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"Twilio was a surprise acquirer. Many expected Segment to be picked off by one of the usual suspects like Adobe or Salesforce." In terms of culture, Twilio wou

"Twilio was a surprise acquirer. Many expected Segment to be picked off by one of the usual suspects like Adobe or Salesforce." In terms of culture, Twilio would be a better fit, given their focus on developer evangelism in user acquisition which is similar to Segment's strategy. In fact, if you look at Sendgrid, which Twilio has acquired 2 years ago, it also adopts a similar strategy.

soumyadeb 6y ago
Never used Sendgrid (have always used mailchimp) but was it also considered very developer friendly?
- senko 6y ago
  Yes, we use it for transactional email and it's a breeze to integrate, just works, and has great support.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    > just works Unless you try to send multiple requests to it's API at the same time. We've had to build in retry with random backoff into our mail sending helper because SendGrid's API doesn't like multiple requests at once.
  - Sodman 6y ago
    > has great support. Anecdata, but my experience with Sendgrid's support during a production outage was that to get a response from a human being we ultimately had to reach out to somebody on LinkedIn. Everything else via official channels just received automated replies promising responses in x business days. Also FWIW while our production e-mails weren't being sent, the Sendgrid API was happily returning HTTP 200 success responses. I agree that it definitely was a breeze to integrate with though.
    - bberenberg 6y ago
      We converted to a paying account after having an inactive account for a year, some automated system turned off our account AFTER we started paying, the API accepted all of the emails and didn't send or save anything. We had to go in and rebuild all of the lost emails on our backend (eng cost > total Sendgrid spend per year). Support was unresponsive until we escalated via a sales phone number. Typical large company automating dangerous behaviors and then not having a good support system to deal with the fallout.
      - senko 6y ago
        Wow that sucks. We had one emergency where someone figured out how to mass mail through our app (flawed "invite via email" feature), we were able to immediately reach support through the live chat feature and stop some 200k spam emails from being processed (they were in their queue by the time we noticed). Saved our butts.
  - jrs235 6y ago
    FWIW, my experience is they used to have great support. Sendgrids support seems to have gotten considerably worse since they married Twilio. I loved Sendgrid several years ago but they seem to be having more issues now and drastically slower to respond to tickets. Some of their older APIs have suddenly stopped working (no code changes on our end, and supposedly no changes on theirs...) and it's taking weeks for support to reply. Years ago you'd be able to chat with someone online almost immediately, now you submit a ticket and hope they respond.
- antimailchimp 6y ago
  Cant be worse than Mailchimp and mandrill. Mailchimp acquired Mandrill and it's essentially abandonware - no updates for years - and when it goes down its often an hr before they even realize, during which they have just silently discarded messasges* and they never follow up with affected customers. (* sometimes they will show as errored in activity log but no retry, no notification). I hope Twilio doesnt do a Mailchimp
  - andyfleming 6y ago
    IIRC they were the ones who created mandrill but after some time they decided to stop investing in it (because it wasn’t aligned with their goals, or something along those lines). Rather than completely shutting it down, they left it online to support people who were already using it. You can debate the merits of that approach, but as I recall they communicated clearly about it at the time.
pantulis 6y ago
While developer evangelism is important, the business strategies must converge otherwise there would be no value in the acquisition.
marc__1 6y ago
In the current environment of everyone against 'big tech' it would be hard for Adobe or Salesforce to justify the acquisition of Segment from a competition standpoint, for they would consolidate the CRM market even further. Acquiring companies that are adjacent to your core business makes total sense in adding value to your platform, and not acquiring core functionalities allows you to claim that competition is getting stronger.

soumyadeb 6y ago

Never used Sendgrid (have always used mailchimp) but was it also considered very developer friendly?

senko 6y ago
Yes, we use it for transactional email and it's a breeze to integrate, just works, and has great support.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > just works Unless you try to send multiple requests to it's API at the same time. We've had to build in retry with random backoff into our mail sending helper because SendGrid's API doesn't like multiple requests at once.
- Sodman 6y ago
  > has great support. Anecdata, but my experience with Sendgrid's support during a production outage was that to get a response from a human being we ultimately had to reach out to somebody on LinkedIn. Everything else via official channels just received automated replies promising responses in x business days. Also FWIW while our production e-mails weren't being sent, the Sendgrid API was happily returning HTTP 200 success responses. I agree that it definitely was a breeze to integrate with though.
  - bberenberg 6y ago
    We converted to a paying account after having an inactive account for a year, some automated system turned off our account AFTER we started paying, the API accepted all of the emails and didn't send or save anything. We had to go in and rebuild all of the lost emails on our backend (eng cost > total Sendgrid spend per year). Support was unresponsive until we escalated via a sales phone number. Typical large company automating dangerous behaviors and then not having a good support system to deal with the fallout.
    - senko 6y ago
      Wow that sucks. We had one emergency where someone figured out how to mass mail through our app (flawed "invite via email" feature), we were able to immediately reach support through the live chat feature and stop some 200k spam emails from being processed (they were in their queue by the time we noticed). Saved our butts.
- jrs235 6y ago
  FWIW, my experience is they used to have great support. Sendgrids support seems to have gotten considerably worse since they married Twilio. I loved Sendgrid several years ago but they seem to be having more issues now and drastically slower to respond to tickets. Some of their older APIs have suddenly stopped working (no code changes on our end, and supposedly no changes on theirs...) and it's taking weeks for support to reply. Years ago you'd be able to chat with someone online almost immediately, now you submit a ticket and hope they respond.
antimailchimp 6y ago
Cant be worse than Mailchimp and mandrill. Mailchimp acquired Mandrill and it's essentially abandonware - no updates for years - and when it goes down its often an hr before they even realize, during which they have just silently discarded messasges* and they never follow up with affected customers. (* sometimes they will show as errored in activity log but no retry, no notification). I hope Twilio doesnt do a Mailchimp
- andyfleming 6y ago
  IIRC they were the ones who created mandrill but after some time they decided to stop investing in it (because it wasn’t aligned with their goals, or something along those lines). Rather than completely shutting it down, they left it online to support people who were already using it. You can debate the merits of that approach, but as I recall they communicated clearly about it at the time.

pantulis 6y ago

While developer evangelism is important, the business strategies must converge otherwise there would be no value in the acquisition.

marc__1 6y ago

In the current environment of everyone against 'big tech' it would be hard for Adobe or Salesforce to justify the acquisition of Segment from a competition standpoint, for they would consolidate the CRM market even further. Acquiring companies that are adjacent to your core business makes total sense in adding value to your platform, and not acquiring core functionalities allows you to claim that competition is getting stronger.