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https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/number... (dates for 2021 to 201

by 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
I wonder if a company should hire as many people even though the Covid drove unexpected traffic. I mean, shouldn't we build systems that scale by adding machines instead of adding people? Even if a company wants to hire for growth, shouldn't they hire a team of 2 or 3 to test water first, namely hiring for results instead of for investment?
- RobertDeNiro 4y ago
  I think a lot of the time the bulk added is in sales and marketing, to capture the most of a 'wave' when it shows up. The penalty for over hiring remains less than for under hiring in these cases.
unshavedyak 4y ago
Man, i need to use Wolfram more. Not being math focused i guess i tended to ignore it, but that's a really cool and easy feature.
- rch 4y ago
  Solid API as well.
- dopeboy 4y ago
  Agreed - very cool use of Wolfram. There's probably a niche product here around reproducing this just for finance folks.
  - someuser54541 4y ago
    I did basically that. It was a natural language processing tool for asking questions about securities. There didn't seem to be much interest.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  I just got inspired to look up the relation instead, which was also interesting: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+...
- shagie 4y ago
  It's one of the "do I spend/save an hour a year on this?" things... to which my answer is "yes." And thus, its one of the things that I'm quite willing to add to my collection of "spending under $100/year on this." Combined with the "this is useful as a back end for knowledge lookup", I suspect some of my toy projects will be using it more.
ghaff 4y ago
You can understand the 2020/2021 hiring at certain companies with a very clear pandemic-related angle like Zoom. But I've lost track of the number of non-answer answers, both public and private, to why companies apparently overhired. We hired more than we meant to. How does that happen? Especially at a company losing large piles of money.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Here's my explanation: 1. In the Internet era, we live with much bigger markets and hence much more of a "winner-take-all" (or at least winner-take-most) economy for companies that exist primarily on the Internet. You see this over and over in different areas - there is usually one giant leader that takes the lion's share of the money, then maybe 1 or 2 frequently discussed competitors, then everyone else. 2. With this "way fewer points for second best" dynamic, most investors and business leaders are biased much more towards FOMO than fear-of-losing-money. 3. Thus, when the pandemic came along, many folks did see it as the start of a new dynamic with how people used online services. And they weren't entirely wrong, e.g. remote work is obviously much more prevalent now than pre-pandemic. But again, from a business leader's perspective, I'm sure most of them thought it would be much worse to miss out on a paradigm shift in online services than to over-invest. Of course, any discussion about this topic should lead with the huge sloshing of money due to low interest rates that abruptly reversed. Whenever that happens you see investors pour money into risky assets as they chase yield.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Fair enough. I would say that looking around in general, the "new normal" looks a lot more like the "old normal" than a lot of people expected in 2020 or 2021. Business travel is essentially back to pre-pandemic levels. There's more workplace flexibility but--especially outside tech--there's relatively little full remote. A lot of food and meal delivery seems to have really tapered off. And arguably it didn't cost companies that much to hedge for an upside. It's not even clear if employees now being laid off were in general worse off for having a job. (Modulo some things like being in the US on a visa.)
Patrol8394 4y ago
That's insane! I think a good future indicator before joining any company is their hypergrowth ... avoid at all cost. Smoke and mirrors. When you hear CEOs blathering on doubling, tripling etc .. headcount ... run ...
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  Absolutely! I’ve avoided hyper growth companies for many years and I’m very glad I made that decision. There are sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places, but ultimately you are most likely to become irrelevant and disposable. Even if you’re a particularly talented and capable person, very few companies are run well enough to ever expose and utilize that. Your career is at risk of stagnating, I think. There are exceptions of course. The risk to reward ratio seems pretty bad to me, though.
  - Patrol8394 4y ago
    > sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places yeah, it is a lottery. Though more often than not is paper money that never realized into actual $$$. I did my fair share of it, but eventually went for steady long term income, slower growth but sustainable. I see it as investing in single stocks or boring mutual funds.
- beambot 4y ago
  I'm quite the opposite: Twilio's revenue tripled from 2019 to today; if their headcount didn't triple to support that growth, I'd run away!
  - Patrol8394 4y ago
    How much of their revenue came in because of acquisitions like Segment? That said, sustainable growth is ok, Twilio's head count growth was "wild" to put it mild.
  - shagie 4y ago
    (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 ) Tripling the revenue and headcount would be ok if they could make this line go up (or even stay level) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+... As it is, the number is negative and the slope is negative.
time_to_smile 4y ago
Thanks for posting that plot. As I've mentioned frequently before, it amazes me how many people looking at tech company financials will only look at Revenue and completely ignore profits. What the revenue/profit plot you showed for TWLO clearly demonstrates is that there is no magic point there suddenly you increase revenue and profitably starts to increase as well. I think an assumption many people have is "if revenue keeps rising you have to be profitable soon", clearly that is not always the case. Another pattern I've noticed is that many companies are not like Amazon, which is the model of a growth company. While AMZN does often reinvest its profits (historically to the dismay of investors) it has repeatedly demonstrated that it can be profitable. For companies like TWLO and UBER it's not obvious that they even can be profitable. When I see this TWLO chart the message I get is that the only way to increase revenue is to increase net losses. It's not even remotely clear that TWLO can generate a profit at any level of revenue.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  The Uber model can be profitable - we know this because of Bolt’s cash flow generation capabilities. Unfortunately for Uber and Lyft, they massively over-hire and over-compensate (except for drivers) relative to the more financially healthy rideshare firms globally.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  TWLO is a SaaS whereas Ubers more of a physical service business can they be compared
PedroBatista 4y ago
Also, I would guess major grows are due to a massive influx of tech-sales people. This is just an extrapolation, but I would bet when the pandemic hit their email boxes and phones blowup with people throwing money at them and begging to "fix" their telephony system in a scenario where most of their employees are at home. Now the market is bigger but also mostly adjusted and the 2021 tsunami of free money is over. I'm sure many technical people are affected by this but they are a minority because they were never the majority of hires ( my guess )
- simfree 4y ago
  Twilio isn't a turnkey platform, quite a bit of this business went to platforms like Telnyx that make Teams Phone System and similar setups super easy.
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    Can’t you just register an API key and get going? Or is this a different offering
    - callalex 4y ago
      Yes. When people talk about “turnkey” they are talking about higher level aggregate products though. For example, ZenDesk is a “turnkey” customer support product that is built on top of Twilio APIs. Dropbox is a “turnkey” file management product built on top of AWS S3 APIs. These days, Twilio does have a lot more integrated solutions, but people still think of them as just the message transport layer that they started as.
oars 4y ago
Thank you for the reminder about this capability in Wolfram Alpha.
pertymcpert 4y ago
I added opex to that chart, which shows clearer why net income was falling. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit+and+number+of+employees+and+opex https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fcantournet 4y ago
Holy shit ! They make $3.5B/y of Revenu qnd they can't afford 9k employees ? How much are they paying them ? and what are they doing with the rest of that huge pile of money ?
stiaje 4y ago
I assume at least some of this growth in number of employees comes from Twilio acquiring Segment in late 2020: https://www.twilio.com/press/releases/twilio-completes-acquisition-segment-market-leading-customer-data-platform https://www.twilio.com/press/releases/twilio-completes-acqui...
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> TWLO revenue and profit and number of employees Do this but add Federal Funds Rate /s

