7 ms·

Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue

130 points by sethbannon 12y ago

cyen 12y ago
I'm intrigued by the fact that this has been on the front page for hours with no comments. Is this because there's nothing to say ("Of course they're IPO'ing, everyone doing telephony uses Twilio, this makes total sense")? Or because the haters have all taken vacation and aren't around to draw comparisons to other recent IPOs? ... or are IPOs no longer news to the HN community anymore?
- akavi 12y ago
  I think it's mostly the former. Unlike some IPOs, there's just nothing controversial about it. Twilio's a great product and they've got solid financials.
  - RobSpectre 12y ago
    Rob from Twilio here - thanks a lot of saying that akavi. Took a lot of work to get here - stoked to hear you are finding it well.
  - taf2 12y ago
    I agree - not only a great product but great people to work with
jaytaylor 12y ago
I don't see any information on Twilio's net expenditures. Am I missing something? What is the significance in taking in $100M in revenue if you had to spend > $100M to get it? Cough BOX Cough Also, how many customers do they have who pay them more than 100-250K/year? Where are these "big deals" coming from? In my experience, Twilio was quite expensive (i.e. not cost-effective) compared to other Telephony service providers. I really like their solid platform, and at the same time I'm a little surprised by the IPO move right now. Have they already burned through the $70M in funding they took in 18 months ago?
- quadrature 12y ago
  We will know more when the SEC filings are underway, until then its anyone's guess.
- dubcanada 12y ago
  I rarely see Twilio ads. When Box was big there was not a site that I visited that I didn't get at least one Box ad, and dare I ever type Dropbox into Google. Nothing but straight Box ads for weeks. Not that this proves anything at all, but I don't think they marketed nearly as hard as Box. But there does seem to be very little in regards to competition. Every single big internet company has their own "cloud storage".
  - sjtgraham 12y ago
    > I rarely see Twilio ads ¿Qué? - https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352 https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352
    - corin_ 12y ago
      Well that's sorted then, dubcanada must indeed see Twilio ads all the time! One billboard doesn't disprove a claim that a company doesn't do much advertising, especially if it's just a personal anecdote about how many ads he's noticed.
  - ihaveajob 12y ago
    Perhaps you failed prey to ad retargeting? It's happened to me with several services. Once you visit their website, you keep seeing their ads everywhere.
- e12e 12y ago
  Well, 200 000 USD in revenue per employee sounds pretty good to me. Sure they'll have other expenses, but my rule of thumb is that you should be getting ~135K USD per head in revenue as a minimum (when starting out) -- so 200K for an established company sounds healthy to me. This is a crazy generalization of course -- and mostly applies when you don't have to deal to much with the physical world of logistics etc.
urs2102 12y ago
Awesome - Twilio to me is the example of a simple, well priced product that has been nothing but just a really well made tool. Looking forward to seeing their S-1...
- RobSpectre 12y ago
  Much obliged urs2102. Whole lot more work between here and there - glad you could be a part of it with us.
pyrrhotech 12y ago
I don't get the point of these posts. If I cared, I'd pull up tech crunch. What relevance does this have? I know this sounds hypocritical as I cared enough to comment, but I'm tired of X company is IPO!!! taking up a precious spot in the otherwise interesting board
TimFogarty 12y ago
Congratulations to them. I've worked with their developer evangelism team a bit and they always bring their A-game. The company really seems to understand how to engage the community and they have a very solid and easy to use product.
- RobSpectre 12y ago
  Very kind of you to say Tim. They put in an enormous amount of work to be prepared to serve you in the field. Lot more preparation ahead, but stoked you found it helpful.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jMyles 12y ago
    Awwww. I love it when we're all so happy!
- xmjw 12y ago
  <smile>
adamboulanger 12y ago
I quite liked this article for associating Twilio's success with strategic decisions to treat developers as customers with particular implications for evangelism and growth. This approach isn't obvious because of the pressure to tie tool adoption to large-sized recurring enterprise contracts, often losing the individual developer as the engine of that model. Also note, Twilio brilliantly dances between concerted efforts in grassroots developer campaigns such as hackathons while bringing down tier 1 enterprise contracts at the same time. This is awesome and not easily done. Developers are smart and ultra-wary of hackathons as thinly veiled API marketing attempts. Over the past year, I've pitched a developer API startup to countless VCs, many of them top tier, and Twilio has almost always come up as a point of reference from the other side of the table. In many, many cases, the VCs will have passed on Twilio, not liking either the developer tool or enabling tech aspect of the company, and are now face-palming a bit...Only a bit...show me a VC that will wholeheartedly admit to making a mistake ;) Overall, the venture sentiment towards developer tools is definitely shifting. A year from now I expect to see quite a lot more activity in financing this space, albeit, in domains that largely coincide with VC comfort zones. Twilio offers communications and telephony, which is a market a lot of folks are comfortable in, compared to education, health, government, or creative industries.
- RobSpectre 12y ago
  Thanks Adam - we're rooting for you as you head out. Building a business serving developers is indeed as difficult as you say, but also - to be fair - an endless amount of fun. Certainly nothing we'd rather be doing.
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  Developer as customer model seems to be Stripe's MO too. This seems to be driven by a few phenomena: - For large companies, developer hours are becoming a large source of cost, so companies can charge a premium by lowering developer time demands. - For independent developers, these services enable rapid prototyping and increases probability of finding product market fit.
  - debaserab2 12y ago
johnrob 12y ago
> Twilio told Venture Capital Dispatch it is adding another $1 million in annual recurring revenue every seven days. Sounds cooler than saying "growing 50% per year".
- taf2 12y ago
  50% per year sounds pretty damn cool to me ;)
curiously 12y ago
one thing im curious is their pay as you go model. we rarely see such pricing plans but wonder if there's any extensive study or analysis into this vs recurring payments.
jeffiel 12y ago
Hi - Jeff from Twilio. We're here to build the a great company for developers. The real story is APIs, not IPOs. Anything else is pure speculation :)
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  congrats dude. moving to SF to join you guys was great. i made a lot of good friends there, and it's been fun to watch from the outside.
- lmg643 12y ago
  It's amazing how easy Twilio's APIs are to use. I've used them in C# several times, just add them to the project, add a line, and you are up and running. Nice work.
  - jeffiel 12y ago
    Thank you lmg643, glad we could help!
MattGrommes 12y ago
Based on his evangelism, which accounts for almost all of what I've personally heard about Twilio, I hope you guys are going to reward patio11 somehow. :)
mehrzad 12y ago
Curious about something: with companies like Heroku we often see open-source alternatives being developed. Is that possible for something like Twilio and is it "FSF-compliant" to use their APIs? Not that that is a requirement for me, but I've never seen people discuss this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mwetzler 12y ago
Impressive, but not quite a impressive as the title alludes. Should be $100M Annual Revenue Run Rate (projected revenue) vs actual revenue in 2014. WSJ has corrected the title on their site. Twilio truly blazed a trail for API companies. Thank you for that, Twilio :)
iask 12y ago
I like Twilio. I've been following them since they started and currently using some of their services in my personal home automation projects. Once you go public you have to answer to shareholders and then prices become an issue. I wish them success. And yes, they really have a savvy marketing team.
some1else 12y ago
Good news for early-stage Twilio employee's current startups?

