27 ms·

Goodbye, Twilio

545 points by joaopaulomcc 3y ago

predictabl3 3y ago
The writing was on the wall when they got acquired, forced two-factor auth with SMS only and forcibly locked me out of my account by turning it on when I didn't have a phone setup. If you want to use SMS as spam prevention, then just do that. Breaking your product and forcing bad security to harvest numbers is, well, just shitty.
- arnvald 3y ago
  When who got acquired? Twillio? They're a public company, aren't they?
  - tnzk 3y ago
    I assume parent is talking about when SendGrid got acquired by Twillio. I had the similar experience with it at that time.
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      You know, I think this is correct. I was using them to do some Email workflow stuff with Pipedream, and ended up replacing it with my own Gmail SMTP since I'm just emailing myself and it's low volume. Apologies for getting that mixed up.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
berkle4455 3y ago
Twilio went from cool developer tooling to facilitating global robocalls and being a net negative for the world.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - late2part 3y ago
    Twilio board members read daily email reports?
- grogenaut 3y ago
  Seems they have multiple income streams from negative actors ... https://billychasen.medium.com/twilios-toll-fraud-problem-28b3aef39243 https://billychasen.medium.com/twilios-toll-fraud-problem-28...
- kec 3y ago
  Twilio was always that way, the zeitgeist has just moved on from the unbridled optimism of the 2010's which masked it.
buro9 3y ago
There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing. With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard reflects it. Everything changes at this point, because it's also not the top priority of the company to keep their own engineering happy at this point.
- Toine 3y ago
  Isn't the main thing to keep the main thing the main thing ?
- liuliu 3y ago
  It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology.
  - cj 3y ago
    > It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology. I feel like it was never technology, especially in SaaS. Sure you need some initial technical chops to get a service up and running, but after MVP —> PMF, it’s all marketing, momentum, consumer trust, your brand, etc. For every successful SaaS (take Notion for example) it’s easy to say things like they never had a real competitor, but the truth is they had a lot of competition but they were able to overcome it and build a moat initially propped up by really good usability, but now their usability could easily go to shit and they’d still do well with a traditional sales/marketing moat.
  - callalex 3y ago
    Early Twilio engineer here. There was never really all that much unique ground breaking technology work being done, we used open source tools running on AWS to build the core products. Our differentiators were reliability and user experience. Both of those came from how the organization was built and run. There was an obsession with uptime and DevOps, with a carefully guarded culture of collaboration and blameless postmortems when things went wrong. Empowering individual engineers and product designers to call out when things sucked really went a long way, and is really hard to scale. Initially managers and directors had very little power over the actual makers and maintainers, which lead to a lot of quality. A few years post-IPO we hit a scale where a lot of that culture began to fall apart. That’s when I made my exit/was pushed out.
29athrowaway 3y ago
It seems the MBAs are at it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 Twilio is now another Xerox. MBA programs should be illegal. You can thank MBAs for spreading PFAS everywhere, single use plastic, profiteering from insulin, making every American a diabetic by adding sugar into everything, selling glyphosate for residential use, killing all the pollinators, moving all manufacturing to countries with no environmental laws, and other consumer and planet-fucking initiatives. The number of extinct species, diabetic patients, number of employees on minimum wage with no health insurance, policitian revenue from lobbying activities, dead bees, cut trees, lost topsoil, former Roundup users with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, revenue from weapons, atmospheric temperature increase, ocean acidity, plastic waste, pollution, every form of ecocide and every other measure of things going wrong is directly proportional to the number of MBAs. Why? because if shareholder value is everything, then the employee, the environment and society at large becomes irrelevant.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries. If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.
    - sethammons 3y ago
      Source?
    - enono 3y ago
      [flagged]
ds0 3y ago
Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used extensively.
- miguelgrinberg 3y ago
  Thank you so much. Glad to hear you've found my work useful.
- fastball 3y ago
  I've had to move away from Python-SocketIO due to countless regressions and subtle failures of the library.
  - miguelgrinberg 3y ago
    Have you reported these? The library has a fairly complete testing suite, and if you are saying there are regressions I'd like to know what those are so that I can make sure the testing is adjusted to cover those cases going forward. Thanks.
Animats 3y ago
Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an additional monthly "campaign" charge for the service. Their business model no longer comprehends a pure request-reply service. They now assume their customers want to spam.
- buttocks 3y ago
  Not defending Twilio, but this isn’t their doing. Every SMS gateway service now requires this due to new anti-spam regulations by US authorities. (FCC or FTC or maybe both.)
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Your work sounds absolutely awesome. Did you blog about it somewhere?
  - Animats 3y ago
    aetherltd.com
- foolfoolz 3y ago
  they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was founded
  - toast0 3y ago
    SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy. Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an alternative voice provider, and only later added them for SMS.
toni_bk 3y ago
Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits? Always about growth, growth, growth!
- fassssst 3y ago
  You could ask the same of yourself, presumably you have a retirement account invested in things that grow…
  - Johnny555 3y ago
    A retirement account is based on the premise that its owner is going to stop working and adding money to it so they can draw money out of it for the rest of their life. Companies don't generally have the same long term goal to stop earning revenue and ride out their savings until they die.
- macspoofing 3y ago
  >Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits? Twilio doesn't make billions in profits. Twilio has been losing money for years. I'm not sure if Twilio was ever profitable?
  - toni_bk 3y ago
    [dead]
xwdv 3y ago
I’m hoping Cloudflare will eventually offer the SMS stuff that Twilio used to, along with other real time communications.
- sethammons 3y ago
  How does that fit in with Cloudflare? DNS is different than SMS, email, etc. Industry regulations, integration with providers, spam fighting, etc. Both benefit from network peering. I would think it would be easier to add DNS to Twilio than to add SMS to Cloudflare.
  - aprilnya 3y ago
    If you think Cloudflare only does DNS, you don’t know what Cloudflare is They do way more than just DNS
    - sethammons 3y ago
      For any of the following Cloudflare products, are any as complex as SMS or Email? None of these are adversarial and covered by legal constraints to my knowledge (except ddos which is a resource game). I'm unfamiliar with their "china network" - probably some legalities there. Cloudflare Services: Advanced Certificate Manager Advanced DDoS Always Online™ Analytics Anycast Network API Apps Marketplace Audit Logs Argo Smart Routing Argo for Spectrum At Cost Registrar Bot Management Browser Insights & Origin Monitoring Browser Isolation (Advanced) Bring Your Own IPs (BYOIP) CDN Certificate Transparency Monitoring China Network Cloudflare Access Cloudflare Gateway™ Cloudflare Gateway™ (DNS Only) Cloudflare Images Cloudflare Logs Cloudflare Network Interconnect Cloudflare Pages® Cloudflare Registrar Cloudflare’s Security Operations Center (SOC) as a Service Cloudflare Spectrum Cloudflare Stream Cloudflare WAF Custom SSL Data Localization Suite Dedicated SSL DNS Firewall Enterprise DNS Only Enterprise - Primary DNS Error Pages Healthcheck Image Resizing Intel Keyless SSL Load Balancing Magic Firewall® Magic Transit® Magic WAN® Page Rules Page Shield Premium Success Rate Limiting Secondary DNS Secure Registrar SSL for SaaS SSL for SaaS Advanced Standard Success Offering Static IPs Teams for Enterprise Waiting Room Workers Bundled Workers KV Workers Unbound
INTPenis 3y ago
As a Swede I naturally gravitated towards the 46elks.se service instead of Twilio. Been using it for years now, no issues. They even called me once to find out what their clients were doing, like a survey.
shakes 3y ago
I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers around the world and I’m unsurprised to see such a thoughtful take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can’t wait to see what he does next.
- miguelgrinberg 3y ago
  Thank you, Ricky! The privilege was also mine. :)
chopete3 3y ago
>> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio. Once it becomes a viable business, growth and departments that support it become equally important. Devs are one of the important departments. Smart devs grow up and seize the opportunity to grow with the company. For most devs it is a rude awakening and accept the reality quickly. This thread coming to the surface means there are a lot of such devs in the YC community surprised or curious about this phenomenon.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Every tech company’s goal is to grow into the thing that you, as a dev, don’t want it to become. There will be a growing focus on security, process, reporting, testing, documentation, reliability, etc. And a shrinking focus on new feature development, prototyping, experimentation. For many that might be something to embrace. Maybe you’re 35 now and have kids and wouldn’t mind a more boringly reliable employment. Otherwise you might want to find a new job. But, yeah, nobody’s being wronged here. It’s just what happens. Like my kids growing up and needing me less and less.
  - oytis 3y ago
    I'm not sure why I as an engineer would not want more focus on security, testing, documentation and reliability. It's by far not the worst that a company can become
cvalka 3y ago
What's a good twilio alternative? Voximplant, plivio, bandwith are not very good.
- cjcampbell 3y ago
  Would you be willing to share more about your experience with these companies? I have a client evaluating Twilio alternatives due to skyrocketing costs, and some of these companies are on the list.
  - jagtstronaut 3y ago
    I work at bandwidth and would also love to know what you don’t like with messaging at least.
  - sparrish 3y ago
    We've used Twilio, Nexmo (now Vonage), and Plivo for years. Twilio is still our go-to for US SMS. Nexmo has great international deliverability but is more expensive than Plivo. Plivo works fine when it works. When it doesn't, their support is horrible. Most times I don't even bother opening a ticket anymore. I just switch the customer to Nexmo. I tried A2P 10DLC registration on Twilio when it first came out and our deliverability went to less than 50%. I quickly switched if off. They're all going to start requiring A2P 10DLC registration for US SMS within a few months. It's going to be painful to get timely SMS delivered.
  - cvalka 3y ago
    The companies I mentioned are substantially inferior in terms of engineering compared to twilio. Plus twilio is more transparent and trustworthy f.e. with porting out numbers. Voxbone is a Russian cheaper twilio clone. Plivo is an Indian cheaper twilio clone. Bandwith is a disaster. You just need to get a single look at their control panel which they won't show to you unless you're a paying customer.
- kleff 3y ago
  Sinch? LinkMobility?
coderintherye 3y ago
The really sad thing is the executive team / board / investors not being able to comprehend that they could vastly increase their revenue (and profit) by just providing expanded technical services to me (an existing customer). There are a ton of things I would pay Twilio for beyond SMS and WhatsApp Messaging. You don't need a MBA to figure that out, you just need someone talking to your customers and an engineering and product team that can turn that into real products.
- cj 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I think one result of the layoffs of the past couple years has been companies 1) really focusing and doubling down on existing product lines, less experiments outside core competencies 2) double down on focus on top 20% paying customers, pull back hands on support for smaller clients, focus on keeping (and upselling) existing large clients with less focus on the bottom 50th percentile
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    I have seen number 2 at my company. They've given up on midsized and startup companies. They are only chasing the large ones and government contracts. Which makes sense from a shareholder perspective as they look to leech as much return as possible. But, it also ensures that the company is not going to innovate anytime soon.
personperson 3y ago
I feel like this isn’t the “betrayal” that it’s made out to be. Twilio won at their niche. People often talk about “if we just get 1% of the market…” — is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once? They’re moving towards doing the same thing with other parts of tech companies, in this case it’s marketing. It’s not like their APIs change because of it, these are additional products they’re introducing. Engineers generally find anything marketing related icky, but they’re very happy to collect the checks which are funded through these icky distribution methodologies.
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
  Agreed. The author is upset for XYZ "other" reasons, I would have recommended they slept on it and not post that publicly.
- rospaya 3y ago
  > is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once? Reading this thread makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Twilio is huge and is the leader, but they hold less than 40% market share in CPaaS and makes something like 60-70% of their revenue in the US. There are a lot of competitors and a lot of reasons to never use Twilio.
jeffiel 3y ago
Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding! For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. As a developer, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads together to make realtime personalization of every communication hard -- and Segment is so good at it. So that's what we're focused on! As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS customers as well. More to come like this. Happy Father's Day (in the US) HN! [1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms-fraud-guard https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms...
- rsync 3y ago
  Haha. Yes, fighting the good fight - doing god’s own work.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors? Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it. I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.
  - ITB 3y ago
    You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely to engage with the community. You could frame the same question in a more constructive style.
firebirdn99 3y ago
Working for any company is a "job", and not a "family" as many have found out in the last few years (but happens at every downturn). It's hard to draw a line, between personal and professional identities, but it's something I feel everyone should do. Corporations simply are built to amass profits, and outcompete others. They do not care nor are they built to care about you.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  Friends are friends and business is business. If you get it confused, you will stay confused while the world moves on. I noticed most people are confused. You serve for your paycheck and then you are forgotten. They don't ask you what you spent the money on. Your reward is the package they gave you. Best to make friends in areas of life where that is the goal.
- drdaeman 3y ago
  The concept of family varied quite a lot over times and cultures, there probably are some that fit. Medieval families are quite different social constructs from modern first-world nuclear families. Heck, and if anything - family abuse is, sadly, a very real thing, too. Same for the companies - they vary, a lot. Working at a two-person startup can resemble a family to some extent (or, well, there are genuine family startups, where partners in life start business together, and some succeed), but large corporations are entirely different experience.
wilg 3y ago
1. I could not tell you what that billboard means, despite also looking through the related blog post. Perhaps it is something only marketing teams understand, which would be an interesting failure mode. 2. I tried to sign up for Twilio Sendgrid the other day to send some emails from a Heroku app but I couldn't complete the sign up because I never received the activation email. Classic!
- karussell 3y ago
  Re 2: had the exact same experience. And the big problem was that in order to contact support I needed an activated account :). But at some point I found a support Email and with that I got an activated account. Still all this was too slow and left a bad taste. And I already finished integrating a different and IMO simpler (and probably less powerful) solution. And as the pricing was ok it was just the Twilio brand that I missed...
rsync 3y ago
I built an entire personal telco for myself using twilio apis and twiml bins, etc. This was encouraged by helpful “hacker” blog posts and official howtos detailing integrations with alert systems and home automation, etc. Twilio sold itself as useful infrastructure. All of this falls apart next month when A2P (or whatever it is) begins. Twilio polluted its own environment so completely that nobody can exist there anymore. (Unless you’re spamming, which is what customer engagement is)
- 1270018080 3y ago
  Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart? https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-is-P2P-and-A2P-messaging- https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-...
  - grumple 3y ago
    I assume they are talking about a2p 10dlc registration. Twilio has badly mishandled the rollout, it's been extremely painful. OP seems to blame them for making things too easy for spammers which caused the changes to be needed, which may be true.
  - rsync 3y ago
    "Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?" A2P 10DLC requires all senders to provide company/corporate information and register their "campaigns". Which is to say, when I send a grocery list to my wife, that must be under the auspices of a business case that I have registered with twilio and the carriers and within the confines of a campaign that I have defined with example messages and an opt-out and unsubscribe mechanism. There is a sole proprietor option which is hazily defined and it is unclear if twilio even understands the implementation of. All of this to say: Because of the horrible behavior of both twilio and their customers there is no longer any such thing as programmable, personal messaging. Personal messaging is something you do with your thumbs, on your physical device and programmable messaging is spam. There is no third classification. Twilio could have been a boring and useful telco infrastructure company providing plumbing for interesting use-cases - but there's no route to billions there so they had to somehow become a unicorn. That's where the "customer engagement" comes in.
