36 ms·

Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio

374 points by ceohockey60 3y ago

DennisAleynikov 3y ago
Was not expecting this departure
alwaysrunning 3y ago
Was this planned? What is behind this move?
- kypro 3y ago
  No. Shareholders have been critical of Twilio's performance, and therefore Jeff Lawson over the last year or two though... They're in a difficult place. They don't have the margins of a SAAS company and they've been losing a lot of money. This was fine in a low interest rate environment where investors are willing to pay up for growth, but when that changed investors wanted them to cut costs and show a path to profitability. As a result Twilio was forced to do large layoffs and refocus the business on products with higher margins. Perhaps Jeff just didn't want to run the type of business Twilio needs to become in this new environment. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else. I he think prefers to get stuck in and build things cool things, and for better or worse that's not where Twilio is anymore.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    > He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else. There is optimizing profit margins, and there is not losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year, year after year. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-in...
    - kypro 3y ago
      Depends on how you look at it I suppose... It's not unusual for growth companies to operate at a large GAAP loss. They were never losing that much cash, and they have recently become cash flow positive, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/price-fcf https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/price-... The large GAAP loses comes from dilution – mostly in the form of stock based comp. In theory if growth exceeds dilution then investors are still owning an appreciating asset, and if the stock is richly valued (as TWLO was) then it makes sense to fund that growth with capital rather than debt. But yeah, as a shareholder I felt their stock based comp was egregiously high and it took management a little too long to realise we're in a new world and things needed to change... A side point, but that's actually why I invested in TWLO because the stock got so beat up and their SBC was so excessive that it was kinda obvious that things were going to need to change and the market would react to that positively. The markets seem to be reacting favourably to this news and again I think that's because there was an assumption that Jeff Lawson was largely to blame for the lack of focus on profit optimisation. Personally I think Jeff is a great CEO though and I didn't want to see him go. I just wanted him to make some tough decisions to stop the burn – which more recently he seemed to be doing. While I do think they need to be more finance minded in this next stage of the business, I would doubt whether a developer focused tech company like Twilio will benefit much from a managerial leader like Shipchandler. We've seen this mistake made repeatedly by tech companies in the past.
Waterluvian 3y ago
“Jeff Epstein Appointed Chair of the Twilio Board of Directors” That’s an unfortunate name to have. I’ve always wondered how people handle when this happens. If it’s as big a deal as I feel it would be if it were me.
7ewis 3y ago
Bloomberg said: "Twilio Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson is stepping down from leading the software company he co-founded amid slowing sales growth and pressure from activist investors." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ceo-jeff-lawson-steps-down-from-ceo-and-board https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ce...
- lagniappe 3y ago
  What a shit sandwich. Not everything needs to be a hockey stick. There's is an angle of the growth line that should not be exceeded because above that level of growth seldom is a good situation for the consumer.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gphil 3y ago
    The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Indeed, either take the investment and the dragons that will come to burn your village or grow slow and own your future (Basecamp/37signals), but make peace with that you’re always going to be small (but it’ll at least be yours).
    - walls 3y ago
      Maybe a notification API provider doesn't need to be spending a ton of money on "AI".
      - dalyons 3y ago
        instead of posting a poorly informed take, you should go and have a look at their list of product offerings. They havent been just a "notification API" for a long time now.
m4tthumphrey 3y ago
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- maerF0x0 3y ago
  can you source major shareholder? The doc I found said 3.7%. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-supervoting-protection-next-month-has-been-meeting-with-activist https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-s...
gkoberger 3y ago
I don't know much about what happened here, but I did meet the early Twilio team (not Jeff, unfortunately) back in 2009 and knew they were something special. Jeff (and team) deserve a ton of credit for two massive things: First, changing how people think about devtools. I know Stripe gets a lot of credit, but Twilio was 3 years earlier and really defined how we look at building, marketing and monetizing tools meant for devs. They were early (if not first) to the devrel space, and Jeff's live coding (paired with a phone literally vibrating) was something I had never seen before. Second, I know a lot of people have lots of opinions about San Francisco, but I have a lot of respect to Jeff for always standing up and fighting for the city that enabled him to build his company. He seems to be a really good person, and is one of the few CEOs I find myself eager to emulate. Good luck to Jeff, Twilio, and everyone else involved. Jeff built something really special in the early years. And jeffiel, now that you have a bit more time on your hands, hopefully we can finally cross paths!
- CamelCaseName 3y ago
  > and knew they were something special Can you share more insights on how you knew they were special?
  - haswell 3y ago
    Not OP, but their approach to devrel was by itself a huge differentiator early on. We’ve become so accustomed to developer-oriented marketing and programs that it’s easy to forget that Twilio was really at the cutting edge of this movement and should be credited (or at least acknowledged) for the easy on-ramps most developer programs now provide. Twilio also pushed the envelope in terms of what it means to talk to their developer community. Greg Baugues’ talk titled “Devs and Depression” reached a lot of people who were struggling, and was one of the reasons I personally sought out therapy, and my life is much better for it. Early Twilio was a very human-oriented company, and I think many developers and developer programs are better for it.
    - gregorymichael 3y ago
      Hi. Greg here. :heart: Good job taking the steps to get help!
maerF0x0 3y ago
https://archive.is/8Ffn4 https://archive.is/8Ffn4 Keep in mind his voting structure changed in May meaning he lost some shareholder power. > Its use of supervoting shares, which gives CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson a voting stake of 21.8% even though he owns only 3.7% of the stock, [1] No derogatory remarks intended to Jeff, Jeff certainly has had great moments, but Kho is also a fantastic leader and capital allocator, who's made some truly uncanny calls (like raising in the market near the top,and share buy back near the bottom). I think Kho is the right person for the job in the times that Twilio finds themselves. It's something I've hoped for for years, as a shareholder. Jeff deserves praise for the humility to step down and promote from within a well groomed and talented successor. [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-supervoting-protection-next-month-has-been-meeting-with-activist https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-s...
- adam_arthur 3y ago
  Any exec who actually tries to sell the stock high, and buy it low is a winner in my book. Most just follow the crowd and do shareholder dilutive buybacks at nosebleed valuations. If you can buy a long duration US treasury yielding more than twice what your shares yield, maybe stop to think before doing any buybacks. Though I've written it up to mostly short term-ism towards increasing their own compensation through pressuring share price in the immediate term. The alternative is that all these CFOs and others are financially illiterate or incompetent
  - maerF0x0 3y ago
    Reminded me of another point on the board for Kho, He was smart enough to grab a billion in 10yr bonds at like 3% which was genius for the growth rate (if you can grow money at 10% then you should take every penny you can get below that). https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/blog/essential-ir-insights-newsletter-summer-july-august-2023 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... The only party he missed was putting our cash reserves in BTC. (which is an inside joke). It would have made the money like $4-5B based on the time of the suggestion. I think investors will be happy to hear he flatly outright said no to that. It looked like a missed opportunity (at $64k)... until it didn't. (back at $16k)
martinky24 3y ago
[flagged]
- MenhirMike 3y ago
  If it was the other one, he'd be literally dead on arrival, so I guess that limits the potential confusion a bit. But yeah, I doubt he uses his full first name much these days.
  - vehementi 3y ago
    At least "we" can reclaim the name, take it back for good, unlike the cool iconography and salutes that the nazis ruined forever
- siva7 3y ago
  Amazing how one can ruin a name for everyone else. See also Weinstein as the poster-child of the me-too era.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  I know nothing about this board, but I imagine he must be the absolute best person for the job, because they probably seriously considered the downsides having to write up that statement.
- deleted 3y ago
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jayski 3y ago
[flagged]
Aeolun 3y ago
They recently cancelled their video offering and recommend we move to zoom. Maybe the ship is sinking?
- figers 3y ago
  They had such a good video offering, never had an issue, very surprised by this, why not try to charge more before dumping it?
  - kwindla 3y ago
