161–170 of 292 posts
Given the successor, they'll either flip Twilio or go private equity - in both cases Twilio as we know it is toast. Amazon could snatch, also Oracle the evergreen. SFDC is the dark horse, don't see MSFT touching it due to massive AWS setup. Godspeed.
I think this is especially sad as Twilio really was a reflection of the purity of product and engineering coming together to make more than the parts.
I can’t think of a better leader at the intersection of people and technology than Jeff Lawson.
I think Twilio has a unique opportunity to lead in AI if they kept their Hacker spirit. Unfortunately the fatal blunder here was that they signed up for this outcome via IPO. Not much better being private under PE, however it was doomed to this fate the moment they went public.
All that said, congrats Jeff (jeffiel) for doing such an amazing job and holding on this long.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's big company and there's BIG company. # 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…
> There's big company and there's BIG company. Which is Twilio?
In tech circles, a very well known story though.
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.
https://archive.is/8Ffn4 Keep in mind his voting structure changed in May meaning he lost some shareholder power. > Its use of supervoting shares, which gives CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson a voting stake of 21.8% even though he owns only 3.7% of the stock, [1] No derogatory remarks intended to Jeff, Jeff certainly has had great moments, but Kho is also a fantastic leader and capital allocator, who's made some truly…
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.
I also had a really annoying experience with Sendgrid post acquisition. I'd used Sendgrid for my first company (as in I personally made the purchase, implemented the apis, and for a long time, was the sole and then admin account). I went to use it for my next company pre website launch and they froze my new account and their customer service was a pita. To be fair, the site wasn't up, but I needed the ability to send emails to publish the site (it's a crucial part of new account flow.) They wouldn't allow me to use sendgrid even though I was happy to share my linkedin, my previous history with their company, etc. We're happy sendinblue customers.
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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…
There's big company and there's BIG company. # 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…
I can't imagine being offered a choice between owning (the company) Tesla or BMW and picking Tesla.
edit: Tesla did 4.2% of total market in 2023, outpacing VW, Subaru and BMW. They did 25% more sales in 2023 than 2022. They sell 500-700k/yr right now with 2023 being 660k. BMW delivered 550k cars worldwide.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-2023-u-s-market-share-volksw...
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?
I stayed for ~1 year after I realized I needed to get out: At the time I was getting paid very well, had very low expenses, and was saving to quit my job and start my own company.
My original plan was to stay a few months longer to build up some more savings, but "things happened" inside the company. I was re-assigned to a horrible manager; I hunted around for another assignment (on the advice of my boss's boss,) but that was going to be Flex-based. (And I bet correctly that Flex was going to fail in the marketplace.) I decided that I was better off quitting and self-teaching myself HTML + Javascript instead of getting paid to learn Flex. However, I could have stayed for a 2-3 more years, worked in Flex, made a boatload of money, and selectively applied for jobs elsewhere.
> One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you stayed on for 3 more years?
There's a lot of risk in changing jobs: If you "have a good thing going," it's best to bide your time until a better thing comes along. Interviewing is quite time consuming too, so don't assume that someone can just casually make a few phone calls and walk away with a "better" job. (This is especially the case if you have kids, a house, a mortgage, and a significant other who has their own career.)
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…
This is pretty key to understanding Twilio's prospects as a business. In my experience, they are fantastically easy to integrate at first.
But they come with a cost that blows up your financial model if your product is any kind of high-volume use case, or if SMS is factored in as a direct cost and you're talking to investors about unit economics. At some point you have to get off of them and onto a cheaper-per-SMS solution, even if it costs more dev hours to maintain.
What a great run. I remember the IPO party in 2016, very early in my career, and being in disbelief that a texting API was used by so many people. It was my first time writing code for systems that operated at _real scale_. While the last few years have been a bit rocky, you can't understate the impact that jeffiel had on the developer tools ecosystem.