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Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

forbes.com

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Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#31

Post by teej »

texasbigdata wrote: post #15
teej wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Segment (and any other SaaS that wants to own the event firehose) has pricing issues as the customer scales. As a customer you are charged on data volume[0], but your data grows at the rate = (Users x Engagement X Features X Data Sources). That rate can easily be the square of your revenue growth. This pricing issue makes it easy for Segment's fast-growing customers to justify an in house replacement. This puts huge…

So what’s the end state solution? The tools change and/or mature slower than a fast company will grow. Where are you going from here? Are you eventually running your own cluster? Or, are you paying per Gb per second how GCP bills with decoupled compute / memory / storage? Or maybe with a little bit more overhead with the orchestration cost on top of consumption with how azure bills for ADF. Just from reading blog pos…

The end state is you DIY. Segment isn’t doing anything secret/magic, it’s just well executed and super convenient.

The “how” question has changed every 3 years in the last 10 that I’ve done data work. That trend is driven primarily by data scale and partially that analytics and ML access patterns have evolved a lot.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#33

Post by Sebguer »

bertjk wrote: post #24
Sebguer wrote: post #17

Step one towards rebranding Sendgrid as a marketing platform and getting them away from the cesspit that is transactional email.

(real question) Why is transactional email considered a cesspit?

A few reasons that all connect to each other. The biggest, most foundational one is that spammers are highly sophisticated criminal organizations, and will constantly be trying to figure out how to leverage your product for spam.

If they are successful, it is extremely costly for you (primarily in terms of IP reputation, which is very difficult to maintain) and cheap for them.

If they are unsuccessful, well, they'll keep trying and stopping them continues to be costly for you and they only need to get lucky once every so often for it to be worthwhile for them to continue.

Exacerbating all this, it's extremely commoditized, so even fairly large customers aren't going to make you that much money, especially given all the hassles of maintaining it.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#34

Post by rasen58 »

raiyu wrote: post #5
aeromusek wrote: post #4

Genius move for Twilio, honestly. Segment can supply the central hub to tie in all channel spokes Twilio already powers (especially after the SendGrid acquisition from a couple years ago). I can't help thinking Segment had much more room to run though...everyone I know who uses them loves them, and they were still only just scratching the surface of the addressable market.

With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out. Usually board will look to make changes, replace founder CEO and if that doesn’t work then push for a sale. Very smart acquisition for Twilio though.

> With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out.

Can you explain what this means. Why does the first part of the sentence imply the second?

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#35

Post by brandnewlow »

rubyfan wrote: post #30
peter_mcrae wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed really good fit. I bet a large % of Segment's customers were using Twilio endpoints. Really nice combination of a data hub / last mile across multiple channels...fully expect they will continue moving up the stack towards a CRM / Marketing automation solution.

Who’s a likely candidate for CRM acquisition? Seems like the space is a bit crowded and Salesforce is the big dog and lots of second tier but who’s a good fit for Twilio?

Intercom

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#36

Post by runako »

brandnewlow wrote: post #35
rubyfan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who’s a likely candidate for CRM acquisition? Seems like the space is a bit crowded and Salesforce is the big dog and lots of second tier but who’s a good fit for Twilio?

Intercom

+1 fits perfectly with the contact center features in Twilio (in addition to messaging etc.).

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#38

Post by cheriot »

rasen58 wrote: post #34
raiyu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out. Usually board will look to make changes, replace founder CEO and if that doesn’t work then push for a sale. Very smart acquisition for Twilio though.

> With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out. Can you explain what this means. Why does the first part of the sentence imply the second?

If they could show strong growth continuing they'd have made more money with an IPO than an acquisition. At least that's what the comment is suggesting.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#39

Post by Wintereise »

bertjk wrote: post #24
Sebguer wrote: post #17

Step one towards rebranding Sendgrid as a marketing platform and getting them away from the cesspit that is transactional email.

(real question) Why is transactional email considered a cesspit?

Indeed. One would think that given the notoriety associated with "marketing" emails, that would qualify for the cesspit title.

Though, I suppose the margins are much higher there.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#40

Post by knes »

hlth wrote: post #26
knes wrote: post #6

That sounds like a sweet deal, especially as Twilio stock is current "overvalued" (like most tech stocks right now). Jeff Lawson continues to follow the SFDC playbook of buying companies (and existing revenue growth) with stocks everytime their stock pops ;)

I'm not sure that it's Jeff Lawson as much as George Hu. 13 year SFDC veteran and credited by Benioff for many successful initiatives in his cloud book. Separately, when George joined Twilio, they didn't really have a sales team. Started working on contract terms, raising prices and a host of other things. He's very systematic. https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgehusf/

Yes you are correct that he probably played a big part in all of this.
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