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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

#211

Post by dasil003 »

acchow wrote: post #143
shakes wrote: post #38

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…

> 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! These are the strange effects of ZIRP and infinite QE. Many companies never had to care at all about profit and could just do things "for fun", and still see valuations skyrocket as long as they hired more people. What a time.

I think this is a bit reductive. Sure ZIRP created an environment where people could get away with trying crazy things, but there was still an expectation of growth in pursuit of some longer time-horizon market dominance. These kind of things may be more risky, but they still can be justified in the pursuit of market awareness and growth. Also, when you're building software products, there's real value to engaging the creativity of the team.

The fact that the music continued so long and led to incredible valuation inflation over the last 15 years made the excesses look a lot worse, but even in a more sane financial environment I'd argue you'd still want to do these things to be competitive in an attention-economy, just maybe not to the extremes we saw.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#212

Post by rukshn »

wintogreen74 wrote: post #157
gkoberger wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said here is true, but I don't think it applies to Twilio or Jeff. I don't think you can accuse Jeff of not caring about company culture. He built one of the defining dev cultures out there. Yes, this have changed as they've grown, but I've always found the people and offices of Twilio to be warm, productive and smart. And Twilio was forged in the hardest time to raise money ever... 2008. If anyone kno…

Memories are short, but Twilio was built when doing what seemed obvious - add an API to telecom services - was really hard. It's what Stripe is (doing, not done) to banking & payment, what countless companies have failed to do with Healthcare... I met Jeff in the early days and the fact that he (a) managed to stay the CEO through this growth & timeline, and (b) gave few enough sh!ts to maintain a hacker dev mentality…

Working in healthcare, I’m genuinely interested why healthcare startups have failed?

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#213

Post by winter-day »

I worked at twilio when they were a series B company and Jeff personally did the on boardings. I think it was the only company I've worked at where I felt that every engineer was a super star. I've followed their career since then, and they've gone on to do phenomenal work. My opinion is that they had very weak leadership below the C-suite. We brought on one of the founders of skype, and after having lunch with him all I could think is how good he is at talking and how little value he'll deliver. I felt the same about the core engineering managers, and they went on to screw over a lot of the early talent - that now thrives at top companies. Regardless, Jeff was amazing. He was the sweetest guy and use to throw bbqs at his home. How fast the years go by.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#214

Post by anildash »

shakes wrote: post #38

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…

Strongly seconding this (especially as someone who was backstage with Jeff and Tony right before that demo). What's less visible is the impact and influence Jeff has had in enabling leaders and founders to do the right thing. So much of the pressure and industry influence on CEOs is to be short-term thinkers, to ruin their user experience, or to be harmful to workers.

I've seen, both personally and through others who've relied on his example or mentorship, Jeff be a force for good for those who were trying to do right while leading companies. And to even be someone to call in (or call out) a mistake when you make it — which a lot of bigger-name people are way too cowardly to do. He's also spoken up for his city, and for vulnerable communities, when it would have been so easy for someone of his stature to just stay silent.

It's obvious that Jeff is a brilliant technical innovator, but he is just as much of a pioneer of thoughtful and conscientious leadership in an industry that's become woefully bereft of it.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#215

Post by atomicnumber3 »

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…

Fwiw I think a key difference in stripe vs twilio in your example is that stripe has 2 levers that twilio doesn't have good analogs to:

- stripe can be a "financial home" for many of its customers and build higher-margin pockets of software functionality, using easy payments as an on-ramp. See: stripe billing, radar, sigma, connect, etc.

- stripe is more likely to be able to "swap out" the credit card rails than twilio would be able to "swap out" sms. If the financial ecosystem evolves to make eg debit cards or any other kind of payment easier, stripe can simply add them as payment methods, as they already do for non-CC payment types (most notable outside of the US). So stripe is already at the abstraction level of "move money from customer to me" instead of "run their CC".

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#216

Post by anildash »

throwaway_108 wrote: post #69
shakes wrote: post #38

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…

Please. George joined the company when it was damn near a decade old, and already a publicly-traded company. It's embarrassing to ascribe anywhere near the agency to someone like that than to a founder.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#217

Post by fnordpiglet »

tshaddox wrote: post #181
fnordpiglet wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. It’s when you ceded leadership to the accountants and shifted gears to maintenance mode that companies stopped growing. You never did these things for fun, you did these things because they had some knock on effect that made it potentially worth it, and in a portfolio of many small bets some w…

> In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. I think the question is more about whether doing these things caused the company financial success, or whether the company's financial success caused them to do these things. It strikes me as plausible that it's almost always the latter, even if the company's financial success isn't attribut…

Usually the issue is you can’t encourage creative risk taking with structured austerity. Structured austerity is about improving operational efficiency and there’s a place for that. But at companies that survive and thrive on creative risk taking, giving the reigns to the CPAs kills the culture.

I think it’s usually a sign of success that to protect the golden goose you stop taking creative risks and focus on operational efficiency.

Macroeconomic conditions really matter a lot more for capital intensive enterprises like manufacturing, refining, real estate, etc. Most creative / R&D based companies are much less cost of capital sensitive and frankly low interest rates matter a heck of a lot less for their planning and operations.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#218

Post by kelnos »

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…

To be fair, Khozema joined Twilio as CFO more than 5 years ago; it's not like he was brought in externally and knows nothing about the business.

But yeah: Jeff had been working toward GAAP profitability for a while now, but was unable to deliver.

I have my own feelings and biases about the company's trajectory over the past years (I worked there from 2011 until 2022), but ultimately a) Jeff lost his super-voting shares last summer, b) he didn't deliver on profitability, c) growth numbers have been unimpressive for a while now. Activist investors have been saber-rattling for most of the past year. Of course Jeff was going to get forced out, sooner or later.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#219

Post by taf2 »

smileysteve wrote: post #59
_fat_santa wrote: post #39

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.

Ooof at the Segment acquisition :-/

Wish it was a T-Mobile purchase instead :/

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#220

Post by zubspace »

If you want to see Jeff Lawson in action, you should watch a great talk of him about company culture and values [1]. Even though I'm a programmer and usually don't think too hard about such topics, I can fully relate to his ideas. He's sharing the process of how they arrived at twilio's company values [2], which really are exceptional.

Usually company values are just written down as a checklist somewhere, which you once read and then forget about. But twilio's values are fun to read, think about and easy to follow.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKI8Jah-Po

[2] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/company/values

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