    They have not adequately funded the video product for a very long time. Other companies built out better infrastructure and a much broader range of features. The market also turned out to be smaller and differently structured than all of us thought. (I am a co-founder of a company that competes with -- though also predated -- Twilio Video.)
- kwindla 3y ago
  I have a dog in this fight, but strongly recommend that you do not move to [the] Zoom [Video SDK]. tldr: architecture that doesn't work for web apps, performance issues, missing features https://www.daily.co/blog/zoom-web-sdk-technical-notes/ https://www.daily.co/blog/zoom-web-sdk-technical-notes/
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    I’d much prefer not moving at all, even if the Twilio product never changes, but unfortunately that’s not an option.
gregorymichael 3y ago
When I joined the Twilio Developer Evangelism team in 2014, we spent a lot of our onboarding practicing the "five minute demo" where we live-code a Twilio app from scratch. I thought this was dumb, mostly because live-coding is so damn hard. Six weeks into the job I watched Jeff live-code a Twilio app in front of 10,000 people at IBM Connect. It was as if he was saying to all of us, "Yeah, live-coding is hard. And if I can do this in front of 10,000 people, you can do it at your local Ruby meetup." It was the first of many, many times over my nine years that Jeff led by example, set the bar, and pushed us all to reach levels we didn't know we were capable of. Working under Jeff's leadership was the privilege of a career. I can't wait to see what he builds next.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  Are there any uploads of Jeff live coding?
  - gregorymichael 3y ago
    Here's the time he built "Hawk or Not" with Tony Hawk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHYyD3upNc&t=6120s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHYyD3upNc&t=6120s
  - buzzy_hacker 3y ago
    This is John Britton, not Jeff Lawson, but an example of the live coding. Epic demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o
  - mleonhard 3y ago
    Here's a good recording of a very smooth Twilio demo at "Yahoo! Hack Europe: London" in 2013 by Michael Wawra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPAe0rJApvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPAe0rJApvk
paxys 3y ago
The new CEO: > Shipchandler has over 25 years of experience growing businesses and driving financial performance across global, public organizations. Prior to Twilio, Khozema spent over two decades at GE where he drove operating excellence in GE’s high tech aviation division, plus accelerated growth in the Middle East region. I wouldn't be too enthused about him running a software-focused company. His experience yells "generic businessman brought in by investors to squeeze more profit".
- raiyu 3y ago
  Yeah definitely not a good sign for Twilio - the tried and true playbook will now get executed once again. Fire a bunch of people, especially those that are most tenured and have the highest salaries. Raise prices each quarter to achieve revenue growth with the assumption that customers are more inelastic than suspected and won't leave. Doubtful that any smart acquisitions will occur, given that requires an actual understanding of product, customers, and markets. The beginning of the end until some larger corporation, looking to grow their revenue base decides to acquire them. End of an era for sure.
  - akmittal 3y ago
    > Fire a bunch of people, especially those that are most tenured and have the highest salaries. That's already done
    - fooster 3y ago
      Not even close to enough. Look at the growth of revenue and headcount. It is clear another huge cut has to be made.
- goopthink 3y ago
  But also: > He has a deep understanding of Twilio’s business, operations and culture, having most recently served as President of Twilio Communications, and previously as Twilio’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.
- deleted 3y ago
shakes 3y ago
I worked at Twilio for nearly 10 years and it's hard to overstate what a gift it was to work there and see Jeff operate as CEO up-close. He created an environment where (at our best) we could have fun doing work that had a real impact, and we could it with people we enjoyed doing the work with. He pushed us to be creative to authentically empower and inspire developers. Wanna build a video game that teaches developers how to code and use Twilio? Let's try it! Wanna build an AI application with Tony Hawk and have Tony Hawk debug the code live on stage? Sure! And Jeff would always be spending time with developer tools and Twilio's products himself, to the point that he could live code at the drop of a hat to show off what we'd been working on. This meant his own understanding of developers and their problems never ceased to amaze me. But more than all of that, he was a rare CEO that led with empathy, humility and care. Thank you, jeffiel. We can't wait to see what you build next.
- throwaway_108 3y ago
  It's also why George Hu left Twilio. Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company. All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch. I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go. Note: former senior level Twilio employee, posted anonymous for obvious reasons.
  - vehementi 3y ago
    Did any of those layoffs coincide with the global layoffs?
    - Moto7451 3y ago
      September of 2022, Feb 2023, and December 2023. So no, kinda, and no.
      - darth_avocado 3y ago
        Sep 2022 and Feb 2023 was the peak layoff season in the industry. Mostly guided by interest rate hikes.
_fat_santa 3y ago
Reading this and related stories, seems to be related to activist investor pressure. Reading into that, seems that activist investors are pushing Twilio to divest from their Data & Applications business. How I understand it Twilio has moved into "customer engagement" from their initial core business and investors aren't happy with the direction or returns from that business unit.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Ooof at the Segment acquisition :-/
  - taf2 3y ago
    Wish it was a T-Mobile purchase instead :/
debacle 3y ago
Twilio is in a weird spot. They are so cheap that it's very easy to build a successful company on top of their APIs, and choosing their APIs is a no brainer. They probably need to go vertical and capture some of the value their users are generating to have the kind of revenue investors want.
deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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jijji 3y ago
I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages, then they wanted you to describe what you're using it for and you had to pay money to fill out a form to tell them what you're using the text messages for.... then they would deny that and then you basically can't use twilio, or pay them to fill out the form again so they can deny you again.... This is for outbound SMS (payment notifications to customers) so I wound up writing an Android application that runs on a phone that just sends out SMS messages using an API talking to a server..... I'm paying $8 a month to Tello now which is about 1/5 the amount of money that I was paying to twilio so I'm glad that I switched..... but I think they really screwed up recently.
- deleted 3y ago
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- echelon 3y ago
  They serve big businesses now. They don't want small players coming in with potentially abusive behavior. Twilio worked hard to build its relationships with carriers and doesn't want to be dragged down by spam.
- oogali 3y ago
  This is likely because of industry regulations around A2P (application-to-person ) messaging that had a due date of August 31, 2023. It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected. https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/6650461-changes-to-10dlc-sms-compliance-summer-2023 https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/6650461-changes-to... https://www.telgorithm.com/news/10dlc-registration-required/ https://www.telgorithm.com/news/10dlc-registration-required/ https://support.referrizer.com/support/solutions/articles/103000206610-tcr-a2p-10dlc-what-will-happen-on-august-31-2023- https://support.referrizer.com/support/solutions/articles/10...
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected. From what I can tell, the telcos aren't performing any enforcement, even tho the deadlines and extensions are long past. Not to say they won't but the endeavor seems to have a stall vibe going on. Some of that might be related to having major mass-campaign requirements placed on small biz who occasionally send a handful of texts (often non-sales) from their workstation phone apps. At least I hope this is why it has stalled. Sending a few texts during a customer service session shouldn't be regulated as if it were a blast of 1M SMS ads.
whalesalad 3y ago
Is the typeface/font being used here glitch for others, too? It looks kinda like a dyslexic optimized font where certain characters have different weights.
- timoteostewart 3y ago
  Yes, for me too.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Same (Chrome, FF and Edge)
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Yeah, w, z, r, d, and some other chars look heavier than the others.
- lofatdairy 3y ago
  On my end as well, Mac + safari
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
makaimc 3y ago
I worked at Twilio from 2014-2023 and had an incredible experience during those 9 years, including all of my interactions with Jeff. One of my favorite moments was running into Jeff in the hallway at our Beale Street office just before he had to do a quarterly earnings call after we went public. I said "good luck on the earnings call" and Jeff said thanks then asked what happened to a link to a specific Stack Overflow question/answer from one of our docs pages that got removed. He had just been building an application and felt like that answer was particularly helpful for context in a certain programming language, and was surprised it was removed. Jeff's always been software developer at heart even though he had a ton of non-dev responsibilities. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages in that mindset! But he created a tremendous company along the way and I wouldn't change working there for anywhere else during those years.
annthurium 3y ago
I worked at Twilio for 4 years and it was one of the highlights of my career. End of an era, for sure. Thanks Jeff for trying to build an anti-racist company even when it upset some of our investors.
- brink 3y ago
  [flagged]
- westhanover 3y ago
