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Twilio is laying off 17% of workforce

452 points by akmittal 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Has there been any data on where the layoffs are coming from? Is it sales, engineering, recruitment, across the board..?
ajaimk 4y ago
Mods please change the title. Layoffs and Firing aren't the same.
- nvr219 4y ago
  What makes this a firing and not a layoff (English is not my first language sorry)
  - cragfar 4y ago
    Firing usually implies you're being terminated for cause. Laid off doesn't.
  - consp 4y ago
    Firing is with targeted and with reason. A layoff is general, broad and non targeted. At least that is how I learned it.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      I always understood that "layoff" has the implication that it's potentially temporary, and that the employees let go would be preferentially hired back if the company's fortunes improve.
      - kasey_junk 4y ago
        That’s what lay-offs used to mean, even to the point it was common to layoff employees with an expected return date. In the last 40 or so years the term has shifted to mean permanent termination.
        ghaff 4y ago
        Furlough would be more commonly used today to imply something temporary.
  - buggy6257 4y ago
    Super simplified: Firing is when the reason for the employee leaving is their fault. Layoff is when it's "the employers fault" (e.g. overstaffing etc). That said, this article gives zero indication this is a firing, so I expect that your parent's comment is someone who is salty at Twilio and wants to make this sound "more vicious" -- 'firing' someone is a harsher sound than 'laying them off'. Plus, there's VERY few examples ever of significant staff cuts happened with _firings_. That would imply that 17% of Twilio did something so egregious at work that they got fired all simultaneously, which, like...how?
    - blackshaw 4y ago
      > Firing is when the reason for the employee leaving is their fault. Layoff is when it's "the employers fault". That's not how I'd use those words. "Fired" just means your employment was involuntarily terminated. Layoffs are a type of firing, at least to my ears.
      - zinclozenge 4y ago
        I suspect in some states, it might have implications for collecting unemployment. But given how almost all long term employment is "at will", there isn't really any meaningful distinction, except colloquially, I suspect.
  - darrenf 4y ago
    Individuals get fired. Roles get laid off. Generally a firing will be followed by a backfill, whereas laying off means the workforce is being shrunk. I don't see anything in the Twilio post that looks anything like a firing.
    - chewbacha 4y ago
      In some states this is legally enforced and if the company opens the position back up within 6 months of the layoff, the former employee needs to be offered the position back.
  - pansa2 4y ago
    It’s a layoff. The title initially said “firing 17%”.
  - shagie 4y ago
    A layoff tends to mean that the job position that the person had is gone. Firing a person tends to mean that the position will be hired for again once the person is gone. Another way of looking at it: Firing a person is terminating an individual working with a company - but the company still has that role to be filled. Laying a person off is the elimination of the role, which also has the person leaving the company, but its the role that is being removed, not the person (they are free to apply for other positions in the company or get rehired later).
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Laying off usually means the person's role is declared redundant, or in a department maybe a number of jobs are declared redundant rather than individual ones (i.e. a call centre finds it needs 20% fewer people manning the phones). There is no fault seen in the individual¹, it is seen as a matter of the state of the company, the market, or the economy as a whole. When you are fired there is a direct implication of fault or failing to perform. These things can vary a lot depending on local/state/country laws, but if you are laid off you may be entitled to a redundancy payment, you may be entitled to apply for other roles in the company², you will have a notice period which you will either work or go on gardening leave for, and so forth. If you are fired, none of this applies³. If you are in an work-at-will state things are a bit different. Gig economy jobs are a grey area in many places⁴. -- [1] other than the implication that the people who kept the same/similar role are better or otherwise more useful to the company [2] if the lay-offs are due to restructuring rather than downsizing [3] except you have access to some sort of appeals process (for unfair dismissal for instance) which goes your way [4] there are court cases and other investigations ongoing to determine/clarify what rights such workers do[n't] and should[n't] have
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Yeah they are. Sugarcoat it all you want but when a company exits you then you have been fired/terminated/etc. It doesn't really matter. Sure they might treat you differently if you terminated for cause or not but when you lose your job you are fired. Laid off is a form of being fired, I guess.
  - colinmorelli 4y ago
    Sure, insofar as you're defining the term as "you're no longer employed here." But that definition is not really all that helpful, and is equivalent to saying that you're fired because you quit, also. There's absolutely a difference in widespread RIFs/layoffs and firing an employee, both in terms of how that individual is treated by future potential employers as well as the eyes of the law.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      There’s voluntary termination and involuntary termination. Within involuntary there’s terminated for cause and terminated without cause. Laid off people are terminated without cause but are fired none the less because they are involuntarily dismissed (terminated) from a job. It’s not an official or legal term. It’s informal. But we’ve come up with other terms to make people feel better or not wound their pride or something. But the result is the same - you’ve been fired.
      - colinmorelli 4y ago
        On an individual basis, sure. But this is not what we're talking about. This is a mass layoff, which absolutely does have special legal treatment. Sure, you can call it a mass firing if you'd prefer, and I suppose you'd be equally "correct," but then it's not clear what the goal of that clarification is besides making these people feel worse about the situation. Everyone knows what a layoff is. Nobody is confused, thinking that it was the employee's choice. We call it a layoff because it absolves the employee from fault in fewer words than "involuntary termination without cause." If, however, you're suggesting that there is in fact no difference between individual involuntary termination without cause and a mass involuntary termination without cause, then the WARN act in CA is just one such counterexample, and very clearly treats "plant closing or mass layoff" as a specific event, separate from other types of involuntary termination without cause.
hu3 4y ago
This is on top of 11% they laid off in September 2022, 5 months ago. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-staff-as-it-aims-for-profitability-in-2023/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-...
- xbar 4y ago
  Thank you for that reminder. This cut now sounds very deep indeed. It seems not at all the same as trimming against "overhiring" nor about mispredictions of growth, but instead perhaps a more fundamental concern about the health of the company.
  - password11 4y ago
    > fundamental concern about the health of the company Although Twilio has never turned a profit, they've cornered the "SMS via API" market and could theoretically start to turn one at any point.
    - runako 4y ago
      > they've cornered the "SMS via API" market This is not true, except for first-time builders and those who do not send a lot of SMS. Twilio is a great on-ramp to the world of SMS via API, but at scale considerations beyond developer UX can become more important.
      - malfist 4y ago
        SNS/Pinpoint is probably a much bigger player than they are
      - decentrality 4y ago
        Telnyx has SMS via API cornered at scale for about half the cost: https://telnyx.com https://telnyx.com
        NoTelnyxBad 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
Remember the rule of thumb: if a company is laying off 5-10% of staff it's business as usual. If it's 20% the company is in real trouble.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  11% 5 months ago -> 89% 89% * .83 = 73.87 So a ~27% reduction since then. Wow (Math may be wrong*)
  - galkk 4y ago
    Math should be right, came here to write same. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28100-11%25%29-17%25 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28100-11%25%29-17%25
    - yellow_lead 4y ago
      Nice, Wolfram handles that well
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jyu 4y ago
  what if it's 20%+ cumulative layoffs within 1 year? what if they doubled in size the previous year when fed rates were much lower (Meta, Amazon)?
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    If you double the size of the team one year then lay off 20+% the following year it means you have a management problem, IMHO, which is also a red flag.
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      But you're twilio, you acquired 2 other companies (sendgrid, segment) with the Fed 0%< and 20% of employees are the hr, finance, and canned feature growth.
burkaman 4y ago
Avoiding the inevitable "does this really count as taking responsibility" comment chain by just not taking responsibility at all, nice.
- Nifty3929 4y ago
  Take responsibility for what? Certainly possible that hiring all these people was the correct choice, and that laying them off now is also the correct choice. Layoff are not necessarily a mistake or a consequence of a mistake. Of course they might be, but not always.
  - burkaman 4y ago
