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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

#91

Post by wslh »

gkoberger wrote: post #89
throwaway_108 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also why George Hu left Twilio. Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company. All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch. I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go. Note: former senior level Twilio employee, p…

This is a genuine question... isn't that his job? For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were priva…

> For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity CEO.

No. Look at S&P 500 CEOs.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#92

Post by [deleted] »

lagniappe wrote: post #11
7ewis wrote: post #5

Bloomberg said: "Twilio Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson is stepping down from leading the software company he co-founded amid slowing sales growth and pressure from activist investors." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ce...

What a shit sandwich. Not everything needs to be a hockey stick. There's is an angle of the growth line that should not be exceeded because above that level of growth seldom is a good situation for the consumer.

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#93

Post by nonstopdev »

As someone who has loved Twilio from the early days and have built many apps for small and enterprise cases as well as fully embraced Flex in the customer experience space, I really have no idea what the hell they are doing now. Not sure if they are right sizing after trying to capture markets like video and Contact Center but it seems like even successful sales teams are let go now so curios where they emerge from this.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#94

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

oogali wrote: post #66
jijji wrote: post #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 (paymen…

This is likely because of industry regulations around A2P (application-to-person ) messaging that had a due date of August 31, 2023. It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected. https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/…

> It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected.

From what I can tell, the telcos aren't performing any enforcement, even tho the deadlines and extensions are long past. Not to say they won't but the endeavor seems to have a stall vibe going on.

Some of that might be related to having major mass-campaign requirements placed on small biz who occasionally send a handful of texts (often non-sales) from their workstation phone apps.

At least I hope this is why it has stalled. Sending a few texts during a customer service session shouldn't be regulated as if it were a blast of 1M SMS ads.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#95

Post by darth_avocado »

Moto7451 wrote: post #82
vehementi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did any of those layoffs coincide with the global layoffs?

September of 2022, Feb 2023, and December 2023. So no, kinda, and no.

Sep 2022 and Feb 2023 was the peak layoff season in the industry. Mostly guided by interest rate hikes.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#96

Post by caseysoftware »

caseysoftware wrote: post #90

I joined Twilio in May '11 the week of the private launch of Twilio Client. I was #18 or so. My first day, we got briefings on what it was, what it will do, and then had to finish docs and re-arrange the office for our top customers. (At that stage, most people knew them by name. Shout out patio11!) Since I knew nothing and the docs were.. weak, I decided to take out the garbage. I grabbed the bags and asked where th…

And the infamous five minute demo.. we drilled on that constantly. At my peak (2013), I was giving it 2-3 times a week in front of small groups, with the occasional sales reps, and in front of huge events.

My favorite times were:

- for one of Bob Metcalfe's courses at UT Austin. Yes, that Bob Metcalfe, the co-creator of ethernet. I talked about the origin of Metcalfe's Law here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259442

- 1:1 for Werner Vogels at SXSW. I gave it to one of his senior guys and he said "wow, this is great, let me go get Werner" which was intimidating as f.. a lot. But I managed to nail it.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#97

Post by marcinzm »

gkoberger wrote: post #89
throwaway_108 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also why George Hu left Twilio. Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company. All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch. I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go. Note: former senior level Twilio employee, p…

This is a genuine question... isn't that his job? For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were priva…

I've seen celebrity CEOs in non-public companies a lot more than in public companies. There is a difference between being the public face of the company and being a celebrity CEO.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#98

Post by dragontamer »

gkoberger wrote: post #89
throwaway_108 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also why George Hu left Twilio. Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company. All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch. I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go. Note: former senior level Twilio employee, p…

This is a genuine question... isn't that his job? For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were priva…

Only if you pretend that the CEOs job is purely for raising money.

Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help brew the culture that makes that company productive.

We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10 years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies they built.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#99

Post by kypro »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #61
kypro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Shareholders have been critical of Twilio's performance, and therefore Jeff Lawson over the last year or two though... They're in a difficult place. They don't have the margins of a SAAS company and they've been losing a lot of money. This was fine in a low interest rate environment where investors are willing to pay up for growth, but when that changed investors wanted them to cut costs and show a path to profit…

> He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else. There is optimizing profit margins, and there is not losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year, year after year. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-in...

Depends on how you look at it I suppose... It's not unusual for growth companies to operate at a large GAAP loss.

They were never losing that much cash, and they have recently become cash flow positive, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/price-...

The large GAAP loses comes from dilution – mostly in the form of stock based comp. In theory if growth exceeds dilution then investors are still owning an appreciating asset, and if the stock is richly valued (as TWLO was) then it makes sense to fund that growth with capital rather than debt.

But yeah, as a shareholder I felt their stock based comp was egregiously high and it took management a little too long to realise we're in a new world and things needed to change... A side point, but that's actually why I invested in TWLO because the stock got so beat up and their SBC was so excessive that it was kinda obvious that things were going to need to change and the market would react to that positively.

The markets seem to be reacting favourably to this news and again I think that's because there was an assumption that Jeff Lawson was largely to blame for the lack of focus on profit optimisation.

Personally I think Jeff is a great CEO though and I didn't want to see him go. I just wanted him to make some tough decisions to stop the burn – which more recently he seemed to be doing. While I do think they need to be more finance minded in this next stage of the business, I would doubt whether a developer focused tech company like Twilio will benefit much from a managerial leader like Shipchandler. We've seen this mistake made repeatedly by tech companies in the past.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#100

Post by josh_carterPDX »

jmacd wrote: post #72

The decline of Twilio's position has been as pretty clear for the last 18 months now, and has been a topic of conversation longer than that. Twilio never had the margins or control of their environment to nearly the degree you need to have in order to maintain software monopoly levels of growth over time. Most of Twilio's business has been built on reselling network access purchased via SMS consolidators. These are c…

In the early days of Twilio, carriers laughed at what we were doing. It didn't help that most of the people at Twilio pre-2014 didn't speak much "telecom." But to your point, it was tough to rely on these carriers who thought Twilio would be gone in a few years so they didn't put much stock in ensuring the infrastructure was redundant and robust.

I was on several calls with providers begging them to put us on a more robust network. Especially in years when there was an election. In those early years, we had one customer doing more minutes than our entire customer base. In fact, at an early Twiliocon (pre-Signal) John and Jeff had to help build out an entirely separate environment for them because it was dragging everyone else down.

My point is that the early days were definitely the "Draw the Owl" days. We were figuring out things on the fly. Carriers were dubious and it was tough to get things working consistently. However, by 2015 those same carriers were developing APIs of their own.

Twilio changed the game for the telecommunications industry. Two years before joining Twilio I was putting in large-scale Avaya systems. The fact that I wrote four lines of code to make a phone ring blew my mind. Twilio and Jeff created something special. It's sad to see his run come to an end, but every company needs to adapt to the changing times. This is just Twilio's time to adapt.

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