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You can say the same for engineers, and really anyone else.
A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.
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You can say the same for engineers, and really anyone else.
A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.
Best engineers making the best product ever will not make a dollar without good sales people and marketing and product managers and VC and ... You need ALL of these to make a succesful company.
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> selling glyphosate for residential use What's wrong with glyphosate?
Read the safety data sheet, see what precautions are needed and then ask an average residential roundup user if they care at all about following those instructions.
That's because the principal "danger" of glyphosate formulations comes from surfactants.
Pure glyphosate by itself is pretty benign.
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A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.
No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising. Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many startups, but that does not mean they live and die by their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that got there without engineering excellence.
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The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.
This is extremely frustrating for me. We used to use Send In Blue. If you send a campaign, and some larger percentage (10% or so) do not open within 24 hours, they automatically suspend your campaign. On the surface you might think this is a good idea, but we used this service for sending investor updates. Most of our investors don’t open non-urgent emails within 24 hours. SIB claimed it was some legal requirement. W…
It seems the MBAs are at it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 Twilio is now another Xerox. MBA programs should be illegal. You can thank MBAs for spreading PFAS everywhere, single use plastic, profiteering from insulin, making every American a diabetic by adding sugar into everything, selling glyphosate for residential use, killing all the pollinators, moving all manufacturing to countries with no en…
> selling glyphosate for residential use What's wrong with glyphosate?
I HOPE this a sarcasm filled question.
Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits? Always about growth, growth, growth!
Twilio doesn't make billions in profits. Twilio has been losing money for years. I'm not sure if Twilio was ever profitable?
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they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was founded
SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy. Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio…
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first of all, big admirer of you. if you feel inclined, would really love your comment on OP's observation: > Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio. it does seem the recent messaging has de emphasized that in favor of "Customer Engagement Platform". as the originator of "Ask Your Developer" (I read your book!) that has to sting a little bit. would love to hear your thinking on how…
At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing. We can have good APIs and make a compelling case to the business why they should pay for it. I agree that sometimes our engagement messaging isn’t quite right for developers. As a developer, I prefer more technical and matter of fact marketing of products. But interestingly…
I’ve always described this as “selling features vs selling solutions”. As a startup grows, the buying persona changes. Startups that sell to developers do best when they’re selling features, whereas a product manager/CEO is shopping for a solution (like increasing customer engagement). A neat thing I’ve noticed is that at one point, almost every B2B company will add a “Solutions” page to their website to highlight that.
Wrote about it more here: https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/selling-features-then-solu...)