull volumes.
|
| Cue Twilio's attempt to go up market. Flex and the purchase of
| Sendgrid were the best examples of this. Could CPaaS work for
| Twilio as a business model? I think we've seen so many fits and
| starts with the Flex product line and the integration of Sendgrid
| that it seemed like perhaps buying their way in to that market
| wasn't panning out.
|
| Finally, as seen in the last year, the culture just seems to have
| gone off the rails at some point. [1] I don't know Jeff, but my
| respect for him is sky high. I've read all his writing over the
| years and he's been hugely influential for an entire generation
| of founders.
|
| Unfortunately this seems like a bit of a hasty departure. I hope
| it isn't, but the choice of replacement CEO screams caretaker-CEO
| rather than shrewd strategic move.
|
| Another commenter mentioned Stripe [2] and how they get a lot of
| credit for advancing DevTools. I agree that Twilio did it first
| and I think paved the way. Jeff Lawson and Twilio deserve more
| credit. "Ask your developer" was not a small thing at all.
|
| I also think Stripe very likely is in a very similar position,
| but they are earlier in their cycle and they've avoided the
| scrutiny of being a public company. Credit card processors are
| gatekeepers and fully dominate in their markets. Stripe serves a
| purpose for them and dramatically improves access to their
| networks via great tooling and abstractions, but there is still a
| fixed cost toll to pay and what that toll is cannot be static for
| interminable time. Is Stripe in the "Commerce" market like Twilio
| is in the "Communications" market, or are they in the "payments"
| market, like Twilio is in the "SMS" market? (or somesuch)
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382361 2:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913134
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| In the early days of Twilio, carriers laughed at what we were
| doing. It didn't help that most of the people at Twilio
| pre-2014 didn't speak much "telecom." But to your point, it was
| tough to rely on these carriers who thought Twilio would be
| gone in a few years so they didn't put much stock in ensuring
| the infrastructure was redundant and robust.
|
| I was on several calls with providers begging them to put us on
| a more robust network. Especially in years when there was an
| election. In those early years, we had one customer doing more
| minutes than our entire customer base. In fact, at an early
| Twiliocon (pre-Signal) John and Jeff had to help build out an
| entirely separate environment for them because it was dragging
| everyone else down.
|
| My point is that the early days were definitely the "Draw the
| Owl" days. We were figuring out things on the fly. Carriers
| were dubious and it was tough to get things working
| consistently. However, by 2015 those same carriers were
| developing APIs of their own.
|
| Twilio changed the game for the telecommunications industry.
| Two years before joining Twilio I was putting in large-scale
| Avaya systems. The fact that I wrote four lines of code to make
| a phone ring blew my mind. Twilio and Jeff created something
| special. It's sad to see his run come to an end, but every
| company needs to adapt to the changing times. This is just
| Twilio's time to adapt.
| drc500free wrote:
| > On top of all that, high volume customers would move directly
| to these consolidators.
|
| This is pretty key to understanding Twilio's prospects as a
| business. In my experience, they are fantastically easy to
| integrate at first.
|
| But they come with a cost that blows up your financial model if
| your product is any kind of high-volume use case, or if SMS is
| factored in as a direct cost and you're talking to investors
| about unit economics. At some point you have to get off of them
| and onto a cheaper-per-SMS solution, even if it costs more dev
| hours to maintain.
| objektif wrote:
| What are cheaper sms solutions that are also reliable and can
| be used at scale?