  Its still crazy to me all of the people who are out there starting racist companies. If you aren't anti-racist you are...
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  [flagged]
- silenced_trope 3y ago
  > Thanks Jeff for trying to build an anti-racist company even when it upset some of our investors. Yikes. I guess when the company has no profit or potential you have to try to build something else?
- deleted 3y ago
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anovikov 3y ago
All of the media clouds that did not include telephony, were always bad business cases, sometimes got repeatedly sold and resold like a proverbial hot potato, see TokBox. Twilio did include telephony and was originally built as telephony-only provider, so it really stood out and was a lot more sustainable as a business than anybody else. But, importance of telephony is falling. When was the last time you dialed-in to a Zoom conference? Without that, what's left of telephony? Just the 2FA SMSes. I believe long term, providers like Twilio will become very thin layers of indirection to aggregate together underlying phone operator services, and will be mostly owner by those phone operators themselves, like Vonage now owns Nexmo, Twilio's direct competitor. Nexmo's API makes a lot more sense than Twilio's by the way, and is a true pleasure to use.
- nunez 3y ago
  people dial in all of the time in the meetings i have. zoom is still awful in low-bandwidth situations.
jmacd 3y ago
The decline of Twilio's position has been as pretty clear for the last 18 months now, and has been a topic of conversation longer than that. Twilio never had the margins or control of their environment to nearly the degree you need to have in order to maintain software monopoly levels of growth over time. Most of Twilio's business has been built on reselling network access purchased via SMS consolidators. These are companies who, decades ago, got their hardware installed inside the networks of the major phone carriers. This allows them direct access to send/receive SMSs. Twilio never really tried to own the network layer and these companies continued to demand higher and higher tolls for access. Short codes are a very good example of this. Twilio spent a lot of time and money trying to sew up access to those short codes. On top of all that, high volume customers would move directly to these consolidators. Sometimes Twilio would keep some portion of the business if the sender used a round robin model to distribute sends, but often they didn't. OpenMarket and a handful of others were the goto providers at scale. Add on to this the overall decline of the utility of SMS. Even as SMS volumes increased, they have not increased at the same rate as messaging overall. ie: other channels like iMessage and WhatsApp continue to pull volumes. Cue Twilio's attempt to go up market. Flex and the purchase of Sendgrid were the best examples of this. Could CPaaS work for Twilio as a business model? I think we've seen so many fits and starts with the Flex product line and the integration of Sendgrid that it seemed like perhaps buying their way in to that market wasn't panning out. Finally, as seen in the last year, the culture just seems to have gone off the rails at some point. [1] I don't know Jeff, but my respect for him is sky high. I've read all his writing over the years and he's been hugely influential for an entire generation of founders. Unfortunately this seems like a bit of a hasty departure. I hope it isn't, but the choice of replacement CEO screams caretaker-CEO rather than shrewd strategic move. Another commenter mentioned Stripe [2] and how they get a lot of credit for advancing DevTools. I agree that Twilio did it first and I think paved the way. Jeff Lawson and Twilio deserve more credit. "Ask your developer" was not a small thing at all. I also think Stripe very likely is in a very similar position, but they are earlier in their cycle and they've avoided the scrutiny of being a public company. Credit card processors are gatekeepers and fully dominate in their markets. Stripe serves a purpose for them and dramatically improves access to their networks via great tooling and abstractions, but there is still a fixed cost toll to pay and what that toll is cannot be static for interminable time. Is Stripe in the "Commerce" market like Twilio is in the "Communications" market, or are they in the "payments" market, like Twilio is in the "SMS" market? (or somesuch) 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382361 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913134
coloneltcb 3y ago
Hats off to a legend. Twilio was The Beatles to the devtools space. They defined modern devrel and the bottom-up/PLG GTM motion. He also disproved would-be investors who said developers would never pay for an API; in fact they’d prefer that to building something only to get rug-pulled when a company decided their free API was no longer strategic for them. And while you hear a lot about ruthless but effective asshole CEOs, Jeff happens to be a brilliant executive and a great human all at the same time. True visionary and 1 of 1.
haltist 3y ago
[flagged]
pkiv 3y ago
What a great run. I remember the IPO party in 2016, very early in my career, and being in disbelief that a texting API was used by so many people. It was my first time writing code for systems that operated at _real scale_. While the last few years have been a bit rocky, you can't understate the impact that jeffiel had on the developer tools ecosystem.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
  writing systems at that scale is exhilarating, it's a shame that it's a small club
movingmove 3y ago
I had the "pleasure" working for Twilio for over 4 years. I cannot tell how much this showed me how you can fake it til you make it in SF. Twilio tried to expand into Europe and failed miserably. Customers (especially German ones) wanted exact locations of data, exact routes of packet transportation, wanted features Twilio promised on Slides but never delivered. I was part of at least 4 customer meetings (the biggest in Europe) where the clients just called Senior levels in and told them off. Twilio was great when it just handled voice and text messaging. It never grew substantially, it never delivered features customers were asking for years. Messy code base, hired product owners with no clue what they should actually build. Jeff was famous for over-promising and under-delivering. 1 year into my Twilio career, it was clear that the company would fail hard. Colleagues and I had bets on when Jeff will be fired or the company sold. Well, the last few months have been telling. A sad story, since they had a great core product, really smart people, great people working there. But especially through the pandemic, they grew an insane amount without actually building anything of substance.
- karim 3y ago
  One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you stayed on for 3 more years? What happened there?
  - smt88 3y ago
    Knowing a company is going to fail doesn't automatically mean the compensation and/or culture don't work for you. One way a company can be mismanaged is burning money it can't afford on ridiculous employee perks, like when Twitter got its own DJ.
  - ctz 3y ago
    I'm not the OP, but agree with their assessment and stayed 3.5 years despite that. For me, the reason was the vesting schedule: 4 years with a 1 year cliff.
    - idopmstuff 3y ago
      But why would you want to vest a bunch of options/shares that you think will decline substantially in value over your tenure there?
caseysoftware 3y ago
I joined Twilio in May '11 the week of the private launch of Twilio Client. I was #18 or so. My first day, we got briefings on what it was, what it will do, and then had to finish docs and re-arrange the office for our top customers. (At that stage, most people knew them by name. Shout out patio11!) Since I knew nothing and the docs were.. weak, I decided to take out the garbage. I grabbed the bags and asked where the dumpster was. Jeff Lawson stopped me and asked if I had an office key card to get back in. Oops, nope. So he grabbed a bag and we took it out together. So yes, Jeff opened doors for me. ;) Despite the last year or so of chaos, he founded and built a company that redefined telecomm specifically and tech gtm as a whole. Not a bad track record.
- caseysoftware 3y ago
  And the infamous five minute demo.. we drilled on that constantly. At my peak (2013), I was giving it 2-3 times a week in front of small groups, with the occasional sales reps, and in front of huge events. My favorite times were: - for one of Bob Metcalfe's courses at UT Austin. Yes, that Bob Metcalfe, the co-creator of ethernet. I talked about the origin of Metcalfe's Law here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259442 - 1:1 for Werner Vogels at SXSW. I gave it to one of his senior guys and he said "wow, this is great, let me go get Werner" which was intimidating as f.. a lot. But I managed to nail it.
nonstopdev 3y ago
As someone who has loved Twilio from the early days and have built many apps for small and enterprise cases as well as fully embraced Flex in the customer experience space, I really have no idea what the hell they are doing now. Not sure if they are right sizing after trying to capture markets like video and Contact Center but it seems like even successful sales teams are let go now so curios where they emerge from this.
ezxs 3y ago
I wouldn't be happy about that. The innovation generally stops when the folks who really know the customer and have the audacity to pull the trigger on big changes are replaced.
muttantt 3y ago
[flagged]
sbeckeriv 3y ago
I haven't used twillo since 2014 and I don't use twillo at company. I have recently tried to use it for my own projects and I have not had a good time with the product. I was able to set things up fine with the docs but the ui and the support didn't seem to understand the hobbyist concept. I could not get my number registered for texting again and support did not care. Example: I cant release the number I have because it has an emergency address I need to remove. I cant find the ui to remove the address. I can only add address. While the ui banner says "Please add an emergency address to this phone number or you may incure a $75.00 charge per emergency call." I am just waiting for my minimum required balance to be eating up by fees i dont understand. I have moved on to a chat service. I wish them luck moving forward.
totalhack 3y ago
Twilio is great and super frustrating at the same time. I've run into outdated or missing documentation, and plenty of low hanging fruit UI improvements that get ignored. They seem to be asleep at the wheel at this point.
