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Twilio S-1

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Re: Twilio S-1

#211

Post by kibibyte »

allworknoplay wrote: post #65
josefdlange wrote: post #43

As a naive nincompoop, is there any way for me to guess the initial price of a share when they become available?

Down the line there will be estimates -- companies progressively update their S-1s as they approach the actual IPO date. It's almost always challenging to get in at the opening price, though -- usually those are deals done with big funds and banks that help place shares.

Also, I think it's generally not a good sign if you, as an individual investor, are able to get in at the offering price; it generally means that the big institutions didn't really want in on those shares, which wouldn't instill much confidence in the stock.

Re: Twilio S-1

#213

Post by ryanburk »

a_small_island wrote: post #183
ChuckMcM wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots. One I was personally familiar with was SSNI (Silver Spring Networks)

Can you elaborate on the exact financial implications of a reverse split prior to IPO? This Brad Feld article [1] seems to say the aversion to this is simply emotional. [1] http://www.feld.com/archives/2005/06/when-are-350-million-sh...

tesla is a good example of a company that did this at ipo.

really, there are no financial implications. the valuation of the company stays the same with a split, but the price of the stock changes proportionate to the quantity outstanding. valuation = # shares * $ per share

what the reverse split does (or split - as twilio did a 2:1 split just over a year ago) is put the cost per share in a range that appears more attractive to buyers. in today's market, that is ~$15 +/-5. so if the internal valuation pre-IPO has the stock at $8, the company often reverse splits 1:2 and then you have an initial price back at $16. that way you don't look like a penny stock going out the door.

Re: Twilio S-1

#214

Post by tyingq »

I'm curious what protects Twilio from a race to the bottom in pricing from competitors. The barrier to entry here seems fairly low. There's Plivo, Nexmo, Tropo, Sinch, and probably others. Some of them appear to have reached near feature parity with relatively low spend.

Re: Twilio S-1

#215

Post by fenesiistvan »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #144

I am skeptical, a bit, of their longterm ability to fight off margin compression. 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 generat…

This is a good question since there are a lot of software available which can easily replace the Twilio service, so instead of monthly payments you can host it yourself for much less. I think that Twilio is doing well only with small customers as the biggest customers could save a lot by self-hosting the same service. In fact you just need to install an Asterisk or some other Softswitch and on the client side use something like the mizu webphone which has all the Twilio's capabilities like API for call, video, chat, SMS, presence and others.

Re: Twilio S-1

#217

Post by jon-wood »

prostoalex wrote: post #210
tryitnow wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to note that yes, cost can rise in advance of growth. Whether or not that's "OK" depends on the unit economics. 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…

> Twilio has few, if any moats, that can't be crossed by large competitors like Google or Amazon Here's one moat - with GOOG's annual revenue of $75 billion or AMZN's $107 billion how likely are either to chase an opportunity that, assuming perfect execution, complete market share grab and ultimate destruction of Twilio, will add $167 million of annual revenue to their balance sheet? From the corporate politics stand…

This feels very much like something Amazon might pursue, although probably in a more piecemeal manner. AWS already has a lot of the components that would be needed for a Twilio competitor in the form of SQS, SNS, and Lambda - all they really need is the ability to receive incoming text messages and voice support to be competitive. A lot of people would jump on that just stay within AWS rather than add another provider to deal with.

Re: Twilio S-1

#218

Post by corobo »

alain94040 wrote: post #200
Animats wrote: post #75

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…

Personally, I'll stick to a rule I found very valuable with the first dot-com bubble: don't touch a stock until the company has had 4 quarters of profitability. Simple rule. Amazing how companies these days never pass that filter.

So you don't touch any growing company until they plateau? Doesn't that defeat the whole point of buying stock?

Re: Twilio S-1

#219

Post by kevinburke »

tyingq wrote: post #214

I'm curious what protects Twilio from a race to the bottom in pricing from competitors. The barrier to entry here seems fairly low. There's Plivo, Nexmo, Tropo, Sinch, and probably others. Some of them appear to have reached near feature parity with relatively low spend.

Sure:

- Reliability of the core service... if you receive inbound calls/SMS, you need to be available 24/7.

- Better/cheaper carrier integrations in more countries. Getting local voice/SMS enabled numbers in every country is a very manual process, you have to go to each country and negotiate deals with local providers.

- Better international routing

- In terms of the core products, features like Copilot, Notify API. Also voice features like conferencing are very hard to do well; Twilio does them well.

- Better fraud detection and prevention - see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/technology/dial-and-redial... for an example.

Re: Twilio S-1

#220

Post by tyingq »

kevinburke wrote: post #219
tyingq wrote: post #214

I'm curious what protects Twilio from a race to the bottom in pricing from competitors. The barrier to entry here seems fairly low. There's Plivo, Nexmo, Tropo, Sinch, and probably others. Some of them appear to have reached near feature parity with relatively low spend.

Sure: - Reliability of the core service... if you receive inbound calls/SMS, you need to be available 24/7. - Better/cheaper carrier integrations in more countries. Getting local voice/SMS enabled numbers in every country is a very manual process, you have to go to each country and negotiate deals with local providers. - Better international routing - In terms of the core products, features like Copilot, Notify API.…

Interesting. Is it commonly agreed that Twilio is better at all these things? (It appears you worked at Twilio for a couple of years).

I've used Plivo, and it does have reasonable conferencing features, and I didn't note any issues with reliability. I only used it for US calls, but they seem to have an extensive list of other countries supported.

I've not used the others on the list, but they all have fairly impressive big name client lists. That's fairly hard to do if there's a leader in the space that's outclassing you on all fronts.

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