    That's not what taking responsibility means. You should acknowledge when your actions hurt people, even if you think it was the right thing to do. In this case, if the CEO thinks they made no mistakes, taking responsibility might involve: 1. Explicitly stating this was your decision, not just the inevitable consequences of the invisible hand of the market. Explaining that "we" in this post refers to the CEO and board of directors. 2. Explaining that you hired thousands in the last couple years with the knowledge that the company was not in a strong long-term position, and knew at the time that you might have to lay them off soon, but didn't tell them because you thought it would hurt your ability to hire and retain them. 3. Acknowledging out loud that layoffs hurt people, not being honest with your employees about their future hurts them, but you do not regret it and believe the size of Twilio's market cap is more important.
greatpostman 4y ago
I’ve seen the threads, but asking again, anyone tried finding a dev job right now? How hard is it? There must be 50k software engineers looking for work. Gotta wonder how long it will take for the job market to recover
- Eumenes 4y ago
  Lots of junior people looking for work, thats for sure.
- ibz 4y ago
  Probably slightly harder if you are in the bottom x%.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Haven't tried, but I've been doing this for several decades and it has always been hard to find good people and 10 years on you can't even remember which years were the downturns and which were the booms.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Dot-bomb is something of an exception to that. I made it through myself but a lot of people ended up long-term unemployed and changing careers.
    - ejb999 4y ago
      Yep. live thru that myself - never got laid of in either the 2008 or 2000 busts, but I know a lot of folks in tech and finance (especially) that it took them years to find anything close to comparable once they were let go. I am not yet convinced we are not heading there again.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I got laid off right after 9/11 and I was lucky enough to get an offer from the CEO at a very small company who I knew from prior work--and didn't get so much as a nibble anywhere else. Never earned as much as my relatively modest comp of the prior decade. Then 2008 rolled around and that didn't seem the best time to be beating the bushes for something else. But finally landed something new with someone else I knew in 2010 and that set me up pretty reasonably.
gaoshan 4y ago
We are heavily invested in Twilio. Should probably be paying more attention to potential alternatives.
- akmittal 4y ago
  Just another stat, After this layoff Twilio still has more employees than it had in 2020
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaoshan 4y ago
    That's fair and good to know. Not like we are going to jump ship as it would be very expensive but we should probably come up with at least a migration plan in case the worst happens some day.
- icedchai 4y ago
  SignalWire is way lower cost than Twilio, and they implement many of the same APIs.
  - muttantt 4y ago
    It used to be, they're also increasing prices now
  - Phurist 4y ago
    They are also very unreliable
    - icedchai 4y ago
      How do you know? We used them at a previous employer for 1000's of numbers, and who knows how many messages and calls (tons...)
- tonightstoast 4y ago
thiago_fm 4y ago
Not surprising, given the -$500m net income result on last quarter amid slowing growth, Twilio has been burning money since a long time, despite being a public company. Sometimes I wonder what those CEOs are doing to let a situation roll like this for so long. How boards accept this kind of thing? Twilio has terrible numbers, you don't even need to be a VC or professional analyst to see that. They need a big cut not only in personel, but in expenses. Perhaps also a new CEO and leadership...
- negamax 4y ago
  Stock market. A lot of these companies are not only kept afloat but celebrated because of some future pie in the sky possibility. Everyone makes money in this game from brokers, engineers, managers, media. A perfect merry go round.
  - thiago_fm 4y ago
    Nope, nobody can make money consistently out of a company that has the same CEO since 2008 and is still burning money(!!!). Maybe their business model isn't even viable, and/or needs a big revamp. Unlike other companies that fired people with 100bi in cash(looking at you, Google), Twilio is literally paying for people to use their services for over a decade. Are boards and VCs so rich that they can keep such thing going on for so long, without ever the expectation of making a profit?
    - negamax 4y ago
      Pension funds and many other xyz funds have these companies in their portfolio. Crypto markets with their scammy tokens are a good simulation of US stock market of today. Unprofitable companies posting 1 less cent loss as compared to forecast and seeing their stock jump 20%.
    - atkailash 4y ago
      [dead]
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
madamelic 4y ago
My favorite part of these posts are learning all the dumb names people call employees. For anyone who has been at a place with an employee pet name that stuck, did you buy into it? Did you have to use it with a straight face or was it more of an outwards facing, recruiting tool? EDIT: Twizzlers is a much better name.
- joegahona 4y ago
  The only one that has ever made sense to me is Workday's -- "Workmates." It's just boring enough and natural-sounding enough to make sense.
  - livinglist 4y ago
    Work, mate!
dkyc 4y ago
My free PR advice to companies announcing layoffs is to cut short on the cute company employee nicknames, keep the 'Twilions', 'stripes' and 'Zoomies' to the good times.
- joegahona 4y ago
  I love PR observations like this -- another one is to reconsider using the company blog template for such postings. This one isn't bad (though it does have prominent share buttons included), but I think it was Zoom that had a giant, cheerful "Don't forget to share!" at the bottom of theirs last week.
  - rmccue 4y ago
    Still there, "Don’t forget to share this post": https://blog.zoom.us/a-message-from-eric-yuan-ceo-of-zoom/ https://blog.zoom.us/a-message-from-eric-yuan-ceo-of-zoom/
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  It is cringe in both good times and bad.... lets just cut it completely.
- Redsquare 4y ago
  Just bin them altogether, they are vommit inducing anytime
- vortexo 4y ago
  Wait until to read about "Gusties" https://gusto.com/company-news/josh-reeves-message-to-all-gusto https://gusto.com/company-news/josh-reeves-message-to-all-gu...
mshake2 4y ago
In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service. They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. They implement the most bureaucratic nightmarish processes for vetting brands which are impossible to do via the UI, and must only be done through broken/bizarre API calls that were clearly cobbled together without any design considerations. Maybe you get it all to work, but then after deliverability customer complaints a month later, you hear from Twilio that something broke on their end and you need to re-submit the vetting. Having a major production issue? Well, you too can get a response in 3 hours by forking over 4% of your spend or $250 minimum, whichever is greater (how does that even make sense? Why should I pay more than a minimum?). And the response right at the end of the 3 hour window will consist of "We have received your issue and are passing it to the relevant team" which resets the 3 hour window. Whoops it looks like you're outside of business hours now, we'll get to it tomorrow. Unless you want to upgrade to the 8% monthly spend or $5000 minimum plan? All that said, Twilio can burn. Burn or get their act together. I hope they get eaten by a better service though, truly.
- toast0 4y ago
  > In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service. > They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. This is an industry issue. You can request SMS delivery indications, and the carrier can send you delivery indications while dropping the messages. Or an intermediary might do the same thing. There's no way to ensure you only get delivery confirmations from the phone, so the delivery confirmation doesn't mean much. (Often, requesting confirmation results in better deliverability though) If you can track delivery yourself, because a user is expected to use the message right away (verification), you should really be running multiple providers and picking the provider to use based on success and costs. All the sms providers will tell you that they have global coverage, only use direct routes, and that they're the best. But they're all lieing. I ran a global SMS (and voice) verification service with 5 SMS providers, and when a major provider had a big outage, their success graph went to zero, but every other provider's graph dropped significantly too --- they all had some routes through that provider.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cardosof 4y ago
I wonder why people just can't be completely honest and say something along the lines of: "look, rising interest rates makes leaving money in the bank way more attractive than spending it by having x% more employees doing things that we were not sure if contributed directly to our financial KPIs. It was cool while it lasted but right now we're just keeping the cash cows and what they need. Thanks"
- cheriot 4y ago
  Revenue growth rate was > 50% per year when most of these people were hired. Now they project 20% growth. That has more impact that wanting to earn interest on a savings account.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  what’s financial benefit of being that direct?
  - azemetre 4y ago
    It also seems worse than that based on other replies in this post. Twilio has only had one profitable quarter in its entire existence. Both the business model and strategy are clearly broken. I do wonder (read: hope) if this means the next wave of tech companies will be more private/lifestyle focused. 37Signals had a great article about this: https://37signals.com/why-we-choose-profit/ https://37signals.com/why-we-choose-profit/ Not every company needs to be a market leader, what's wrong with having a drastically smaller size (say <200 people, a number plucked from thin air) and decent revenue?
    - throwaway98797 4y ago
      there’s nothing morally wrong with that that being said i don’t know any investor that wants to invest in companies that are middle of the road most employees want to work for winners we may not want that to be true but it tends to be if you’re not first you’re last
orangepanda 4y ago
I chose not to use sendgrid (twilio) because they force their own 2nd factor auth app, instead of allowing to use literally any of the ones already out there. Anecdotal, but still
- thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  What do you use instead?