joeythedolphin 3y ago
The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. Great products are built by companies that love their developers. They don't need to tell that on billboards, they need to tell that privately to each engineer they employ. It is not appropriate for a developer to be the center of a company. Why not quietly say thank you for the employment opportunity (a rare treat across all time and history)? Accept the fortune they gave you, if they were good share it with the world, and if not, move on to your next opportunity? HN may downvote me but I do not understand these "goodbye" posts. I don't think anybody cares and it just makes you think twice about the person who is leaving if they showed up at your door for a job.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. I think the point is that developers are (or were) the customers. Twilio got adopted because they targeted and excited developers. Now they don't care about targeting the developers, they're targeting executives and marketing professionals. I did not down vote you, and I don't think you deserve the down votes.
  - joeythedolphin 3y ago
    This is helpful! Thanks. Sometimes I come off intense, it's just an authentic invitation to spar.
catgirlinspace 3y ago
Kinda disappointing to see how Twilio has changed. used to have a pretty positive opinion of them even though i hadn’t used their services, and then i went to signup for twilio sendgrid for sending emails for a little website and i immediately got suspended before i even activated my account? support was completely useless too
mkl95 3y ago
Twilio are still doing better than their competition. To name an example, MessageBird laid off 30% of their workforce in late 2022 vs Twilio's 17% in early 2023, and they are known to be an absolute clusterfuck, which is not something you hear about Twilio (yet).
rsynnott 3y ago
From the linked AI product page: > What is digital greatness? Has no-one in Twilio ever seen Parks and Rec? This is definitely a Ron Swanson thing.
smallerfish 3y ago
I've been playing with Twilio recently, and it's certainly not the lean platform that it once apparently was. In the Java client SDK for example, I count 7 separate Message classes. There are multiple APIs with overlapping functionality; you can send SMS and whatsapps several different ways each. The documentation is likewise byzantine and bloated. I get that scaling tech organizations is hard (Stripe is another company with abysmal bloat in their APIs) but jfc, get a competent chief architect who is opinionated, please, and aim towards coherency. If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK. (That said, better than MessageBird, who don't even have SDK support for the APIs they're promoting as the correct way; on the other hand, their documentation is markedly better than Twilio's).
- rabiddmeese 3y ago
  > If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK. They might want to alienate and break things for many of their existing clients who use the older APIs. Plenty of companies contract out dev work until they have a working product and keep it as is. They don't have devs on hand to update them if they deprecate older APIs leading to a completely broken app despite all the old functionalities being perfectly adequate for the task.
paxys 3y ago
"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all their work into a viable business.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > (...) and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and (...) Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at all.
  - paxys 3y ago
    You can say the same for engineers, and really anyone else.
    - rewmie 3y ago
      A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.
      - eightysixfour 3y ago
        No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising. Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many startups, but that does not mean they live and die by their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that got there without engineering excellence.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
There’s nothing surprising here. This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO. Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this. I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that has maintained the core of what they do, and the value proposition, but didn’t push most of their money into paying for sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally, stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees. Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he’s a good person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else, and so it’s honorable that he is attempting to find ways to mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end of the day the arrow of history is clear.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Who is Jeff Lawson and what thread did he jump into?
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > Who is Jeff Lawson https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/ "CEO and cofounder of Twilio" > and what thread did he jump into? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383229
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- louwrentius 3y ago
  It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu. I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. Or in plain language: making other people more rich at the cost of others. I’m just happy the guy got out when the company didn’t align with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself a conscience.
mightybyte 3y ago
Anyone else share my thought that Twilio (and any other companies like them that I'm not aware of) is likely the primary driver of the massive epidemic of spam text messages and phone calls? Phone and text have been rendered almost completely useless to me. I often get close to double digit spam texts and calls per day. Obviously the drivers of this stuff are many and complicated, but it seems like the automation layer is the main thing that enabled it all.
- singpolyma3 3y ago
  To send SMS with Twilio (or any other similar service) you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to register your traffic with major carriers and get their sign off.
wayeq 3y ago
> I'm sure you want to know what the future has in store for me. do I though?
erhaetherth 3y ago
FWIW I never thought Twilio was good as a developer. At least not coming hot off of Stripe. Which is glorious. The dev mode is fantabulous, and so are the docs. Twilio... I.. it's just atrocious in so many ways. Firstly, it needs a proper dev API key and then all the SMS's should just be collected into a dashboard on their site instead of going to phones. And their Connect option is very half baked. Customers should be able to re-use their existing Twilio numbers, not re-buy under a connected app, and they should be able to manage their numbers on twilio.com, not force me to rebuild the entire Twilio UI.
kypro 3y ago
I'll try to add some perspective to help people understand Twilio's side here. Twilio is has always been a very unprofitable company. Unlike their SaaS counterparts Twilio's PaaS model has significant costs in the form of fees which they pay to network providers. They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant. What's more there's very little moat in a communications API so Twilio has little pricing power which only compounds the cost issues they face since they cannot easily increase prices to offset growing costs of an already unprofitable business model. Basically the business model sucks. I'd argue it's one that can only exist in a world where investors are not interested in profits. Now interest rates are rising it's becoming harder for companies like Twilio to attract investors by posting revenue growth alone. I don't think Twilio wanted to shift their focus, they simply had to. They had to find something that had more of a moat, and therefore better margins. Segment is the answer, but ultimately it's a different product which understandably requires a different focus. If you sell a communications API then developers are the people whom you must evangelise, but Segment is a product used by business folks to grow their business. I don't envy the position Jeff and Twilio's management team are in. They've had to make some really tough decisions, but if you like Twilio then I'd see this simply as them doing what they need to do to survive and continue providing the awesome developer focused products they provide. I'll also note that unlike Facebook's mass layoffs Twilio's layoffs weren't simply done to increase profitability, but needed to right side a business that's currently burning over $1 billion a year.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  > They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant. And Twilio is wholly incompetent when it comes to battling this. Not only are they unable to keep bad actors off, they punish good actors. They require "approval" of what text messages you are going to send (never mind if part of it needs to be dynamic) and limit your sending ability to arbitrarily low levels. The company I work for just switched off them after high rejection rates and them randomly blocking us or limiting our send volume. They also bungled the whole number verification thing that recently went into effect, or at least dropped the ball on the communications side. Very glad to be off them and kind of sad, I remember when Twilio first hit the scene and it was truly amazing and so cool to work with.
