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Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

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Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#221

Post by crabasa »

shakes wrote: post #38

I worked at Twilio for nearly 10 years and it's hard to overstate what a gift it was to work there and see Jeff operate as CEO up-close. He created an environment where (at our best) we could have fun doing work that had a real impact, and we could it with people we enjoyed doing the work with. He pushed us to be creative to authentically empower and inspire developers. Wanna build a video game that teaches developer…

People who weren't there don't understand, but the world before "Ask Your Developer" was completely different than the world we live in today where developers are at the heart of how decisions are made, products are built and how the world itself is changing.

I joined Twilio in 2012 and I saw first hand how pivotal Jeff was in supporting the idea that in order for a platform to be successful it needed to treat developers like first class citizens, and not simply the recipient of a "directive to integrate" from the CTO.

This idea wasn't simply a fist bump to devs for cool points, it was a recognition that developers themselves held the key to innovation and creating radically new things. This culture led to entirely new ways of building API docs, designing developer dashboards, creating developer events, and so on.

So many of these things have become mainstream and the new baseline for platform companies that people forget how unlikely it was in the beginning and how hard Jeff had to fight to keep the company from treating developers as a means, and not as an end. And I think all developers who are happily hacking away on a free tier of a cool API with excellent docs and a vibrant developer community should tip their hat to a person who helped make this normal and influenced a generation of leaders to do the same.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#222

Post by callalex »

dragontamer wrote: post #98
gkoberger wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a genuine question... isn't that his job? For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were priva…

Only if you pretend that the CEOs job is purely for raising money. Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help brew the culture that makes that company productive. We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10 years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies they built.

I was tasked with taking over some of jeffiel’s code bases around the time period we are discussing here. He perfectly skirted the line of telling me what he was thinking while writing stuff and simultaneously staying out of it and letting the people he hired take the reins. He spent most of his time interacting with Cxx and Director level people to set the tone and direction of the company, while still taking the time to know what ICs were doing so that he could usefully answer questions and use our products.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#223

Post by drchopchop »

yawgmoth wrote: post #19
pylua wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock price has been lackluster unfortunately. I’m not sure as to why.

My take: They're too expensive at volume (and they have competitors, just not famous ones) and not specialized enough / not best in class compared to tools like Klaviyo.

This. They're great for small/mid-sized developers, but they price themselves out once you're doing billions of messages a month. At that point companies start looking at aggregators one level down (i.e. closer to the carriers or raw SMTP).

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#224

Post by mikepurvis »

randomdata wrote: post #206
creaturemachine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why he thought to cast himself in commercials is beyond me.

Why's that? He has been doing the commercials for around a couple of decades, staring long before he was the one doing the casting. Even after taking that role in 2016, the previous commenter points out that the commercials continued to be well received until well into the 2020s. It was a successful formula for a long time. Indeed, positive audience sentiment has an expiration date. He rode the wave too long, perhaps…

I didn't actually know that he'd been doing it for a while, but I've not ever been a regular TV viewer. The change from my perspective was the commercials showing up in my Facebook feed and my family group chat joking around about the latest dispatches from old Gal Pal and how we could pick up a shrimp ring for 20% off.

So even if it was a longstanding thing, pushing the content toward a more millenial/gen-z audience is still a new direction and risk.

In the end, the biggest factor was the dissonance between his warm, cozy "all in this together" messaging combined with grocery price hikes and news like this coming on the other side of it all: https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/11/loblaw-report-profit-foo...

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#225

Post by jmacd »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #215
jmacd wrote: post #72

The decline of Twilio's position has been as pretty clear for the last 18 months now, and has been a topic of conversation longer than that. Twilio never had the margins or control of their environment to nearly the degree you need to have in order to maintain software monopoly levels of growth over time. Most of Twilio's business has been built on reselling network access purchased via SMS consolidators. These are c…

Fwiw I think a key difference in stripe vs twilio in your example is that stripe has 2 levers that twilio doesn't have good analogs to: - stripe can be a "financial home" for many of its customers and build higher-margin pockets of software functionality, using easy payments as an on-ramp. See: stripe billing, radar, sigma, connect, etc. - stripe is more likely to be able to "swap out" the credit card rails than twil…

I think those are good points and valid, but Twilio definitly had equivalent arguments in their own product.

Encumbents manage scale very very well and historically they tend to come to a market late. While Stripe is rushing up the value chain, the issuers are just slowly lumbering around.

Billing, Radar, Sigma, Connect are all very well built products which drive usage of their core revenue generator. I suspect the revenue mix at Stripe is still largely payment processing. Voice minutes and SMSs on a carriers network, or authorizations and settlements on an issuer network.