130 points by sethbannon 12y ago

cyen 12y ago

I'm intrigued by the fact that this has been on the front page for hours with no comments. Is this because there's nothing to say ("Of course they're IPO'ing, everyone doing telephony uses Twilio, this makes total sense")? Or because the haters have all taken vacation and aren't around to draw comparisons to other recent IPOs? ... or are IPOs no longer news to the HN community anymore?

akavi 12y ago
I think it's mostly the former. Unlike some IPOs, there's just nothing controversial about it. Twilio's a great product and they've got solid financials.
- RobSpectre 12y ago
  Rob from Twilio here - thanks a lot of saying that akavi. Took a lot of work to get here - stoked to hear you are finding it well.
- taf2 12y ago
  I agree - not only a great product but great people to work with

jaytaylor 12y ago

I don't see any information on Twilio's net expenditures. Am I missing something? What is the significance in taking in $100M in revenue if you had to spend > $100M to get it? Cough BOX Cough Also, how many customers do they have who pay them more than 100-250K/year? Where are these "big deals" coming from? In my experience, Twilio was quite expensive (i.e. not cost-effective) compared to other Telephony service providers. I really like their solid platform, and at the same time I'm a little surprised by the IPO move right now. Have they already burned through the $70M in funding they took in 18 months ago?

quadrature 12y ago
We will know more when the SEC filings are underway, until then its anyone's guess.
dubcanada 12y ago
I rarely see Twilio ads. When Box was big there was not a site that I visited that I didn't get at least one Box ad, and dare I ever type Dropbox into Google. Nothing but straight Box ads for weeks. Not that this proves anything at all, but I don't think they marketed nearly as hard as Box. But there does seem to be very little in regards to competition. Every single big internet company has their own "cloud storage".
- sjtgraham 12y ago
  > I rarely see Twilio ads ¿Qué? - https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352 https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352
  - corin_ 12y ago
    Well that's sorted then, dubcanada must indeed see Twilio ads all the time! One billboard doesn't disprove a claim that a company doesn't do much advertising, especially if it's just a personal anecdote about how many ads he's noticed.
- ihaveajob 12y ago
  Perhaps you failed prey to ad retargeting? It's happened to me with several services. Once you visit their website, you keep seeing their ads everywhere.
e12e 12y ago
Well, 200 000 USD in revenue per employee sounds pretty good to me. Sure they'll have other expenses, but my rule of thumb is that you should be getting ~135K USD per head in revenue as a minimum (when starting out) -- so 200K for an established company sounds healthy to me. This is a crazy generalization of course -- and mostly applies when you don't have to deal to much with the physical world of logistics etc.

urs2102 12y ago

Awesome - Twilio to me is the example of a simple, well priced product that has been nothing but just a really well made tool. Looking forward to seeing their S-1...