taf2 3y ago
This is unfortunate that he got disillusioned but the shift is for really one simple reason - segment. The original twilio that went on to acquire sendgrid, was increasingly in a low margin commodity market. Segment is hugely profitable in contrast and is not dependent on increasingly competitive upstream providers (carriers) providing lower cost similar apis as twilio voice/messaging. It still stands that Twilio’s apis are better than the competitors but that will only last so long. Segment will keep twilio relevant for a much longer time.
blobbers 3y ago
I'm curious why this got upvoted on hackernews. Isn't this some rando- employee (no offense Miguel Grinberg) that joined an established medium sized software company and then is moving on after spending a fairly short time there. Did this particular engineer move the needle on their product somehow? How is this in any way "news" worthy.
- blobbers 3y ago
  (thanks for the downvotes but I stand by what I said)
obiefernandez 3y ago
Another one bites the dust. Goddammit
rajanaccros 3y ago
The trend we are seeing across the tech industry and business in general is to know/consolidate/extract/exploit. Even users who pay now are still "the product". Who are the buyers? Intelligence agencies, both governmental and private who have different aims, but with the same intermediate goal is to know everything about you. The only (ONLY) motive is profit. Growth, growth, growth above all costs at the expense of people and the environment. Jeff jumped into this thread to try to color it with verbiage such as: > we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. This is another way to habituate and legitimate the exploitation of users for those few who profit. An example, is the A2P 10DLC registration that is being forced on users of the product that will charge a registration fee, a vetting fee, and a recurring monthly cost. From what I can tell, there is no legal basis forcing this. The Telco cartel got together and came up with a way to make more money off of you. Sure they will talk about it in terms of "improving your experience" and "stopping spam texts". While there may be a kernel of truth in there, that is not the main reason. Go back to rule number 1: profit, profit, profit. It is a shame that the Telcos are strong arming the CSP middlemen to make them abide by these rules or not deliver their messages. And of course that rolls down to the end users. But I think the bigger issue here is that they need to know exactly who you are in terms of registration. Blocking VOIP numbers for OTP verification, etc etc. Why do you think this is? Because they will take all of the data you provide, the metadata you produce and sell it to third parties for profit at your expense and without your consent (or otherwise wrapped up in a "privacy policy" that is too long that no one reads). None of what I am saying is new, it is the same old playbook that most people are ignorant of. I suggest reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff for a deeper study of this topic. If you would like to refute any of this @jeffiel I would welcome it. I find the forced registration of A2P 10DLC absolutely horrifying. The trend for everybody is to put them into a "pre-crime" bucket. In doing so, we lose all privacy on the web, and with it the web itself. Edit: I don't know Jeff and I am not making my comment about a personal attack or a character (mis)representation. My point is to look at trends in general, at the decline of privacy for the growth of profit, and how language is used to characterize it as something else selling it as you are getting a better experience through personalization, relevancy, effective, etc. Zuboff touches on this in her book and it is recently in my mind so my comments are coming through the lens of this recent discovery. However, the larger anti-privacy trend and centralization across the web is not new, and I stand that we are all losers if we allow this trend to continue.
balozi 3y ago
For my teams, we used Twilio services on projects very early in the company's lifecycle. Its always been a running joke about how the company's trajectory will play out. So far the cynics seem to have won out. In hindsight it wasn't very difficult to predict but the trajectory Twilio is on appears to repeat itself on more than a few of the tech companies we invested in or utilized. ugh! Moral of the story, is to get off someone else's platform as soon as reasonably possible.
- __d 3y ago
  I think this is a massively undervalued point of view, and I agree completely. Especially if the company is using developer engagement to build. The day will come when they're too big for that, and all the stuff you liked will steadily fall away.
Solvency 3y ago
This guy is crazy if he thinks "The Cloud Communications Platform" makes more sense to the average driver passing by the billboard than "Customer Engagement Platform". At least the average person knows who customers are and what engaging means.
zht 3y ago
What a time to leave lol. Good luck
istillwritecode 3y ago
I was a twilio customer developer until they instituted a change that demanded to know my personal phone number in order to login to their account. They claimed this was for security, but TOTP doesn't require a phone number. After a meeting with their engineering staff, I realized that they completely screwed up their TOTP implementation and they needed the phone number as the seed. Since I wasn't going to give them my phone number, that brought our customer relationship to an end. They clearly had no idea how to spell the word privacy.
willmeyers 3y ago
Sad, unfortunate, but inevitable. Twilio still has the best startup tech demo to date in my book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o
redroyal 3y ago
I’ll never take Twilio seriously after their fire the white people first layoffs. I think they’re racist and won’t do business with them ever again.
- swyx 3y ago
  uh what? source?
  - austhrow743 3y ago
    https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-lawson https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-l... >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. Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345
galkk 3y ago
We all know true reasons why a lot engineers leave at about 4 year mark, it doesn’t need long post with justification.
soumyadeb 3y ago
Twilio has to go for high margin business than their usual SMS business. Old HN discussion on why Twilio acquired Segment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781493 (Disclaimer: I was the author of the blog)
JoeyPardella 3y ago
It's impressive, in such a short article you managed to execute the most low brow self promotion (that you're looking for a new job) and also trash your previous employer who you were quite comfortable profiting off of for years. Twilio's long term vision did not change overnight - in fact it's been very consistent since 2019.
rdiddly 3y ago
That was refreshing as heck. No damn them to hell, no woe is me, just a lot of here's what happened, and that's why I'm leaving, bye and thanks. Simple, clear, balanced, no histrionics. The word "sadly," I believe was used, that's about it. And yeah, if part of your reason for leaving has to do with the vision becoming cloudy and diffuse, then your writing had better be as concise, neutral and simple as this was, bravo.
kelnos 3y ago
I was at Twilio for 10.5 years, and left at the beginning of 2022. It's interesting to read things like this, from someone who joined in 2019, as the change OP is talking about in the company started well before his arrival. We all saw it, with increasing emphasis on enterprise sales (we hired someone from Salesforce as COO specifically for this). Courting individual developers and small startups stopped being a priority, even though those sorts of folks are the ones who formed the backbone of Twilio's mind share. I'm not saying this was bad thing for the business; Twilio's growth would have slowed well below what would have been acceptable for a VC-backed (and the newly-public) company without this move. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was happy with where the value of my equity went. On top of that, Twilio was life-changing socially: I have many dear friends who have remained dear friends well after we all left the company, something that's never really been that case for me at other companies. As for the work itself, there were many fun and challenging problems to solve over time as the company grew, despite our frustration with the growing pains. In the end, I left for very similar reasons as OP: the company seemed more focused on helping brands increase engagement than on doing anything novel with communications. Sure, a lot of the older, interesting use cases (the ones that got me stoked about Twilio in the first place) were still running on the platform, but those kinds of things felt like a minuscule percentage of the business. The change of the billboard to the "How can I reduce my acquisition cost" branding makes me feel sad any time I drive by it. "Ask your developer" was brilliant, but Twilio isn't that company anymore, and hasn't been for a while.
liftsh 3y ago
Hmm...is this really surprising to anyone? Yes, I'd like the purpose of a tech company to be to "make developers heroes," but in a capitalist society, companies exist to make money. I'm not saying I like it, but that's just the way it is. I think developers have been treated extremely well--justifiably, I might add, given the profit some of these tech companies are making--but at the same time developers expect things from their companies that no one else would. Could you imagine your local barista complaining that Starbucks isn't giving them a free gym, free meals, transportation expense reimbursements, and making them heroes? Again, I'm not saying I like it.

