Goodbye, Twilio

Also its technically not required for actually inbound only, but it sounds like this application also sends ack replies.

Cloudflare Services:

Advanced Certificate Manager Advanced DDoS Always Online™ Analytics Anycast Network API Apps Marketplace Audit Logs Argo Smart Routing Argo for Spectrum At Cost Registrar Bot Management Browser Insights & Origin Monitoring Browser Isolation (Advanced) Bring Your Own IPs (BYOIP) CDN Certificate Transparency Monitoring China Network Cloudflare Access Cloudflare Gateway™ Cloudflare Gateway™ (DNS Only) Cloudflare Images Cloudflare Logs Cloudflare Network Interconnect Cloudflare Pages® Cloudflare Registrar Cloudflare’s Security Operations Center (SOC) as a Service Cloudflare Spectrum Cloudflare Stream Cloudflare WAF Custom SSL Data Localization Suite Dedicated SSL DNS Firewall Enterprise DNS Only Enterprise - Primary DNS Error Pages Healthcheck Image Resizing Intel Keyless SSL Load Balancing Magic Firewall® Magic Transit® Magic WAN® Page Rules Page Shield Premium Success Rate Limiting Secondary DNS Secure Registrar SSL for SaaS SSL for SaaS Advanced Standard Success Offering Static IPs Teams for Enterprise Waiting Room Workers Bundled Workers KV Workers Unbound

Unfortunately, this is a common outcome. Sales/marketing will quantify revenue/profit goals, these goals often implicitly assume that it is only because of sales that those numbers were hit. Sales then grows headcount and gains influence in the organization. Eventually, you get some insane ratio of dev:sales and things get strange. The terminal state of such firms is the sales team driving acquisitions of products - so that they can sell the new product. By the time you’ve reached this point “technical” innovation is impossible.

On the flip side, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with driving a business from the sales side. There is lots of room for business process innovation. However, as an engineer - I’d much rather work at an engineering driven firm.

Twilio is has always been a very unprofitable company. Unlike their SaaS counterparts Twilio's PaaS model has significant costs in the form of fees which they pay to network providers. They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant. What's more there's very little moat in a communications API so Twilio has little pricing power which only compounds the cost issues they face since they cannot easily increase prices to offset growing costs of an already unprofitable business model.

Basically the business model sucks. I'd argue it's one that can only exist in a world where investors are not interested in profits. Now interest rates are rising it's becoming harder for companies like Twilio to attract investors by posting revenue growth alone.

I don't think Twilio wanted to shift their focus, they simply had to. They had to find something that had more of a moat, and therefore better margins. Segment is the answer, but ultimately it's a different product which understandably requires a different focus. If you sell a communications API then developers are the people whom you must evangelise, but Segment is a product used by business folks to grow their business.

I don't envy the position Jeff and Twilio's management team are in. They've had to make some really tough decisions, but if you like Twilio then I'd see this simply as them doing what they need to do to survive and continue providing the awesome developer focused products they provide.

I'll also note that unlike Facebook's mass layoffs Twilio's layoffs weren't simply done to increase profitability, but needed to right side a business that's currently burning over $1 billion a year.