Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO

Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option.

Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America.

This is why they are building on top of the underlying commodity and moving upmarket into things like call center automation products, which start to compete directly with many of their customers.

You can easily negotiate down your SIP/SMS Twilio prices the second you realize they have plenty of competitors.

If a smaller competitor gets their name out there by doing some basic guerrilla marketing against a behemoth public company with tons of money, it seems pretty benign. Everyone wins but the overpriced incumbent.

They found themselves in the same place as Dropbox. A company built on being a wrapper around a commodity has a way of becoming a more robust company's feature. They always try to add more stuff on to differentiate, but it doesn't always work.

> Dropbox

I have so much respect for Dropbox. I remember laughing when Dropbox gave away 2GB for free back in 2009(?) and I never really thought they had a valid business plan. I read Drew Houston talked to Steve Jobs and I still don't understand why he wouldn't sell. But then I'm poor. Anything that puts more than USD 20M in my pocket would be life changing for me.

> What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius).

https://web.archive.org/web/20200520184823/https://www.forbe...

Special terms. They already did a few million rev.

Great insight and thoughts on Houston and Dropbox. Dropbox would have floundered at Apple. Even a loose competitor, Box, where Aaron, the co-founder, owned around 5.5% (after all exercised stocks) post IPO, that still was over $100M while he got to continue running the company through now. Apple buying Dropbox for $800M back in 2009-2010 would’ve given Houston $300M or so I am assuming? I’m sure even if he eventually came out with much less, even less than Aaron, continuing to run the company for over a decade more is far more fulfilling.

And of course Houston is a billionare from Dropbox since it went public a little over two years ago in 2018.

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I remember thinking Snapchat, namely, Spiegel and Murphy co-founders as being a bit crazy to not sell Snapchat to Facebook in late 2013 for $3B when Instagram was bought for $1B 1.5 years earlier.

However the two remaining founders had taken $10M a piece in the previous 2013 funding round. So like you said about $20M being insane as it would be for me. A lot easier to turn that down with all the possibly upsides and millions in your bank account.

Even with Snapchat not exploding the way it was thought it would later on: - a year after rebuffing FB, they raised almost $500M at a $10B+ valuation in late 2014. - 2.5 years later, in early-ish 2017, they went public at $30B+, raising $3.5B. - Tencent became the next big company to have a large stake in Snapchat. After being a previous small investor. Gathering 12-18% of the company by late 2017/early 2018 when Snap stock was doing pretty badly. - Today, the co-founders still have super voting rights and Snap stock is back to being above $30B while seemingly everyone copies them.

They unethically (IMO) kicked out the third co-founder for a while by then, like Twitter did before them, but less ruthlessly in the end since Snap’s 3rd guy, Brown, still made out very well.

Twitter’s Noah Glass on the other hand...it’s just too sad. No less seeing the worst Twitter guy of them all, Dorsey, getting all this praise for his recent big donations with almost no mentions of how he began his lies and consolidation of power [at Twitter]