141–150 of 229 posts
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I suspect this will be painful to Twilio in a couple years. If you think anything like WeChat and its service ecosystem is coming to the rest of the world, it's going to happen on Facebook (or Telegram), not WhatsApp.
Facebook owns Whatsapp. Anything that happens on Facebook will be in conjunction with Whatsapp.
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Yes, this is fascinating. I can only imagine that as more and more developers flock to "free" SMS verification services provided by companies like Facebook (Account Kit) and Twitter (Digits), their long term outlook is even more unsure.
Could you share a link to the Firebase SMS verification you stated in your comment? Was actually looking for something like this... :D
What do people use them for?
If minutes of calling, inbound or outbound, that is trivial in terms of switching costs.
If sms, there are plenty of competitors, including teli.net (disclaimer, I know people that work there), haven't directly compared pricing however.
The real question to ask is how much lockin they have managed to generate. Without lockin they will eventually suffer margin compression.
Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
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Net loss: Don't think that is a biggie. They expanded their cost base both in R&D, sales & marketing, and general and admin. With a little bit of cost discipline for one year, they are going to be profitable. Voting rights: that is indeed yucky. Competitive threat: Not really. The inertia for existing customers is high, especially since the average revenue per active account is about $580/month. For a big company, th…
>a little bit of cost discipline for one year So, layoffs?
There'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…
Frankly, I share your skepticism. I think you hit the nail on the head - Twilio has few, if any moats, that can't be crossed by large competitors like Google or Amazon.
And if I'm Bezos and Twilio is making all this money off the back of AWS, why not just cut out Twilio? Heck, Amazon is doing that to friggin vitamin makers, why not do it to tech companies?
There'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…
And since the Unicorn Feeding stations have all been shut down :-) unprofitable companies of this size have three choices, IPO, die quickly, or try to shrink into a profitable chunk and bootstrap slowly into larger growth. I commend them for the IPO route, I expect to see more companies in this spot. This path also gives employees some liquidity but if they did a big reverse split prior to the S-1 its possible the employees will have underwater options at the IPO, anyone working there care to comment on that?
There'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…
> It's unusual to try to pull that off when you're unprofitable. It may be unusual, but to me it seems even more important to have uncontested control when the common shareholders may be angry.
Twitter (TWTR) only has one class of stock. But so far, there hasn't been a major effort to oust Dorsey.
[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/twitter-inc-twtr-shareholders-meeting...
There'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…
I don't think Google is much of a threat, they seem to hate Gvoice internally having had several opportunities to make it a platform and passing (yes they used to have voice APIs on code.google.com). Bottom line, I don't think Google gets it (kind of like Facebook and web search) And since the Unicorn Feeding stations have all been shut down :-) unprofitable companies of this size have three choices, IPO, die quickly…
Is there anything here that indicates that the cash infusion from an IPO would get them on the track to profitability?