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| Fwiw I think a key difference in stripe vs twilio in your
| example is that stripe has 2 levers that twilio doesn't have
| good analogs to:
|
| - stripe can be a "financial home" for many of its customers
| and build higher-margin pockets of software functionality,
| using easy payments as an on-ramp. See: stripe billing, radar,
| sigma, connect, etc.
|
| - stripe is more likely to be able to "swap out" the credit
| card rails than twilio would be able to "swap out" sms. If the
| financial ecosystem evolves to make eg debit cards or any other
| kind of payment easier, stripe can simply add them as payment
| methods, as they already do for non-CC payment types (most
| notable outside of the US). So stripe is already at the
| abstraction level of "move money from customer to me" instead
| of "run their CC".
| jmacd wrote:
| I think those are good points and valid, but Twilio definitly
| had equivalent arguments in their own product.
|
| Encumbents manage scale very very well and historically they
| tend to come to a market late. While Stripe is rushing up the
| value chain, the issuers are just slowly lumbering around.
|
| Billing, Radar, Sigma, Connect are all very well built
| products which drive usage of their core revenue generator. I
| suspect the revenue mix at Stripe is still largely payment
| processing. Voice minutes and SMSs on a carriers network, or
| authorizations and settlements on an issuer network.
|
| I am not saying Stripe is doomed, far from it, but it's a non
| trival problem to solve over the long term and the default
| state is attrition. I think Twilio is a very good example of
| how difficult this can be.
| coloneltcb wrote:
| Hats off to a legend. Twilio was The Beatles to the devtools
| space. They defined modern devrel and the bottom-up/PLG GTM
| motion. He also disproved would-be investors who said developers
| would never pay for an API; in fact they'd prefer that to
| building something only to get rug-pulled when a company decided
| their free API was no longer strategic for them.
|
| And while you hear a lot about ruthless but effective asshole
| CEOs, Jeff happens to be a brilliant executive and a great human
| all at the same time.
|
| True visionary and 1 of 1.
| pkiv wrote:
| What a great run. I remember the IPO party in 2016, very early in
| my career, and being in disbelief that a texting API was used by
| so many people. It was my first time writing code for systems
| that operated at _real scale_. While the last few years have been
| a bit rocky, you can't understate the impact that jeffiel had on
| the developer tools ecosystem.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| writing systems at that scale is exhilarating, it's a shame
| that it's a small club
| movingmove wrote:
| I had the "pleasure" working for Twilio for over 4 years. I
| cannot tell how much this showed me how you can fake it til you
| make it in SF.
|
| Twilio tried to expand into Europe and failed miserably.
| Customers (especially German ones) wanted exact locations of
| data, exact routes of packet transportation, wanted features
| Twilio promised on Slides but never delivered.
|
| I was part of at least 4 customer meetings (the biggest in
| Europe) where the clients just called Senior levels in and told
| them off.
|
| Twilio was great when it just handled voice and text messaging.
| It never grew substantially, it never delivered features
| customers were asking for years. Messy code base, hired product
| owners with no clue what they should actually build.
|
| Jeff was famous for over-promising and under-delivering. 1 year
| into my Twilio career, it was clear that the company would fail
| hard. Colleagues and I had bets on when Jeff will be fired or the
| company sold. Well, the last few months have been telling.
|
| A sad story, since they had a great core product, really smart
| people, great people working there. But especially through the
| pandemic, they grew an insane amount without actually building
| anything of substance.
| karim wrote:
| One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you
| stayed on for 3 more years? What happened there?
| ctz wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but agree with their assessment and stayed
| 3.5 years despite that. For me, the reason was the vesting
| schedule: 4 years with a 1 year cliff.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| But why would you want to vest a bunch of options/shares
| that you think will decline substantially in value over
| your tenure there?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Hypothetical scenario:
|
| You join and are granted 400000 options at $10 strike and
| stock is worth $10
|
| 2 years in and the stock price is now $110
|
| You think the company is terribly run and the stock with
| crash at this point. However if you quit, you lose the
| 200000 unvested options worth $2M on paper
|
| Even if the stock crashes to $20 they are worth $200k
|
| Hard to find a better paying job in that situation until
| the options are fully vested
| kelnos wrote:
| I mean, you can take it quarter by quarter. If you get
| your vest and (even if you sell them immediately) the
| value is worth it to you, you'll probably stick around
| for another quarter to get the next one.
|
| You don't just say on day 1, "I don't think the company
| is going anywhere, but I'm committing to staying another
| 4 years".