545 points by joaopaulomcc 3y ago

The writing was on the wall when they got acquired, forced two-factor auth with SMS only and forcibly locked me out of my account by turning it on when I didn't have a phone setup. If you want to use SMS as spam prevention, then just do that. Breaking your product and forcing bad security to harvest numbers is, well, just shitty.

arnvald 3y ago
When who got acquired? Twillio? They're a public company, aren't they?
- tnzk 3y ago
  I assume parent is talking about when SendGrid got acquired by Twillio. I had the similar experience with it at that time.
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    You know, I think this is correct. I was using them to do some Email workflow stuff with Pipedream, and ended up replacing it with my own Gmail SMTP since I'm just emailing myself and it's low volume. Apologies for getting that mixed up.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

berkle4455 3y ago

Twilio went from cool developer tooling to facilitating global robocalls and being a net negative for the world.

29athrowaway 3y ago
[flagged]
- late2part 3y ago
  Twilio board members read daily email reports?
grogenaut 3y ago
Seems they have multiple income streams from negative actors ... https://billychasen.medium.com/twilios-toll-fraud-problem-28b3aef39243 https://billychasen.medium.com/twilios-toll-fraud-problem-28...
kec 3y ago
Twilio was always that way, the zeitgeist has just moved on from the unbridled optimism of the 2010's which masked it.

buro9 3y ago

There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing. With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard reflects it. Everything changes at this point, because it's also not the top priority of the company to keep their own engineering happy at this point.

Toine 3y ago
Isn't the main thing to keep the main thing the main thing ?
liuliu 3y ago
It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology.
- cj 3y ago
  > It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology. I feel like it was never technology, especially in SaaS. Sure you need some initial technical chops to get a service up and running, but after MVP —> PMF, it’s all marketing, momentum, consumer trust, your brand, etc. For every successful SaaS (take Notion for example) it’s easy to say things like they never had a real competitor, but the truth is they had a lot of competition but they were able to overcome it and build a moat initially propped up by really good usability, but now their usability could easily go to shit and they’d still do well with a traditional sales/marketing moat.
- callalex 3y ago
  Early Twilio engineer here. There was never really all that much unique ground breaking technology work being done, we used open source tools running on AWS to build the core products. Our differentiators were reliability and user experience. Both of those came from how the organization was built and run. There was an obsession with uptime and DevOps, with a carefully guarded culture of collaboration and blameless postmortems when things went wrong. Empowering individual engineers and product designers to call out when things sucked really went a long way, and is really hard to scale. Initially managers and directors had very little power over the actual makers and maintainers, which lead to a lot of quality. A few years post-IPO we hit a scale where a lot of that culture began to fall apart. That’s when I made my exit/was pushed out.

29athrowaway 3y ago

It seems the MBAs are at it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 Twilio is now another Xerox. MBA programs should be illegal. You can thank MBAs for spreading PFAS everywhere, single use plastic, profiteering from insulin, making every American a diabetic by adding sugar into everything, selling glyphosate for residential use, killing all the pollinators, moving all manufacturing to countries with no environmental laws, and other consumer and planet-fucking initiatives. The number of extinct species, diabetic patients, number of employees on minimum wage with no health insurance, policitian revenue from lobbying activities, dead bees, cut trees, lost topsoil, former Roundup users with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, revenue from weapons, atmospheric temperature increase, ocean acidity, plastic waste, pollution, every form of ecocide and every other measure of things going wrong is directly proportional to the number of MBAs. Why? because if shareholder value is everything, then the employee, the environment and society at large becomes irrelevant.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SamuelAdams 3y ago
Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries. If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.
  - sethammons 3y ago
    Source?
  - enono 3y ago
    [flagged]

ds0 3y ago

Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used extensively.

miguelgrinberg 3y ago
Thank you so much. Glad to hear you've found my work useful.
fastball 3y ago
I've had to move away from Python-SocketIO due to countless regressions and subtle failures of the library.
- miguelgrinberg 3y ago
  Have you reported these? The library has a fairly complete testing suite, and if you are saying there are regressions I'd like to know what those are so that I can make sure the testing is adjusted to cover those cases going forward. Thanks.

Animats 3y ago

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an additional monthly "campaign" charge for the service. Their business model no longer comprehends a pure request-reply service. They now assume their customers want to spam.

buttocks 3y ago
Not defending Twilio, but this isn’t their doing. Every SMS gateway service now requires this due to new anti-spam regulations by US authorities. (FCC or FTC or maybe both.)
tomjen3 3y ago
Your work sounds absolutely awesome. Did you blog about it somewhere?
- Animats 3y ago
  aetherltd.com
foolfoolz 3y ago
they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was founded
- toast0 3y ago
  SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy. Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an alternative voice provider, and only later added them for SMS.

toni_bk 3y ago

Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits? Always about growth, growth, growth!

fassssst 3y ago
You could ask the same of yourself, presumably you have a retirement account invested in things that grow…
- Johnny555 3y ago
  A retirement account is based on the premise that its owner is going to stop working and adding money to it so they can draw money out of it for the rest of their life. Companies don't generally have the same long term goal to stop earning revenue and ride out their savings until they die.
macspoofing 3y ago
>Why can’t a company just be happy making several billion dollars a year in profits? Twilio doesn't make billions in profits. Twilio has been losing money for years. I'm not sure if Twilio was ever profitable?
- toni_bk 3y ago
  [dead]

xwdv 3y ago

I’m hoping Cloudflare will eventually offer the SMS stuff that Twilio used to, along with other real time communications.

sethammons 3y ago
How does that fit in with Cloudflare? DNS is different than SMS, email, etc. Industry regulations, integration with providers, spam fighting, etc. Both benefit from network peering. I would think it would be easier to add DNS to Twilio than to add SMS to Cloudflare.
- aprilnya 3y ago
  If you think Cloudflare only does DNS, you don’t know what Cloudflare is They do way more than just DNS
  - sethammons 3y ago
    For any of the following Cloudflare products, are any as complex as SMS or Email? None of these are adversarial and covered by legal constraints to my knowledge (except ddos which is a resource game). I'm unfamiliar with their "china network" - probably some legalities there. Cloudflare Services: Advanced Certificate Manager Advanced DDoS Always Online™ Analytics Anycast Network API Apps Marketplace Audit Logs Argo Smart Routing Argo for Spectrum At Cost Registrar Bot Management Browser Insights & Origin Monitoring Browser Isolation (Advanced) Bring Your Own IPs (BYOIP) CDN Certificate Transparency Monitoring China Network Cloudflare Access Cloudflare Gateway™ Cloudflare Gateway™ (DNS Only) Cloudflare Images Cloudflare Logs Cloudflare Network Interconnect Cloudflare Pages® Cloudflare Registrar Cloudflare’s Security Operations Center (SOC) as a Service Cloudflare Spectrum Cloudflare Stream Cloudflare WAF Custom SSL Data Localization Suite Dedicated SSL DNS Firewall Enterprise DNS Only Enterprise - Primary DNS Error Pages Healthcheck Image Resizing Intel Keyless SSL Load Balancing Magic Firewall® Magic Transit® Magic WAN® Page Rules Page Shield Premium Success Rate Limiting Secondary DNS Secure Registrar SSL for SaaS SSL for SaaS Advanced Standard Success Offering Static IPs Teams for Enterprise Waiting Room Workers Bundled Workers KV Workers Unbound