adolfisback 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cranberryturkey 3y ago
twilio gone through soem radical changes lately with the new regulations. its much more difficult to use
knodi 3y ago
I think with the US Carriers mandating proper campaign registration process for texting, even small number of testing it has taken a huge toll on their support. I think earning for last year q4 are about to be lower then expected
EMCymatics 3y ago
I don't see how this move changes anything.
ultrasaurus 3y ago
I met Jeff back in 2011 when I was considering moving to SF. Although I didn't end up at Twilio, I distinctly remember thinking I'd be happy to work for him. His original Twilio demos were a big part in convincing me to make the move to working at a proper startup.
shadowtree 3y ago
Given the successor, they'll either flip Twilio or go private equity - in both cases Twilio as we know it is toast. Amazon could snatch, also Oracle the evergreen. SFDC is the dark horse, don't see MSFT touching it due to massive AWS setup. Godspeed.
- tschellenbach 3y ago
  I'm upvoting this, it's a clear issue
- ejb999 3y ago
  I always thought AWS would end up buying them, of course this was 5+ years ago when I had that thought - not so sure anymore ... but I do agree, I don't think they will remain a company as-is.
tschellenbach 3y ago
not good for twilio. probably will bounce up in the short run as they increase financial discipline. (ie cut projects and teams). but then its not clear to me what their tech/product vision is going forward. and their core markets of sms and voip are slowly being replaced by other channels. (IE companies like Stream for chat, braze for notifications & marketing, authy for 2fa etc)
- hackitup7 3y ago
  I believe that Twilio owns Authy fwiw
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
We will now watch the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Twilio. I think this is especially sad as Twilio really was a reflection of the purity of product and engineering coming together to make more than the parts. I can’t think of a better leader at the intersection of people and technology than Jeff Lawson. I think Twilio has a unique opportunity to lead in AI if they kept their Hacker spirit. Unfortunately the fatal blunder here was that they signed up for this outcome via IPO. Not much better being private under PE, however it was doomed to this fate the moment they went public. All that said, congrats Jeff (jeffiel) for doing such an amazing job and holding on this long.
- BetterWhisper 3y ago
  And what is this unique opportunity to lead in AI?
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Right now: voice-bot telephony. So, immediately have a twilio number that you can call/text and talk to a GPT much like I do with the ChatGPT app interface. This rapidly could couple into actions API for doordash amazon etc…so Twilio would be handling all this scalable AI-Telephony data. They have the infrastructure and engineering for it. Long term: own the infrastructure for infinitely scaling call centers for any task you would need to do over sms/gsm voice
tomashertus 3y ago
I love Twillio's products. As a developer turned product manager, I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively favorable ROI. Anyway, I wish the best of luck to Jeff. I consider his book Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century to be one of the must-read books for founders.
- sp527 3y ago
  > I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively favorable ROI. This was not my experience. The gulf in pricing between Twilio's raw STUN/TURN solution (which they had clearly gone to great lengths to keep hidden amongst their product offerings) and their batteries-included WebRTC API solution was so vast it was almost comical. At a certain scale, a company could save maybe millions of dollars a year at the cost of a day or two of extra engineering effort. They were far from averse to the strategy of looting their customers.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
How do folks respond to the notion Twilio could be replaced by KeePass or to what extent is that true/untrue in terms of 2FA? Not sure what they do outside of that
davidshepherd7 3y ago
Does anyone have a list of which products are in which business units?
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Moving someone from CFO to COO and finally CEO doesn't inspire confidence in a Board's ability to find the best people for a role.
winter-day 3y ago
I worked at twilio when they were a series B company and Jeff personally did the on boardings. I think it was the only company I've worked at where I felt that every engineer was a super star. I've followed their career since then, and they've gone on to do phenomenal work. My opinion is that they had very weak leadership below the C-suite. We brought on one of the founders of skype, and after having lunch with him all I could think is how good he is at talking and how little value he'll deliver. I felt the same about the core engineering managers, and they went on to screw over a lot of the early talent - that now thrives at top companies. Regardless, Jeff was amazing. He was the sweetest guy and use to throw bbqs at his home. How fast the years go by.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Seems like such a common failure mode - early team proves pmf, then founders go on and hire substandard management who alienate early folks, hire their puppets/friends and proceed to ruin everything. I've seen it personally a few times now and still not quite sure why otherwise smart founders keep falling for it.
zubspace 3y ago
If you want to see Jeff Lawson in action, you should watch a great talk of him about company culture and values [1]. Even though I'm a programmer and usually don't think too hard about such topics, I can fully relate to his ideas. He's sharing the process of how they arrived at twilio's company values [2], which really are exceptional. Usually company values are just written down as a checklist somewhere, which you once read and then forget about. But twilio's values are fun to read, think about and easy to follow. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKI8Jah-Po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKI8Jah-Po [2] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/company/values https://www.twilio.com/en-us/company/values
kelnos 3y ago
I worked at Twilio from 2011 to 2022, and it was quite the amazing ride, especially for the first four or five years. Twilio basically wrote the book on API-first businesses, and on how to court developers to use and love a product, and evangelize that product to less-than-technical management types. While Jeff wasn't all that involved in the technical side of things by the time I joined, he still kept his engineering chops up, and it was always fun to see him live-coding Twilio apps on conference stages. I was disappointed in Twilio for the last several years I was there. What had started off as an engineering (and product) focused company devolved into being driven by sales. We put out some products that were half-baked from an engineering perspective, and it showed: missing or buggy features, downtime, and unfulfilled promises to customers that sales/product made with barely perfunctory consultation with engineering. IMO it really hurt the company's reputation. I remembered a time when mentions of Twilio in tech circles would come with praise and even awe; more recently complaints seem to have overtaken the good vibes. The "Ask Your Developer" billboard on US-101 as you entered SF was iconic. I loved that billboard; it perfectly encapsulated what the company stood for and illustrated why I was so happy there. For a while it was changed to something about reducing customer acquisition costs, a big red flag. More recently, it says some meaningless nonsense about "digital greatness" and "customer AI". That kind of shift tells me everything I need to know about where things have headed. Ok, time to stop being so negative... having said all that, I wouldn't trade my time there for anything. I learned more than I thought possible, worked with a ton of people who I respect heavily, made many lifelong friends... it was a life-changing experience. Jeff was a big part of that, and I'll always be thankful to him, Evan, and John for creating a place where I could thrive and grow.
swozey 3y ago
I've been reading about the last year of twilio w/regard to layoffs and what not. Mostly trying to figure out what teams had layoffs, so down a rabbit hole. This article [1] says "Anson and Legion [[2 investors]] have pushed Twilio to sell the Data and Applications unit, if not the whole company. Anson and Legion have both amassed individual stakes of around $50 million" Twilios marketcap is 13.33bn. Why do 2 investment groups that own a collective of $100m twilio have so much power that they can push for layoffs or SELLING the WHOLE company? They want twilio to sell a group that is 20% of their revenue. 20% of their revenue based on a 2023 $4bn would be around $800m or so. Twilio is an 8k employee company.. Is $50m in stock so high on the food chain that you get critical voting rights? That's nothing to an 8k large company. Could anyone explain? 1 = https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/04/twilio-layoffs-company-to-cut-5percent-of-employees.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/04/twilio-layoffs-company-to-cu... Edit: Ok I'm learning about "Activist Investing" now and I'm pretty sure as opposed to that really nice seeming name it's corporate vultures who try to take over the board and push a company to do whatever they're doing with Bed Bath and Beyond and all those. It was ONE Portfolio Manager who went from Legion to Anson and brought Twilio into their portfolio at both companies, at $50m each. He launched campaigns at Kohls, BB&B, Twilio, Nutanix and SurveyMonkey at least according to this article. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N3B82SO/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N3B82SO/ And for anyone curious about Activist Investing - Moral of the story once you own 5% you get a form that notifies the board you own 5% and they send in a form to the SEC with all their wants/complaints: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/02/03/whats-an-activist-investorand-how-do-they-exercise-so-much-control/?sh=207ae6312b8e https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/02/03/whats-...

