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Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

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Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#41
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…

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Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#42
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…

I agree that this is not a move I am happy to see. I hope I am proven wrong. I have been struggling with my love of Twilio. For years they have been one of my favorite tech companies, but I have been really struggling with them and their products lately. It feels like they have lost their core mission.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#43
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm somewhat on top of the stock, here's my not financial advice take: 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 C…

https://contracts.justia.com/companies/twilio-inc-3579/contr...

Looks like Eyal's compensation was more like 9-10M?

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#44
I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages, then they wanted you to describe what you're using it for and you had to pay money to fill out a form to tell them what you're using the text messages for.... then they would deny that and then you basically can't use twilio, or pay them to fill out the form again so they can deny you again.... This is for outbound SMS (payment notifications to customers) so I wound up writing an Android application that runs on a phone that just sends out SMS messages using an API talking to a server..... I'm paying $8 a month to Tello now which is about 1/5 the amount of money that I was paying to twilio so I'm glad that I switched..... but I think they really screwed up recently.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#48
post #8

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.

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Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#49

When I joined the Twilio Developer Evangelism team in 2014, we spent a lot of our onboarding practicing the "five minute demo" where we live-code a Twilio app from scratch. I thought this was dumb, mostly because live-coding is so damn hard. Six weeks into the job I watched Jeff live-code a Twilio app in front of 10,000 people at IBM Connect. It was as if he was saying to all of us, "Yeah, live-coding is hard. And if…

Are there any uploads of Jeff live coding?

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#50
I worked at Twilio from 2014-2023 and had an incredible experience during those 9 years, including all of my interactions with Jeff.

One of my favorite moments was running into Jeff in the hallway at our Beale Street office just before he had to do a quarterly earnings call after we went public. I said "good luck on the earnings call" and Jeff said thanks then asked what happened to a link to a specific Stack Overflow question/answer from one of our docs pages that got removed. He had just been building an application and felt like that answer was particularly helpful for context in a certain programming language, and was surprised it was removed.

Jeff's always been software developer at heart even though he had a ton of non-dev responsibilities. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages in that mindset! But he created a tremendous company along the way and I wouldn't change working there for anywhere else during those years.

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