  - tracker1 4y ago
    There are standards for 2FA (OTP) codes... "Google Auth" being one, but the same generators are available inside both LastPass and BitWarden, for contrast. The Microsoft authenticator is another annoying variation imo. While other techniques and applications might be (somewhat) more secure, the loss of ability to use the same application you already have/use for 2FA is a pretty big annoyance for a lot of people. I have my 2FA in bitwarden myself... with a pretty long passphrase that I don't use for anything else. It's the master key to the kingdom. There are many sites that I keep with the sms/email codes simply because they either don't offer typical OTP as an option.
    - thebigspacefuck 4y ago
      Sorry, I meant what do you use instead of Sendgrid?
      - tracker1 4y ago
        Sorry, my bad... Mailgun is pretty popular as an alternative... there's also AWS SES, which some seem to like.
- kl4m 4y ago
  1 - Create a Twilio account. 2 - You need to add a phone number and receive a SMS challenge, before setting up any other 2FA method 3 - With the Authy app installed on your phone, the token is instead instantly added to your account upon reception of the SMS. This cannot be disabled. Use a very particular combination of steps in the account settings to convince it to let you use a simple offline TOTP app instead. 4 - Use your recovery code every month and repeat the whole thing because somehow all other 2FA methods break simultaneously for all Twilio accounts set up with that phone number. The experience was so awful I had to delete the App and the account.
dcchambers 4y ago
I've been bull-ish on Twilio as a technology for a long time, but the business seems like it needs some serious help.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Have to agree... I'm still shocked at how much vendor lock in there is in telephone services still.
- grumple 4y ago
  On paper, they solve a lot of problems. They've got apis for everything. The problem in my interactions with them is that they have a ton of people working in different directions on those problems. One team tells us to do X, support asks us why we're doing it, another team tells us we can't do that. Then they do madness like make the process for registering a phone number you already own take 15 api calls... and that's if you don't count checking on registration progress.
  - csharpminor 4y ago
    I share the frustration but to be fair a lot of this madness is just bubbling up through them from The Campaign Registry and carriers.
  - callalex 4y ago
    A lot of that is protectionism/regulatory capture being wielded as a weapon by the dinosaur carriers. Your frustration and problems are by design, unfortunately.
alberth 4y ago
Stock is up 2.5% today. It's my understanding, in Twilio's 15-years of existence ... they've only had 1 profitable quarter (out of 60 quarters).
fleddr 4y ago
CEO angry at market for expecting a profit after 15 years.
saos 4y ago
How many cuts will these guys be making :/
shagie 4y ago
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number... (dates for 2021 to 2015 as of Dec 31 on that yer) 2022 8,992 ( from https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/13/twilio-layoffs-1500-employees-17percent-of-workforce.html ) 2021 7,867 2020 4,629 2019 2,905 2018 1,440 2017 996 2016 730 2015 567 In the past 3 years, they've tripled in size. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit shows the comparison of the revenue and net income over that time. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit+and+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit... isn't quite as readable for financial data, but shows the context with employees (as this is about a layoff).
- kalnins 4y ago
  Can somebody explain to me where the companies get all these people? A lot of huge companies doubled/tripled in size during pandemic. Did people just take on 3 jobs or where we hitting super low levels of unemployment?
  - colinmorelli 4y ago
    Unemployment spiked early in the pandemic, aggressively lowered back to pre-pandemic levels, and then stabilized slightly lower, at least until mid-2022. Putting it in context: the US has about 160 million people in the labor force. It's shocking when we see companies laying off 10,000 people, but in the grand scheme of things this is really quite a small drop in the bucket. In all of 2022, tech saw ~150k layoffs, or about 0.1% of the labor force.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I assume it's mostly people jumping from lower tier companies into higher tier ones. A lot of companies don't utilize their employees effectively. Also, on the scale of the whole industry people jumping to these tech companies is probably a tiny fraction of overall employment.
- hintymad 4y ago
Analemma_ 4y ago
I should probably start thinking about how to move all my 2FA codes out of Authy, at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly stick me with a monthly fee to keep logging in to my stuff. Does anyone know how to do this? Authy seems to make it intentionally as difficult as possible to export TOTP keys and I'd rather not repeat the 2FA setup process for dozens of accounts.
- hypeatei 4y ago
  It's really cumbersome, but I've used this guide in the past: https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d958c93 https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d... You basically use the Authy desktop app and open up the console (it's Electron) and run some JS lol.
tobinfekkes 4y ago
They should focus on customer service instead, then maybe the profits would follow
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
You cannot just say that these businesses hire too many people, there is a reason why they’re laying people off right now. These businesses know what’s coming. Get ready for a higher than expected inflation rate tomorrow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774930
- pavlov 4y ago
  Twilio doesn't seem very inflation-sensitive to me? They're mostly software, there's no complicated supply chain.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    Every company that relied on low interest rate loans because the Fed held the rate at near 0% is sensitive to inflation when the Fed is about to raise that same rate.
    - throwaway2847 4y ago
      Twilio doesn't have a high debt burden. They're affected like all other growth tech because future cash flows are discounted against the risk free rate.
    - cheriot 4y ago
      They have ~3 billion more cash than debt
      - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
        Last year "Twilio had an earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) loss, truth be told. Indeed, in that time it burnt through $254m of cash and made a loss of US$1.1b." They will burn through that cash much faster with higher interest rates on their 1.012B in debt.
        cheriot 4y ago
trts 4y ago
notably absent language about anti-racism in this RIF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897195
TuringNYC 4y ago
I love the Twilio product line, but always saw it as classic Product Lead Growth, self-service, self-scale. Surprised to hear of their troubles. Are they selling below cost? Are they creating product lines or features that dont drive revenue? Is it high-touch corporate sales?
fasteo 4y ago
I make a living sending SMS in Europe (transactional, mostly for banks and insurance companies) and Twilio SMS pricing is extremely expensive for this geo. Even so, they keep losing money. Just made a quick comparison with two competitors in terms in gross margin: Twilio: 52% Sinch: 21% Link Mobility: 24%
- muttantt 4y ago
  Twilio also quietly increased their prices recently, ie. US numbers went from $1 to $1.15
  - callalex 4y ago
    A 15% price increase in ~12 years on a finite, depleting resource seems pretty reasonable (if not excellent), especially when considering inflation in that time period is over 30%.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  May I ask for more context, are you building a service on top?
cuteboy19 4y ago
Would these be race conscious layoffs too?
- muttantt 4y ago
  Looking at Twilio employees posting their Linkedin Open-for-hire ad post-layoff, I see lots of POC, women and H1B's. Seems this layoff was not done through the same anti-racist/anti-oppression lens as last time.
purpleblue 4y ago
I can understand a single layoff to "right size" the company, but a second layoff always points to an underlying problem that they didn't either believe or recognize only a few months previous. Which kind of makes me nervous. This as the Meta layoffs means that they didn't have a handle on the problem only a few months back.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Or maybe they thought two ~small~ big numbers in layoff headlines (or remaining employee morale) would be better than one ~big~ massive one.
  - alvis 4y ago
    or maybe the seniors think headline layoff is an opportunity for free advertisements
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >Or maybe they thought two ~small~ big numbers in layoff headlines (or remaining employee morale) would be better than one ~big~ massive one. No one in their right mind would think that. One layoff can be understood as necessary. Two says to employees "you will never feel safe here again", and is a huge signal for top performers to run for the exit.
  - purpleblue 4y ago
    Two layoffs is worse than one big layoff, in terms of morale.
    - x86x87 4y ago
      Lol. I don't think anyone gives a damn about morale nowadays. :(
    - OJFord 4y ago
jimbok 4y ago
Probably needs to sell to a legacy company.. similarly to how Duo sold to Cisco
- ejb999 4y ago
  always thought twilio would be acquired by AWS eventually - twilio is more of a product than a company, or even just a set of product features. Never made sense to me as a stand-alone company.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Turns out all the people asking: "Why does company X have so many employees?" weren't completely wrong.
- x86x87 4y ago
  Even a broken clock is right twice per day. The question that I have is: why are all these big corporations doing synchronized layoffs? Is it about having more people than needed or is it pure greed and expectations that they can easily get away with it because "everyone is doing it"?
  - tnzk 4y ago
    More layoffs -> more supplies in job market -> able to reduce labor cost per person on average
  - cfeduke 4y ago