RobSpectre 12y ago
Much obliged urs2102. Whole lot more work between here and there - glad you could be a part of it with us.

pyrrhotech 12y ago

I don't get the point of these posts. If I cared, I'd pull up tech crunch. What relevance does this have? I know this sounds hypocritical as I cared enough to comment, but I'm tired of X company is IPO!!! taking up a precious spot in the otherwise interesting board

TimFogarty 12y ago

Congratulations to them. I've worked with their developer evangelism team a bit and they always bring their A-game. The company really seems to understand how to engage the community and they have a very solid and easy to use product.

RobSpectre 12y ago
Very kind of you to say Tim. They put in an enormous amount of work to be prepared to serve you in the field. Lot more preparation ahead, but stoked you found it helpful.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jMyles 12y ago
  Awwww. I love it when we're all so happy!
xmjw 12y ago
<smile>

adamboulanger 12y ago

I quite liked this article for associating Twilio's success with strategic decisions to treat developers as customers with particular implications for evangelism and growth. This approach isn't obvious because of the pressure to tie tool adoption to large-sized recurring enterprise contracts, often losing the individual developer as the engine of that model. Also note, Twilio brilliantly dances between concerted efforts in grassroots developer campaigns such as hackathons while bringing down tier 1 enterprise contracts at the same time. This is awesome and not easily done. Developers are smart and ultra-wary of hackathons as thinly veiled API marketing attempts. Over the past year, I've pitched a developer API startup to countless VCs, many of them top tier, and Twilio has almost always come up as a point of reference from the other side of the table. In many, many cases, the VCs will have passed on Twilio, not liking either the developer tool or enabling tech aspect of the company, and are now face-palming a bit...Only a bit...show me a VC that will wholeheartedly admit to making a mistake ;) Overall, the venture sentiment towards developer tools is definitely shifting. A year from now I expect to see quite a lot more activity in financing this space, albeit, in domains that largely coincide with VC comfort zones. Twilio offers communications and telephony, which is a market a lot of folks are comfortable in, compared to education, health, government, or creative industries.

RobSpectre 12y ago
Thanks Adam - we're rooting for you as you head out. Building a business serving developers is indeed as difficult as you say, but also - to be fair - an endless amount of fun. Certainly nothing we'd rather be doing.
seizethecheese 12y ago
Developer as customer model seems to be Stripe's MO too. This seems to be driven by a few phenomena: - For large companies, developer hours are becoming a large source of cost, so companies can charge a premium by lowering developer time demands. - For independent developers, these services enable rapid prototyping and increases probability of finding product market fit.
- debaserab2 12y ago

johnrob 12y ago

> Twilio told Venture Capital Dispatch it is adding another $1 million in annual recurring revenue every seven days. Sounds cooler than saying "growing 50% per year".

taf2 12y ago
50% per year sounds pretty damn cool to me ;)

curiously 12y ago

one thing im curious is their pay as you go model. we rarely see such pricing plans but wonder if there's any extensive study or analysis into this vs recurring payments.

jeffiel 12y ago

Hi - Jeff from Twilio. We're here to build the a great company for developers. The real story is APIs, not IPOs. Anything else is pure speculation :)

MarkPNeyer 12y ago
congrats dude. moving to SF to join you guys was great. i made a lot of good friends there, and it's been fun to watch from the outside.
lmg643 12y ago
It's amazing how easy Twilio's APIs are to use. I've used them in C# several times, just add them to the project, add a line, and you are up and running. Nice work.
- jeffiel 12y ago
  Thank you lmg643, glad we could help!

MattGrommes 12y ago

Based on his evangelism, which accounts for almost all of what I've personally heard about Twilio, I hope you guys are going to reward patio11 somehow. :)

mehrzad 12y ago

Curious about something: with companies like Heroku we often see open-source alternatives being developed. Is that possible for something like Twilio and is it "FSF-compliant" to use their APIs? Not that that is a requirement for me, but I've never seen people discuss this.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mwetzler 12y ago

Impressive, but not quite a impressive as the title alludes. Should be $100M Annual Revenue Run Rate (projected revenue) vs actual revenue in 2014. WSJ has corrected the title on their site. Twilio truly blazed a trail for API companies. Thank you for that, Twilio :)

iask 12y ago

I like Twilio. I've been following them since they started and currently using some of their services in my personal home automation projects. Once you go public you have to answer to shareholders and then prices become an issue. I wish them success. And yes, they really have a savvy marketing team.

some1else 12y ago

Good news for early-stage Twilio employee's current startups?