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Goodbye, Twilio

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#181

Post by rapind »

brigadier132 wrote: post #169
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is 100% legally zero sum unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?

The world is trivially not zero sum. If it were zero sum we would all be living worse off than medieval peasants

Every “win-win” most certainly produces side effects, usually unmeasured, which leads to naive statements like “it’s not zero sum”.

We may no longer be peasants (hard to prove), but a large number of extinct species and ecological disasters would like to argue the “not zero sum” point.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#182

Post by VirusNewbie »

reaperman wrote: post #149
el_nahual wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do stock buybacks enrich investors at the cost of employees ? They are (almost identical) to a dividend, which yes, enriches shareholders but a) that's kind of the point of a business b) especially in startups employees are often shareholders as well, and meaningfully so c) even if they weren't, how do they hurt employees?

Stock buybacks represent excess profits which otherwise could be used for employee bonuses or salary raises. There's a lot of room for argument here, because it's not clear if in the absence of stock buybacks, that excess profits wouldn't go more directly into the pockets of the owners via direct capital withdrawal. But it's not an entirely invalid viewpoint. There really is a lot of room for reasonable minds to disa…

Stock price increase benefits workers quite a bit though.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#183

Post by Aeolun »

unusualmonkey wrote: post #144
rewmie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry, but that's kinda of nonsense. You can build a fairly successful startup with little to no engineering. Sure, engineers are usually pretty important (they're great at automating tasks to improve efficeincy)... but so are many other roles.

You can, but then you generally do not try to build a first in class telephony service.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#184

Post by 29athrowaway »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #129
29athrowaway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.

Your comments in this thread seem to me to be heavily laden with the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion#Magnifica... > Catastrophizing – Giving greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable. --- Hopefully it goes without saying that talking about elderly peop…

My grandpa had a pulse-dialing phone (aka rotary dialing) and he was strongly against learning how to use a different type of phone. I tried to have him use a cordless phone but he strongly refused.

So each time the phone rang the guy had to stand up, then slowly walk to the phone and answer. He did fall a few times as he got older.

That was not his cause of death but I can imagine that if you call enough people for long enough as those robocallers do it is not hard to imagine it happening kind of often. A lot of older people have no idea how to use a smartphone and new technology is particularly hostile to them (small fonts by default, complex menus, tech jargon, etc.)

As robocalls became more frequent he was really pissed off at the situation.

Just call your grandparents and ask them what they think of robocalls.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#185

Post by Aeolun »

Turbots wrote: post #132
rewmie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was an engineer for 15 years and have been a tech presales for 4 years now. You couldn't be more wrong. 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.

Marketing/sales is fine. As long as they sell what we have, not a pie in the sky that we might at some point in the future have.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#186

Post by Solvency »

This guy is crazy if he thinks "The Cloud Communications Platform" makes more sense to the average driver passing by the billboard than "Customer Engagement Platform". At least the average person knows who customers are and what engaging means.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#187

Post by satvikpendem »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #103

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…

But...Twilio is a public company, VC shareholders have already sold their stock, so most of what you say isn't applicable, unless you mean to imply that a public company also acts similarly to a VC backed one.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#188

Post by __d »

brigadier132 wrote: post #169
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is 100% legally zero sum unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?

The world is trivially not zero sum. If it were zero sum we would all be living worse off than medieval peasants

Without (yet) having an opinion here, that's not necessarily true: resource consumption is adding value to the system at a level that might offset population growth?

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#189

Post by rewmie »

paxys wrote: post #145
eightysixfour wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a very naive view of the industry and the world.

> And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a very naive view of the industry and the world.

You're putting up lame strawmen. No one claimed "Engineering = success".

The claim is that it is absolutely impossible to have a tech startup without engineers, and no idea, no matter how cunning it might be, can have success if engineering can't turn it to into reality.

A tech startup without engineering is snake oil. Simple as that. Let's not pretend that a salesperson parachuting into a startup with a product in the market can possibly have a comparable impact to those who actually deliver the actual product.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#190

Post by Solvency »

pkiv wrote: post #140
jeffiel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Former Twilion here) 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 w…

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