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Twilio S-1

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Re: Twilio S-1

#151

Post by mikeyouse »

cissou wrote: post #139
mikeyouse wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page 143, or ctrl + F for "All executive officers and directors as a group (9 persons)".

it says how much they own, but not how much Jeff cashed out, right?

Ah, my bad, thought you were looking for the ownership numbers. He cashed out $15.6M worth in two transactions. Page 139. Quick math, without his share repurchases, he'd own roughly 15% of the company. 2-3 percentage points for $15M in cash seems like a pretty good deal.

2013 Repurchase: $6,355,308

2015 Repurchase: $9,310,100

Evan Cooke cashed out $4.4M in the same transactions.

Re: Twilio S-1

#152

Post by shostack »

fapjacks wrote: post #125
mbesto wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's play the devil's advocate for a second. FY13 FY14 FY15 Sales and marketing: 21,931 33,322 49,308 Just turn it off and now you have a $11M profit. NetSuite and SuccessFactors did it in 2008 and they're both profitable, or at least were in NetSuite's case (NetSuite has recently pushed hard on S&M, hence a decline in profit in the last few years, probably because the market is dictating to do so and money is cheap…

I think this is a smart move and a good observation. Specifically with respect to Twilio, because I already know about their services. Having needed this kind of integration as a business need previously, I am aware of what services they are offering. What I'm saying is that I don't think this is a discovery problem for Twilio. All of their marketing and sales efforts seem to be focused on asking me to get to know Tw…

I'd be surprised if they are targeting just developers and people knowledgeable about the tech.

A lot of that is probably focused on reaching PHB's in enterprises who don't know what Twilio is or why they should care until a sales person takes them to an expensive lunch to explain it.

Re: Twilio S-1

#154

Post by shostack »

bcruddy wrote: post #135
Shivetya wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay, I am still laughing and yes I used it just now. Still how do places like yours actually get the word out?

We got pretty big about a year ago when we posted it to /r/internetisbeautiful (mods took it down after about an hour since it requires a phone number and that's "personal info"). From there, @thepacketrat from Arstechnica picked it up and ran a story and it just sort of exploded from there for a couple days. At the peak of it's popularity we were on Ars, Business Insider, the front page of Mashable, and a handful of…

That's crazy. If you don't mind my asking, does it actually make a decent amount of money? I always wonder whether things like this with very tiny transaction amounts, and (I'm assuming) a low avg. orders/person.

Also curious how hard it was to code something like this. I can think of a few less funny things like this that I'd find pretty useful for my own projects and wondering if I have enough skills to make something like this.

Re: Twilio S-1

#155

Post by xanamander »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #111
breaker05 wrote: post #3

Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com

Canada please... there's no end to money I'm throwing your way then :->

Can confirm, works for Canadian numbers (same country code, and billed the same on the Twilio side of things afaics)

Re: Twilio S-1

#157

Post by BukhariH »

hamana wrote: post #80
ojbyrne wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the quora question here - https://www.quora.com/How-did-Bill-Gates-own-such-a-large-sh... - says, its for a pretty straightforward reason, economics. If you need investor money to grow, you get diluted. If you don't you don't.

Why does Twilio need investor money to grow and Microsoft did not? Microsoft also grew rapidly, but didn't take a lot of outside funding. Why? Because they charged adequate price for their products. In the documents, Twilio stated they have a hard time determining pricing (something I've seen with other SaaS companies as well). Since they are not profitable with the current pricing, they should increase it and cut ce…

That's because Twilio doesn't exist in a bubble. They're in a highly competitive sector. Their pricing has to reflect that.

They may lose money in the short-term but it allows them to become the de facto standard for telephony APIs and then they can increase their pricing or they can leverage their size to open new revenue streams.

Re: Twilio S-1

#158

Post by dang »

ShaneBonich wrote: post #92

Worst of all, lots of free Twilio alternatives are popping up, like https://www.bitrix24.com/alternatives/free-twilio-alternativ... Twilio is great but it's hard to compete with free.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780119 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Twilio S-1

#159

Post by gdudeman »

Animats wrote: post #75

There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…

Twilio went from $33m to $59 Q1 '15 to Q1 '16. That's huge growth - and is a lot to like.

Virtually every company that is growing at 80% YoY runs unprofitably.

Here's why: compounding. They're growing 80% YoY because of that spend and it's absolutely worth it.

Say they could run break even at 50% YoY growth. Straight line that growth through 2019 and you have a company doing just shy of $800m in annual revenue. Invest $40m extra a year for 80% growth (admittedly very simplified!), and you have a company doing $1.4B per year.

Growth costs money up front: it's marketing, it's customer acquisition, it's hiring and scaling so you're ready to do nearly double the volume next year and it's opening new lines of business.

You'd be nuts not to spend some extra cash when a) unit economics are good and b) you can turn it into significantly more cash in 12-24 months.

Twilio could run profitably tomorrow at the cost of hundreds of millions in revenue and potential profit 3, 4 and 5 years out.

Disclaimer: Jeff Lawson is a CEO I greatly admire.

Re: Twilio S-1

#160

Post by api »

Animats wrote: post #75

There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…

My first question would be: how hard would it be for them to become profitable right now?

That translates to: how manual is their business? How much cost in the form of wages, contractors, etc. could they shed?

If the answer is that they could easily become profitable, that means they're leaning into growth. If the answer is 'no' that's a bad sign.

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