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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.