Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
It's hard to get me to part with my money. I didn't go through with it, but this site almost convinced me to.
Twilio S-1
121–130 of 229 posts
Re: Twilio S-1
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot disagree with your attitude more. This company is saying they have an existing threat to their ongoing operations that _will_ be fatal, that they are unsure will ever be solved. This is fundamentally different than saying ad blockers could impact Google's business. In a way, their honesty is unexceptional because they are required by law to be honest about their risks. But the level of risk is not usual.
Wide spread ad blocking would be fatal or nearly fatal to Google. The loss of the vast majority of their income and the resulting contraction that comes with that would probably tear apart the company.
Near-universal ad blocking (across all kinds of devices) would be fatal to so many different businesses and business models.
Revenue primarily derived via ads seems kind of unsustainable at this point. And the same may even eventually be true of TV commercials.
Re: Twilio S-1
#123"Disrupt" appears 18 times in this filing. Is that code for "one day we'll be profitable, I promise!"
Re: Twilio S-1
#124There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…
> This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. I haven't looked at the S-1 and I'm not sure if they even break this out, but user acquisition costs are all paid up front, while the value is realised over the life of the customer, depending on the average lifetime of a customer, this could be fine, if risky. And you often do prepay for AWS since it saves you money over the course of a few yea…
> And you often do prepay for AWS since it saves you money over the course of a few years.
I don't think this would show up as an expense. It would just shift assets from cash to prepaid expenses, and not show up on the P&L - until the expenses are realized, which would be over time.
Re: Twilio S-1
#125There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…
Let's play the devil's advocate for a second. FY13 FY14 FY15 Sales and marketing: 21,931 33,322 49,308 Just turn it off and now you have a $11M profit. NetSuite and SuccessFactors did it in 2008 and they're both profitable, or at least were in NetSuite's case (NetSuite has recently pushed hard on S&M, hence a decline in profit in the last few years, probably because the market is dictating to do so and money is cheap…
I think this is a smart move and a good observation. Specifically with respect to Twilio, because I already know about their services. Having needed this kind of integration as a business need previously, I am aware of what services they are offering. What I'm saying is that I don't think this is a discovery problem for Twilio. All of their marketing and sales efforts seem to be focused on asking me to get to know Twilio's services better. But I already know what they offer (I just don't want to buy a short code). I'm pretty sure most other people shopping for this kind of integration are in the same boat (already aware of what Twilio is selling). Spending money to make sure people know what Twilio is selling seems redundant to me. Just for one point on the graph.
Re: Twilio S-1
#126There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…
Uncommonly good distillation there. Thank you.
Re: Twilio S-1
#127Worst of all, lots of free Twilio alternatives are popping up, like https://www.bitrix24.com/alternatives/free-twilio-alternativ... Twilio is great but it's hard to compete with free.
Since when is a run-of-the-mill cloud PBX a "Twilio alternative"?
Re: Twilio S-1
#128Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
I love goats. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to share how well goat attack packs have been selling?
Well I've goat to tell you, we send a lot of goats! To give you an idea, since we launched April 2015, we've sent over 2 million messages.
Re: Twilio S-1
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The major investors (Bessemer, USV, Fidelity) amount to 48.2%. Bear in mind that other founders and employees will also hold equity, and that Jeff Lawson already cashed out a big chunk of equity (detailed in the doc). Given that Twilio has raised a lot of money across a number of rounds (six listed in the document) as a loss making company, none of this seems that strange to me.
where do you see that? I don't know how to read those things
Page 143, or ctrl + F for "All executive officers and directors as a group (9 persons)".
Re: Twilio S-1
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want to see the overall size of the pool? That's simply shares outstanding. Do you want to see shares owned by specific people? That's only going to be there for the largest holders. Keep in mind shares outstanding is almost certainly larger than the existing options held by employees for a few reasons. First, people probably haven't vested their options completely in many/all cases. Secondly, some reserve is…
OK thanks, it was more to get an idea of "how much stock do the employees own vs. VCs and execs" but it looks like we don't have enough data to compute that
You can get an idea of this just by using standard funding math. Series E means investors hold 70% give or take. Execs hold 20-25% of the remainder, and rank and file employees have < 5%. One factor here that is meaningful -- original shareholders have taken money off the table, meaning they've given up ownership in the company to investors in exchange for cash. I don't know if that offer was made equally to all shareholders (I've heard a lot of good things about Twilio, so I imagine it was) -- which is why I say < 5% -- the number would be larger otherwise.