INTPenis 3y ago

As a Swede I naturally gravitated towards the 46elks.se service instead of Twilio. Been using it for years now, no issues. They even called me once to find out what their clients were doing, like a survey.

shakes 3y ago

I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers around the world and I’m unsurprised to see such a thoughtful take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can’t wait to see what he does next.

miguelgrinberg 3y ago
Thank you, Ricky! The privilege was also mine. :)

chopete3 3y ago

>> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio. Once it becomes a viable business, growth and departments that support it become equally important. Devs are one of the important departments. Smart devs grow up and seize the opportunity to grow with the company. For most devs it is a rude awakening and accept the reality quickly. This thread coming to the surface means there are a lot of such devs in the YC community surprised or curious about this phenomenon.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Every tech company’s goal is to grow into the thing that you, as a dev, don’t want it to become. There will be a growing focus on security, process, reporting, testing, documentation, reliability, etc. And a shrinking focus on new feature development, prototyping, experimentation. For many that might be something to embrace. Maybe you’re 35 now and have kids and wouldn’t mind a more boringly reliable employment. Otherwise you might want to find a new job. But, yeah, nobody’s being wronged here. It’s just what happens. Like my kids growing up and needing me less and less.
- oytis 3y ago
  I'm not sure why I as an engineer would not want more focus on security, testing, documentation and reliability. It's by far not the worst that a company can become

cvalka 3y ago

What's a good twilio alternative? Voximplant, plivio, bandwith are not very good.

cjcampbell 3y ago
Would you be willing to share more about your experience with these companies? I have a client evaluating Twilio alternatives due to skyrocketing costs, and some of these companies are on the list.
- jagtstronaut 3y ago
  I work at bandwidth and would also love to know what you don’t like with messaging at least.
- sparrish 3y ago
  We've used Twilio, Nexmo (now Vonage), and Plivo for years. Twilio is still our go-to for US SMS. Nexmo has great international deliverability but is more expensive than Plivo. Plivo works fine when it works. When it doesn't, their support is horrible. Most times I don't even bother opening a ticket anymore. I just switch the customer to Nexmo. I tried A2P 10DLC registration on Twilio when it first came out and our deliverability went to less than 50%. I quickly switched if off. They're all going to start requiring A2P 10DLC registration for US SMS within a few months. It's going to be painful to get timely SMS delivered.
- cvalka 3y ago
  The companies I mentioned are substantially inferior in terms of engineering compared to twilio. Plus twilio is more transparent and trustworthy f.e. with porting out numbers. Voxbone is a Russian cheaper twilio clone. Plivo is an Indian cheaper twilio clone. Bandwith is a disaster. You just need to get a single look at their control panel which they won't show to you unless you're a paying customer.
kleff 3y ago
Sinch? LinkMobility?

coderintherye 3y ago

The really sad thing is the executive team / board / investors not being able to comprehend that they could vastly increase their revenue (and profit) by just providing expanded technical services to me (an existing customer). There are a ton of things I would pay Twilio for beyond SMS and WhatsApp Messaging. You don't need a MBA to figure that out, you just need someone talking to your customers and an engineering and product team that can turn that into real products.

cj 3y ago
Anecdotally, I think one result of the layoffs of the past couple years has been companies 1) really focusing and doubling down on existing product lines, less experiments outside core competencies 2) double down on focus on top 20% paying customers, pull back hands on support for smaller clients, focus on keeping (and upselling) existing large clients with less focus on the bottom 50th percentile
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  I have seen number 2 at my company. They've given up on midsized and startup companies. They are only chasing the large ones and government contracts. Which makes sense from a shareholder perspective as they look to leech as much return as possible. But, it also ensures that the company is not going to innovate anytime soon.

personperson 3y ago

I feel like this isn’t the “betrayal” that it’s made out to be. Twilio won at their niche. People often talk about “if we just get 1% of the market…” — is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once? They’re moving towards doing the same thing with other parts of tech companies, in this case it’s marketing. It’s not like their APIs change because of it, these are additional products they’re introducing. Engineers generally find anything marketing related icky, but they’re very happy to collect the checks which are funded through these icky distribution methodologies.

thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
Agreed. The author is upset for XYZ "other" reasons, I would have recommended they slept on it and not post that publicly.
rospaya 3y ago
> is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once? Reading this thread makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Twilio is huge and is the leader, but they hold less than 40% market share in CPaaS and makes something like 60-70% of their revenue in the US. There are a lot of competitors and a lot of reasons to never use Twilio.

jeffiel 3y ago

Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding! For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. As a developer, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads together to make realtime personalization of every communication hard -- and Segment is so good at it. So that's what we're focused on! As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS customers as well. More to come like this. Happy Father's Day (in the US) HN! [1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms-fraud-guard https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms...

rsync 3y ago
Haha. Yes, fighting the good fight - doing god’s own work.
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors? Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it. I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.
- ITB 3y ago
  You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely to engage with the community. You could frame the same question in a more constructive style.

firebirdn99 3y ago

Working for any company is a "job", and not a "family" as many have found out in the last few years (but happens at every downturn). It's hard to draw a line, between personal and professional identities, but it's something I feel everyone should do. Corporations simply are built to amass profits, and outcompete others. They do not care nor are they built to care about you.

joeythedolphin 3y ago
Friends are friends and business is business. If you get it confused, you will stay confused while the world moves on. I noticed most people are confused. You serve for your paycheck and then you are forgotten. They don't ask you what you spent the money on. Your reward is the package they gave you. Best to make friends in areas of life where that is the goal.
drdaeman 3y ago
The concept of family varied quite a lot over times and cultures, there probably are some that fit. Medieval families are quite different social constructs from modern first-world nuclear families. Heck, and if anything - family abuse is, sadly, a very real thing, too. Same for the companies - they vary, a lot. Working at a two-person startup can resemble a family to some extent (or, well, there are genuine family startups, where partners in life start business together, and some succeed), but large corporations are entirely different experience.

wilg 3y ago

1. I could not tell you what that billboard means, despite also looking through the related blog post. Perhaps it is something only marketing teams understand, which would be an interesting failure mode. 2. I tried to sign up for Twilio Sendgrid the other day to send some emails from a Heroku app but I couldn't complete the sign up because I never received the activation email. Classic!

karussell 3y ago
Re 2: had the exact same experience. And the big problem was that in order to contact support I needed an activated account :). But at some point I found a support Email and with that I got an activated account. Still all this was too slow and left a bad taste. And I already finished integrating a different and IMO simpler (and probably less powerful) solution. And as the pricing was ok it was just the Twilio brand that I missed...

rsync 3y ago

I built an entire personal telco for myself using twilio apis and twiml bins, etc. This was encouraged by helpful “hacker” blog posts and official howtos detailing integrations with alert systems and home automation, etc. Twilio sold itself as useful infrastructure. All of this falls apart next month when A2P (or whatever it is) begins. Twilio polluted its own environment so completely that nobody can exist there anymore. (Unless you’re spamming, which is what customer engagement is)