    It's a good time to do it; copycat layoffs (The Board: "everyone is doing layoffs, why aren't we?") and it's a way to give a short term boost to the stock price - at least for publicly traded companies - when technology earnings are mixed or poor.
  - qqtt 4y ago
    I don't think it's really a mystery as to why most tech companies are doing layoffs (also import to note that other industries still have tight labor markets, like oil and gas which happens to be rapidly growing during this downturn). Tech company growth rates were high during the pandemic so they hired to fuel that growth. Now that growth rates are lower, they have to re-balance their cost structure to match their new forecasted growth. This is happening at every company currently doing layoffs. In Twilio's case, they went from almost 70% year over year growth during the pandemic to currently about 20-30% year over year growth. The same evaporating growth rates is true across the tech industry - Meta is actually seeing revenue decline year over year, Google has seen growth shrink to just 1%. Even more telling are operating margins which are evaporating very quickly as growth stalls - Google's operating margins are down 17% year over year. No one has a crystal ball, so companies hire during high growth periods to capitalize on growth, and lay off during low growth periods to re-balance their cost structure towards profit. This is true of many industries - you see the same effects play out in the boom and bust cycle of industries like O&G - which are currently hiring and not too long ago were laying off as well. People want to frame lay offs as de facto failure, but really it is just companies responding to market conditions - no different then companies hiring when growth is high.
sn0w_crash 4y ago
[dead]
johndhi 4y ago
This is the impact of moving from the "growth company" to "profitable company" investment model. Twilio and other "high growth" saas companies for the last few years have competed solely on how much they could grow the top line every quarter. Now they have to rebuild themselves.
diebeforei485 4y ago
This guy Jeff Lawson was virtue signalling big time about how much he loves paying San Francisco's taxes. I wonder if he's taking a pay cut while he leaves 17% of his workforce without jobs.
- baby-yoda 4y ago
  Twilio hit its all time high around Jan 2021, $435/share. In the 12 months following that he sold roughly $160M in stock, riding the price down to about $250/share. And he even got a 75,000 share grant last March after that performance. From afar it seems like the company is being plundered by the C suite, would love to hear first hand accounts from employees after the last 24 months.
heliophane 4y ago
Leo Laporte mentioned on security now last week that he was happy to move away from authy because it was run by twillio(a previous sponsor of the podcast). Have things been rough for the company?
fredgrott 4y ago
I have a mild question: Ukraine war outlook in 3 months China will face a severe shortage of fertilizer(they get that from Russia at over 80%) along with India and since those are two big supply chains it might be that all these companies see a rise in one of their inputs via the supply chain disruption in the future towards April-May as decreasing their profits while at the same time increasing other costs. So my question is why is everyone assuming that it is some other economic force than this if this is the actual looming economic near term disaster? Think back a full year when we had the last supply chain disruption, did not Governments step in a fund grants to prevent the rise in input costs?
berkle4455 4y ago
Twilio is nothing more than a Robocall enabler that’s going to be shutdown by the FCC anyway.
- ejb999 4y ago
  https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-issues-robocall-cease-and-desist-letter-twilio https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-issues-robocall-cease-and-d...
corrius 4y ago
IMHO all these companies are flooded with account managers, sales, customer success, BDR, when they could just let customers choose their own plans, upgrade freely, etc, instead of "schedule a call with our team"
- callalex 4y ago
  Companies do that because it works. Early in Twilio’s life (pre-ipo) the company was very adamant that outreach and negotiation are not needed for SaaS. Jeff Lawson (the CEO) would regularly mock and lambast companies for having a pricing page that said any variation of “contact us for pricing”. There were some pretty dramatic reorgs and management departures because of that attitude. Lawson eventually relented and adopted a more hands-on growth model and growth went up. Before the change, the company was really struggling to attract blockbuster customers. The growth strategy was (and still partly is) to have startups get hooked early by the quality and just never leave as they grow. For the longest time their biggest customer by faaaaar was Uber, and that happened because both companies were created and grew together. Once the hands-on outreach started, they started getting meaningful revenue from giant multinational banks and manufacturers that have a ton of money but, frankly, don’t empower their developers to choose the best tools for the job.
adam_arthur 4y ago
The truth is that many of these companies can be run with fewer and fewer people as abstractions in technology become higher-level. Software takes a lot of effort to write, and much less to maintain. We just went through an era of effectively no software, to one with a large saturation of software that fills many niches. In the 2010's there was no competition for the majority of these businesses as VC capital tended to move towards new ideas, rather than directly competing with existing ventures. All of that is changing. The world will continue to need new and improving software, but the value provided by a single engineer continues to trend higher, and fewer and fewer developers will be needed to create these systems. Some SaaS has high costs of switching and a defensible moat, but many do not and are easily replicated. Existing players may even be at a disadvantage to competitors due to existing architectures using old patterns that require more manual labor/cost to maintain. e.g. Something like DocuSign is a good example of a low moat SaaS. Database systems are a good example of large moat (high cost of switching, even if better tech comes out)
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Given that info, does it even make sense to try and build a SaaS these days? especially as someone bootstrapping, is there even possible to build software with a moat? like building a database isn’t easy
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    It's worth competing in any industry if the numbers work out. My main point was that the extremely high margin and lack of competition in SaaS is not likely to persist over time (without a defensible moat/high cost of switching). It's a better time than ever to create a SaaS with low cost overhead. If you leverage serverless and strong design, you can build extremely useful and far-reaching products with a handful of people. No longer do you need hundreds or thousands of people to do this. Then operational cost is low, and revenue required for breakeven/profit is low too.
- americafun 4y ago
  > Software takes a lot of effort to write, and much less to maintain. ahahahahahahhahaaha Have you even written a line of code in your life ??? This is the most brazenly wrong statement I've heard on this website. We are in dire need of a correction ...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bogomipz 4y ago
The post states: >"We’re winding down some of the perks we’ve historically offered, including our book and wellness allowances. We’ve also decided to sunset Twilio Recharge, which I believe in, but which (in retrospect) was ill-timed given our profitability goals." Can someone say what "Twilio Recharge" is/was?
- elijaht 4y ago
  Looks like a "a four-week paid sabbatical that employees would get every three years" (source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/13/twilio-cuts-17-of-its-workforce-just-months-after-previous-round-of-layoffs/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/13/twilio-cuts-17-of-its-work...)
ghiculescu 4y ago
Over the last few years Twilio’s CEO wrote a navel gazing book and hosted some conferences about social justice, but didn’t improve the core product. I bet this made him popular with employees, though I suspect it would have made him less popular if they saw these layoffs coming.
dheerajrav 4y ago
I was part of the RIF and I am actively looking for Data Scientist roles. Any leads are much appreciated. You can find me - [here](https://linkedin.com/in/dheeraj-ravindranath https://linkedin.com/in/dheeraj-ravindranath) - https://github.com/dheerajrav https://github.com/dheerajrav
wonderwonder 4y ago
From the article "I'm sure you're wondering why we're making additional cuts to the team after the September layoffs. At that time, we sought to streamline the company as it was then structured." Translates as "We did a terrible job with the first round of layoffs and didn't really explore all of our options and because we messed up then we have to lay off more of you now." Wasn't this the company that announced they were laying people off based on race in the last round of layoffs? Looks like that turned out great for them, shocked they are laying more people off now. No mention of race in this announcement though. Note [before I get torched here]: I am saying hiring and firing based on race is insane and should be based on talent and what skills you need for the job. I am in no way saying any race is better than any other race at anything.
- jwond 4y ago
  > Wasn't this the company that announced they were laying people off based on race in the last round of layoffs? Oh yeah, they were. I forgot about that. > As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000119312522244315/d380990dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000119312522... I notice they did not include similar language in this new round of layoffs.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    They finally listened to their lawyers. Anyone not of a so called “marginalized community”fired in the last round very likely sued for civil rights violations. One of the silver linings of this recession is DEI has been gutted and thrown on the trash heap where it belongs. Any competent CEO is using this moment to gut the commissars and rabble rousers from their payrolls. Time to check the Slack logs and cleanse the company of activists.
ivan23178 4y ago
They tried to recruit me a few years ago. Good thing it didn't work out, I guess.

