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Goodbye, Twilio

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

201–210 of 353 posts

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#201

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

We’ve strip mined the earth, decimated humanity, are globally hopeless (look at birth rates) and individual alienation has never been wider spread

Suicide is quickly becoming the leading cause of death

I’m not sure we’re any better off now holistically

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Jeff If I understand the page for Fraud Guard correctly, this appears to cost money. Seems like Twilio should be filtering spam (a) by default / auto-enabled for all and (b) at no cost to the user. Much like how spam is included & auto enabled for all (and free) from Gmail/Outlook/etc.

It's no cost to the user! Defaults are rolled out to everybody, but the users opts-into aggressive protection because of the risk of false positives. Note, this is Verify today. All Programmable SMS customers will get it soon as well.

FWIW, the “Cost of Terminating Each SMS” is what confused me.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#203
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you written any stories or learnings of your time at WhatsApp anywhere?

I'm not much of a focused writer, so other than comments on HN, and private communications. Not really.

If it's on topic, I'm happy to answer questions. And my email is in my profile.

On this topic, I guess the big learning if you use phone numbers for verification is to use multiple providers, and build a system that automatically chooses providers in real time based on success. They all have incidents, and they all have destinations that work better and worse. I don't usually mention suppliers by name unless it was clearly public, they put us in their SEC forms by name, so I think it's fair.

My "favorite" incidents are when one provider has a major incident, and several others have minor incidents that correspond exactly. This is because most of the aggregators are interconnected, and sometimes it makes more sense for them to send through another aggregator than directly (they don't tend to have direct routes for all carriers, regardless of what they claim).

If you use voice codes, I also recommend working to make the voice spacing sound good. Remembering 6 digits from a call isn't super easy; it's better if you make it sounds like two groups of three or maybe three groups of two. It's not totally obvious how to do that either; smashing audio files together doesn't sound great. You've got to adjust the silence between voice samples.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#204
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're looking at how many pies there are in the world-- yes, that's zero sum. But if we're considering utility-- how useful stuff is to me-- it is far from zero sum. If I produce lots of wheat, being able to trade some of it for my neighbor's beef makes both of us richer.

Your example proves my point You have a fixed amount of already acquired property You do specified labor on that You exchange your labor + property for someone else’s labor + property That’s commerce and has nothing to do with the question I’m talking about, which is: How you acquired the property in the first place is the ethical question. What’s unethical is if your a neighbor was struggling to survive and instead…

If I develop and produce a fertilizer which doubles yields for a particular crop, that's uncaptured pie. Plain and simple.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu. I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. Or in plain language: making other people more rich at the cost of others. I’m just happy the guy got out when the company didn’t align with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself a conscience.

> making other people more rich at the cost of others Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.

Some have more money than they can spend in a lifetime while others are homeless.

This is the society we live in, created by capitalism that demands unsustainable growth.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#206
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Who cares about population growth? We know human population will stabilize pretty soon. Malthusian arguments are meaningless when the very premise of unlimited population growth is false.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#207
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

definitely. my most quoted dev marketing tweet is about me constantly having to relearn “"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!” in the early stage devtool startup playpen i operate in, but at your stage you have multiple equally impt constituencies. whenever i’m caught between a thesis and an antithesis i try to look for a synthesis to break through the apparent conflict. perhaps TWLO can find messaging that do…

Link to tweet?

https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1361279902889086980

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#208
post #97

"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all…

I think you read a different article. Miguel is aggrieved by the fact that it is no longer a developer focused company, which was the reason for its success. Sure, you need sales, marketing and the rest of it; it does not mean that you need to forget what made you great in the first place.

Rubbish.

Money doesn't magically show up at your doorstep even if your product is focused on developers. How do you think SaaS companies are able to hire developers? Do those $350k bay area salaries magically come from nothing? Yes, they often initially fueled by VC dollars, but eventually customer revenues pay for them.

The "anti sales" drivel from engineers on HN who are largely some of the highest paid positions in the world always puzzles me.

It's OKAY to be okay with Sales & Marketing in companies. It isn't some evil function, and discounting it means future entrepreneurs are doomed to fail.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#210
post #108
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can say the same thing about marketing. If there's no marketing, who buys the product.
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