374 points by ceohockey60 3y ago

DennisAleynikov 3y ago

Was not expecting this departure

alwaysrunning 3y ago

Was this planned? What is behind this move?

kypro 3y ago
No. Shareholders have been critical of Twilio's performance, and therefore Jeff Lawson over the last year or two though... They're in a difficult place. They don't have the margins of a SAAS company and they've been losing a lot of money. This was fine in a low interest rate environment where investors are willing to pay up for growth, but when that changed investors wanted them to cut costs and show a path to profitability. As a result Twilio was forced to do large layoffs and refocus the business on products with higher margins. Perhaps Jeff just didn't want to run the type of business Twilio needs to become in this new environment. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else. I he think prefers to get stuck in and build things cool things, and for better or worse that's not where Twilio is anymore.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who gets passionate about running a mature business that needs to focus on optimising profit margins above all else. There is optimizing profit margins, and there is not losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year, year after year. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/net-in...
  - kypro 3y ago
    Depends on how you look at it I suppose... It's not unusual for growth companies to operate at a large GAAP loss. They were never losing that much cash, and they have recently become cash flow positive, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/price-fcf https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWLO/twilio/price-... The large GAAP loses comes from dilution – mostly in the form of stock based comp. In theory if growth exceeds dilution then investors are still owning an appreciating asset, and if the stock is richly valued (as TWLO was) then it makes sense to fund that growth with capital rather than debt. But yeah, as a shareholder I felt their stock based comp was egregiously high and it took management a little too long to realise we're in a new world and things needed to change... A side point, but that's actually why I invested in TWLO because the stock got so beat up and their SBC was so excessive that it was kinda obvious that things were going to need to change and the market would react to that positively. The markets seem to be reacting favourably to this news and again I think that's because there was an assumption that Jeff Lawson was largely to blame for the lack of focus on profit optimisation. Personally I think Jeff is a great CEO though and I didn't want to see him go. I just wanted him to make some tough decisions to stop the burn – which more recently he seemed to be doing. While I do think they need to be more finance minded in this next stage of the business, I would doubt whether a developer focused tech company like Twilio will benefit much from a managerial leader like Shipchandler. We've seen this mistake made repeatedly by tech companies in the past.

Waterluvian 3y ago

“Jeff Epstein Appointed Chair of the Twilio Board of Directors” That’s an unfortunate name to have. I’ve always wondered how people handle when this happens. If it’s as big a deal as I feel it would be if it were me.

7ewis 3y ago

Bloomberg said: "Twilio Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson is stepping down from leading the software company he co-founded amid slowing sales growth and pressure from activist investors." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ceo-jeff-lawson-steps-down-from-ceo-and-board https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/twilio-ce...

lagniappe 3y ago
What a shit sandwich. Not everything needs to be a hockey stick. There's is an angle of the growth line that should not be exceeded because above that level of growth seldom is a good situation for the consumer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gphil 3y ago
  The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Indeed, either take the investment and the dragons that will come to burn your village or grow slow and own your future (Basecamp/37signals), but make peace with that you’re always going to be small (but it’ll at least be yours).
  - walls 3y ago
    Maybe a notification API provider doesn't need to be spending a ton of money on "AI".
    - dalyons 3y ago
      instead of posting a poorly informed take, you should go and have a look at their list of product offerings. They havent been just a "notification API" for a long time now.

m4tthumphrey 3y ago

[deleted]

maerF0x0 3y ago
can you source major shareholder? The doc I found said 3.7%. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-supervoting-protection-next-month-has-been-meeting-with-activist https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-s...

gkoberger 3y ago

I don't know much about what happened here, but I did meet the early Twilio team (not Jeff, unfortunately) back in 2009 and knew they were something special. Jeff (and team) deserve a ton of credit for two massive things: First, changing how people think about devtools. I know Stripe gets a lot of credit, but Twilio was 3 years earlier and really defined how we look at building, marketing and monetizing tools meant for devs. They were early (if not first) to the devrel space, and Jeff's live coding (paired with a phone literally vibrating) was something I had never seen before. Second, I know a lot of people have lots of opinions about San Francisco, but I have a lot of respect to Jeff for always standing up and fighting for the city that enabled him to build his company. He seems to be a really good person, and is one of the few CEOs I find myself eager to emulate. Good luck to Jeff, Twilio, and everyone else involved. Jeff built something really special in the early years. And jeffiel, now that you have a bit more time on your hands, hopefully we can finally cross paths!

CamelCaseName 3y ago
> and knew they were something special Can you share more insights on how you knew they were special?
- haswell 3y ago
  Not OP, but their approach to devrel was by itself a huge differentiator early on. We’ve become so accustomed to developer-oriented marketing and programs that it’s easy to forget that Twilio was really at the cutting edge of this movement and should be credited (or at least acknowledged) for the easy on-ramps most developer programs now provide. Twilio also pushed the envelope in terms of what it means to talk to their developer community. Greg Baugues’ talk titled “Devs and Depression” reached a lot of people who were struggling, and was one of the reasons I personally sought out therapy, and my life is much better for it. Early Twilio was a very human-oriented company, and I think many developers and developer programs are better for it.
  - gregorymichael 3y ago
    Hi. Greg here. :heart: Good job taking the steps to get help!

maerF0x0 3y ago

https://archive.is/8Ffn4 https://archive.is/8Ffn4 Keep in mind his voting structure changed in May meaning he lost some shareholder power. > Its use of supervoting shares, which gives CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson a voting stake of 21.8% even though he owns only 3.7% of the stock, [1] No derogatory remarks intended to Jeff, Jeff certainly has had great moments, but Kho is also a fantastic leader and capital allocator, who's made some truly uncanny calls (like raising in the market near the top,and share buy back near the bottom). I think Kho is the right person for the job in the times that Twilio finds themselves. It's something I've hoped for for years, as a shareholder. Jeff deserves praise for the humility to step down and promote from within a well groomed and talented successor. [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-supervoting-protection-next-month-has-been-meeting-with-activist https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twilio-set-to-lose-s...

adam_arthur 3y ago
Any exec who actually tries to sell the stock high, and buy it low is a winner in my book. Most just follow the crowd and do shareholder dilutive buybacks at nosebleed valuations. If you can buy a long duration US treasury yielding more than twice what your shares yield, maybe stop to think before doing any buybacks. Though I've written it up to mostly short term-ism towards increasing their own compensation through pressuring share price in the immediate term. The alternative is that all these CFOs and others are financially illiterate or incompetent
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  Reminded me of another point on the board for Kho, He was smart enough to grab a billion in 10yr bonds at like 3% which was genius for the growth rate (if you can grow money at 10% then you should take every penny you can get below that). https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/blog/essential-ir-insights-newsletter-summer-july-august-2023 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... The only party he missed was putting our cash reserves in BTC. (which is an inside joke). It would have made the money like $4-5B based on the time of the suggestion. I think investors will be happy to hear he flatly outright said no to that. It looked like a missed opportunity (at $64k)... until it didn't. (back at $16k)

martinky24 3y ago

[flagged]

MenhirMike 3y ago
If it was the other one, he'd be literally dead on arrival, so I guess that limits the potential confusion a bit. But yeah, I doubt he uses his full first name much these days.
- vehementi 3y ago
  At least "we" can reclaim the name, take it back for good, unlike the cool iconography and salutes that the nazis ruined forever
siva7 3y ago
Amazing how one can ruin a name for everyone else. See also Weinstein as the poster-child of the me-too era.
ibejoeb 3y ago
I know nothing about this board, but I imagine he must be the absolute best person for the job, because they probably seriously considered the downsides having to write up that statement.
deleted 3y ago
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jayski 3y ago

[flagged]

Aeolun 3y ago

They recently cancelled their video offering and recommend we move to zoom. Maybe the ship is sinking?

figers 3y ago
They had such a good video offering, never had an issue, very surprised by this, why not try to charge more before dumping it?
- kwindla 3y ago
  They have not adequately funded the video product for a very long time. Other companies built out better infrastructure and a much broader range of features. The market also turned out to be smaller and differently structured than all of us thought. (I am a co-founder of a company that competes with -- though also predated -- Twilio Video.)
kwindla 3y ago
I have a dog in this fight, but strongly recommend that you do not move to [the] Zoom [Video SDK]. tldr: architecture that doesn't work for web apps, performance issues, missing features https://www.daily.co/blog/zoom-web-sdk-technical-notes/ https://www.daily.co/blog/zoom-web-sdk-technical-notes/
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I’d much prefer not moving at all, even if the Twilio product never changes, but unfortunately that’s not an option.

