Twilio

“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,…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

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

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

“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.”