Twilio

“Jeff Shocks is his name, and he did all the IP and patent work for Twilio. So he was the first investor in Twilio, talks about when he was there, when the whole team could be fed by a pizza, and he's a very prominent investor and IP attorney in the Bay Area.”

“And to me, Twilio is another example. It almost died. It's growing four percent. Now it's growing over 20% because the API worked with agents.”

“Even though we could go and vibe code that, all of a sudden, you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks, and are they gonna flag you as spam, and Twilio has all these huge decades of relationships built out, In a real network there…”

“From a business model perspective, in other words, the kind of front-end API to aggregate a lot of complexity, What Open Router does for LLMs, what Stripe does for money, and what Twilio does for telecoms.”

“What do 11 Labs use, which is already doing five hundred million in like a year and a half? They're using Twilio, ok?”

“They're using Twilio's APIs, and boom, growth goes from four percent, or six, to 20% in 18 months. That's an epic turnaround for a public company at this scale.”

“Our friend Jeff Lawson at Twilio built that company from nothing. To four billion dollars in, you know, actual revenue, like stock up 390% since IPO. I mean, by all accounts, you know, smash rip roaring success. And then his super voting shares expired after 1…”

“So at the time he was fired, the stock was down like 80% from the peak. And it's like, oh, well case closed. But if you measure from the IPO or even from the pandemic peak, revenue was up. It's like, did the business go down? Was revenue down? Was there some k…”

“To be a two-pronged AI beneficiary, you have to be able to monetize your AI, and you have to attract new customers. There's two prongs, and the ones that have done it so far are close to infra, right? Cloudflare, Twilio, Mongo, Datadog and even DigitalOcean”

“When you're treated terribly as a CEO was like Jeff is, if people come back with humble pie and you care, you get over it. You got to pay the price. Like they might have to have to have given them a half million billion dollar package, but if there's a little …”

“Every single quarter since Q one of 20, 22 growth has slowed for the, for all public software stocks. Every single quarter it has slowed and it continues to slow. And there are a handful of folks that have reaccelerated like Mongo and Palantir. And there are a…”

“These companies, they're in a much more bounded world now. They might grow 15%. They might grow five percent. They might trade at six times revenues. They might trade at four times revenues. You know, if you look at the stock chart, the area of magic is gone, …”

“HubSpot and Salesforce got to deliver in 20, 26 because they're in play. They have the AI things they built, they ship the products, but they haven't seen the bump that data dog and Twilio and Mongo have”

“When I start a company, this is my, I mean, until now, all my prior ventures, that was a hundred percent of my capital allocation for myself, for my life, For my time, for my bank account, for everything. And so the whole idea that an investor would you know, …”

“I have heard whispers that a lot of their product portfolio is not really contributing to the business. It really is the core business, which is, you know, pretty common. I'd say probably the same of, you know, largely the same of Twilio too, right? It's a, it…”

“I analyzed every developer thing that was out there, and I decided there were three categories of developer companies, and only, sorry, there were many kinds, only three that actually got breakaway revenue. And there were a lot of folks that were stocked with …”

“So it used to be Twilio. Then you know, probably StubHub, Canva, Anthropic Yeah, probably, probably that bucket.”

“We own 28% of Shopify and Twilio at IPO and we owned, you know, well less than that of Procore and Service Titan just because we, you know, included a lot of other investors downstream.”

“Developer-led... Motion there is to It does appeal to an individual engineer, often within the department of the CTO who have accountability and a fair amount of latitude to choose a solution. This works if your product is sort of a platform product. It doesn'…”

“I'm very lucky to have Jeff Lawson, the CEO and founder of Twilio, as an angel investor, and he's been instrumental in the growth of this company and a big advisor to me.”

“I had an intern at my first company. I was really nice to that intern, and we have a really good relationship now, but he goes on later to found a company that goes through YC that gets sold to Twilio for 3.2 billion dollars.”

“Second one was Twilio. Twilio develop developer first, you know, kind of model. And we weren't as clear as to the power, the kingmaker, Or queen maker of developers was not as obvious to us”

“When you sell to software engineering, sometimes you can go PLG for a lot deeper in the journey and, you know, Stripe and Twilio and others have done that very successfully. But data for a variety of reasons that are probably too boring to get into ends up nee…”

“Remember when Apple, that two FA, the two, the SMS that For two of a, when that little sheet came up and said, just add this. 22% increase in conversion.”

“So Twilio initially was a very good investment for us and actually ended up being a decent investment overall. It could have been a legendary investment. We held on for too long.”

“TBH grew through variety of things, people sharing their messages to Snapchat and text invites. And that was 2017. And the way you invited your friends on TBH was that you tap their name your contact name and there was a button that said invite. And then we us…”

“The broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager, but the activities, the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what. And in some cases, this is why the prototypical companies that everyone references when they say they…”

“It hasn't been able to make segment, make any money. Which it's paid billions of dollars for.”