gregorymichael 3y ago

When I joined the Twilio Developer Evangelism team in 2014, we spent a lot of our onboarding practicing the "five minute demo" where we live-code a Twilio app from scratch. I thought this was dumb, mostly because live-coding is so damn hard. Six weeks into the job I watched Jeff live-code a Twilio app in front of 10,000 people at IBM Connect. It was as if he was saying to all of us, "Yeah, live-coding is hard. And if I can do this in front of 10,000 people, you can do it at your local Ruby meetup." It was the first of many, many times over my nine years that Jeff led by example, set the bar, and pushed us all to reach levels we didn't know we were capable of. Working under Jeff's leadership was the privilege of a career. I can't wait to see what he builds next.

lawgimenez 3y ago
Are there any uploads of Jeff live coding?
- gregorymichael 3y ago
  Here's the time he built "Hawk or Not" with Tony Hawk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHYyD3upNc&t=6120s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHYyD3upNc&t=6120s
- buzzy_hacker 3y ago
  This is John Britton, not Jeff Lawson, but an example of the live coding. Epic demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o
- mleonhard 3y ago
  Here's a good recording of a very smooth Twilio demo at "Yahoo! Hack Europe: London" in 2013 by Michael Wawra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPAe0rJApvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPAe0rJApvk

paxys 3y ago

The new CEO: > Shipchandler has over 25 years of experience growing businesses and driving financial performance across global, public organizations. Prior to Twilio, Khozema spent over two decades at GE where he drove operating excellence in GE’s high tech aviation division, plus accelerated growth in the Middle East region. I wouldn't be too enthused about him running a software-focused company. His experience yells "generic businessman brought in by investors to squeeze more profit".

raiyu 3y ago
Yeah definitely not a good sign for Twilio - the tried and true playbook will now get executed once again. Fire a bunch of people, especially those that are most tenured and have the highest salaries. Raise prices each quarter to achieve revenue growth with the assumption that customers are more inelastic than suspected and won't leave. Doubtful that any smart acquisitions will occur, given that requires an actual understanding of product, customers, and markets. The beginning of the end until some larger corporation, looking to grow their revenue base decides to acquire them. End of an era for sure.
- akmittal 3y ago
  > Fire a bunch of people, especially those that are most tenured and have the highest salaries. That's already done
  - fooster 3y ago
    Not even close to enough. Look at the growth of revenue and headcount. It is clear another huge cut has to be made.
goopthink 3y ago
But also: > He has a deep understanding of Twilio’s business, operations and culture, having most recently served as President of Twilio Communications, and previously as Twilio’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.
deleted 3y ago

shakes 3y ago

I worked at Twilio for nearly 10 years and it's hard to overstate what a gift it was to work there and see Jeff operate as CEO up-close. He created an environment where (at our best) we could have fun doing work that had a real impact, and we could it with people we enjoyed doing the work with. He pushed us to be creative to authentically empower and inspire developers. Wanna build a video game that teaches developers how to code and use Twilio? Let's try it! Wanna build an AI application with Tony Hawk and have Tony Hawk debug the code live on stage? Sure! And Jeff would always be spending time with developer tools and Twilio's products himself, to the point that he could live code at the drop of a hat to show off what we'd been working on. This meant his own understanding of developers and their problems never ceased to amaze me. But more than all of that, he was a rare CEO that led with empathy, humility and care. Thank you, jeffiel. We can't wait to see what you build next.

throwaway_108 3y ago
It's also why George Hu left Twilio. Because Jeff wanted to be a celebrity CEO, and it was to the detriment of the company. All of Twilio's growth (as a public company) happened on George's watch. I don't think it's a coincidence that well after George left, on Jeff's watch - they had to do 3 different layoff for a total of ~24% of their entire public company being let go. Note: former senior level Twilio employee, posted anonymous for obvious reasons.
- vehementi 3y ago
  Did any of those layoffs coincide with the global layoffs?
  - Moto7451 3y ago
    September of 2022, Feb 2023, and December 2023. So no, kinda, and no.
    - darth_avocado 3y ago
      Sep 2022 and Feb 2023 was the peak layoff season in the industry. Mostly guided by interest rate hikes.

_fat_santa 3y ago

Reading this and related stories, seems to be related to activist investor pressure. Reading into that, seems that activist investors are pushing Twilio to divest from their Data & Applications business. How I understand it Twilio has moved into "customer engagement" from their initial core business and investors aren't happy with the direction or returns from that business unit.

smileysteve 3y ago
Ooof at the Segment acquisition :-/
- taf2 3y ago
  Wish it was a T-Mobile purchase instead :/

debacle 3y ago

Twilio is in a weird spot. They are so cheap that it's very easy to build a successful company on top of their APIs, and choosing their APIs is a no brainer. They probably need to go vertical and capture some of the value their users are generating to have the kind of revenue investors want.

deleted 3y ago

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jijji 3y ago

I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages, then they wanted you to describe what you're using it for and you had to pay money to fill out a form to tell them what you're using the text messages for.... then they would deny that and then you basically can't use twilio, or pay them to fill out the form again so they can deny you again.... This is for outbound SMS (payment notifications to customers) so I wound up writing an Android application that runs on a phone that just sends out SMS messages using an API talking to a server..... I'm paying $8 a month to Tello now which is about 1/5 the amount of money that I was paying to twilio so I'm glad that I switched..... but I think they really screwed up recently.

deleted 3y ago
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echelon 3y ago
They serve big businesses now. They don't want small players coming in with potentially abusive behavior. Twilio worked hard to build its relationships with carriers and doesn't want to be dragged down by spam.
oogali 3y ago
This is likely because of industry regulations around A2P (application-to-person ) messaging that had a due date of August 31, 2023. It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected. https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/6650461-changes-to-10dlc-sms-compliance-summer-2023 https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/6650461-changes-to... https://www.telgorithm.com/news/10dlc-registration-required/ https://www.telgorithm.com/news/10dlc-registration-required/ https://support.referrizer.com/support/solutions/articles/103000206610-tcr-a2p-10dlc-what-will-happen-on-august-31-2023- https://support.referrizer.com/support/solutions/articles/10...
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected. From what I can tell, the telcos aren't performing any enforcement, even tho the deadlines and extensions are long past. Not to say they won't but the endeavor seems to have a stall vibe going on. Some of that might be related to having major mass-campaign requirements placed on small biz who occasionally send a handful of texts (often non-sales) from their workstation phone apps. At least I hope this is why it has stalled. Sending a few texts during a customer service session shouldn't be regulated as if it were a blast of 1M SMS ads.

whalesalad 3y ago

Is the typeface/font being used here glitch for others, too? It looks kinda like a dyslexic optimized font where certain characters have different weights.

timoteostewart 3y ago
Yes, for me too.
stronglikedan 3y ago
Same (Chrome, FF and Edge)
gnicholas 3y ago
Yeah, w, z, r, d, and some other chars look heavier than the others.
lofatdairy 3y ago
On my end as well, Mac + safari
deleted 3y ago
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makaimc 3y ago

I worked at Twilio from 2014-2023 and had an incredible experience during those 9 years, including all of my interactions with Jeff. One of my favorite moments was running into Jeff in the hallway at our Beale Street office just before he had to do a quarterly earnings call after we went public. I said "good luck on the earnings call" and Jeff said thanks then asked what happened to a link to a specific Stack Overflow question/answer from one of our docs pages that got removed. He had just been building an application and felt like that answer was particularly helpful for context in a certain programming language, and was surprised it was removed. Jeff's always been software developer at heart even though he had a ton of non-dev responsibilities. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages in that mindset! But he created a tremendous company along the way and I wouldn't change working there for anywhere else during those years.

annthurium 3y ago

I worked at Twilio for 4 years and it was one of the highlights of my career. End of an era, for sure. Thanks Jeff for trying to build an anti-racist company even when it upset some of our investors.

brink 3y ago
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westhanover 3y ago
Its still crazy to me all of the people who are out there starting racist companies. If you aren't anti-racist you are...
boeingUH60 3y ago
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silenced_trope 3y ago
> Thanks Jeff for trying to build an anti-racist company even when it upset some of our investors. Yikes. I guess when the company has no profit or potential you have to try to build something else?
deleted 3y ago
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anovikov 3y ago

