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Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

cnbc.com

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Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#31

Post by pastor_bob »

gkoberger wrote: post #7

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…

They laid off all of those early Dev Relations people, from what I understand.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#33

Post by raiyu »

paxys wrote: post #26

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 yell…

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.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#34

Post by debacle »

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.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#35

Post by goopthink »

paxys wrote: post #26

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 yell…

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.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#38

Post by shakes »

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.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#39

Post by _fat_santa »

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.
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