by shagie 4y ago

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

I wonder if a company should hire as many people even though the Covid drove unexpected traffic. I mean, shouldn't we build systems that scale by adding machines instead of adding people? Even if a company wants to hire for growth, shouldn't they hire a team of 2 or 3 to test water first, namely hiring for results instead of for investment?

RobertDeNiro 4y ago
I think a lot of the time the bulk added is in sales and marketing, to capture the most of a 'wave' when it shows up. The penalty for over hiring remains less than for under hiring in these cases.

unshavedyak 4y ago

Man, i need to use Wolfram more. Not being math focused i guess i tended to ignore it, but that's a really cool and easy feature.

rch 4y ago
Solid API as well.
dopeboy 4y ago
Agreed - very cool use of Wolfram. There's probably a niche product here around reproducing this just for finance folks.
- someuser54541 4y ago
  I did basically that. It was a natural language processing tool for asking questions about securities. There didn't seem to be much interest.
kristiandupont 4y ago
I just got inspired to look up the relation instead, which was also interesting: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+...
shagie 4y ago
It's one of the "do I spend/save an hour a year on this?" things... to which my answer is "yes." And thus, its one of the things that I'm quite willing to add to my collection of "spending under $100/year on this." Combined with the "this is useful as a back end for knowledge lookup", I suspect some of my toy projects will be using it more.

ghaff 4y ago

You can understand the 2020/2021 hiring at certain companies with a very clear pandemic-related angle like Zoom. But I've lost track of the number of non-answer answers, both public and private, to why companies apparently overhired. We hired more than we meant to. How does that happen? Especially at a company losing large piles of money.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Here's my explanation: 1. In the Internet era, we live with much bigger markets and hence much more of a "winner-take-all" (or at least winner-take-most) economy for companies that exist primarily on the Internet. You see this over and over in different areas - there is usually one giant leader that takes the lion's share of the money, then maybe 1 or 2 frequently discussed competitors, then everyone else. 2. With this "way fewer points for second best" dynamic, most investors and business leaders are biased much more towards FOMO than fear-of-losing-money. 3. Thus, when the pandemic came along, many folks did see it as the start of a new dynamic with how people used online services. And they weren't entirely wrong, e.g. remote work is obviously much more prevalent now than pre-pandemic. But again, from a business leader's perspective, I'm sure most of them thought it would be much worse to miss out on a paradigm shift in online services than to over-invest. Of course, any discussion about this topic should lead with the huge sloshing of money due to low interest rates that abruptly reversed. Whenever that happens you see investors pour money into risky assets as they chase yield.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Fair enough. I would say that looking around in general, the "new normal" looks a lot more like the "old normal" than a lot of people expected in 2020 or 2021. Business travel is essentially back to pre-pandemic levels. There's more workplace flexibility but--especially outside tech--there's relatively little full remote. A lot of food and meal delivery seems to have really tapered off. And arguably it didn't cost companies that much to hedge for an upside. It's not even clear if employees now being laid off were in general worse off for having a job. (Modulo some things like being in the US on a visa.)

