121–130 of 292 posts
I worked at Twilio for 4 years and it was one of the highlights of my career. End of an era, for sure. Thanks Jeff for trying to build an anti-racist company even when it upset some of our investors.
I had the "pleasure" working for Twilio for over 4 years. I cannot tell how much this showed me how you can fake it til you make it in SF. Twilio tried to expand into Europe and failed miserably. Customers (especially German ones) wanted exact locations of data, exact routes of packet transportation, wanted features Twilio promised on Slides but never delivered. I was part of at least 4 customer meetings (the biggest…
One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you stayed on for 3 more years? What happened there?
One way a company can be mismanaged is burning money it can't afford on ridiculous employee perks, like when Twitter got its own DJ.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages, New telco industry texting requirements came into play. In short, US biz are required to register with The Campaign Registry and pay regular fees if they want to do any (as in 1+) software text comms. It can be onerous for not-large biz. Twillo took point early-on (inserting themselves into the administration, IIRC) and Twil…
Somewhat surprising/disappointing to me was that now you can't even send SMS to a number that initiates the conversation--this would seem to be a pretty clear opt-in indicator. Because of that, I couldn't find a way (through Twilio) to get around the registration requirements just to send SMS to my own number for development purposes to try some things out. The registration workflow and UX is also comically terrible…
That bad UX is being supplied by The Campaign Registry org.
I do recall Twillo performing TCR's tasks in the beginning (applications, registration, etc) but only until TCR was spun up. It's all on TCR now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Is it? From the DJIA: can you even name the CEO of 3M? Cisco? Amex? Visa? I don't think celebrity is a pre-req for being a CEO. And as OP suggests, it could even be a detriment.
I did reword my comment though, because I don't agree Jeff is a "celebrity" as much as a "public" CEO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a public company, the CEO has to be a celebrity CEO. Is it? From the DJIA: can you even name the CEO of 3M? Cisco? Amex? Visa? I don't think celebrity is a pre-req for being a CEO. And as OP suggests, it could even be a detriment.
It's also a double edged sword where greater visibility leads to greater scrutiny. Galen Weston Jr stepped into the public eye much more during the pandemic as the face of Loblaws (Canadian grocery chain), and although it originally was welcome, he ended up outing himself as just another entitled, out of touch zillionaire, and at least in my social circles becoming kind of as punchline.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's celebrity CEOs and there's celebrity CEOs. Without googling, can you tell me the name of the CEO of Target? Sony? Texas Instruments? BMW? FedEx? Mitsubishi? Exxon? Home Depot? Siemens? Procter & Gamble? 3M? Nestle? Broadcom? I certainly can't. But I bet you can tell me who the CEOs of Tesla and Amazon are. Just because whoever-is-in-charge-of-siemens hasn't run a vanity PR campaign to raise their personal pro…
# Market caps:
Target 64.99B
Sony ~116B (I think)
TI 152B
BMW ~70B
Fedex 62B
Mitsubishi ~70B
Exxon 396B
Home Depot 343B
Siemens 141B
P&G 349B
3M 60B
Nestle ~290B
Broadcom 501B
...
Amazon 1520B
Tesla 750B
The sum of the market cap of the first group of companies is ~2.068T USD, while the sum of the second group is ~2.270T.
And of course the CEO of Tesla is(?) allegedly the richest man in the world, which is one of the reasons why people know him. And I honestly don't remember the name of the CEO of Amazon since Jeff Bezos stepped down.
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 developer…
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…