452 points by akmittal 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Has there been any data on where the layoffs are coming from? Is it sales, engineering, recruitment, across the board..?

ajaimk 4y ago

Mods please change the title. Layoffs and Firing aren't the same.

nvr219 4y ago
What makes this a firing and not a layoff (English is not my first language sorry)
- cragfar 4y ago
  Firing usually implies you're being terminated for cause. Laid off doesn't.
- consp 4y ago
  Firing is with targeted and with reason. A layoff is general, broad and non targeted. At least that is how I learned it.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    I always understood that "layoff" has the implication that it's potentially temporary, and that the employees let go would be preferentially hired back if the company's fortunes improve.
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      That’s what lay-offs used to mean, even to the point it was common to layoff employees with an expected return date. In the last 40 or so years the term has shifted to mean permanent termination.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Furlough would be more commonly used today to imply something temporary.
- buggy6257 4y ago
  Super simplified: Firing is when the reason for the employee leaving is their fault. Layoff is when it's "the employers fault" (e.g. overstaffing etc). That said, this article gives zero indication this is a firing, so I expect that your parent's comment is someone who is salty at Twilio and wants to make this sound "more vicious" -- 'firing' someone is a harsher sound than 'laying them off'. Plus, there's VERY few examples ever of significant staff cuts happened with _firings_. That would imply that 17% of Twilio did something so egregious at work that they got fired all simultaneously, which, like...how?
  - blackshaw 4y ago
    > Firing is when the reason for the employee leaving is their fault. Layoff is when it's "the employers fault". That's not how I'd use those words. "Fired" just means your employment was involuntarily terminated. Layoffs are a type of firing, at least to my ears.
    - zinclozenge 4y ago
      I suspect in some states, it might have implications for collecting unemployment. But given how almost all long term employment is "at will", there isn't really any meaningful distinction, except colloquially, I suspect.
- darrenf 4y ago
  Individuals get fired. Roles get laid off. Generally a firing will be followed by a backfill, whereas laying off means the workforce is being shrunk. I don't see anything in the Twilio post that looks anything like a firing.
  - chewbacha 4y ago
    In some states this is legally enforced and if the company opens the position back up within 6 months of the layoff, the former employee needs to be offered the position back.
- pansa2 4y ago
  It’s a layoff. The title initially said “firing 17%”.
- shagie 4y ago
  A layoff tends to mean that the job position that the person had is gone. Firing a person tends to mean that the position will be hired for again once the person is gone. Another way of looking at it: Firing a person is terminating an individual working with a company - but the company still has that role to be filled. Laying a person off is the elimination of the role, which also has the person leaving the company, but its the role that is being removed, not the person (they are free to apply for other positions in the company or get rehired later).
- dspillett 4y ago
  Laying off usually means the person's role is declared redundant, or in a department maybe a number of jobs are declared redundant rather than individual ones (i.e. a call centre finds it needs 20% fewer people manning the phones). There is no fault seen in the individual¹, it is seen as a matter of the state of the company, the market, or the economy as a whole. When you are fired there is a direct implication of fault or failing to perform. These things can vary a lot depending on local/state/country laws, but if you are laid off you may be entitled to a redundancy payment, you may be entitled to apply for other roles in the company², you will have a notice period which you will either work or go on gardening leave for, and so forth. If you are fired, none of this applies³. If you are in an work-at-will state things are a bit different. Gig economy jobs are a grey area in many places⁴. -- [1] other than the implication that the people who kept the same/similar role are better or otherwise more useful to the company [2] if the lay-offs are due to restructuring rather than downsizing [3] except you have access to some sort of appeals process (for unfair dismissal for instance) which goes your way [4] there are court cases and other investigations ongoing to determine/clarify what rights such workers do[n't] and should[n't] have
nemo44x 4y ago
Yeah they are. Sugarcoat it all you want but when a company exits you then you have been fired/terminated/etc. It doesn't really matter. Sure they might treat you differently if you terminated for cause or not but when you lose your job you are fired. Laid off is a form of being fired, I guess.
- colinmorelli 4y ago
  Sure, insofar as you're defining the term as "you're no longer employed here." But that definition is not really all that helpful, and is equivalent to saying that you're fired because you quit, also. There's absolutely a difference in widespread RIFs/layoffs and firing an employee, both in terms of how that individual is treated by future potential employers as well as the eyes of the law.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    There’s voluntary termination and involuntary termination. Within involuntary there’s terminated for cause and terminated without cause. Laid off people are terminated without cause but are fired none the less because they are involuntarily dismissed (terminated) from a job. It’s not an official or legal term. It’s informal. But we’ve come up with other terms to make people feel better or not wound their pride or something. But the result is the same - you’ve been fired.
    - colinmorelli 4y ago
      On an individual basis, sure. But this is not what we're talking about. This is a mass layoff, which absolutely does have special legal treatment. Sure, you can call it a mass firing if you'd prefer, and I suppose you'd be equally "correct," but then it's not clear what the goal of that clarification is besides making these people feel worse about the situation. Everyone knows what a layoff is. Nobody is confused, thinking that it was the employee's choice. We call it a layoff because it absolves the employee from fault in fewer words than "involuntary termination without cause." If, however, you're suggesting that there is in fact no difference between individual involuntary termination without cause and a mass involuntary termination without cause, then the WARN act in CA is just one such counterexample, and very clearly treats "plant closing or mass layoff" as a specific event, separate from other types of involuntary termination without cause.

hu3 4y ago

This is on top of 11% they laid off in September 2022, 5 months ago. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-staff-as-it-aims-for-profitability-in-2023/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-...

xbar 4y ago
Thank you for that reminder. This cut now sounds very deep indeed. It seems not at all the same as trimming against "overhiring" nor about mispredictions of growth, but instead perhaps a more fundamental concern about the health of the company.
- password11 4y ago
  > fundamental concern about the health of the company Although Twilio has never turned a profit, they've cornered the "SMS via API" market and could theoretically start to turn one at any point.
  - runako 4y ago
    > they've cornered the "SMS via API" market This is not true, except for first-time builders and those who do not send a lot of SMS. Twilio is a great on-ramp to the world of SMS via API, but at scale considerations beyond developer UX can become more important.
    - malfist 4y ago
      SNS/Pinpoint is probably a much bigger player than they are
    - decentrality 4y ago
      Telnyx has SMS via API cornered at scale for about half the cost: https://telnyx.com https://telnyx.com
      - NoTelnyxBad 4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

Remember the rule of thumb: if a company is laying off 5-10% of staff it's business as usual. If it's 20% the company is in real trouble.

yellow_lead 4y ago
11% 5 months ago -> 89% 89% * .83 = 73.87 So a ~27% reduction since then. Wow (Math may be wrong*)
- galkk 4y ago
  Math should be right, came here to write same. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28100-11%25%29-17%25 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28100-11%25%29-17%25
  - yellow_lead 4y ago
    Nice, Wolfram handles that well
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jyu 4y ago
what if it's 20%+ cumulative layoffs within 1 year? what if they doubled in size the previous year when fed rates were much lower (Meta, Amazon)?
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  If you double the size of the team one year then lay off 20+% the following year it means you have a management problem, IMHO, which is also a red flag.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    But you're twilio, you acquired 2 other companies (sendgrid, segment) with the Fed 0%< and 20% of employees are the hr, finance, and canned feature growth.

burkaman 4y ago

Avoiding the inevitable "does this really count as taking responsibility" comment chain by just not taking responsibility at all, nice.