| smt88 wrote:
| Knowing a company is going to fail doesn't automatically mean
| the compensation and/or culture don't work for you.
|
| One way a company can be mismanaged is burning money it can't
| afford on ridiculous employee perks, like when Twitter got
| its own DJ.
| collingreen wrote:
| Part of the problem, perhaps?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Being an employee isn't the same as being an investor. Some
| jobs are good even at bad companies.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I was in a similar situation. A year into a job with a large
| company, I realized the company had issues and that I didn't
| like most of the people I worked with.
|
| I stayed for ~1 year after I realized I needed to get out: At
| the time I was getting paid very well, had very low expenses,
| and was saving to quit my job and start my own company.
|
| My original plan was to stay a few months longer to build up
| some more savings, but "things happened" inside the company.
| I was re-assigned to a horrible manager; I hunted around for
| another assignment (on the advice of my boss's boss,) but
| that was going to be Flex-based. (And I bet correctly that
| Flex was going to fail in the marketplace.) I decided that I
| was better off quitting and self-teaching myself HTML +
| Javascript instead of getting paid to learn Flex. However, I
| could have stayed for a 2-3 more years, worked in Flex, made
| a boatload of money, and selectively applied for jobs
| elsewhere.
|
| > One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet
| you stayed on for 3 more years?
|
| There's a lot of risk in changing jobs: If you "have a good
| thing going," it's best to bide your time until a better
| thing comes along. Interviewing is quite time consuming too,
| so don't assume that someone can just casually make a few
| phone calls and walk away with a "better" job. (This is
| especially the case if you have kids, a house, a mortgage,
| and a significant other who has their own career.)
| ejb999 wrote:
| this is pretty much my take as well - but as a non-employee - I
| was a big fan and user of twilio when they first came out, even
| attended the very first few twiliocon conferences in SF,
| (mostly developer focused) where they would announce and
| release new features - lots of excitement as new things got
| announced and rolled out during the annual conferences.
|
| Then after not very long, you would goto the conferences where
| they would make announcements about what is coming, but no real
| timelines attached and some things that were announced, never
| really materialized - or not fast enough etc.
|
| Then they started diversify like crazy into other areas,
| unrelated, and I think they really lost their focus - stopped
| using them (99% stopped) a long time ago for those reasons.
| Solvency wrote:
| So: What big brain moves did you think Twilio should have made
| during your 4 year tenure there that they failed to do?
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I joined Twilio in May '11 the week of the private launch of
| Twilio Client. I was #18 or so.
|
| My first day, we got briefings on what it was, what it will do,
| and then had to finish docs and re-arrange the office for our top
| customers. (At that stage, most people knew them by name. Shout
| out patio11!)
|
| Since I knew nothing and the docs were.. weak, I decided to take
| out the garbage. I grabbed the bags and asked where the dumpster
| was. Jeff Lawson stopped me and asked if I had an office key card
| to get back in. Oops, nope. So he grabbed a bag and we took it
| out together.
|
| So yes, Jeff opened doors for me. ;)
|
| Despite the last year or so of chaos, he founded and built a
| company that redefined telecomm specifically and tech gtm as a
| whole. Not a bad track record.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| And the infamous five minute demo.. we drilled on that
| constantly. At my peak (2013), I was giving it 2-3 times a week
| in front of small groups, with the occasional sales reps, and
| in front of huge events.
|
| My favorite times were:
|
| - for one of Bob Metcalfe's courses at UT Austin. Yes, that Bob
| Metcalfe, the co-creator of ethernet. I talked about the origin
| of Metcalfe's Law here too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259442
|
| - 1:1 for Werner Vogels at SXSW. I gave it to one of his senior
| guys and he said "wow, this is great, let me go get Werner"
| which was intimidating as f.. a lot. But I managed to nail it.