1270018080 3y ago
Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart? https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-is-P2P-and-A2P-messaging- https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-...
- grumple 3y ago
  I assume they are talking about a2p 10dlc registration. Twilio has badly mishandled the rollout, it's been extremely painful. OP seems to blame them for making things too easy for spammers which caused the changes to be needed, which may be true.
- rsync 3y ago
  "Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?" A2P 10DLC requires all senders to provide company/corporate information and register their "campaigns". Which is to say, when I send a grocery list to my wife, that must be under the auspices of a business case that I have registered with twilio and the carriers and within the confines of a campaign that I have defined with example messages and an opt-out and unsubscribe mechanism. There is a sole proprietor option which is hazily defined and it is unclear if twilio even understands the implementation of. All of this to say: Because of the horrible behavior of both twilio and their customers there is no longer any such thing as programmable, personal messaging. Personal messaging is something you do with your thumbs, on your physical device and programmable messaging is spam. There is no third classification. Twilio could have been a boring and useful telco infrastructure company providing plumbing for interesting use-cases - but there's no route to billions there so they had to somehow become a unicorn. That's where the "customer engagement" comes in.

joeythedolphin 3y ago

The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. Great products are built by companies that love their developers. They don't need to tell that on billboards, they need to tell that privately to each engineer they employ. It is not appropriate for a developer to be the center of a company. Why not quietly say thank you for the employment opportunity (a rare treat across all time and history)? Accept the fortune they gave you, if they were good share it with the world, and if not, move on to your next opportunity? HN may downvote me but I do not understand these "goodbye" posts. I don't think anybody cares and it just makes you think twice about the person who is leaving if they showed up at your door for a job.

freedomben 3y ago
> The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do not know why the developer should be the center of any company, none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't care, they want a great product. I think the point is that developers are (or were) the customers. Twilio got adopted because they targeted and excited developers. Now they don't care about targeting the developers, they're targeting executives and marketing professionals. I did not down vote you, and I don't think you deserve the down votes.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  This is helpful! Thanks. Sometimes I come off intense, it's just an authentic invitation to spar.

catgirlinspace 3y ago

Kinda disappointing to see how Twilio has changed. used to have a pretty positive opinion of them even though i hadn’t used their services, and then i went to signup for twilio sendgrid for sending emails for a little website and i immediately got suspended before i even activated my account? support was completely useless too

mkl95 3y ago

Twilio are still doing better than their competition. To name an example, MessageBird laid off 30% of their workforce in late 2022 vs Twilio's 17% in early 2023, and they are known to be an absolute clusterfuck, which is not something you hear about Twilio (yet).

rsynnott 3y ago

From the linked AI product page: > What is digital greatness? Has no-one in Twilio ever seen Parks and Rec? This is definitely a Ron Swanson thing.

smallerfish 3y ago

I've been playing with Twilio recently, and it's certainly not the lean platform that it once apparently was. In the Java client SDK for example, I count 7 separate Message classes. There are multiple APIs with overlapping functionality; you can send SMS and whatsapps several different ways each. The documentation is likewise byzantine and bloated. I get that scaling tech organizations is hard (Stripe is another company with abysmal bloat in their APIs) but jfc, get a competent chief architect who is opinionated, please, and aim towards coherency. If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK. (That said, better than MessageBird, who don't even have SDK support for the APIs they're promoting as the correct way; on the other hand, their documentation is markedly better than Twilio's).

rabiddmeese 3y ago
> If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK. They might want to alienate and break things for many of their existing clients who use the older APIs. Plenty of companies contract out dev work until they have a working product and keep it as is. They don't have devs on hand to update them if they deprecate older APIs leading to a completely broken app despite all the old functionalities being perfectly adequate for the task.

paxys 3y ago

"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all their work into a viable business.

rewmie 3y ago
> (...) and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and (...) Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at all.
- paxys 3y ago
  You can say the same for engineers, and really anyone else.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.
    - eightysixfour 3y ago
      No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising. Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many startups, but that does not mean they live and die by their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that got there without engineering excellence.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

There’s nothing surprising here. This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO. Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this. I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that has maintained the core of what they do, and the value proposition, but didn’t push most of their money into paying for sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally, stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees. Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he’s a good person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else, and so it’s honorable that he is attempting to find ways to mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end of the day the arrow of history is clear.

refulgentis 3y ago
Who is Jeff Lawson and what thread did he jump into?
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Who is Jeff Lawson https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/ "CEO and cofounder of Twilio" > and what thread did he jump into? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383229
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
louwrentius 3y ago
It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu. I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. Or in plain language: making other people more rich at the cost of others. I’m just happy the guy got out when the company didn’t align with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself a conscience.

mightybyte 3y ago

Anyone else share my thought that Twilio (and any other companies like them that I'm not aware of) is likely the primary driver of the massive epidemic of spam text messages and phone calls? Phone and text have been rendered almost completely useless to me. I often get close to double digit spam texts and calls per day. Obviously the drivers of this stuff are many and complicated, but it seems like the automation layer is the main thing that enabled it all.

singpolyma3 3y ago
To send SMS with Twilio (or any other similar service) you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to register your traffic with major carriers and get their sign off.

wayeq 3y ago

> I'm sure you want to know what the future has in store for me. do I though?

erhaetherth 3y ago

FWIW I never thought Twilio was good as a developer. At least not coming hot off of Stripe. Which is glorious. The dev mode is fantabulous, and so are the docs. Twilio... I.. it's just atrocious in so many ways. Firstly, it needs a proper dev API key and then all the SMS's should just be collected into a dashboard on their site instead of going to phones. And their Connect option is very half baked. Customers should be able to re-use their existing Twilio numbers, not re-buy under a connected app, and they should be able to manage their numbers on twilio.com, not force me to rebuild the entire Twilio UI.

kypro 3y ago

I'll try to add some perspective to help people understand Twilio's side here. Twilio is has always been a very unprofitable company. Unlike their SaaS counterparts Twilio's PaaS model has significant costs in the form of fees which they pay to network providers. They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant. What's more there's very little moat in a communications API so Twilio has little pricing power which only compounds the cost issues they face since they cannot easily increase prices to offset growing costs of an already unprofitable business model. Basically the business model sucks. I'd argue it's one that can only exist in a world where investors are not interested in profits. Now interest rates are rising it's becoming harder for companies like Twilio to attract investors by posting revenue growth alone. I don't think Twilio wanted to shift their focus, they simply had to. They had to find something that had more of a moat, and therefore better margins. Segment is the answer, but ultimately it's a different product which understandably requires a different focus. If you sell a communications API then developers are the people whom you must evangelise, but Segment is a product used by business folks to grow their business. I don't envy the position Jeff and Twilio's management team are in. They've had to make some really tough decisions, but if you like Twilio then I'd see this simply as them doing what they need to do to survive and continue providing the awesome developer focused products they provide. I'll also note that unlike Facebook's mass layoffs Twilio's layoffs weren't simply done to increase profitability, but needed to right side a business that's currently burning over $1 billion a year.

joshstrange 3y ago
> They're also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is significant. And Twilio is wholly incompetent when it comes to battling this. Not only are they unable to keep bad actors off, they punish good actors. They require "approval" of what text messages you are going to send (never mind if part of it needs to be dynamic) and limit your sending ability to arbitrarily low levels. The company I work for just switched off them after high rejection rates and them randomly blocking us or limiting our send volume. They also bungled the whole number verification thing that recently went into effect, or at least dropped the ball on the communications side. Very glad to be off them and kind of sad, I remember when Twilio first hit the scene and it was truly amazing and so cool to work with.