Patrol8394 4y ago

That's insane! I think a good future indicator before joining any company is their hypergrowth ... avoid at all cost. Smoke and mirrors. When you hear CEOs blathering on doubling, tripling etc .. headcount ... run ...

steve_adams_86 4y ago
Absolutely! I’ve avoided hyper growth companies for many years and I’m very glad I made that decision. There are sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places, but ultimately you are most likely to become irrelevant and disposable. Even if you’re a particularly talented and capable person, very few companies are run well enough to ever expose and utilize that. Your career is at risk of stagnating, I think. There are exceptions of course. The risk to reward ratio seems pretty bad to me, though.
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  > sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places yeah, it is a lottery. Though more often than not is paper money that never realized into actual $$$. I did my fair share of it, but eventually went for steady long term income, slower growth but sustainable. I see it as investing in single stocks or boring mutual funds.
beambot 4y ago
I'm quite the opposite: Twilio's revenue tripled from 2019 to today; if their headcount didn't triple to support that growth, I'd run away!
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  How much of their revenue came in because of acquisitions like Segment? That said, sustainable growth is ok, Twilio's head count growth was "wild" to put it mild.
- shagie 4y ago
  (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 ) Tripling the revenue and headcount would be ok if they could make this line go up (or even stay level) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+... As it is, the number is negative and the slope is negative.

time_to_smile 4y ago

Thanks for posting that plot. As I've mentioned frequently before, it amazes me how many people looking at tech company financials will only look at Revenue and completely ignore profits. What the revenue/profit plot you showed for TWLO clearly demonstrates is that there is no magic point there suddenly you increase revenue and profitably starts to increase as well. I think an assumption many people have is "if revenue keeps rising you have to be profitable soon", clearly that is not always the case. Another pattern I've noticed is that many companies are not like Amazon, which is the model of a growth company. While AMZN does often reinvest its profits (historically to the dismay of investors) it has repeatedly demonstrated that it can be profitable. For companies like TWLO and UBER it's not obvious that they even can be profitable. When I see this TWLO chart the message I get is that the only way to increase revenue is to increase net losses. It's not even remotely clear that TWLO can generate a profit at any level of revenue.

atdrummond 4y ago
The Uber model can be profitable - we know this because of Bolt’s cash flow generation capabilities. Unfortunately for Uber and Lyft, they massively over-hire and over-compensate (except for drivers) relative to the more financially healthy rideshare firms globally.
moneywoes 4y ago
TWLO is a SaaS whereas Ubers more of a physical service business can they be compared

PedroBatista 4y ago

Also, I would guess major grows are due to a massive influx of tech-sales people. This is just an extrapolation, but I would bet when the pandemic hit their email boxes and phones blowup with people throwing money at them and begging to "fix" their telephony system in a scenario where most of their employees are at home. Now the market is bigger but also mostly adjusted and the 2021 tsunami of free money is over. I'm sure many technical people are affected by this but they are a minority because they were never the majority of hires ( my guess )

simfree 4y ago
Twilio isn't a turnkey platform, quite a bit of this business went to platforms like Telnyx that make Teams Phone System and similar setups super easy.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Can’t you just register an API key and get going? Or is this a different offering
  - callalex 4y ago
    Yes. When people talk about “turnkey” they are talking about higher level aggregate products though. For example, ZenDesk is a “turnkey” customer support product that is built on top of Twilio APIs. Dropbox is a “turnkey” file management product built on top of AWS S3 APIs. These days, Twilio does have a lot more integrated solutions, but people still think of them as just the message transport layer that they started as.

oars 4y ago

Thank you for the reminder about this capability in Wolfram Alpha.

pertymcpert 4y ago

I added opex to that chart, which shows clearer why net income was falling. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit+and+number+of+employees+and+opex https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+revenue+and+profit...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fcantournet 4y ago

Holy shit ! They make $3.5B/y of Revenu qnd they can't afford 9k employees ? How much are they paying them ? and what are they doing with the rest of that huge pile of money ?

stiaje 4y ago

I assume at least some of this growth in number of employees comes from Twilio acquiring Segment in late 2020: https://www.twilio.com/press/releases/twilio-completes-acquisition-segment-market-leading-customer-data-platform https://www.twilio.com/press/releases/twilio-completes-acqui...

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> TWLO revenue and profit and number of employees Do this but add Federal Funds Rate /s