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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

#51

Post by bleonard »

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…

We are building Grouparoo (https://www.grouparoo.com) because we think you should be able to do this yourself and own/control the data - without the incentive structure being messed up from the cost pressure.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#53

Post by robbiemitchell »

Really happy for the team. Huge fan of Segment from the start, and Twilio is slowly getting itself into the middle of everything. (I realized only recently that they've owned Authy for years following the recent rebranding.)

I find it interesting that Segment (and thus the entire downstream ecosystem) has gone this far while staying strictly oriented around users and accounts, without first-class support for other entities -- namely a notion of workspace/team/contract/opportunity/etc. "Groups" was sort of a false start that didn't get a new direction. There's still a ways to go connecting all the dots between how companies structure their data and how all third-party products are prepared (or not) to mirror that structure.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#54

Post by divbzero »

tito wrote: post #41
spondyl wrote: post #16

This is the same Segment that started out as a single Javascript file that a couple guys threw together before rebranding right? I mean, they're so much more now (or so it seems) but feels like it was just yesterday... and I'm only 26!

10 bajillion percent HN / YC success story. Congrats to all -- especially the person on the original thread who said "this is a cool idea"

Here’s the original post [1] and another early thread [2]. Always fun looking back with 20/20 hindsight.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 "Analytics.js"

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116832 "Segment.io"

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#57

Post by shostack »

peter_mcrae wrote: post #27
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.

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.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting as somewhat of a "bottoms up" approach vs the Salesforce approach.

I swear there's some law for these sorts of things where they inevitably end up as a marketing automation platform.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#58

Post by m463 »

gigatexal wrote: post #55

The article is so dumb. Not a single sentence on what Segment does.

From wikipedia (deleted?)

> Segment is an American customer data infrastructure company based in San Francisco, California. Its software allows enterprises to combine the collection of data from their customers, whether through a mobile app, by e-mail or in a store. Segment was founded in 2011 and accepted into Y Combinator in the same year.

So nobody feels comfortable talking about what they do.

> Segment | Customer Data Platform (CDP)

> segment.com

> Segment collects user events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company. Marketing Single view of the customer.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#59

Post by fancyfish »

Really happy for the team and especially for the founders. They proved to be very technical and assembled a truly impressive engineering team, culminating in a huge exit.

The founders deserve every penny of that $3.2b and deserve the very nice lifestyle that will afford them. A great story that will inspire others including myself.

Re: Twilio set to acquire Segment for $3.2B

#60

Post by Toine »

alexjray wrote: post #43
dmix wrote: post #22

I follow(ed) Segment’s GitHub branches and always felt they adopted the latest and best front end tooling. I usually let them being the testing ground at a real company in between the stuff they developed themselves. This goes from using Metalsmith early for their single page web sites, some coding practices (mono vs micro), some CSS frameworks and design patterns and other library choices when there always seemed li…

Most of that is Ian Storm Taylor. This is what happens when software is treated as a first class citizen and the co founder(s) are technical. It's a specific class of companies like Stripe and Square. The business itself is treated as a software product, internal influences external.

Can you elaborate on "internal influences external" ? I don't get it.
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