All of the media clouds that did not include telephony, were always bad business cases, sometimes got repeatedly sold and resold like a proverbial hot potato, see TokBox. Twilio did include telephony and was originally built as telephony-only provider, so it really stood out and was a lot more sustainable as a business than anybody else. But, importance of telephony is falling. When was the last time you dialed-in to a Zoom conference? Without that, what's left of telephony? Just the 2FA SMSes. I believe long term, providers like Twilio will become very thin layers of indirection to aggregate together underlying phone operator services, and will be mostly owner by those phone operators themselves, like Vonage now owns Nexmo, Twilio's direct competitor. Nexmo's API makes a lot more sense than Twilio's by the way, and is a true pleasure to use.

nunez 3y ago
people dial in all of the time in the meetings i have. zoom is still awful in low-bandwidth situations.

jmacd 3y ago

The decline of Twilio's position has been as pretty clear for the last 18 months now, and has been a topic of conversation longer than that. Twilio never had the margins or control of their environment to nearly the degree you need to have in order to maintain software monopoly levels of growth over time. Most of Twilio's business has been built on reselling network access purchased via SMS consolidators. These are companies who, decades ago, got their hardware installed inside the networks of the major phone carriers. This allows them direct access to send/receive SMSs. Twilio never really tried to own the network layer and these companies continued to demand higher and higher tolls for access. Short codes are a very good example of this. Twilio spent a lot of time and money trying to sew up access to those short codes. On top of all that, high volume customers would move directly to these consolidators. Sometimes Twilio would keep some portion of the business if the sender used a round robin model to distribute sends, but often they didn't. OpenMarket and a handful of others were the goto providers at scale. Add on to this the overall decline of the utility of SMS. Even as SMS volumes increased, they have not increased at the same rate as messaging overall. ie: other channels like iMessage and WhatsApp continue to pull volumes. Cue Twilio's attempt to go up market. Flex and the purchase of Sendgrid were the best examples of this. Could CPaaS work for Twilio as a business model? I think we've seen so many fits and starts with the Flex product line and the integration of Sendgrid that it seemed like perhaps buying their way in to that market wasn't panning out. Finally, as seen in the last year, the culture just seems to have gone off the rails at some point. [1] I don't know Jeff, but my respect for him is sky high. I've read all his writing over the years and he's been hugely influential for an entire generation of founders. Unfortunately this seems like a bit of a hasty departure. I hope it isn't, but the choice of replacement CEO screams caretaker-CEO rather than shrewd strategic move. Another commenter mentioned Stripe [2] and how they get a lot of credit for advancing DevTools. I agree that Twilio did it first and I think paved the way. Jeff Lawson and Twilio deserve more credit. "Ask your developer" was not a small thing at all. I also think Stripe very likely is in a very similar position, but they are earlier in their cycle and they've avoided the scrutiny of being a public company. Credit card processors are gatekeepers and fully dominate in their markets. Stripe serves a purpose for them and dramatically improves access to their networks via great tooling and abstractions, but there is still a fixed cost toll to pay and what that toll is cannot be static for interminable time. Is Stripe in the "Commerce" market like Twilio is in the "Communications" market, or are they in the "payments" market, like Twilio is in the "SMS" market? (or somesuch) 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382361 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913134

coloneltcb 3y ago

Hats off to a legend. Twilio was The Beatles to the devtools space. They defined modern devrel and the bottom-up/PLG GTM motion. He also disproved would-be investors who said developers would never pay for an API; in fact they’d prefer that to building something only to get rug-pulled when a company decided their free API was no longer strategic for them. And while you hear a lot about ruthless but effective asshole CEOs, Jeff happens to be a brilliant executive and a great human all at the same time. True visionary and 1 of 1.

haltist 3y ago

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pkiv 3y ago

What a great run. I remember the IPO party in 2016, very early in my career, and being in disbelief that a texting API was used by so many people. It was my first time writing code for systems that operated at _real scale_. While the last few years have been a bit rocky, you can't understate the impact that jeffiel had on the developer tools ecosystem.

GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
writing systems at that scale is exhilarating, it's a shame that it's a small club

movingmove 3y ago

I had the "pleasure" working for Twilio for over 4 years. I cannot tell how much this showed me how you can fake it til you make it in SF. Twilio tried to expand into Europe and failed miserably. Customers (especially German ones) wanted exact locations of data, exact routes of packet transportation, wanted features Twilio promised on Slides but never delivered. I was part of at least 4 customer meetings (the biggest in Europe) where the clients just called Senior levels in and told them off. Twilio was great when it just handled voice and text messaging. It never grew substantially, it never delivered features customers were asking for years. Messy code base, hired product owners with no clue what they should actually build. Jeff was famous for over-promising and under-delivering. 1 year into my Twilio career, it was clear that the company would fail hard. Colleagues and I had bets on when Jeff will be fired or the company sold. Well, the last few months have been telling. A sad story, since they had a great core product, really smart people, great people working there. But especially through the pandemic, they grew an insane amount without actually building anything of substance.

karim 3y ago
One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you stayed on for 3 more years? What happened there?
- smt88 3y ago
  Knowing a company is going to fail doesn't automatically mean the compensation and/or culture don't work for you. One way a company can be mismanaged is burning money it can't afford on ridiculous employee perks, like when Twitter got its own DJ.
- ctz 3y ago
  I'm not the OP, but agree with their assessment and stayed 3.5 years despite that. For me, the reason was the vesting schedule: 4 years with a 1 year cliff.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    But why would you want to vest a bunch of options/shares that you think will decline substantially in value over your tenure there?

caseysoftware 3y ago

I joined Twilio in May '11 the week of the private launch of Twilio Client. I was #18 or so. My first day, we got briefings on what it was, what it will do, and then had to finish docs and re-arrange the office for our top customers. (At that stage, most people knew them by name. Shout out patio11!) Since I knew nothing and the docs were.. weak, I decided to take out the garbage. I grabbed the bags and asked where the dumpster was. Jeff Lawson stopped me and asked if I had an office key card to get back in. Oops, nope. So he grabbed a bag and we took it out together. So yes, Jeff opened doors for me. ;) Despite the last year or so of chaos, he founded and built a company that redefined telecomm specifically and tech gtm as a whole. Not a bad track record.

caseysoftware 3y ago
And the infamous five minute demo.. we drilled on that constantly. At my peak (2013), I was giving it 2-3 times a week in front of small groups, with the occasional sales reps, and in front of huge events. My favorite times were: - for one of Bob Metcalfe's courses at UT Austin. Yes, that Bob Metcalfe, the co-creator of ethernet. I talked about the origin of Metcalfe's Law here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259442 - 1:1 for Werner Vogels at SXSW. I gave it to one of his senior guys and he said "wow, this is great, let me go get Werner" which was intimidating as f.. a lot. But I managed to nail it.

nonstopdev 3y ago

As someone who has loved Twilio from the early days and have built many apps for small and enterprise cases as well as fully embraced Flex in the customer experience space, I really have no idea what the hell they are doing now. Not sure if they are right sizing after trying to capture markets like video and Contact Center but it seems like even successful sales teams are let go now so curios where they emerge from this.

ezxs 3y ago

I wouldn't be happy about that. The innovation generally stops when the folks who really know the customer and have the audacity to pull the trigger on big changes are replaced.

muttantt 3y ago

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sbeckeriv 3y ago

I haven't used twillo since 2014 and I don't use twillo at company. I have recently tried to use it for my own projects and I have not had a good time with the product. I was able to set things up fine with the docs but the ui and the support didn't seem to understand the hobbyist concept. I could not get my number registered for texting again and support did not care. Example: I cant release the number I have because it has an emergency address I need to remove. I cant find the ui to remove the address. I can only add address. While the ui banner says "Please add an emergency address to this phone number or you may incure a $75.00 charge per emergency call." I am just waiting for my minimum required balance to be eating up by fees i dont understand. I have moved on to a chat service. I wish them luck moving forward.

totalhack 3y ago

Twilio is great and super frustrating at the same time. I've run into outdated or missing documentation, and plenty of low hanging fruit UI improvements that get ignored. They seem to be asleep at the wheel at this point.

