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 f…
The stock price has been lackluster unfortunately. I’m not sure as to why.
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.