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Goodbye, Twilio

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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231–240 of 353 posts

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#231

Post by rsync »

Aeolun wrote: post #225
rsync wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?" A2P 10DLC requires all senders to provide company/corporate information and register their "campaigns". Which is to say, when I send a grocery list to my wife, that must be under the auspices of a business case that I have registered with twilio and the carriers and within the confines of a campaign that I have defined with example messages and an…

Can you get around it by registering a company in a country that’s not spam heaven? I sure hope I won’t have to deal with that (in the Netherlands) just because the US has tons of spam.

If you send SMS to a US mobile number you need to register like this.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#232

Post by prottog »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #153
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?

[flagged]

If M. Proudhon thinks private property stinks so much, he should see what happens in places where there are no private property rights.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#233

Post by vikramkr »

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…

I notice there's always this impulse to blame VCs for how startup businesses evolve but like, founders want to make money too, and plenty of founders dream of building a huge company with a massive exit or ipo etc etc and push for that as a company without vcs needing to force it

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#234

Post by Fordec »

Fordec wrote: post #17
Animats wrote: post #12

Yeah, 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…

My open question becomes, who is servicing the request-reply service in its void? It still has a place as a subsystem within IoT that itself isn't anything necessarily hype worthy, but quiet background productive infrastructure in an easy to consume API format. Maybe the answer isn't SMS but someone working on constrained satellite internet?

After following this thread and following up on some mentioned competitors, looks like I'm looking for Plivo. Cheaper and still covers the SMS backhaul use case without the fluff I don't need while still focusing on the developer. I'm sure I will have to move again in a few years, more its something for now.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#235

Post by swyx »

redroyal wrote: post #230

I’ll never take Twilio seriously after their fire the white people first layoffs. I think they’re racist and won’t do business with them ever again.

uh what? source?

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#236

Post by prottog »

rajanaccros wrote: post #214
louwrentius wrote: post #141

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.

> I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. I am really glad I am starting to see a lot more posts here on HN with regard to this fact. Capitalism is literally destroying everything and has proven itself not to be a viable system for long term sustainability and a healthy society and ecosystem. Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still…

> Capitalism is literally destroying everything

You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0].

> Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience.

The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#237

Post by yesimahuman »

Aeolun wrote: post #223
yesimahuman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me there's just an argument for effective marketing. That new billboard can't be more effective at generating industry and brand awareness, can it? It's so forgettable. It's _mediocre_, and reads just like every other uninteresting stat point most B2B enterprise SaaS companies put out there. That's the part that I don't get, even if they are moving up market and away from a pure developer play, that kind of messag…

I think the “Ask your developer” resonates with only a small segment of the market (a fairly passionate segment). The “Lower your aquisition costs by 66%” resonates with the CFO, who will drive past the board every day until he remembers to tell someone in passing to “investigate this twilio thing”. From there the cogs of the org start turning and 6 months later out rolls a several million dollar order for Twilio. To…

The issue is that everyone is saying some version of that tagline. It's forgettable and the kind of thing you tune out over time. I guess we'll see how they perform moving forward though.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#238

Post by [deleted] »

vikramkr wrote: post #233
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…

I notice there's always this impulse to blame VCs for how startup businesses evolve but like, founders want to make money too, and plenty of founders dream of building a huge company with a massive exit or ipo etc etc and push for that as a company without vcs needing to force it

[deleted]

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#239

Post by Daz1 »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#240

Post by Daz1 »

rajanaccros wrote: post #214
louwrentius wrote: post #141

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.

> I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. I am really glad I am starting to see a lot more posts here on HN with regard to this fact. Capitalism is literally destroying everything and has proven itself not to be a viable system for long term sustainability and a healthy society and ecosystem. Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still…

Capitalism is the driving force behind everything you enjoy about your modern, comfortable life.
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