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Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

cnbc.com

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Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#271

Post by zilti »

Solvency wrote: post #184
Aurornis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. My anecdote, FWIW, is that some of the worst performing startups do these tricks too. There's something about flashy events and boondoggles that sound good on LinkedIn that draws bad founders into spending waaay too much on parties and fun activities. Stripe obviously isn't in that category,…

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

I know wannabe-execs who unironically think the "tres commas" guy is cool

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#272

Post by toast0 »

josh_carterPDX wrote: post #100
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…

In the early days of Twilio, carriers laughed at what we were doing. It didn't help that most of the people at Twilio pre-2014 didn't speak much "telecom." But to your point, it was tough to rely on these carriers who thought Twilio would be gone in a few years so they didn't put much stock in ensuring the infrastructure was redundant and robust. I was on several calls with providers begging them to put us on a more…

> In those early years, we had one customer doing more minutes than our entire customer base. In fact, at an early Twiliocon (pre-Signal) John and Jeff had to help build out an entirely separate environment for them because it was dragging everyone else down.

As an early large customer, I wonder if that was me... sorry for messing up everyone else ;) I do remember some issues at times, but nothing we didn't see with other voice and SMS providers. Well, other providers didn't have an online log browser, so I never had trouble with browsing logs their logs.

Twiml was much easier to use than the other 'programatic voice' apis at the time, and I never had time to figure out how to run calls on sip directly. As I recall, it didn't take much time to setup voice calls, and then boom. It was helpful that quality was good and support was helpful when there were destinations with poor results.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#273

Post by BetterWhisper »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #162

We will now watch the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Twilio. 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. Unfortunate…

And what is this unique opportunity to lead in AI?

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#274

Post by AndrewKemendo »

BetterWhisper wrote: post #273
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #162

We will now watch the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Twilio. 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. Unfortunate…

And what is this unique opportunity to lead in AI?

Right now: voice-bot telephony. So, immediately have a twilio number that you can call/text and talk to a GPT much like I do with the ChatGPT app interface. This rapidly could couple into actions API for doordash amazon etc…so Twilio would be handling all this scalable AI-Telephony data. They have the infrastructure and engineering for it.

Long term: own the infrastructure for infinitely scaling call centers for any task you would need to do over sms/gsm voice

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#275

Post by aisha_mc »

itinerantwarble wrote: post #265
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is industry self-regulation. See A2P 10DLC. Dealing with it at scale has sucked. If you want to send SMS, it's the price of admission everywhere--not just at Twilio. I know you said you wanted to send yourself an SMS, but you can test without sending using test credentials and magic numbers: https://www.twilio.com/docs/messaging/tutorials/automate-tes...

There has been an increase in SMS phishing attacks too.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#276

Post by falconcoder »

x0x0 wrote: post #166
pylua wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock price has been lackluster unfortunately. I’m not sure as to why.

I think the common thread with Twilio the sms/sip product and Twilio the CDP / nee Segment is this: businesses outgrow them. Both of them work well for smb and lower midmarket, but as companies grow, become horrendously expensive and essentially strongly encourage migration off. A public company is not a failure, but when your product has a ceiling with your customers, that's painful. I also had a really annoying exp…

I also facing the same issue, for my new site. end up I'm moving to azure communication service.

One of the worse CustomerService for SaaS Provider.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#277

Post by aisha_mc »

oogali wrote: post #66
jijji wrote: post #44

I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages, then they wanted you to describe what you're using it for and you had to pay money to fill out a form to tell them what you're using the text messages for.... then they would deny that and then you basically can't use twilio, or pay them to fill out the form again so they can deny you again.... This is for outbound SMS (paymen…

This is likely because of industry regulations around A2P (application-to-person ) messaging that had a due date of August 31, 2023. It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected. https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/…

Had a good experience regarding this with one of the SMS API providers - Message Central.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#278

Post by slac »

lokar wrote: post #132
dragontamer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the company and what it needs. At google Eric had very little to do with product and engineering. He was still a very effective CEO.

Having been in Eric reviews, let me tell you he was very involved in what I was working on... And I learned a ton.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#279

Post by mlrtime »

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.

Exact same situation here...

My wife thought the show couldn't be reality. I told her I'm confident that almost everything you see in this show happened in SV to at least someone, just not the same company/people in a short amount of time.

It's like if you took every story in SV history and compressed it to one company in 6 years.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#280

Post by mlrtime »

swozey wrote: post #167
hnfong wrote: post #128

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…

lmao Teslas market cap is such a joke. 750bn, 10x higher than BMW while I see tens of millions more BMWs on the road and the BMW brand has astronomically more staying power as brand recognition. Wild. Nobody would be surprised if Tesla flopped but we know BMW, a company over 100 years old won't flop. I can't imagine being offered a choice between owning (the company) Tesla or BMW and picking Tesla. edit: Tesla did 4.…

So you are shorting TSLA right? Or do you just believe in capital markets?
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