Twilio went from cool developer tooling to facilitating global robocalls and being a net negative for the world.
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Twilio board members read daily email reports?
Goodbye, Twilio
21–30 of 353 posts
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#22I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers around the world and I’m unsurprised to see such a thoughtful take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#23There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing. With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard refl…
Isn't the main thing to keep the main thing the main thing ?
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#24Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…
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.
Good. The fact that the FCC refuses to act (and GOP in Congress blockades things like chair nominations (read up on what happened to Gigi Sohn) to ensure inaction) against telcos just allowing spammers to ruin our national communications infrastructure because the pennies they get from them are worth more than all their consumers is an embarrassment to our country.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#25There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing. With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard refl…
It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#26Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…
what's the alternative for something straightforward like that?
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#27I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers around the world and I’m unsurprised to see such a thoughtful take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Thank you, Ricky! The privilege was also mine. :)
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#28It 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…
Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries.
If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#29Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used extensively.
Thank you so much. Glad to hear you've found my work useful.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#30>> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio.
Once it becomes a viable business, growth and departments that support it become equally important. Devs are one of the important departments.
Smart devs grow up and seize the opportunity to grow with the company. For most devs it is a rude awakening and accept the reality quickly.
This thread coming to the surface means there are a lot of such devs in the YC community surprised or curious about this phenomenon.