101–110 of 353 posts
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> selling glyphosate for residential use What's wrong with glyphosate?
There's a lot that can go wrong when unqualified and untrained people are given a powerful pesticide for residential use.
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Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors? Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it. I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I s…
You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely to engage with the community. You could frame the same question in a more constructive style.
Jeff is the CEO of a public company, and hence works for shareholders.
It's in Jeff's interest to engage with the community, and we are glad he's here. We certainly don't need to tiptoe around delicate sensibilities though...
This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO.
Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this.
I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that has maintained the core of what they do, and the value proposition, but didn’t push most of their money into paying for sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally, stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees.
Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he’s a good person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else, and so it’s honorable that he is attempting to find ways to mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end of the day the arrow of history is clear.
"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all…
Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at all.
"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all…
> (...) and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and (...) Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at all.
"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all…
A developer run and developer focused business could absolutely be a viable business. But it wouldn’t be the 10x hockey stick growth company venture capitalists demand and ultimately they hold the power here. So we get the inevitable.
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> (...) and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and (...) Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at all.
You can say the same for engineers, and really anyone else.
Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding! For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. As a developer,…
Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors? Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it. I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I s…
For us, we typically work with customers who are victims of fraud and the first time, we give them advice on how to better protect themselves and then refund them ~ the amount of profit we would have made. Ie we recoup costs but that’s it. For the financially aware, this is bad for our gross margin and profit but we do it to help customers the first time. After that though we expect them do implement some defenses otherwise our incentives aren’t aligned. Now however, we have Fraud Guard rolling out which should prevent much of the fraud in the first place.
There are other forms of bad actors but that’s the most prevalent these days.
There’s nothing surprising here. This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO. Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this. I am unaware of a v…