I am not saying Stripe is doomed, far from it, but it's a non trival problem to solve over the long term and the default state is attrition. I think Twilio is a very good example of how difficult this can be.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#226

Post by balls187 »

ctvo wrote: post #178
fnordpiglet wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. It’s when you ceded leadership to the accountants and shifted gears to maintenance mode that companies stopped growing. You never did these things for fun, you did these things because they had some knock on effect that made it potentially worth it, and in a portfolio of many small bets some w…

> In my 32 years in the industry the best performing companies always did these things regardless of the macroeconomic climate. Agreed. Creative, high performing people don't do well in a work environment that's structured like a regional bank. Valve Software -- incredibly profitable, high performing and private company, did fun things like hire economists (and then later Greek prime minister) to study and simulate v…

> Valve Software ... high performing

Depends on how you measure performance. ARPU? Very high. Shipping software? Super low.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#227

Post by dilyevsky »

winter-day wrote: post #213

I worked at twilio when they were a series B company and Jeff personally did the on boardings. I think it was the only company I've worked at where I felt that every engineer was a super star. I've followed their career since then, and they've gone on to do phenomenal work. My opinion is that they had very weak leadership below the C-suite. We brought on one of the founders of skype, and after having lunch with him a…

Seems like such a common failure mode - early team proves pmf, then founders go on and hire substandard management who alienate early folks, hire their puppets/friends and proceed to ruin everything. I've seen it personally a few times now and still not quite sure why otherwise smart founders keep falling for it.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#228

Post by kelnos »

I worked at Twilio from 2011 to 2022, and it was quite the amazing ride, especially for the first four or five years. Twilio basically wrote the book on API-first businesses, and on how to court developers to use and love a product, and evangelize that product to less-than-technical management types. While Jeff wasn't all that involved in the technical side of things by the time I joined, he still kept his engineering chops up, and it was always fun to see him live-coding Twilio apps on conference stages.

I was disappointed in Twilio for the last several years I was there. What had started off as an engineering (and product) focused company devolved into being driven by sales. We put out some products that were half-baked from an engineering perspective, and it showed: missing or buggy features, downtime, and unfulfilled promises to customers that sales/product made with barely perfunctory consultation with engineering. IMO it really hurt the company's reputation. I remembered a time when mentions of Twilio in tech circles would come with praise and even awe; more recently complaints seem to have overtaken the good vibes.

The "Ask Your Developer" billboard on US-101 as you entered SF was iconic. I loved that billboard; it perfectly encapsulated what the company stood for and illustrated why I was so happy there. For a while it was changed to something about reducing customer acquisition costs, a big red flag. More recently, it says some meaningless nonsense about "digital greatness" and "customer AI". That kind of shift tells me everything I need to know about where things have headed.

Ok, time to stop being so negative... having said all that, I wouldn't trade my time there for anything. I learned more than I thought possible, worked with a ton of people who I respect heavily, made many lifelong friends... it was a life-changing experience. Jeff was a big part of that, and I'll always be thankful to him, Evan, and John for creating a place where I could thrive and grow.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#229

Post by fshr »

vineyardmike wrote: post #141
itsoktocry wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Environment -- Cashflow negative meaning another raise was required without fiscal controls The company was founded almost 20 years ago, and went public in 2016..and they are still needing to raise money? I mean, this isn't a capital intensive space, right? What's the deal?

They spent a ton of money buying other companies. That’s always capital intense. Software isn’t capital intensive the way a large industrial factory would be, but it still has unfavorable financial conditions that require raising. You can’t sell software until you’ve built it, so you have to incur a large employee/R&D expense for years until the product is ready. And of course none of that is IP that you can just get…

> You can’t sell software until you’ve built it

It’s funny to contrast that with the video game publishers. They’ll push to sell things that aren’t even close to finished, make bank, and do it again and again.

Re: Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

#230

Post by randomdata »

mikepurvis wrote: post #224
randomdata wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that? He has been doing the commercials for around a couple of decades, staring long before he was the one doing the casting. Even after taking that role in 2016, the previous commenter points out that the commercials continued to be well received until well into the 2020s. It was a successful formula for a long time. Indeed, positive audience sentiment has an expiration date. He rode the wave too long, perhaps…

I didn't actually know that he'd been doing it for a while, but I've not ever been a regular TV viewer. The change from my perspective was the commercials showing up in my Facebook feed and my family group chat joking around about the latest dispatches from old Gal Pal and how we could pick up a shrimp ring for 20% off. So even if it was a longstanding thing, pushing the content toward a more millenial/gen-z audience…

Funny thing is that restaurant patronage has declined considerably in Canada in the past year or so. Even with many restaurants now operating at a loss (i.e. paying you to eat) to try and win back customers, they are failing to capture hearts and minds.

If people aren't eating at restaurants, it is almost certain they are getting their food at the grocery store instead. For all the mockery of Galen, it seems the marketing strategy has been unbelievably successful.

That's probably why he continued to cast himself even as the audience focus shifted to millennials and gen-z. Letting someone laughing at you for a few minutes is no big deal. Watching them love you when they show up at your store over and over makes it all worthwhile, I'm sure.

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