| nonstopdev wrote:
| As someone who has loved Twilio from the early days and have
| built many apps for small and enterprise cases as well as fully
| embraced Flex in the customer experience space, I really have no
| idea what the hell they are doing now. Not sure if they are right
| sizing after trying to capture markets like video and Contact
| Center but it seems like even successful sales teams are let go
| now so curios where they emerge from this.
| ezxs wrote:
| I wouldn't be happy about that. The innovation generally stops
| when the folks who really know the customer and have the audacity
| to pull the trigger on big changes are replaced.
| sbeckeriv wrote:
| I haven't used twillo since 2014 and I don't use twillo at
| company. I have recently tried to use it for my own projects and
| I have not had a good time with the product. I was able to set
| things up fine with the docs but the ui and the support didn't
| seem to understand the hobbyist concept. I could not get my
| number registered for texting again and support did not care.
| Example: I cant release the number I have because it has an
| emergency address I need to remove. I cant find the ui to remove
| the address. I can only add address. While the ui banner says
| "Please add an emergency address to this phone number or you may
| incure a $75.00 charge per emergency call."
|
| I am just waiting for my minimum required balance to be eating up
| by fees i dont understand. I have moved on to a chat service. I
| wish them luck moving forward.
| totalhack wrote:
| Twilio is great and super frustrating at the same time. I've run
| into outdated or missing documentation, and plenty of low hanging
| fruit UI improvements that get ignored. They seem to be asleep at
| the wheel at this point.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| twilio gone through soem radical changes lately with the new
| regulations. its much more difficult to use
| knodi wrote:
| I think with the US Carriers mandating proper campaign
| registration process for texting, even small number of testing it
| has taken a huge toll on their support. I think earning for last
| year q4 are about to be lower then expected
| EMCymatics wrote:
| I don't see how this move changes anything.
| ultrasaurus wrote:
| I met Jeff back in 2011 when I was considering moving to SF.
| Although I didn't end up at Twilio, I distinctly remember
| thinking I'd be happy to work for him. His original Twilio demos
| were a big part in convincing me to make the move to working at a
| proper startup.
| shadowtree wrote:
| Given the successor, they'll either flip Twilio or go private
| equity - in both cases Twilio as we know it is toast.
|
| Amazon could snatch, also Oracle the evergreen. SFDC is the dark
| horse, don't see MSFT touching it due to massive AWS setup.
|
| Godspeed.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| I'm upvoting this, it's a clear issue
| ejb999 wrote:
| I always thought AWS would end up buying them, of course this
| was 5+ years ago when I had that thought - not so sure anymore
| ... but I do agree, I don't think they will remain a company
| as-is.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| not good for twilio. probably will bounce up in the short run as
| they increase financial discipline. (ie cut projects and teams).
| but then its not clear to me what their tech/product vision is
| going forward. and their core markets of sms and voip are slowly
| being replaced by other channels. (IE companies like Stream for
| chat, braze for notifications & marketing, authy for 2fa etc)
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I believe that Twilio owns Authy fwiw
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| We will now watch the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of
| Twilio.
|
| I think this is especially sad as Twilio really was a reflection
| of the purity of product and engineering coming together to make
| more than the parts.
|
| I can't think of a better leader at the intersection of people
| and technology than Jeff Lawson.
|
| I think Twilio has a unique opportunity to lead in AI if they
| kept their Hacker spirit. Unfortunately the fatal blunder here
| was that they signed up for this outcome via IPO. Not much better
| being private under PE, however it was doomed to this fate the
| moment they went public.
|
| All that said, congrats Jeff (jeffiel) for doing such an amazing
| job and holding on this long.
| tomashertus wrote:
| I love Twillio's products. As a developer turned product manager,
| I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the
| wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively
| favorable ROI.
|
| Anyway, I wish the best of luck to Jeff. I consider his book Ask
| Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers
| and Win in the 21st Century to be one of the must-read books for
| founders.
| sp527 wrote:
| > I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the
| wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a
| relatively favorable ROI.
|
| This was not my experience. The gulf in pricing between
| Twilio's raw STUN/TURN solution (which they had clearly gone to
| great lengths to keep hidden amongst their product offerings)
| and their batteries-included WebRTC API solution was so vast it
| was almost comical. At a certain scale, a company could save
| maybe millions of dollars a year at the cost of a day or two of
| extra engineering effort. They were far from averse to the
| strategy of looting their customers.
| davidshepherd7 wrote:
| Does anyone have a list of which products are in which business
| units?
