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Twilio S-1

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Re: Twilio S-1

#81

Post by robbiemitchell »

markolschesky wrote: post #12

Had no idea that WhatsApp was even a Twilio customer let alone one of its largest. >We currently generate significant revenue from WhatsApp and the loss of WhatsApp could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition. >In 2013, 2014 and 2015 and the three months ended March 31, 2016, WhatsApp accounted for 11%, 13%, 17% and 15% of our revenue, respectively. WhatsApp uses our Programmable Voice prod…

I suspect this will be painful to Twilio in a couple years. If you think anything like WeChat and its service ecosystem is coming to the rest of the world, it's going to happen on Facebook (or Telegram), not WhatsApp.

Re: Twilio S-1

#82

Post by hamana »

evanpw wrote: post #70
hamana wrote: post #45

> Jeff Lawson(1) --- 8,623,617 --- 11.9% How pathetic is this? Around 90% of the company is taken by the vulture capitalists and you, as a founder, only get to keep 12%. Bill Gates at the time of Microsoft's IPO had around 50% of the company.

From a 1986 Fortune article: "With pretax profits running as high as 34% of revenues, Microsoft needed no outside money to expand." [1] http://fortune.com/2011/03/13/inside-the-deal-that-made-bill...

Why doesn't Twilio have 34% profit margin? Because their price is low and their costs are high. If they increase the price of their product and cut certain costs, they would have similar profit margin to Microsoft.

Re: Twilio S-1

#83

Post by hexalisk »

markolschesky wrote: post #12

Had no idea that WhatsApp was even a Twilio customer let alone one of its largest. >We currently generate significant revenue from WhatsApp and the loss of WhatsApp could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition. >In 2013, 2014 and 2015 and the three months ended March 31, 2016, WhatsApp accounted for 11%, 13%, 17% and 15% of our revenue, respectively. WhatsApp uses our Programmable Voice prod…

Yes, this is fascinating. I can only imagine that as more and more developers flock to "free" SMS verification services provided by companies like Facebook (Account Kit) and Twitter (Digits), their long term outlook is even more unsure.

Re: Twilio S-1

#84

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

breaker05 wrote: post #72
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 30 one.

It's fixed. Sorry we wrote the code for this site drunk in a night.

It's all good. Less all good, though, is that I managed to complete an order for the 13 one targetting my coworker and his phone has remained silent since I placed the order.

EDIT: I tried the allegedly fixed 30 goat order as well to no avail.

EDIT 2: Actually it did work but my coworker's phone is on vibrate and he didn't react as loudly as I had hoped :(

Re: Twilio S-1

#85

Post by sulam »

cissou wrote: post #63

If someone with better knowledge of S-1s could shed light on this: where can we see the option pool / option grants awarded to employees? Must be somewhere in there, no?

Do you want to see the overall size of the pool? That's simply shares outstanding. Do you want to see shares owned by specific people? That's only going to be there for the largest holders. Keep in mind shares outstanding is almost certainly larger than the existing options held by employees for a few reasons. First, people probably haven't vested their options completely in many/all cases. Secondly, some reserve is maintained for anticipated hiring.

The S-1 doesn't reveal every shareholder or potential shareholder (either unexercised option holder or still vesting). You can get into this somewhat when you look at compensation expenses. Some portion of that is shares granted -- but that's only a retrospective number.

Re: Twilio S-1

#86

Post by [deleted] »

hamana wrote: post #45

> Jeff Lawson(1) --- 8,623,617 --- 11.9% How pathetic is this? Around 90% of the company is taken by the vulture capitalists and you, as a founder, only get to keep 12%. Bill Gates at the time of Microsoft's IPO had around 50% of the company.

[deleted]

Re: Twilio S-1

#87

Post by antoniuschan99 »

Animats wrote: post #75

There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…

I don't understand this. Is it a land-grab focus?

Why do so many software companies focus solely on growth? A traditional business with $166 million in revenue is huge. Why are investors not asking for a return on their investments already?

Don't investors usually look for a return on their investments within 2-3 years?

Re: Twilio S-1

#88

Post by c-slice »

cissou wrote: post #63

If someone with better knowledge of S-1s could shed light on this: where can we see the option pool / option grants awarded to employees? Must be somewhere in there, no?

Only stockholders >5% are required to show up in an S-1

Re: Twilio S-1

#89

Post by jgalt212 »

Animats wrote: post #75

There's a lot there not to like: Revenue: $166,919,000 Net Loss: $38,896,000 So they're still not profitable. This is surprising, since they don't have any big capital investments. They're not doing anything that takes a lot of R&D. The thing runs on Amazon AWS. They've been operating for years and should be profitable by now. Yes, they're growing fast, but the costs don't rise in advance of the growth. You don't hav…

> It's unusual to try to pull that off when you're unprofitable.

It may be unusual, but to me it seems even more important to have uncontested control when the common shareholders may be angry.

Re: Twilio S-1

#90

Post by sulam »

josefdlange wrote: post #43

As a naive nincompoop, is there any way for me to guess the initial price of a share when they become available?

How good of a guess do you need? If you want something that's +/- 50% you can probably do that pretty easily. +/- 10% is probably impossible at this stage. They will do a roadshow (fly around the country literally pitching large investors on buying their stock). After the roadshow they will gather data about the interest, and where it's from. Institutional investors are usually preferred over retail because they are less likely to immediately flip the shares -- but institutions may not pay as much. They will hope to have far more interest than they have shares allocated for the IPO, which will allow them to raise the price (stokes interest in the stock, which helps support the price once they're public). There's a lot that goes into this and I'm only marginally more knowledgeable than you are, so I'm probably missing 90% of the interesting stuff.

If you are a shareholder and asking from that perspective, or know any employees who may hold options, you should keep in mind that there will be an associated lockup for 180 days after IPO, during which time the stock will probably do all sorts of "interesting" things. Predicting the price it will be when the lockup expires is beyond anyone's ability. :)

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