“Twilio delisted voluntarily. So now there's Asana and ThredUp. They have two companies listed on the exchange.”

“I saw the Twilio seed. I didn't think big enough. And this has been a problem with my kind of personal cognitive model for a while, is I didn't think big enough, I didn't understand, ah, how much value was there, and I over-indexed on how commoditized it would…”

“Zipwhip was bought by Twilio and went out of business. So there was a feast for all the customers and like, we just started this. So I was able to pull a list from Zipwhip and then feed that to someone on Upwork to like get deeper into the data.”

“If you look at all of the companies like Atlassians of the world, like the Twilios of the world, Outsido, or even Bursell, most of them, what ends up happening is that 80, 85% of the revenue comes from mid-market and enterprise, 15% come from SMBs, but that 15…”

“What my team did is we studied the world's top PLG companies, companies like Datadog, Snowflake, Twilio, and HubSpot, to find out what makes them different. Now, these were companies that are growing very quickly in its scale, so twice as fast as traditional S…”

“We don't give theoretical cases or external cases throughout the hiring process.”

“The best product leaders within our organization are generalists can apply their craft to a bunch of different domains.”

“We run product reviews on demand as product teams are at a point where they want additional input.”

“We have about 630 customers. We've processed about three billion bucks through the app, and we sent thirty-one million SMS messages, which is Twilio is the underlying technology here.”

“I just built, started building SaaS integrations with, like, Twilio Lob API UiPath, Bot Builders, and things like that, and that allowed me to go from one product, parking tickets, to over 200 today.”

“You know, like one of our early customers was Uber, and they came to us and said, well, actually, we want to let you know when your ride's arriving. Can we do that with Twilio? We said, of course you could. And they, like a day later, rolled out the first vers…”

“And so we spent that whole summer and did not have a dollar to show for it from investors. We raised no money.”

“I remember the day we launched Sony. Reached out. And you'd say, Sony? What did Sony need? And you'd sort of think about some big enterprise use case. Well, it was actually Sony Music, and there was a music promoter who worked at the record label who was like,…”

“We hired our first software developer who was not a founder joining the company, a guy named Adam Belli. And I remember Evan saying, hey, Adam is great. We really got to hire this guy, but he wants a salary of like a hundred K.”

“Uber, when we won them as a customer, I think the whole company was about five people.”

“So I remember I showed up at one of these hackathons at two AM with about 700 dollars worth of Taco Bell. That was probably the best marketing dollars ROI we ever got.”

“And at that time, no one else was trying to reach them. We were like one of the only ones.”

“Almost every carrier in the world that I can think of in that era, in those early days, like, Built an API on top of their services and launched with great fanfare, their developer platform. And every one of those carriers within 12 months had shut it down.”

“Our first year, we made 200,000 dollars. Our second year, we made two million dollars.”

“So they were growing to be like a quarter of our revenue. I'm like, that's actually a problem. That's not something to celebrate. That's actually something to worry about.”

“There's a budget owner somewhere who's spending now millions and going on tens of millions of dollars on our services, we at the very least have to know that person really well. And that was the transition that we had not really made, because we were taken a l…”

“At the beginning of the pandemic, we had, I think, three buildings in San Francisco. And today, you look at those offices, they're about, you know, low single digit percent utilization.”

“And in 2008, they got a really great deal on the domain Twilio.com. It only cost them seven bucks.”

“As we were penetrating new markets, adding more products, we were adding complexity and we were pulling in folks who were a little bit less motivated. And those things contributed to people saying, this is difficult.”

“I'm not kidding. It improved conversion. Like there's no personalization, nothing past it, just the questions. It improved conversion by like five percent, like just improved signups.”

“And if something like very logical isn't converting well, sometimes it means that you're battling against the psyche of the user and you want to take a step back and You know, think about and learn about where someone is psychologically in your space.”

“There was a Fang company who signed up for Twilio. Built a POC, launched to production, all this, and operate in that space for months without engaging once with sales.”

“We, you know, IPO, we were two hundred million dollar run rate. And Jeff had set out this vision of we're gonna get to a billion dollar run rate.”

“Twilio does this every quarter. Jeff told me that many, many years ago and I tried to do it. Anything standing gets deleted every quarter.”

“What they actually did was we work with them and we kind of identified that monthly tracked users, what was a much better metric into how customers perceive value. And that was the more fairer metric for customers. Like if you're tracking more users in segment…”

“I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid a 102 103 100,000 dollars a year in equity, and that could be worth potentially eight figures in 10 years.”

“It's gonna be a long time until folks are comfortable with lower quality revenue again, and what I mean is fintechs with 20% margins companies, you know, folks with huge, with, even, even folks like Twilio, one of the best companies in the history of, Cloud an…”