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| How do folks respond to the notion Twilio could be replaced by
| KeePass or to what extent is that true/untrue in terms of 2FA?
| Not sure what they do outside of that
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Moving someone from CFO to COO and finally CEO doesn't inspire
| confidence in a Board's ability to find the best people for a
| role.
| winter-day wrote:
| I worked at twilio when they were a series B company and Jeff
| personally did the on boardings. I think it was the only company
| I've worked at where I felt that every engineer was a super star.
| I've followed their career since then, and they've gone on to do
| phenomenal work. My opinion is that they had very weak leadership
| below the C-suite. We brought on one of the founders of skype,
| and after having lunch with him all I could think is how good he
| is at talking and how little value he'll deliver. I felt the same
| about the core engineering managers, and they went on to screw
| over a lot of the early talent - that now thrives at top
| companies. Regardless, Jeff was amazing. He was the sweetest guy
| and use to throw bbqs at his home. How fast the years go by.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Seems like such a common failure mode - early team proves pmf,
| then founders go on and hire substandard management who
| alienate early folks, hire their puppets/friends and proceed to
| ruin everything. I've seen it personally a few times now and
| still not quite sure why otherwise smart founders keep falling
| for it.
| zubspace wrote:
| If you want to see Jeff Lawson in action, you should watch a
| great talk of him about company culture and values [1]. Even
| though I'm a programmer and usually don't think too hard about
| such topics, I can fully relate to his ideas. He's sharing the
| process of how they arrived at twilio's company values [2], which
| really are exceptional.
|
| Usually company values are just written down as a checklist
| somewhere, which you once read and then forget about. But
| twilio's values are fun to read, think about and easy to follow.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKI8Jah-Po
|
| [2] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/company/values
| kelnos wrote:
| I worked at Twilio from 2011 to 2022, and it was quite the
| amazing ride, especially for the first four or five years. Twilio
| basically wrote the book on API-first businesses, and on how to
| court developers to use and love a product, and evangelize that
| product to less-than-technical management types. While Jeff
| wasn't all that involved in the technical side of things by the
| time I joined, he still kept his engineering chops up, and it was
| always fun to see him live-coding Twilio apps on conference
| stages.
|
| I was disappointed in Twilio for the last several years I was
| there. What had started off as an engineering (and product)
| focused company devolved into being driven by sales. We put out
| some products that were half-baked from an engineering
| perspective, and it showed: missing or buggy features, downtime,
| and unfulfilled promises to customers that sales/product made
| with barely perfunctory consultation with engineering. IMO it
| really hurt the company's reputation. I remembered a time when
| mentions of Twilio in tech circles would come with praise and
| even awe; more recently complaints seem to have overtaken the
| good vibes.
|
| The "Ask Your Developer" billboard on US-101 as you entered SF
| was iconic. I loved that billboard; it perfectly encapsulated
| what the company stood for and illustrated why I was so happy
| there. For a while it was changed to something about reducing
| customer acquisition costs, a big red flag. More recently, it
| says some meaningless nonsense about "digital greatness" and
| "customer AI". That kind of shift tells me everything I need to
| know about where things have headed.
|
| Ok, time to stop being so negative... having said all that, I
| wouldn't trade my time there for anything. I learned more than I
| thought possible, worked with a ton of people who I respect
| heavily, made many lifelong friends... it was a life-changing
| experience. Jeff was a big part of that, and I'll always be
| thankful to him, Evan, and John for creating a place where I
| could thrive and grow.
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