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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

#231

Post by sp527 »

tomashertus wrote: post #174

I love Twillio's products. As a developer turned product manager, I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively favorable ROI. Anyway, I wish the best of luck to Jeff. I consider his book Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century to be one of the must-read books for founders.

> I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively favorable ROI.

This was not my experience. The gulf in pricing between Twilio's raw STUN/TURN solution (which they had clearly gone to great lengths to keep hidden amongst their product offerings) and their batteries-included WebRTC API solution was so vast it was almost comical. At a certain scale, a company could save maybe millions of dollars a year at the cost of a day or two of extra engineering effort. They were far from averse to the strategy of looting their customers.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#232

Post by lotsofpulp »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #182
Nextgrid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock price isn’t a great indicator of product quality though. Stock price requires endless growth which is unsustainable.

No. Stock price requires higher per share values. One can continuously grow a stock if they reduce the shares outstanding. That being said iirc buy backs have notoriously all gone to executives. Essentially they buy back, and then award themselves options to re-dilute, but cannot readily find a source for that. So maybe incorrect.

When a business does a stock buyback, the business receives the stock, not any executive(s).

The business might pay the executive with stock per the board approved compensation package, but a CEO does not wake up and say “I want to give myself 5M shares so let’s do a 5M share buyback”.

A buyback benefits all shareholders equally by reducing supply of the stock and therefore increasing its price.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#233

Post by whiplash451 »

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…

I see a third causality option.

Both « being successful » and « doing these things » could be caused by a single root cause: a leadership team playing the long game.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#234

Post by 1tao »

dools wrote: post #204
acchow wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

QE and ZIRP are deflationary policies because they reduce the amount of interest payments (which are no different from any other transfer payment) paid by the government.

as a first order effect, sure. but do you agree they have resulted in the inflation which causes our debt-burden/GDP to rise?

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#235

Post by hyggetrold »

ctvo wrote: post #178
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. Agreed. Creative, high performing people don't do well in a work environment that's structured like a regional bank. Valve Software -- incredibly profitable, high performing and private company, did fun things like hire economists (and then later Greek prime minister) to study and simulate v…

> Google allowed their engineers 20% time.

I once heard that this was more like 120% time? Meaning, 'extracurricular activities' on company infra was allowed and encouraged, but not at the expense of regular productivity/output.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#236

Post by lulznews »

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.

Don’t forget massive PMF in the case of twilio

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#237

Post by mise_en_place »

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.

These are multibillion dollar companies, not your scammy SV dogshit startups. Fun is a rounding error for them.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#238

Post by nunez »

anovikov wrote: post #71

All of the media clouds that did not include telephony, were always bad business cases, sometimes got repeatedly sold and resold like a proverbial hot potato, see TokBox. Twilio did include telephony and was originally built as telephony-only provider, so it really stood out and was a lot more sustainable as a business than anybody else. But, importance of telephony is falling. When was the last time you dialed-in to…

people dial in all of the time in the meetings i have. zoom is still awful in low-bandwidth situations.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#239

Post by nostrademons »

bearcobra wrote: post #160
nostrademons wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in tech and had never heard of Jeff or George. I could name every CEO of Twitter or Google, or the founding CEOs of companies like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber, Coinbase, etc. Companies like Twilio and Unity don't really register.

Being able to keep track of the craziness that is the leadership history at X/Twitter is kind of impressive.

There actually haven't been that many, and double-checking against Wikipedia I forgot Parag Agrawal but Wikipedia forgot Linda Yaccarino. I divide them up into eras and power struggles:

1. Jack Dorsey. Founding era, founding engineer, forced out when Twitter was ~30 employees because he had no management experience.

2. Evan Williams. Growth era. Another founder, but one who had past experience dealing with hypergrowth, getting companies acquired, and working inside a big company.

3. Dick Costolo. Maturation era. Adult supervision, he's the professional CEO hired to manage Twitter because both of its previous CEOs were really startup people.

4. Jack Dorsey (2). Came back after gaining some political savvy and learning how to launch a boardroom coup. Founded Square in the meantime and got a bunch of experience being CEO of another company. Also famously the guy who shut down the Jan 6th insurrection by blocking the sitting U.S. president from Twitter.

5. Parag Agrawal. Caretaker; Twitter was in trouble by then and Jack Dorsey was either forced out or decided it was better to die a hero than be remembered as a villain.

6. Elon Musk. Bought Twitter in a fit of insanity.

7. Linda Yaccarino. Glass cliff. Installed as CEO so that X's eventual demise is not Elon Musk's problem.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#240

Post by Phurist »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #208
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…

Interesting. I tried to create a Twilio account 2 weeks ago and it was the worse developer experience I've ever had by far . Like seriously. They first make you deposit $20 to get started. THEN, they tell you to talk to customer support to activate your account (customer support took forever to reply). Oh and then I had to fill out like 3 applications and my text messages are still randomly getting blocked - I have n…

You have to thanks the abusers and scammers for that. All nice things have to be locked down :(
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