Nifty3929 4y ago
Take responsibility for what? Certainly possible that hiring all these people was the correct choice, and that laying them off now is also the correct choice. Layoff are not necessarily a mistake or a consequence of a mistake. Of course they might be, but not always.
- burkaman 4y ago
  That's not what taking responsibility means. You should acknowledge when your actions hurt people, even if you think it was the right thing to do. In this case, if the CEO thinks they made no mistakes, taking responsibility might involve: 1. Explicitly stating this was your decision, not just the inevitable consequences of the invisible hand of the market. Explaining that "we" in this post refers to the CEO and board of directors. 2. Explaining that you hired thousands in the last couple years with the knowledge that the company was not in a strong long-term position, and knew at the time that you might have to lay them off soon, but didn't tell them because you thought it would hurt your ability to hire and retain them. 3. Acknowledging out loud that layoffs hurt people, not being honest with your employees about their future hurts them, but you do not regret it and believe the size of Twilio's market cap is more important.

greatpostman 4y ago

I’ve seen the threads, but asking again, anyone tried finding a dev job right now? How hard is it? There must be 50k software engineers looking for work. Gotta wonder how long it will take for the job market to recover

Eumenes 4y ago
Lots of junior people looking for work, thats for sure.
ibz 4y ago
Probably slightly harder if you are in the bottom x%.
dboreham 4y ago
Haven't tried, but I've been doing this for several decades and it has always been hard to find good people and 10 years on you can't even remember which years were the downturns and which were the booms.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Dot-bomb is something of an exception to that. I made it through myself but a lot of people ended up long-term unemployed and changing careers.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    Yep. live thru that myself - never got laid of in either the 2008 or 2000 busts, but I know a lot of folks in tech and finance (especially) that it took them years to find anything close to comparable once they were let go. I am not yet convinced we are not heading there again.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I got laid off right after 9/11 and I was lucky enough to get an offer from the CEO at a very small company who I knew from prior work--and didn't get so much as a nibble anywhere else. Never earned as much as my relatively modest comp of the prior decade. Then 2008 rolled around and that didn't seem the best time to be beating the bushes for something else. But finally landed something new with someone else I knew in 2010 and that set me up pretty reasonably.

gaoshan 4y ago

We are heavily invested in Twilio. Should probably be paying more attention to potential alternatives.

akmittal 4y ago
Just another stat, After this layoff Twilio still has more employees than it had in 2020
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gaoshan 4y ago
  That's fair and good to know. Not like we are going to jump ship as it would be very expensive but we should probably come up with at least a migration plan in case the worst happens some day.
icedchai 4y ago
SignalWire is way lower cost than Twilio, and they implement many of the same APIs.
- muttantt 4y ago
  It used to be, they're also increasing prices now
- Phurist 4y ago
  They are also very unreliable
  - icedchai 4y ago
    How do you know? We used them at a previous employer for 1000's of numbers, and who knows how many messages and calls (tons...)
tonightstoast 4y ago

thiago_fm 4y ago

Not surprising, given the -$500m net income result on last quarter amid slowing growth, Twilio has been burning money since a long time, despite being a public company. Sometimes I wonder what those CEOs are doing to let a situation roll like this for so long. How boards accept this kind of thing? Twilio has terrible numbers, you don't even need to be a VC or professional analyst to see that. They need a big cut not only in personel, but in expenses. Perhaps also a new CEO and leadership...

negamax 4y ago
Stock market. A lot of these companies are not only kept afloat but celebrated because of some future pie in the sky possibility. Everyone makes money in this game from brokers, engineers, managers, media. A perfect merry go round.
- thiago_fm 4y ago
  Nope, nobody can make money consistently out of a company that has the same CEO since 2008 and is still burning money(!!!). Maybe their business model isn't even viable, and/or needs a big revamp. Unlike other companies that fired people with 100bi in cash(looking at you, Google), Twilio is literally paying for people to use their services for over a decade. Are boards and VCs so rich that they can keep such thing going on for so long, without ever the expectation of making a profit?
  - negamax 4y ago
    Pension funds and many other xyz funds have these companies in their portfolio. Crypto markets with their scammy tokens are a good simulation of US stock market of today. Unprofitable companies posting 1 less cent loss as compared to forecast and seeing their stock jump 20%.
  - atkailash 4y ago
    [dead]
  - phpisthebest 4y ago

madamelic 4y ago

My favorite part of these posts are learning all the dumb names people call employees. For anyone who has been at a place with an employee pet name that stuck, did you buy into it? Did you have to use it with a straight face or was it more of an outwards facing, recruiting tool? EDIT: Twizzlers is a much better name.

joegahona 4y ago
The only one that has ever made sense to me is Workday's -- "Workmates." It's just boring enough and natural-sounding enough to make sense.
- livinglist 4y ago
  Work, mate!

dkyc 4y ago

My free PR advice to companies announcing layoffs is to cut short on the cute company employee nicknames, keep the 'Twilions', 'stripes' and 'Zoomies' to the good times.

joegahona 4y ago
I love PR observations like this -- another one is to reconsider using the company blog template for such postings. This one isn't bad (though it does have prominent share buttons included), but I think it was Zoom that had a giant, cheerful "Don't forget to share!" at the bottom of theirs last week.
- rmccue 4y ago
  Still there, "Don’t forget to share this post": https://blog.zoom.us/a-message-from-eric-yuan-ceo-of-zoom/ https://blog.zoom.us/a-message-from-eric-yuan-ceo-of-zoom/
phpisthebest 4y ago
It is cringe in both good times and bad.... lets just cut it completely.
Redsquare 4y ago
Just bin them altogether, they are vommit inducing anytime
vortexo 4y ago
Wait until to read about "Gusties" https://gusto.com/company-news/josh-reeves-message-to-all-gusto https://gusto.com/company-news/josh-reeves-message-to-all-gu...

mshake2 4y ago

In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service. They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. They implement the most bureaucratic nightmarish processes for vetting brands which are impossible to do via the UI, and must only be done through broken/bizarre API calls that were clearly cobbled together without any design considerations. Maybe you get it all to work, but then after deliverability customer complaints a month later, you hear from Twilio that something broke on their end and you need to re-submit the vetting. Having a major production issue? Well, you too can get a response in 3 hours by forking over 4% of your spend or $250 minimum, whichever is greater (how does that even make sense? Why should I pay more than a minimum?). And the response right at the end of the 3 hour window will consist of "We have received your issue and are passing it to the relevant team" which resets the 3 hour window. Whoops it looks like you're outside of business hours now, we'll get to it tomorrow. Unless you want to upgrade to the 8% monthly spend or $5000 minimum plan? All that said, Twilio can burn. Burn or get their act together. I hope they get eaten by a better service though, truly.

toast0 4y ago
> In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service. > They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. This is an industry issue. You can request SMS delivery indications, and the carrier can send you delivery indications while dropping the messages. Or an intermediary might do the same thing. There's no way to ensure you only get delivery confirmations from the phone, so the delivery confirmation doesn't mean much. (Often, requesting confirmation results in better deliverability though) If you can track delivery yourself, because a user is expected to use the message right away (verification), you should really be running multiple providers and picking the provider to use based on success and costs. All the sms providers will tell you that they have global coverage, only use direct routes, and that they're the best. But they're all lieing. I ran a global SMS (and voice) verification service with 5 SMS providers, and when a major provider had a big outage, their success graph went to zero, but every other provider's graph dropped significantly too --- they all had some routes through that provider.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cardosof 4y ago

I wonder why people just can't be completely honest and say something along the lines of: "look, rising interest rates makes leaving money in the bank way more attractive than spending it by having x% more employees doing things that we were not sure if contributed directly to our financial KPIs. It was cool while it lasted but right now we're just keeping the cash cows and what they need. Thanks"

cheriot 4y ago
Revenue growth rate was > 50% per year when most of these people were hired. Now they project 20% growth. That has more impact that wanting to earn interest on a savings account.
newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
throwaway98797 4y ago
what’s financial benefit of being that direct?
- azemetre 4y ago
  It also seems worse than that based on other replies in this post. Twilio has only had one profitable quarter in its entire existence. Both the business model and strategy are clearly broken. I do wonder (read: hope) if this means the next wave of tech companies will be more private/lifestyle focused. 37Signals had a great article about this: https://37signals.com/why-we-choose-profit/ https://37signals.com/why-we-choose-profit/ Not every company needs to be a market leader, what's wrong with having a drastically smaller size (say <200 people, a number plucked from thin air) and decent revenue?
  - throwaway98797 4y ago
    there’s nothing morally wrong with that that being said i don’t know any investor that wants to invest in companies that are middle of the road most employees want to work for winners we may not want that to be true but it tends to be if you’re not first you’re last

orangepanda 4y ago

I chose not to use sendgrid (twilio) because they force their own 2nd factor auth app, instead of allowing to use literally any of the ones already out there. Anecdotal, but still

