241–250 of 292 posts
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Semi-related to your third point, I do not trust a text message from a company that does not use the shortened phone number system that was popularized by Twilio. It's the easiest way to detect phishing attempts because scammers don't use those.
Wait, you trust shortened numbers more than un-shortened ones? That hadn't occurred to me before.
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.
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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…
George Hu cut his teeth under Benioff during the most meteoric rise of both Salesforce and Benioff's celebrity. I would be very surprised if Jeff's desire to be a public facing CEO would even cause George to notice, let alone bristle at. It's more likely that someone as smart as George might have just looked at the fundamentals of the business and decided it could not keep this up over the long term. or... it might h…
That was gossip, of course; sure, George may have decided back then that -- even with all the growth he drove -- Twilio wasn't going anywhere long-term.
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…
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…
My question is what these activist investors think the fix is. In my experience they’ll bring someone in to try to apply aggressive sales strategies to a dev tools company & it never goes well.
But my feeling is they really just want to strip the company for parts and/or sell it to private equity.
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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.
Twilio is more of a "how the sausage gets made" type of company, I do t really think its the type that benefits from a celebrity CEO
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.
After mid-2021, that $400+ stock price started looking a little silly. And the broader market downturn in 2022 hit Twilio even harder than it hit the broader market.
And, meanwhile, Twilio's growth numbers -- while still being an unprofitable company! -- look worse than they did at the beginning of 2020. $75 might be generous for how the company is actually doing.
(Full disclosure: former employee for ~10 years, and I still have a few shares left.)
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Semi-related to your third point, I do not trust a text message from a company that does not use the shortened phone number system that was popularized by Twilio. It's the easiest way to detect phishing attempts because scammers don't use those.
Wait, you trust shortened numbers more than un-shortened ones? That hadn't occurred to me before.
Meanwhile, a short code would run you $4500 for three months (IIRC, memory is fuzzy, and it's probably changed), and you had to go through an approval process with all the mobile carriers (that is, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. had to individually approve the short code) where you explained your use case and promised not to spam.
(Obviously things are different now with the campaign registration and approvals requires even for long code numbers. But short codes are still harder to get, and the approvals more rigorous.)
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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.
His customers probably expected better products, whereas his developers expected another round of amazing perks and fun work.
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I'm not the OP, but agree with their assessment and stayed 3.5 years despite that. For me, the reason was the vesting schedule: 4 years with a 1 year cliff.
But why would you want to vest a bunch of options/shares that you think will decline substantially in value over your tenure there?
You don't just say on day 1, "I don't think the company is going anywhere, but I'm committing to staying another 4 years".