adolfisback 3y ago

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cranberryturkey 3y ago

twilio gone through soem radical changes lately with the new regulations. its much more difficult to use

knodi 3y ago

I think with the US Carriers mandating proper campaign registration process for texting, even small number of testing it has taken a huge toll on their support. I think earning for last year q4 are about to be lower then expected

EMCymatics 3y ago

I don't see how this move changes anything.

ultrasaurus 3y ago

I met Jeff back in 2011 when I was considering moving to SF. Although I didn't end up at Twilio, I distinctly remember thinking I'd be happy to work for him. His original Twilio demos were a big part in convincing me to make the move to working at a proper startup.

shadowtree 3y ago

Given the successor, they'll either flip Twilio or go private equity - in both cases Twilio as we know it is toast. Amazon could snatch, also Oracle the evergreen. SFDC is the dark horse, don't see MSFT touching it due to massive AWS setup. Godspeed.

tschellenbach 3y ago
I'm upvoting this, it's a clear issue
ejb999 3y ago
I always thought AWS would end up buying them, of course this was 5+ years ago when I had that thought - not so sure anymore ... but I do agree, I don't think they will remain a company as-is.

tschellenbach 3y ago

not good for twilio. probably will bounce up in the short run as they increase financial discipline. (ie cut projects and teams). but then its not clear to me what their tech/product vision is going forward. and their core markets of sms and voip are slowly being replaced by other channels. (IE companies like Stream for chat, braze for notifications & marketing, authy for 2fa etc)

hackitup7 3y ago
I believe that Twilio owns Authy fwiw

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

We will now watch the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Twilio. I think this is especially sad as Twilio really was a reflection of the purity of product and engineering coming together to make more than the parts. I can’t think of a better leader at the intersection of people and technology than Jeff Lawson. I think Twilio has a unique opportunity to lead in AI if they kept their Hacker spirit. Unfortunately the fatal blunder here was that they signed up for this outcome via IPO. Not much better being private under PE, however it was doomed to this fate the moment they went public. All that said, congrats Jeff (jeffiel) for doing such an amazing job and holding on this long.

BetterWhisper 3y ago
And what is this unique opportunity to lead in AI?
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Right now: voice-bot telephony. So, immediately have a twilio number that you can call/text and talk to a GPT much like I do with the ChatGPT app interface. This rapidly could couple into actions API for doordash amazon etc…so Twilio would be handling all this scalable AI-Telephony data. They have the infrastructure and engineering for it. Long term: own the infrastructure for infinitely scaling call centers for any task you would need to do over sms/gsm voice

tomashertus 3y ago

I love Twillio's products. As a developer turned product manager, I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively favorable ROI. Anyway, I wish the best of luck to Jeff. I consider his book Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century to be one of the must-read books for founders.

sp527 3y ago
> I always find it striking that many teams try to reinvent the wheel while Twilio provides a suitable solution with a relatively favorable ROI. This was not my experience. The gulf in pricing between Twilio's raw STUN/TURN solution (which they had clearly gone to great lengths to keep hidden amongst their product offerings) and their batteries-included WebRTC API solution was so vast it was almost comical. At a certain scale, a company could save maybe millions of dollars a year at the cost of a day or two of extra engineering effort. They were far from averse to the strategy of looting their customers.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

How do folks respond to the notion Twilio could be replaced by KeePass or to what extent is that true/untrue in terms of 2FA? Not sure what they do outside of that

davidshepherd7 3y ago

Does anyone have a list of which products are in which business units?

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Moving someone from CFO to COO and finally CEO doesn't inspire confidence in a Board's ability to find the best people for a role.

winter-day 3y ago

I worked at twilio when they were a series B company and Jeff personally did the on boardings. I think it was the only company I've worked at where I felt that every engineer was a super star. I've followed their career since then, and they've gone on to do phenomenal work. My opinion is that they had very weak leadership below the C-suite. We brought on one of the founders of skype, and after having lunch with him all I could think is how good he is at talking and how little value he'll deliver. I felt the same about the core engineering managers, and they went on to screw over a lot of the early talent - that now thrives at top companies. Regardless, Jeff was amazing. He was the sweetest guy and use to throw bbqs at his home. How fast the years go by.

dilyevsky 3y ago
Seems like such a common failure mode - early team proves pmf, then founders go on and hire substandard management who alienate early folks, hire their puppets/friends and proceed to ruin everything. I've seen it personally a few times now and still not quite sure why otherwise smart founders keep falling for it.

zubspace 3y ago

If you want to see Jeff Lawson in action, you should watch a great talk of him about company culture and values [1]. Even though I'm a programmer and usually don't think too hard about such topics, I can fully relate to his ideas. He's sharing the process of how they arrived at twilio's company values [2], which really are exceptional. Usually company values are just written down as a checklist somewhere, which you once read and then forget about. But twilio's values are fun to read, think about and easy to follow. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKI8Jah-Po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKI8Jah-Po [2] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/company/values https://www.twilio.com/en-us/company/values

kelnos 3y ago

I worked at Twilio from 2011 to 2022, and it was quite the amazing ride, especially for the first four or five years. Twilio basically wrote the book on API-first businesses, and on how to court developers to use and love a product, and evangelize that product to less-than-technical management types. While Jeff wasn't all that involved in the technical side of things by the time I joined, he still kept his engineering chops up, and it was always fun to see him live-coding Twilio apps on conference stages. I was disappointed in Twilio for the last several years I was there. What had started off as an engineering (and product) focused company devolved into being driven by sales. We put out some products that were half-baked from an engineering perspective, and it showed: missing or buggy features, downtime, and unfulfilled promises to customers that sales/product made with barely perfunctory consultation with engineering. IMO it really hurt the company's reputation. I remembered a time when mentions of Twilio in tech circles would come with praise and even awe; more recently complaints seem to have overtaken the good vibes. The "Ask Your Developer" billboard on US-101 as you entered SF was iconic. I loved that billboard; it perfectly encapsulated what the company stood for and illustrated why I was so happy there. For a while it was changed to something about reducing customer acquisition costs, a big red flag. More recently, it says some meaningless nonsense about "digital greatness" and "customer AI". That kind of shift tells me everything I need to know about where things have headed. Ok, time to stop being so negative... having said all that, I wouldn't trade my time there for anything. I learned more than I thought possible, worked with a ton of people who I respect heavily, made many lifelong friends... it was a life-changing experience. Jeff was a big part of that, and I'll always be thankful to him, Evan, and John for creating a place where I could thrive and grow.

swozey 3y ago

I've been reading about the last year of twilio w/regard to layoffs and what not. Mostly trying to figure out what teams had layoffs, so down a rabbit hole. This article [1] says "Anson and Legion [[2 investors]] have pushed Twilio to sell the Data and Applications unit, if not the whole company. Anson and Legion have both amassed individual stakes of around $50 million" Twilios marketcap is 13.33bn. Why do 2 investment groups that own a collective of $100m twilio have so much power that they can push for layoffs or SELLING the WHOLE company? They want twilio to sell a group that is 20% of their revenue. 20% of their revenue based on a 2023 $4bn would be around $800m or so. Twilio is an 8k employee company.. Is $50m in stock so high on the food chain that you get critical voting rights? That's nothing to an 8k large company. Could anyone explain? 1 = https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/04/twilio-layoffs-company-to-cut-5percent-of-employees.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/04/twilio-layoffs-company-to-cu... Edit: Ok I'm learning about "Activist Investing" now and I'm pretty sure as opposed to that really nice seeming name it's corporate vultures who try to take over the board and push a company to do whatever they're doing with Bed Bath and Beyond and all those. It was ONE Portfolio Manager who went from Legion to Anson and brought Twilio into their portfolio at both companies, at $50m each. He launched campaigns at Kohls, BB&B, Twilio, Nutanix and SurveyMonkey at least according to this article. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N3B82SO/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N3B82SO/ And for anyone curious about Activist Investing - Moral of the story once you own 5% you get a form that notifies the board you own 5% and they send in a form to the SEC with all their wants/complaints: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/02/03/whats-an-activist-investorand-how-do-they-exercise-so-much-control/?sh=207ae6312b8e https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/02/03/whats-...