thebigspacefuck 4y ago
What do you use instead?
- tracker1 4y ago
  There are standards for 2FA (OTP) codes... "Google Auth" being one, but the same generators are available inside both LastPass and BitWarden, for contrast. The Microsoft authenticator is another annoying variation imo. While other techniques and applications might be (somewhat) more secure, the loss of ability to use the same application you already have/use for 2FA is a pretty big annoyance for a lot of people. I have my 2FA in bitwarden myself... with a pretty long passphrase that I don't use for anything else. It's the master key to the kingdom. There are many sites that I keep with the sms/email codes simply because they either don't offer typical OTP as an option.
  - thebigspacefuck 4y ago
    Sorry, I meant what do you use instead of Sendgrid?
    - tracker1 4y ago
      Sorry, my bad... Mailgun is pretty popular as an alternative... there's also AWS SES, which some seem to like.
kl4m 4y ago
1 - Create a Twilio account. 2 - You need to add a phone number and receive a SMS challenge, before setting up any other 2FA method 3 - With the Authy app installed on your phone, the token is instead instantly added to your account upon reception of the SMS. This cannot be disabled. Use a very particular combination of steps in the account settings to convince it to let you use a simple offline TOTP app instead. 4 - Use your recovery code every month and repeat the whole thing because somehow all other 2FA methods break simultaneously for all Twilio accounts set up with that phone number. The experience was so awful I had to delete the App and the account.

dcchambers 4y ago

I've been bull-ish on Twilio as a technology for a long time, but the business seems like it needs some serious help.

tracker1 4y ago
Have to agree... I'm still shocked at how much vendor lock in there is in telephone services still.
grumple 4y ago
On paper, they solve a lot of problems. They've got apis for everything. The problem in my interactions with them is that they have a ton of people working in different directions on those problems. One team tells us to do X, support asks us why we're doing it, another team tells us we can't do that. Then they do madness like make the process for registering a phone number you already own take 15 api calls... and that's if you don't count checking on registration progress.
- csharpminor 4y ago
  I share the frustration but to be fair a lot of this madness is just bubbling up through them from The Campaign Registry and carriers.
- callalex 4y ago
  A lot of that is protectionism/regulatory capture being wielded as a weapon by the dinosaur carriers. Your frustration and problems are by design, unfortunately.

alberth 4y ago

Stock is up 2.5% today. It's my understanding, in Twilio's 15-years of existence ... they've only had 1 profitable quarter (out of 60 quarters).

fleddr 4y ago

CEO angry at market for expecting a profit after 15 years.

saos 4y ago

How many cuts will these guys be making :/

shagie 4y ago

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number... (dates for 2021 to 2015 as of Dec 31 on that yer) 2022 8,992 ( from https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/13/twilio-layoffs-1500-employees-17percent-of-workforce.html ) 2021 7,867 2020 4,629 2019 2,905 2018 1,440 2017 996 2016 730 2015 567 In the past 3 years, they've tripled in size. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit shows the comparison of the revenue and net income over that time. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit+and+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit... isn't quite as readable for financial data, but shows the context with employees (as this is about a layoff).

kalnins 4y ago
Can somebody explain to me where the companies get all these people? A lot of huge companies doubled/tripled in size during pandemic. Did people just take on 3 jobs or where we hitting super low levels of unemployment?
- colinmorelli 4y ago
  Unemployment spiked early in the pandemic, aggressively lowered back to pre-pandemic levels, and then stabilized slightly lower, at least until mid-2022. Putting it in context: the US has about 160 million people in the labor force. It's shocking when we see companies laying off 10,000 people, but in the grand scheme of things this is really quite a small drop in the bucket. In all of 2022, tech saw ~150k layoffs, or about 0.1% of the labor force.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I assume it's mostly people jumping from lower tier companies into higher tier ones. A lot of companies don't utilize their employees effectively. Also, on the scale of the whole industry people jumping to these tech companies is probably a tiny fraction of overall employment.
hintymad 4y ago

Analemma_ 4y ago

I should probably start thinking about how to move all my 2FA codes out of Authy, at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly stick me with a monthly fee to keep logging in to my stuff. Does anyone know how to do this? Authy seems to make it intentionally as difficult as possible to export TOTP keys and I'd rather not repeat the 2FA setup process for dozens of accounts.

hypeatei 4y ago
It's really cumbersome, but I've used this guide in the past: https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d958c93 https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d... You basically use the Authy desktop app and open up the console (it's Electron) and run some JS lol.

tobinfekkes 4y ago

They should focus on customer service instead, then maybe the profits would follow

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

You cannot just say that these businesses hire too many people, there is a reason why they’re laying people off right now. These businesses know what’s coming. Get ready for a higher than expected inflation rate tomorrow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774930

pavlov 4y ago
Twilio doesn't seem very inflation-sensitive to me? They're mostly software, there's no complicated supply chain.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Every company that relied on low interest rate loans because the Fed held the rate at near 0% is sensitive to inflation when the Fed is about to raise that same rate.
  - throwaway2847 4y ago
    Twilio doesn't have a high debt burden. They're affected like all other growth tech because future cash flows are discounted against the risk free rate.
  - cheriot 4y ago
    They have ~3 billion more cash than debt
    - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
      Last year "Twilio had an earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) loss, truth be told. Indeed, in that time it burnt through $254m of cash and made a loss of US$1.1b." They will burn through that cash much faster with higher interest rates on their 1.012B in debt.
      - cheriot 4y ago

trts 4y ago

notably absent language about anti-racism in this RIF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897195

TuringNYC 4y ago

I love the Twilio product line, but always saw it as classic Product Lead Growth, self-service, self-scale. Surprised to hear of their troubles. Are they selling below cost? Are they creating product lines or features that dont drive revenue? Is it high-touch corporate sales?

fasteo 4y ago

I make a living sending SMS in Europe (transactional, mostly for banks and insurance companies) and Twilio SMS pricing is extremely expensive for this geo. Even so, they keep losing money. Just made a quick comparison with two competitors in terms in gross margin: Twilio: 52% Sinch: 21% Link Mobility: 24%

muttantt 4y ago
Twilio also quietly increased their prices recently, ie. US numbers went from $1 to $1.15
- callalex 4y ago
  A 15% price increase in ~12 years on a finite, depleting resource seems pretty reasonable (if not excellent), especially when considering inflation in that time period is over 30%.
moneywoes 4y ago
May I ask for more context, are you building a service on top?

cuteboy19 4y ago

Would these be race conscious layoffs too?

muttantt 4y ago
Looking at Twilio employees posting their Linkedin Open-for-hire ad post-layoff, I see lots of POC, women and H1B's. Seems this layoff was not done through the same anti-racist/anti-oppression lens as last time.

purpleblue 4y ago

I can understand a single layoff to "right size" the company, but a second layoff always points to an underlying problem that they didn't either believe or recognize only a few months previous. Which kind of makes me nervous. This as the Meta layoffs means that they didn't have a handle on the problem only a few months back.

OJFord 4y ago
Or maybe they thought two ~small~ big numbers in layoff headlines (or remaining employee morale) would be better than one ~big~ massive one.
- alvis 4y ago
  or maybe the seniors think headline layoff is an opportunity for free advertisements
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Or maybe they thought two ~small~ big numbers in layoff headlines (or remaining employee morale) would be better than one ~big~ massive one. No one in their right mind would think that. One layoff can be understood as necessary. Two says to employees "you will never feel safe here again", and is a huge signal for top performers to run for the exit.
- purpleblue 4y ago
  Two layoffs is worse than one big layoff, in terms of morale.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Lol. I don't think anyone gives a damn about morale nowadays. :(
  - OJFord 4y ago

jimbok 4y ago

Probably needs to sell to a legacy company.. similarly to how Duo sold to Cisco

ejb999 4y ago
always thought twilio would be acquired by AWS eventually - twilio is more of a product than a company, or even just a set of product features. Never made sense to me as a stand-alone company.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

Turns out all the people asking: "Why does company X have so many employees?" weren't completely wrong.