taf2 3y ago

This is unfortunate that he got disillusioned but the shift is for really one simple reason - segment. The original twilio that went on to acquire sendgrid, was increasingly in a low margin commodity market. Segment is hugely profitable in contrast and is not dependent on increasingly competitive upstream providers (carriers) providing lower cost similar apis as twilio voice/messaging. It still stands that Twilio’s apis are better than the competitors but that will only last so long. Segment will keep twilio relevant for a much longer time.

blobbers 3y ago

I'm curious why this got upvoted on hackernews. Isn't this some rando- employee (no offense Miguel Grinberg) that joined an established medium sized software company and then is moving on after spending a fairly short time there. Did this particular engineer move the needle on their product somehow? How is this in any way "news" worthy.

blobbers 3y ago
(thanks for the downvotes but I stand by what I said)

obiefernandez 3y ago

Another one bites the dust. Goddammit

rajanaccros 3y ago

The trend we are seeing across the tech industry and business in general is to know/consolidate/extract/exploit. Even users who pay now are still "the product". Who are the buyers? Intelligence agencies, both governmental and private who have different aims, but with the same intermediate goal is to know everything about you. The only (ONLY) motive is profit. Growth, growth, growth above all costs at the expense of people and the environment. Jeff jumped into this thread to try to color it with verbiage such as: > we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. This is another way to habituate and legitimate the exploitation of users for those few who profit. An example, is the A2P 10DLC registration that is being forced on users of the product that will charge a registration fee, a vetting fee, and a recurring monthly cost. From what I can tell, there is no legal basis forcing this. The Telco cartel got together and came up with a way to make more money off of you. Sure they will talk about it in terms of "improving your experience" and "stopping spam texts". While there may be a kernel of truth in there, that is not the main reason. Go back to rule number 1: profit, profit, profit. It is a shame that the Telcos are strong arming the CSP middlemen to make them abide by these rules or not deliver their messages. And of course that rolls down to the end users. But I think the bigger issue here is that they need to know exactly who you are in terms of registration. Blocking VOIP numbers for OTP verification, etc etc. Why do you think this is? Because they will take all of the data you provide, the metadata you produce and sell it to third parties for profit at your expense and without your consent (or otherwise wrapped up in a "privacy policy" that is too long that no one reads). None of what I am saying is new, it is the same old playbook that most people are ignorant of. I suggest reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff for a deeper study of this topic. If you would like to refute any of this @jeffiel I would welcome it. I find the forced registration of A2P 10DLC absolutely horrifying. The trend for everybody is to put them into a "pre-crime" bucket. In doing so, we lose all privacy on the web, and with it the web itself. Edit: I don't know Jeff and I am not making my comment about a personal attack or a character (mis)representation. My point is to look at trends in general, at the decline of privacy for the growth of profit, and how language is used to characterize it as something else selling it as you are getting a better experience through personalization, relevancy, effective, etc. Zuboff touches on this in her book and it is recently in my mind so my comments are coming through the lens of this recent discovery. However, the larger anti-privacy trend and centralization across the web is not new, and I stand that we are all losers if we allow this trend to continue.

balozi 3y ago

For my teams, we used Twilio services on projects very early in the company's lifecycle. Its always been a running joke about how the company's trajectory will play out. So far the cynics seem to have won out. In hindsight it wasn't very difficult to predict but the trajectory Twilio is on appears to repeat itself on more than a few of the tech companies we invested in or utilized. ugh! Moral of the story, is to get off someone else's platform as soon as reasonably possible.

__d 3y ago
I think this is a massively undervalued point of view, and I agree completely. Especially if the company is using developer engagement to build. The day will come when they're too big for that, and all the stuff you liked will steadily fall away.

Solvency 3y ago

This guy is crazy if he thinks "The Cloud Communications Platform" makes more sense to the average driver passing by the billboard than "Customer Engagement Platform". At least the average person knows who customers are and what engaging means.

zht 3y ago

What a time to leave lol. Good luck

istillwritecode 3y ago

I was a twilio customer developer until they instituted a change that demanded to know my personal phone number in order to login to their account. They claimed this was for security, but TOTP doesn't require a phone number. After a meeting with their engineering staff, I realized that they completely screwed up their TOTP implementation and they needed the phone number as the seed. Since I wasn't going to give them my phone number, that brought our customer relationship to an end. They clearly had no idea how to spell the word privacy.

willmeyers 3y ago

Sad, unfortunate, but inevitable. Twilio still has the best startup tech demo to date in my book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o

redroyal 3y ago

I’ll never take Twilio seriously after their fire the white people first layoffs. I think they’re racist and won’t do business with them ever again.

swyx 3y ago
uh what? source?
- austhrow743 3y ago
  https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-lawson https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-l... >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. Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345

galkk 3y ago

We all know true reasons why a lot engineers leave at about 4 year mark, it doesn’t need long post with justification.

soumyadeb 3y ago

Twilio has to go for high margin business than their usual SMS business. Old HN discussion on why Twilio acquired Segment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781493 (Disclaimer: I was the author of the blog)

JoeyPardella 3y ago

It's impressive, in such a short article you managed to execute the most low brow self promotion (that you're looking for a new job) and also trash your previous employer who you were quite comfortable profiting off of for years. Twilio's long term vision did not change overnight - in fact it's been very consistent since 2019.

rdiddly 3y ago

That was refreshing as heck. No damn them to hell, no woe is me, just a lot of here's what happened, and that's why I'm leaving, bye and thanks. Simple, clear, balanced, no histrionics. The word "sadly," I believe was used, that's about it. And yeah, if part of your reason for leaving has to do with the vision becoming cloudy and diffuse, then your writing had better be as concise, neutral and simple as this was, bravo.

kelnos 3y ago

I was at Twilio for 10.5 years, and left at the beginning of 2022. It's interesting to read things like this, from someone who joined in 2019, as the change OP is talking about in the company started well before his arrival. We all saw it, with increasing emphasis on enterprise sales (we hired someone from Salesforce as COO specifically for this). Courting individual developers and small startups stopped being a priority, even though those sorts of folks are the ones who formed the backbone of Twilio's mind share. I'm not saying this was bad thing for the business; Twilio's growth would have slowed well below what would have been acceptable for a VC-backed (and the newly-public) company without this move. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was happy with where the value of my equity went. On top of that, Twilio was life-changing socially: I have many dear friends who have remained dear friends well after we all left the company, something that's never really been that case for me at other companies. As for the work itself, there were many fun and challenging problems to solve over time as the company grew, despite our frustration with the growing pains. In the end, I left for very similar reasons as OP: the company seemed more focused on helping brands increase engagement than on doing anything novel with communications. Sure, a lot of the older, interesting use cases (the ones that got me stoked about Twilio in the first place) were still running on the platform, but those kinds of things felt like a minuscule percentage of the business. The change of the billboard to the "How can I reduce my acquisition cost" branding makes me feel sad any time I drive by it. "Ask your developer" was brilliant, but Twilio isn't that company anymore, and hasn't been for a while.

liftsh 3y ago

Hmm...is this really surprising to anyone? Yes, I'd like the purpose of a tech company to be to "make developers heroes," but in a capitalist society, companies exist to make money. I'm not saying I like it, but that's just the way it is. I think developers have been treated extremely well--justifiably, I might add, given the profit some of these tech companies are making--but at the same time developers expect things from their companies that no one else would. Could you imagine your local barista complaining that Starbucks isn't giving them a free gym, free meals, transportation expense reimbursements, and making them heroes? Again, I'm not saying I like it.