Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 292 posts

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#251

Post by maerF0x0 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #232
maerF0x0 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the business receives the stock

correct. Hence my wording

> and then award themselves options to re-dilute

It's not that executives receive the bought back stock, but that their stock based compensation plans result in no net decrease in the amount of outstanding shares.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#252

Post by jmacd »

kelnos wrote: post #243
jmacd wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have any direct knowledge, but the gossip flying around internally at the time was that a big part of George leaving Twilio was because he wanted the CEO role, but knew Jeff wasn't going to leave and give it to him. 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.

The fact that George has not taken on a CEO role since tells me that it probably wasn't a driving factor for him. That's conjecture though. I think that role would be available to him at a lot of strong companies if that was his goal.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#253

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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.

Were companies in other sectors besides so-called "tech" able to disregard profit and just keep hiring as a result of ZIRP and QE. If yes, what are some examples.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#254

Post by tootie »

kelnos wrote: post #245
toddmorey wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they've already made that clear: sell off the underperforming data & applications units. But my feeling is they really just want to strip the company for parts and/or sell it to private equity.

I'm having trouble parsing this against what Twilio does. Are they talking primarily about the Segment acquisition? I primarily know Twilio as an SMS gateway.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#255

Post by kwindla »

Aeolun wrote: post #23

They recently cancelled their video offering and recommend we move to zoom. Maybe the ship is sinking?

I have a dog in this fight, but strongly recommend that you do not move to [the] Zoom [Video SDK].

tldr: architecture that doesn't work for web apps, performance issues, missing features

https://www.daily.co/blog/zoom-web-sdk-technical-notes/

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#256

Post by kwindla »

figers wrote: post #177
Aeolun wrote: post #23

They recently cancelled their video offering and recommend we move to zoom. Maybe the ship is sinking?

They had such a good video offering, never had an issue, very surprised by this, why not try to charge more before dumping it?

They have not adequately funded the video product for a very long time. Other companies built out better infrastructure and a much broader range of features. The market also turned out to be smaller and differently structured than all of us thought. (I am a co-founder of a company that competes with -- though also predated -- Twilio Video.)

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#257

Post by mleonhard »

lawgimenez wrote: post #49
gregorymichael wrote: post #24

When I joined the Twilio Developer Evangelism team in 2014, we spent a lot of our onboarding practicing the "five minute demo" where we live-code a Twilio app from scratch. I thought this was dumb, mostly because live-coding is so damn hard. Six weeks into the job I watched Jeff live-code a Twilio app in front of 10,000 people at IBM Connect. It was as if he was saying to all of us, "Yeah, live-coding is hard. And if…

Are there any uploads of Jeff live coding?

Here's a good recording of a very smooth Twilio demo at "Yahoo! Hack Europe: London" in 2013 by Michael Wawra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPAe0rJApvk

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#258

Post by hyggetrold »

sokoloff wrote: post #192
Solvency wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Half of the Silicon Valley show was lampooning this corporate excess of frivolous indulgence.

My wife is not in tech (and so enjoyed Silicon Valley quite a bit less than I did when we watched it together). Every so often, she'd express frustration about the "over the top writing" in Silicon Valley. Way over half the time, I could tie whatever it was she was complaining about to some concrete story from our industry.

I read a great article about the making of the show and there were many real-life stories they couldn't include because they felt people wouldn't believe it was real.

I think their go-to example was meeting up with a Google X person in their offices and that person getting huffy about something or other and then trying to storm out. But then they had trouble with their keycard so there was that awkward pause because they couldn't just storm out and slam the door. Best part was that they were on inline skates (and rocking a pony tail!) so it was a totally Mike Judge perfect moment - weird silent tension as pony tail skate master is trying to beep himself out of the room.

I've definitely seen and heard about lots of strange things in SV that people simply wouldn't believe if they heard it.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#259

Post by wintogreen74 »

balls187 wrote: post #226
ctvo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Valve Software ... high performing Depends on how you measure performance. ARPU? Very high. Shipping software? Super low.

what about the hardware that significantly leverages their non-game software? I think the full ramifications of what they're doing with mobile gaming have not yet been felt.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#260

Post by swozey »

I've been reading about the last year of twilio w/regard to layoffs and what not. Mostly trying to figure out what teams had layoffs, so down a rabbit hole.

This article [1] says "Anson and Legion [[2 investors]] have pushed Twilio to sell the Data and Applications unit, if not the whole company. Anson and Legion have both amassed individual stakes of around $50 million"

Twilios marketcap is 13.33bn. Why do 2 investment groups that own a collective of $100m twilio have so much power that they can push for layoffs or SELLING the WHOLE company?

They want twilio to sell a group that is 20% of their revenue. 20% of their revenue based on a 2023 $4bn would be around $800m or so. Twilio is an 8k employee company.. Is $50m in stock so high on the food chain that you get critical voting rights? That's nothing to an 8k large company.

Could anyone explain?

1 = https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/04/twilio-layoffs-company-to-cu...

Edit: Ok I'm learning about "Activist Investing" now and I'm pretty sure as opposed to that really nice seeming name it's corporate vultures who try to take over the board and push a company to do whatever they're doing with Bed Bath and Beyond and all those.

It was ONE Portfolio Manager who went from Legion to Anson and brought Twilio into their portfolio at both companies, at $50m each.

He launched campaigns at Kohls, BB&B, Twilio, Nutanix and SurveyMonkey at least according to this article.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N3B82SO/

And for anyone curious about Activist Investing - Moral of the story once you own 5% you get a form that notifies the board you own 5% and they send in a form to the SEC with all their wants/complaints: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/02/03/whats-...

Post reply on HN