x86x87 4y ago
Even a broken clock is right twice per day. The question that I have is: why are all these big corporations doing synchronized layoffs? Is it about having more people than needed or is it pure greed and expectations that they can easily get away with it because "everyone is doing it"?
- tnzk 4y ago
  More layoffs -> more supplies in job market -> able to reduce labor cost per person on average
- cfeduke 4y ago
  It's a good time to do it; copycat layoffs (The Board: "everyone is doing layoffs, why aren't we?") and it's a way to give a short term boost to the stock price - at least for publicly traded companies - when technology earnings are mixed or poor.
- qqtt 4y ago
  I don't think it's really a mystery as to why most tech companies are doing layoffs (also import to note that other industries still have tight labor markets, like oil and gas which happens to be rapidly growing during this downturn). Tech company growth rates were high during the pandemic so they hired to fuel that growth. Now that growth rates are lower, they have to re-balance their cost structure to match their new forecasted growth. This is happening at every company currently doing layoffs. In Twilio's case, they went from almost 70% year over year growth during the pandemic to currently about 20-30% year over year growth. The same evaporating growth rates is true across the tech industry - Meta is actually seeing revenue decline year over year, Google has seen growth shrink to just 1%. Even more telling are operating margins which are evaporating very quickly as growth stalls - Google's operating margins are down 17% year over year. No one has a crystal ball, so companies hire during high growth periods to capitalize on growth, and lay off during low growth periods to re-balance their cost structure towards profit. This is true of many industries - you see the same effects play out in the boom and bust cycle of industries like O&G - which are currently hiring and not too long ago were laying off as well. People want to frame lay offs as de facto failure, but really it is just companies responding to market conditions - no different then companies hiring when growth is high.

sn0w_crash 4y ago

[dead]

johndhi 4y ago

This is the impact of moving from the "growth company" to "profitable company" investment model. Twilio and other "high growth" saas companies for the last few years have competed solely on how much they could grow the top line every quarter. Now they have to rebuild themselves.

diebeforei485 4y ago

This guy Jeff Lawson was virtue signalling big time about how much he loves paying San Francisco's taxes. I wonder if he's taking a pay cut while he leaves 17% of his workforce without jobs.

baby-yoda 4y ago
Twilio hit its all time high around Jan 2021, $435/share. In the 12 months following that he sold roughly $160M in stock, riding the price down to about $250/share. And he even got a 75,000 share grant last March after that performance. From afar it seems like the company is being plundered by the C suite, would love to hear first hand accounts from employees after the last 24 months.

heliophane 4y ago

Leo Laporte mentioned on security now last week that he was happy to move away from authy because it was run by twillio(a previous sponsor of the podcast). Have things been rough for the company?

fredgrott 4y ago

I have a mild question: Ukraine war outlook in 3 months China will face a severe shortage of fertilizer(they get that from Russia at over 80%) along with India and since those are two big supply chains it might be that all these companies see a rise in one of their inputs via the supply chain disruption in the future towards April-May as decreasing their profits while at the same time increasing other costs. So my question is why is everyone assuming that it is some other economic force than this if this is the actual looming economic near term disaster? Think back a full year when we had the last supply chain disruption, did not Governments step in a fund grants to prevent the rise in input costs?

berkle4455 4y ago

Twilio is nothing more than a Robocall enabler that’s going to be shutdown by the FCC anyway.

ejb999 4y ago
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-issues-robocall-cease-and-desist-letter-twilio https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-issues-robocall-cease-and-d...

corrius 4y ago

IMHO all these companies are flooded with account managers, sales, customer success, BDR, when they could just let customers choose their own plans, upgrade freely, etc, instead of "schedule a call with our team"

callalex 4y ago
Companies do that because it works. Early in Twilio’s life (pre-ipo) the company was very adamant that outreach and negotiation are not needed for SaaS. Jeff Lawson (the CEO) would regularly mock and lambast companies for having a pricing page that said any variation of “contact us for pricing”. There were some pretty dramatic reorgs and management departures because of that attitude. Lawson eventually relented and adopted a more hands-on growth model and growth went up. Before the change, the company was really struggling to attract blockbuster customers. The growth strategy was (and still partly is) to have startups get hooked early by the quality and just never leave as they grow. For the longest time their biggest customer by faaaaar was Uber, and that happened because both companies were created and grew together. Once the hands-on outreach started, they started getting meaningful revenue from giant multinational banks and manufacturers that have a ton of money but, frankly, don’t empower their developers to choose the best tools for the job.

adam_arthur 4y ago

The truth is that many of these companies can be run with fewer and fewer people as abstractions in technology become higher-level. Software takes a lot of effort to write, and much less to maintain. We just went through an era of effectively no software, to one with a large saturation of software that fills many niches. In the 2010's there was no competition for the majority of these businesses as VC capital tended to move towards new ideas, rather than directly competing with existing ventures. All of that is changing. The world will continue to need new and improving software, but the value provided by a single engineer continues to trend higher, and fewer and fewer developers will be needed to create these systems. Some SaaS has high costs of switching and a defensible moat, but many do not and are easily replicated. Existing players may even be at a disadvantage to competitors due to existing architectures using old patterns that require more manual labor/cost to maintain. e.g. Something like DocuSign is a good example of a low moat SaaS. Database systems are a good example of large moat (high cost of switching, even if better tech comes out)

moneywoes 4y ago
Given that info, does it even make sense to try and build a SaaS these days? especially as someone bootstrapping, is there even possible to build software with a moat? like building a database isn’t easy
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  It's worth competing in any industry if the numbers work out. My main point was that the extremely high margin and lack of competition in SaaS is not likely to persist over time (without a defensible moat/high cost of switching). It's a better time than ever to create a SaaS with low cost overhead. If you leverage serverless and strong design, you can build extremely useful and far-reaching products with a handful of people. No longer do you need hundreds or thousands of people to do this. Then operational cost is low, and revenue required for breakeven/profit is low too.
americafun 4y ago
> Software takes a lot of effort to write, and much less to maintain. ahahahahahahhahaaha Have you even written a line of code in your life ??? This is the most brazenly wrong statement I've heard on this website. We are in dire need of a correction ...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bogomipz 4y ago

The post states: >"We’re winding down some of the perks we’ve historically offered, including our book and wellness allowances. We’ve also decided to sunset Twilio Recharge, which I believe in, but which (in retrospect) was ill-timed given our profitability goals." Can someone say what "Twilio Recharge" is/was?

elijaht 4y ago
Looks like a "a four-week paid sabbatical that employees would get every three years" (source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/13/twilio-cuts-17-of-its-workforce-just-months-after-previous-round-of-layoffs/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/13/twilio-cuts-17-of-its-work...)

ghiculescu 4y ago

Over the last few years Twilio’s CEO wrote a navel gazing book and hosted some conferences about social justice, but didn’t improve the core product. I bet this made him popular with employees, though I suspect it would have made him less popular if they saw these layoffs coming.

dheerajrav 4y ago

I was part of the RIF and I am actively looking for Data Scientist roles. Any leads are much appreciated. You can find me - [here](https://linkedin.com/in/dheeraj-ravindranath https://linkedin.com/in/dheeraj-ravindranath) - https://github.com/dheerajrav https://github.com/dheerajrav

wonderwonder 4y ago

From the article "I'm sure you're wondering why we're making additional cuts to the team after the September layoffs. At that time, we sought to streamline the company as it was then structured." Translates as "We did a terrible job with the first round of layoffs and didn't really explore all of our options and because we messed up then we have to lay off more of you now." Wasn't this the company that announced they were laying people off based on race in the last round of layoffs? Looks like that turned out great for them, shocked they are laying more people off now. No mention of race in this announcement though. Note [before I get torched here]: I am saying hiring and firing based on race is insane and should be based on talent and what skills you need for the job. I am in no way saying any race is better than any other race at anything.

jwond 4y ago
> Wasn't this the company that announced they were laying people off based on race in the last round of layoffs? Oh yeah, they were. I forgot about that. > As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000119312522244315/d380990dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000119312522... I notice they did not include similar language in this new round of layoffs.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  They finally listened to their lawyers. Anyone not of a so called “marginalized community”fired in the last round very likely sued for civil rights violations. One of the silver linings of this recession is DEI has been gutted and thrown on the trash heap where it belongs. Any competent CEO is using this moment to gut the commissars and rabble rousers from their payrolls. Time to check the Slack logs and cleanse the company of activists.

ivan23178 4y ago

They tried to recruit me a few years ago. Good thing it didn't work out, I guess.